EMPRESS MARIA THERESA OF AUSTRIA

 Maria Theresa, German Maria Theresia    (born May 13, 1717, Vienna—died Nov. 29, 1780, Vienna), archduchess of Austria and queen of Hungary and Bohemia (1740–80), wife and empress of the Holy Roman emperor Francis I (reigned 1745–65), and mother of the Holy Roman emperor Joseph II (reigned 1765–90). Upon her accession, the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) erupted, challenging her inheritance of the Habsburg lands. This contest with Prussia was followed by two more, the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–79), which further checked Austrian power.

 

 

Early life

 

Maria Theresa was the eldest daughter of the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI and Elizabeth of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. The death of an only son prompted Charles, the only living prince of his line, to promulgate the so-called Pragmatic Sanction, a royal act, eventually recognized by most powers, whereby female issue was entitled to succeed to the domains of the Habsburgs. (Since nearly every major European nation coveted some part of the Habsburg domains, their consent to the Pragmatic Sanction must be taken as nothing more than an act of convenience.) Maria Theresa thus became a pawn on Europe’s political chessboard. In 1736 she married Francis Stephen of Lorraine. Because of French objections to the union of Lorraine with the Habsburg lands, Francis Stephen had to exchange his ancestral duchy for the right of succession to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. The marriage was a love match, and 16 children were born to the couple, of whom 10 survived to adulthood.

 

 

War of the Austrian Succession

 

On Oct. 20, 1740, Charles VI died, and the war of succession he had striven so hard to forestall broke out before the end of the year. Charles left the Habsburg state at the lowest point of its prestige, its coffers empty, its capital beset by unrest. The naive courage with which Maria Theresa assumed her heritage (and made her husband co-regent) astounded Europe’s chancelleries. Her refusal to negotiate with Frederick II (later the Great) of Prussia, who had invaded Silesia, her most prosperous province, appalled the senescent councillors of her late father. Her successful appearance before the refractory Hungarian Estates, ending with an appeal for a mass levy of troops, gave her a European reputation for diplomatic skill. When the elector Charles Albert of Bavaria—one of the princes who had joined Frederick in assaulting Habsburg territories—was elected emperor, Maria Theresa was mortified; that dignity, little more than titular by then, had in practice been hereditary in her family for 300 years. Upon the death of Charles Albert (1745), she secured for her husband, Francis, the imperial crown, which the law denied to women.

 

 

Domestic reforms

 

Realizing the need for a sizable standing army and in order to maintain one, Maria Theresa accepted the plans of Count Friedrich Wilhelm Haugwitz—the first in a succession of remarkable men of intellect she was to draw into her council. In the face of the opposition of many noblemen, she managed to reduce drastically (except in Hungary) the powers of the various dominions’ estates, which had held the monarchy’s purse strings since time immemorial. In the further process of abolishing tax exemptions held by the great landowners, who dominated those assemblies, she hit on the notion of a “God-pleasing equality.” Yet she did not question the justice of the manorial lord’s claim on the labour of his hereditary subjects. Only many years later did peasant riots in famine-stricken Bohemia, as well as the reported cruelty of Hungarian magnates, cause her to limit the use of forced labour. “The peasantry must be able to sustain itself as well as pay taxes . . . ,” she wrote.

 

Practical, if not always fiscal, considerations, rather than doctrinaire humanitarianism, guided all of Maria Theresa’s reforms. An enlarged central administration—from which the judiciary was separated in 1749—and a repeatedly reorganized treasury required knowledgeable civil servants and judges; and their training was, to her mind, the sole purpose of higher education. She approved drastic changes that her physician, the Dutchman Gerhard van Swieten, carried through at the universities (such as the introduction of textbooks, the linking of the medical school of the University of Vienna with the embryonic public health service, and the sovereign’s right to veto the election of deans by the faculties) even as he took them out of the hands of the Jesuits, to whose Society she herself was devoted. (She was the last of the Catholic monarchs to close its establishments.) Deeply pious, strictly observant, and intolerant to the point of bigotry, she was moving, nonetheless, toward subordinating the church to the authority of the state.

