Maria Louisa of Spain (1745-1792)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Maria Luisa infanta of Spain, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Empress of Austria

Maria Louisa (Spanish: Maria Luisa, German: Maria Ludovika) (24 November 1745–15 May 1792) was Empress consort to Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II.

[edit] Life

Maria Louisa was born in Portici, in Campania, the site of the summer palace of her parents, King Charles VII and Queen Maria Amalia of Naples and Sicily. She was the fifth daughter, and second surviving child, of her parents. Her father became King of Spain as Charles III in 1759, and she moved with her family to Spain.

On 16 February 1764 she was married by proxy at Madrid to Archduke Peter Leopold, the second son of Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa, and the heir apparent to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. The next year, on 5 August, she married him in person at Innsbruck. Only a few days later, the death of Emperor Francis made Maria Louisa's husband the new Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the newly married couple moved to Florence, where they would live for the next twenty-five years.

In 1790, on the death of Peter Leopold's childless brother, Joseph II, Maria Louisa's husband inherited the Habsburg lands in Central Europe, and was shortly thereafter elected Holy Roman Emperor. Taking the name of Leopold II, the new Emperor moved his family to Vienna, where Maria Louisa took on the role of imperial consort. Leopold died scarcely two years later, dying on 1 March 1792. Maria Louisa followed her husband to the grave in less than three months, not living long enough to see her eldest son Francis elected as the last Holy Roman Emperor.

[edit] Children

Over the course of twenty-one years, between 1767 and 1788, Maria Louisa bore her husband sixteen children, of whom all but two survived to adulthood. These were:

• Maria Theresia (1767–1827), who married the future King Anton of Saxony.
• Francis (1768–1835), who would become Holy Roman Emperor as Francis II and later the first Emperor of Austria as Francis I.
• Ferdinand (1769–1824), who would succeed his father as Grand Duke of Tuscany.
• Maria Anna (1770–1809)
• Charles (1771–1847), who would become a famous general during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
• Alexander (1772–1795), who served as Palatine of Hungary
• Albert (1773–1774)
• Maximilian (1774–1778)
• Joseph (1776–1847), who succeeded his brother as Palatine of Hungary
• Maria Clementina (1777–1801), who married her first cousin Francis, Duke of Calabria, later King Francis I of the Two Sicilies
• Archduke Anton Victor of Austria (1779–1835), briefly Archbishop-Elector of Cologne and later Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights
• Maria Amalia (1780–1798)
• John (1782–1859), also a general and later Imperial Vicar of the short-lived German Empire of the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848.
• Rainer (1783–1853), who became Viceroy of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom
• Louis (1784–1864), effective regent of the Austrian Empire during the reign of his mentally disabled nephew Ferdinand I.
• Rudolf (1788–1831), Prince-Archbishop of Olmütz and Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.

[edit] Ancestry