When the Holy Roman Emperor, king of Hungary and Bohemia, Charles VIFootnote 1 unexpectedly died in October 1740, his oldest daughter and successor, the twenty-three-year-old Maria Theresia, had to shoulder the burdens of the Habsburg empire and face the ensuing War of Austrian Succession (1740–8), the most severe crisis of the dynasty's early modern history. The treasury was almost empty, the armies were exhausted, and the dynasty's debt was high. Amidst these difficulties, it was essential for the young queen to emphasize the legitimacy of her power and secure the support of her lands, among them Hungary. Consequently, she had to assume the fullness of royal power there as soon as possible and demonstrate the Pragmatic Sanction's domestic validity to its contenders. But what does royal power mean when it is exercised by a woman? For the Hungarians, the succession of the young queen to the throne not only raised doubts about her abilities to tackle the immediate problems of war, but also challenged their ideas about kingship. Should the very concept of royal power be rearticulated in order that it might accommodate the rule of a woman? Or vice versa, is it the new ruler's womanhood that must be addressed and refashioned in a way that it might fit into the existing frameworks of tradition? The curious sounding title, ‘Domina et Rex’, with which Maria Theresia was finally addressed at her coronation in 1741 by her Hungarian subjects, concisely expresses this dilemma.
Reflecting on these problems, this article aims both to investigate the origins of the queen's rex title, and to examine the question of gynecocracy – the political supremacy of women – in eighteenth-century Hungary. While the existing scholarship on Maria Theresia had a penchant for applying the dichotomy of the body politic and body natural as an explanatory framework for why she was called rex, so far no one has examined what people in the eighteenth century actually thought about this or how they understood the obvious tension between the female gender of their ruler and the male representation of royal power conferred on her. This article argues that there was a medieval historiographical tradition and an ancient legal procedure in Hungary, which suggested that women can be, or rather have to be, seen as men when it came to assuming royal power. Therefore, this study demonstrates that in this context medieval tradition and legal thought served as tools in transgressing existing boundaries between seemingly fixed gender roles, while at the same time keeping the integrity of kingship.
I
The English traveller, Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, when visiting Vienna in 1779, scribbled down some notes in his diary on the Hungarian coronation of Maria Theresia, based on the reminiscences of people who attended the ceremony in 1741 at Pressburg (today Bratislava, Slovakia). According to the informants, ‘[w]hen the Crown was placed upon her head it proved to be so much large, that it was found necessary to put cushions round her forehead, in order to prevent its falling down over her face’.Footnote 2 Furthermore, Wraxall was told that due to its heavy weight the crown was removed from the queen's head during the festive dinner following the coronation. What is intriguing about these accounts is that both describe regular customs – adapting the crown to the head by the means of cushions, as well as the removal of the crown during the dinner – that were observed at the coronations of male rulers as well.Footnote 3 Wraxall's informants, however, depicted these moments as unfortunate incidents which signified the female weakness of Maria Theresia. These rumours on the size and unbearable weight of the Holy Crown of St Stephen are telling, because they clearly express doubt as to whether a female head would be able to wear the diadem of the country.Footnote 4
Besides the peculiar coronation ritual, European contemporaries were also interested in the fact that during the ceremony, the Hungarian estates addressed Maria Theresia with the title of male kings, rex, instead of the female form, regina. The eighteenth-century French historian, Claude-Louis-Michel de Sacy, made a curious remark on female rule in Hungary: ‘it seems that the ancestors of the Hungarians…could not stand female rule to such an extent that they gave the title of kings to the women who ruled over them’.Footnote 5 Thus, Sacy understood the rex title of the Hungarian female monarchs as a token of rejecting gynecocracy.
The two above-mentioned examples convey the tension between expectations and reality and problematize the question of continuity at a time when a woman had to assume a role for which only men were considered capable. These issues not only puzzled eighteenth-century contemporaries, but also historians who examine gendered hierarchies and the representation of royal power. How could it be explained that a woman ascended the throne bearing a male royal title?
Recent scholarship focusing on Maria Theresia had drawn inspiration from Ernst Kantorowicz's study of the king's two bodies. According to Kantorowicz, medieval English rulers had a biological body (body natural) and a political body founded on legal fiction (body politic). In times when the ‘state’ as a concept did not exist, this legal fiction represented the kingdom and the continuity of royal power.Footnote 6 The dichotomy between the two bodies has influenced the fields of gender and art history, where the theory served as an explanatory framework for examining how the masculine language of royal power is related to the female gender of queens.