 

 

Though Francis had not been a faithful husband, Maria Theresa never wavered in her love, and his sudden death in 1765 plunged her into prolonged grief. She emerged from it, her zeal for activity nowise impaired. A new public-debt policy, the settlement of the empty spaces of Hungary, the drafting of a penal code to supplant the tangle of local systems, and a kind of poor law—these were but some of the innovations in which she herself took a hand, with her common sense doing service for the book learning she lacked. In step with the enforced retreat of the church from secular affairs, she came to feel that it was incumbent on the state to control the intellectual life of its subjects. It was she who institutionalized government censorship; on the other hand, it was she, too, who launched plans for compulsory primary education.

 

 

Late years

 

Although Maria Theresa pedantically supervised her children’s upbringing and education, she was to experience many disappointments in connection with them. Of her sons, only Leopold of Tuscany (later Emperor Leopold II), though difficult as a child, lived up to her hopes. Her special affection belonged to Maria Christina, who was allowed to marry for love and on whom Maria Theresa showered vast gifts of money. Three of her daughters, married off to unprepossessing Bourbons—in Parma, Naples, and France—again and again irritated their mother with their strong will or their follies; to her dying day she bombarded one of these, Queen Marie-Antoinette of France, with practical advice, moral exhortations, and dire warnings of the future.

 

But it was the running conflict with her son Joseph that clouded the years of her widowhood most. His flirting with the “new philosophy” of the Enlightenment frightened her, his admiration of Frederick the Great offended her, and his foreign enterprises filled her with trepidation. There were threats of abdication on both his part and hers. When Joseph, supported by Kaunitz, pressured her into agreeing to share in the (first) partition of Poland in 1772, she loudly bewailed the immorality of the action. And while she had shrugged off ridicule on such occasions as her setting up a public morals squad (the “chastity commission” of popular parlance) or, prude though she was, her enlisting the help of Louis XV’s mistress, Mme de Pompadour, in order to obtain the French alliance, the accusation of “lachrymose hypocrisy” raised in foreign courts during the Polish affair distressed her. Grown enormously stout and in poor health, she spent more and more of her time in suburban Schönbrunn, whose palace owed its reconstruction to her initiative. She was still trying to hold off the approach of the new age. Ironically, her own pragmatic reforms had smoothed the road to the enlightened despotism that was to mark the reign of her son and successor, Joseph II. She died in November 1780.

Assessment

 

Maria Theresa was a key figure in the power politics of 18th-century Europe. To the Habsburg monarchy, a dynastic agglomeration of disparate lands, she gave a measure of unity. A princess of engaging naturalness, she was one of the most capable rulers of her house and, according to one historian, “the most human of the Habsburgs.”

 

Cleopatra Seduces Antony, 41 BC

The romance between Antony and Cleopatra might have changed the world. If Antony had succeeded in wining sole control of Rome with Cleopatra as his queen, he could have changed the course of the Roman Empire, making the world we live in today a different place. However, their relationship ended in mutual suicide in 30 BC, eleven years after it started, when Roman troops engulfed the Egyptian city of Alexandria and threatened their capture.

 

The seed that spawned their relationship was sown with the murder of Julius Caesar in March 44 BC (see The Assassination of Julius Caesar). Rome descended into anarchy and civil war. By 41 BC Antony and Octavian (who would later change his name to Augustus) shared the leadership of Rome and had divided the state into two regions - the western portion including Spain and Gaul ruled by Octavian, the eastern region including Greece and the Middle East ruled by Antony.

 

The Parthian Empire located in modern-day Iraq posed a threat to Antony's eastern territory and he planned a military campaign to subdue them. But Antony needed money to put his plan into action and he looked to Cleopatra - ruler of Egypt and the richest woman in the world - to supply it. In 41 BC he summoned Cleopatra to meet him in the city of Tarsus in modern-day Turkey.

 

Cleopatra was a seductive woman and she used her talents to maintain and expand her power. Her first conquest was Julius Caesar in 48 BC. He was 52, she was 22. Their relationship produced a son and was ended only by Caesar's assassination.

 

Her initial response to Antony's summons was to delay her journey - possibly to send the message to the Roman leader that as a queen in her own right, she was not at his beck and call. Eventually surrendering to the inevitable, Cleopatra sailed from Egypt to the city of Tarsus. As she made the final leg of her journey up the river Cydnus she traveled in a magnificent barge filled with flowers and scented with exotic perfumes while she reclined on deck surrounded by her servants and trappings of gold. Antony enjoyed women and once he saw her, he fell under her spell.

