Maria Theresa and Hungary

Abstract

Modern Habsburg history begins in 1740, with the accession of Maria Theresa as ruler over a group of realms which, lacking allies themselves, were immediately beleaguered by a hostile alliance of five European states. Over the next decades, especially after the temporary peace of 1748, and then between the final peace of 1763 and up to her death in 1780, her measures were piecemeal, but remarkably concrete and far-reaching, modernising and consolidating those realms for the future. The modern Austro-Hungarian relationship was unveiled in those same decades. We find one aspect of it in the drama of September 1741, as the young queen, Maria Theresa, arrived to seek succour from a typically tempestuous and obstructive coronation diet at Pressburg. Attired in Hungarian style (white, with gold braid and blue floral decoration), she made a direct and emotional appeal to the assembled nobles, and evoked their famous offer of physical sacrifice, amid the general cry of ‘vitam nostram et sanguinem consecramus’.¹