be hazy and colorless, yet few queens in history can have come to the throne under circumstances more conducive to the creation of a romantic aura than Maria Theresa did. Her claim to the throne was disputed, and that dispute was seized upon by the foremost soldier of the age, Frederick the Great of Prussia. The treasury was empty, the army unready, and the provinces restive.
Most of all, the Hapsburg Empire, to which Maria Theresa succeeded, itself had by modern standards hardly any logical reason for existing. In Western Europe, though the doctrine of absolute dynastic monarchy still held sway, and frontier pro-vinces might change hands from war to war, the dynasties were firmly attached to nations. France was France, England was England, the Netherlands were the Netherlands, Spain was Spain. Even on the other side of the Hapsburg dominions, though the Russian Empire was a polyglot, multinational empire, it was firmly based on historic Russia proper (more or less as the present-day CIS is anchored by the Russian Republic).
In contrast, the dominions of the HapsburgÆs had no national identity. It was instead a conglomeration of kingdoms, principalities, duchies, "Free and Imperial Cities," and other territorial units that had in common only the fact that at some time or another they had fallen under the rule of the Hapsburg dynasty.
By convention, Maria Theresa's dominions are spoken of in a collective sense as "Austria." Certainly what we now call Austria was its core, and Vienna its imperial city, but Austria was
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