 

[Antony was] "...carried away by her to Alexandria, there to keep holiday, like a boy, in play and diversion, squandering and fooling away in enjoyment that most costly of all valuables, time."

 

Plutarch was a Greek historian who wrote a history of the life of Antony in the first century AD. We join his story as Cleopatra receives Antony's summons to join him:

 

"She had faith in her own attractions, which, having formerly recommended her to Caesar and the young Pompey, she did not doubt might prove yet more successful with Antony. Their acquaintance was with her when a girl, young, and ignorant of the world, but she was to meet Antony in the time of life when women's beauty is most splendid, and their intellects are in full maturity. She made great preparations for her journey, of money, gifts, and ornaments of value, such as so wealthy a kingdom might afford, but she brought with her her surest hopes in her own magic arts and charms.

 

...she came sailing up the river Cydnus in a barge with gilded stern and outspread sails of purple, while oars of silver beat time to the music of flutes and fifes and harps. She herself lay all along, under a canopy of cloth of gold, dressed as Venus in a picture, and beautiful young boys, like painted Cupids, stood on each side to fan her. Her maids were dressed like Sea Nymphs and Graces, some steering at the rudder, some working at the ropes.

 

...perfumes diffused themselves from the vessel to the shore, which was covered with multitudes, part following the galley up the river on either bank, part running out of the city to see the sight. The market place was quite emptied, and Antony at last was left alone sitting upon the tribunal; while the word went .through all the multitude, that Venus was come to feast with Bacchus for the common good of Asia.

 

On her arrival, Antony sent to invite her to supper. She thought it fitter he should come to her; so, willing to show his good humor and courtesy, he complied, and went. He found the preparations to receive him magnificent beyond expression, but nothing so admirable as the great number of lights; for on a sudden there was let down altogether so great a number of branches with lights in them so ingeniously disposed, some in squares, and some in circles, that the whole thing was a spectacle that has seldom been equaled for beauty.

 

The next day, Antony invited her to supper, and was very desirous to outdo her as well in magnificence as contrivance; but he found he was altogether beaten in both, and was so well convinced of it, that he was himself the first to jest and mock at his poverty of wit, and his rustic awkwardness. She, perceiving that his raillery was broad and gross, and savored more of the soldier than the courtier, rejoined in the same taste, and fell into it at once, without any sort of reluctance or reserve.

For her actual beauty, it is said, was not in itself so remarkable that none could be compared with her, or that no one could see her without being struck by it, but the contact of her presence, if you lived with her, was irresistible; the attraction of her person, joining with the charm of her conversation, and the character that attended all she said or did, was something bewitching. It was a pleasure merely to hear the sound of her voice, with which, like an instrument of many strings, she could pass from one language to another; so that there were few of the barbarian nations that she answered by an interpreter.

 

Antony was so captivated by her, that while Fulvia his wife maintained his quarrels in Rome against Caesar by actual force of arms, and the Parthian troops...were assembled in Mesopotamia, and ready to enter Syria, he could yet suffer himself to be carried away by her to Alexandria, there to keep holiday, like a boy, in play and diversion, squandering and fooling away in enjoyment that most costly, as Antiphon says, of all valuables, time.

 

Were Antony serious or disposed to mirth, she had at any moment some new delight or charm to meet his wishes; at every turn she was upon him, and let him escape her neither by day nor by night. She played at dice with him, drank with him, hunted with him; and when he exercised in arms, she was there to see.

 

At night she would go rambling with him to disturb and torment people at their doors and windows, dressed like a servant woman for Antony also went in servant's disguise, and from these expeditions he often came home very scurvily answered, and sometimes even beaten severely, though most people guessed who it was. However, the Alexandrians in general liked it all well enough, and joined good humouredly and kindly in his frolic and play, saying they were much obliged to Antony for acting his tragic parts at Rome, and keeping his comedy for them."

 

Condottiere

Italian history

 

Condottiere, plural Condottieri,  leader of a band of mercenaries engaged to fight in numerous wars among the Italian states from the mid-14th to the 16th century. The name was derived from the condotta, or “contract,” by which the condottieri put themselves in the service of a city or of a lord.

