Maria Theresa Dies

1780

The Habsburg empress-queen, mother of sixteen (including Marie Antoinette) and ruler of central Europe for forty years, died at the Hofburg. She had kept her empire together through war and reformed it through patience. Her impatient son Joseph II, now sole ruler, immediately began a decade of breakneck reform. He abolished serfdom, granted religious toleration, and dissolved hundreds of monasteries, earning the enmity of nearly everyone.