Death of the Elector Max Joseph and Austrian Occupation of Bavaria

Abstract

On the eighth of December 1777, the Elector Max Joseph was on his way to church in his capital city of Munich. As his carriage passed the clock-tower in the Kaufingerstrasse, the bell-mechanism of the clock suddenly began to run wild. Before it had run out, seventy-seven strokes had been counted. The elector remarked to those with him in the carriage that this was to be taken as a sign that his own life had run down.¹ Indeed, just a few days thereafter he was set upon by his last illness. To be sure, at first it was not regarded as grave, although his fifteen doctors could not agree upon a diagnosis. Some thought it was a catarrh; others attributed his symptoms to his imagination. ² On the sixteenth the Imperial agent, Büttner, could write Prince Kaunitz that the Elector was not doing at all badly, that performances had not been cancelled in Munich, and that it was expected that he would be fully recovered within a week. ³ It was ordered that two golden medals be struck to commemorate Max Joseph’s recovery, but again there was an ill omen: one of them broke in the casting. ⁴ Within a day or two of this misfortune the Elector had suffered a relapse and now it was clear to even the most obtuse of his many physicians what the true nature of his illness was. The Elector was suffering from small-pox, and even, it seemed, from one of the most virulent strains of that awful disease.