 

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Italian city-states of Venice, Florence, and Genoa were very rich from their trade with the Levant, yet possessed woefully small national armies. In the event that foreign powers and envious neighbors attacked, the ruling nobles hired foreign mercenaries to fight for them. The military-service terms and conditions were stipulated in a condotta (contract) between the city-state and the soldiers (officer and enlisted man), thus, the contracted leader, the mercenary captain commanding, was titled the Condottiere.

From the eleventh to the thirteenth century, European soldiers led by professional officers fought against the Muslims in the Crusades (1095–1291). These crusading officers provided large-scale warfare combat experience in the Holy Land. On the Crusades’ conclusion, the first masnada (bands of roving soldiers) appeared in Italy. Given the profession, some masnade were less mercenaries than bandits and desperate men. These masnada were not Italian, but (mostly) German, from the Duchy of Brabant (hence, Brabanzoni), and from Catalonia and Aragon. The latter were Spanish soldiers who had followed King Peter III of Aragon in the War of the Sicilian Vespers in Italy in October 1282, and, post-war, remained there, seeking military employment. By 1333 other mercenaries had arrived in Italy to fight with John of Bohemia as the Compagnia della Colomba (Company of the Dove) in Perugia’s war against Arezzo.

 

The first mercenary armies in Italy (often called free companies) were made up of foreigners. The earliest (1303) was composed of Catalans who had fought in the dynastic wars of the south. In the mid-14th century the Grand Company, composed mainly of Germans and Hungarians, terrorized the country, devastating Romagna, Umbria, and Tuscany. It was one of the first to have a formal organization and a strict code of discipline, developed by the Provençal adventurer Montréal d’Albarno. The Englishman Sir John Hawkwood, one of the most famous of the non-Italian condottieri, came to Italy in the 1360s during a lull in the Hundred Years’ War and for the next 30 years led the White Company in the confused wars of northern Italy.

 

By the end of the 14th century, Italians began to raise mercenary armies, and soon condottieri were conquering principalities for themselves. The organization of the companies was perfected in the early 15th century by Muzio Attendolo Sforza, in the service of Naples, and his rival Braccio da Montone, in the service of Perugia. Muzio’s son, Francesco Sforza, who won control of Milan in 1450, was one of the most successful of all the condottieri.

Once aware of their military power monopoly in Italy, the condottieri bands became notorious for their capriciousness, and soon dictated terms to their ostensible employers. In turn, many condottieri, such as  the said Braccio da Montone and Muzio Sforza, became powerful politicians. As most were educated men acquainted with Roman military-science manuals (e.g. Vegetius’s Epitoma rei militarii), they began viewing warfare from the perspective of military science, rather than that of valor or physical courage —a great, consequential departure from chivalry, the traditional medieval model of soldiering. Consequently, the condottieri fought by outmanoeuvring the opponent and fighting his ability to wage war, rather than risk uncertain fortune —defeat, capture, death— in battlefield combat.

 

The earlier, medieval condottieri developed the art of war (strategy and tactics) into military science more than any of their historical military predecessors —fighting indirectly, not directly— thus, only reluctantly endangering themselves and their enlisted men, avoiding battle when possible, also avoiding hard work and winter campaigns, as these all reduced the total number of trained soldiers available, and was detrimental to their political and economic interest. Niccolò Machiavelli even said that condottieri fought each other in grandiose, but often pointless and near-bloodless battles. However, later in the Renaissance the condottieri line of battle still deployed the grand armoured knight and medieval weapons and tactics after most European powers had begun employing professional standing armies of pikemen and musketeers —this helped to contribute to their eventual decline and destruction

 

Less fortunate was another great condottiere, Carmagnola, who first served one of the viscounts of Milan and then conducted the wars of Venice against his former masters but at last awoke the suspicion of the Venetian oligarchy and was put to death before the palace of St. Mark (1432). Toward the end of the 15th century, when the large cities had gradually swallowed up the small states and Italy itself was drawn into the general current of European politics and became the battlefield of powerful armies—French, Spanish, and German—the condottieri, who proved unequal to the gendarmery of France and the improved Italian troops, disappeared.

 

The soldiers who fought under the condottieri were almost entirely heavy-armoured cavalry and were noted for their rapacious and disorderly behaviour. With no goal beyond personal gain, the armies of the condottieri often changed sides, and their battles often resulted in little bloodshed.

Guelf and Ghibelline

Guelf and Ghibellines, Guelf also spelled Guelph,  members of two opposing factions in German and Italian politics during the Middle Ages. The split between the Guelfs, who were sympathetic to the papacy, and the Ghibellines, who were sympathetic to the German (Holy Roman) emperors, contributed to chronic strife within the cities of northern Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries

 

Guelf was derived from Welf, the name of the dynasty of German dukes of Bavaria who competed for the imperial throne through the 12th and early 13th centuries. The name Ghibelline was derived from Waiblingen, the name of a castle of the Welfs’ opponents, the Hohenstaufen dukes of Swabia. The rivalry between Welfs and Hohenstaufens figured prominently in German politics after the death of the Holy Roman emperor Henry V in 1125: Lothar II (reigned 1125–37) was a Welf, and his successor as emperor, Conrad III (reigned 1138–52), was a Hohenstaufen. A dubious tradition relates that the terms Guelf and Ghibelline originated as battle cries (“Hie Welf!” “Hie Waiblingen!”) during Conrad III’s defeat of Welf VI of Bavaria in 1140 at the siege of Weinsberg.

 

It was during the reign of the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick I Barbarossa (1152–90) that the terms Guelf and Ghibelline acquired significance in Italy, as that emperor tried to reassert imperial authority over northern Italy by force of arms. Frederick’s military expeditions were opposed not only by the Lombard and Tuscan communes, who wished to preserve their autonomy within the empire, but also by the newly elected (1159) pope Alexander III. Frederick’s attempts to gain control over Italy thus split the peninsula between those who sought to enhance their powers and prerogatives by siding with the emperor and those (including the popes) who opposed any imperial interference.

 

During the struggles between the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II (reigned 1220–50) and the popes, the Italian parties took on their characteristic names of Guelf and Ghibelline (beginning in Florence) and contributed to intensifying antagonisms within and among the Italian cities. Most often, previously existing factions in the cities (usually among the nobility) adopted a pro-papal or pro-imperial attitude, thus drawing themselves into the wider international struggle but without losing their local character. The fighting between Guelfs and Ghibellines in various communes often ended with the exile of the losing party from the city. The rivalry between Ghibellines (in this case representing feudal aristocrats) and Guelfs (representing wealthy merchants) was especially ferocious in Florence, where the Guelfs were exiled twice (1248 and 1260) before the invading Charles of Anjou ended Ghibelline domination in 1266. Besides the vying of local factions for power within a city, antagonisms between different cities were aggravated as they took sides on the papal-imperial issue. A series of wars, for example, was fought from the mid-13th century through the early 14th century between Guelf-controlled Florence and its allies—Montepulciano, Bologna, and Orvieto—and its Ghibelline opponents—Pisa, Siena, Pistoia, and Arezzo.

 

After the Hohenstaufen loss of southern Italy (1266) and the final extinction of their line (1268), the Guelf and Ghibelline conflict changed in meaning. In the international sphere, Guelfism constituted a system of alliances among those who supported the Angevin presence in southern Italy—including the Angevin rulers of Sicily themselves, the popes, and Florence with its Tuscan allies. Within the many cities where the Guelfs triumphed, the party became a conservative force, a property-owning group interested in maintaining the exile of the Ghibellines whose holdings had been confiscated. Ghibellinism became associated with a nostalgia for the empire (a waning force in Italy after 1268) and briefly revived during the Italian expeditions of the emperors Henry VII in 1310–13 and Louis IV in 1327–30.

 

During the course of the 14th century, the importance of both parties rapidly declined. They lost international significance because the emperors no longer interfered in Italy and the popes moved from Rome to France. “Guelf” and “Ghibelline” implied only local factions.

 

The terms were revived during the movement for Italian unification of the 19th century. The Neo-Guelfs were those who urged the pope to lead a federation of Italian states. (Vincenzo Gioberti’s Del primato morale e civile degli italiani [“On the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians”], published in 1843, was the classic expression of this attitude.) Their opponents, the Neo-Ghibellines, saw the pope as a barrier to the development of Italian unity.