Scholars like Regina Schulte, Werner Telesko, and Christina Strunck used the term body politic in a broader sense, standing for the political meanings attached to the natural body of the ruler. They all referred to the well-known moment at the Diet in 1741, when the Hungarian nobility expressed sympathy for the desperate young queen – who according to the commonly held misconception wore the Holy Crown while holding the baby Joseph II in her handsFootnote 7 – and gallantly offered their military assistance amidst the escalating war of succession while shouting ‘moriamur pro rege nostro’. Historians stressed that Maria Theresia consciously blurred the line between her body natural and body politic so that she could use her physical body for manipulating emotions and imposing her political will.Footnote 8
Furthermore, Sandra Hertel argued that the two bodies of kings became even more visible in the case of Maria Theresia's Hungarian coronation, when the biologically female body was extended by the act of anointment and coronation into a political state body (Staatskörper) which compensated the alleged weaknesses of the female nature. She concluded that this explained why Maria Theresia was crowned not as queen, but as ‘king’ of Hungary.Footnote 9 While these scholars all reference Kantorowicz or use his work as a point of departure, it seems that they have blurred his model in different ways which raised several problems rather than solving them. It should be stressed that the term body politic as it was applied by Kantorowicz is not equivalent to the natural body on which political meanings were inscribed. While the former was closely associated with a legal fiction of kingship, the latter was more about the representation of politics made manifest on a natural body.
This becomes especially obvious when one considers that in the Hungarian legal universe rulers had only one, physical, body. The fact that such legal fiction as the theory of the ‘king's two bodies’ was never developed there has already been noted by Kantorowicz himself. He convincingly argued that ‘Hungary carried the distinction between the mystical Crown and a physical king to great refinement, but the material relic of the Crown of St Stephen seems to have prevented the king from growing his own super-body.’Footnote 10 Kantorowicz briefly touched even upon the reason why Mary I of Anjou, queen of Hungary, and Maria Theresia both held the title of Rex Hungariae. He stipulated that as the crown gradually begun to represent more than just an object, the royal title itself became more abstract.Footnote 11
Based on these observations, I suggest that instead of applying the ‘two bodies’ narrative, it would make more sense to examine closely the specificities of the early modern intellectual context in which Maria Theresia's rex title had been developed and to focus on the problem of gynecocracy in Hungary more broadly. I find the idea that one must consider the basis on which royal power is legitimated in any given context before analysing the meaning of queens’ bodies to be crucial.Footnote 12
II
It has recently been argued that Maria Theresia's coronation was ritually an exceptional case without any historical precedent, because in 1741 a woman was anointed as the ‘king’ of Hungary who also symbolically carried the sword.Footnote 13 This, however, was just the opposite of what contemporaries in the eighteenth century thought about the event. In fact, even before the problem of female succession in the Habsburg dynasty under Charles VI was raised, Hungarian legal thinkers kept referring to the medieval precedent of Mary I, whose coming to the throne served as the model for determining whether gynecocracy could be an accepted political form in the country and under what title the new female monarch ought to begin her rule.
The most relevant source in this context is a passage in the Chronica Hungarorum (1488) written by János Thuróczy. As King Louis I of Anjou (1342–82) did not have male heirs, he had to divide his realms between his two daughters before his death. Hedwig became the heir of Poland, while twelve-year-old Mary succeeded her father in Hungary and her mother, Elisabeth, was given regency.Footnote 14 In all probability, King Louis I may well have thought that Mary would reign as soon as she became old enough to marry her groom, Sigismund of Luxembourg, on which occasion Mary would pass over the royal power to her husband.
Thuróczy – based on the work of the Venetian ambassador, Lorenzo de Monacis – recorded Mary's coronation as follows: ‘with one heart and soul the entire people address this girl as king, they decorate the female sex with this distinguished title, she is seated on the glorious throne of her father and they crown the virgin head with the Holy Crown’.Footnote 15 Thus, Mary I became a rex femineus, a woman with royal power who, as a sign of respect, received the title of rex which meant nothing less than that, in spite of her sex, she was seen as equal with former male kings. The Italian chronicler of King Matthias I, Antonio Bonfini, added the remark that the lavish favours of good fortune compensated Mary for all the shortcomings that her female sex caused to her.Footnote 16 This ‘compliment’ highlighted an important feature of the rex femineus topos, namely that her capabilities were beyond those of other women in which sense she stood closer to men. Thuróczy's, and consequently Bonfini's, narrative on Mary as rex was adopted by all the relevant works on the Holy Crown and the Hungarian coronations written between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, which firmly grounded Mary I's precedent in the historical thought of the early modern period.Footnote 17 This was the tradition whose elements were recomposed in the eighteenth century in order to prepare the ground for Maria Theresia's kingship.
However, while the rex femineus concept served as a paragon for the future, the judgement on female rule in Hungary was not so simple, for the reign of Mary and her mother escalated into a bloody civil war between competing baronial leagues, which was finally ended by Sigismund, the husband of Mary I. Thuróczy also recorded the opinion of those who opposed Mary's rule and who argued that Hungarians never venerated women with a royal title, for their sagacity was insufficient to hold the reins of the kingdom.Footnote 18
Therefore, early modern legal scholars in Hungary were divided on the question of whether gynecocracy could be accepted. In this period, the Hungarian political thought was heavily influenced by the works of Justus Lipsius and German Neo-Aristotelian political theory.Footnote 19 Lipsius's works were equivocal about gynecocracy: in some places, he welcomed occasions when ‘the peaceful sex’ was given political power, while other passages indicate that he dismissed the idea of female rule.Footnote 20 In the Politica, Lipsius argued that ‘unius imperium’ could fall on both sexes, but especially men were ordered by nature to possess it. Although women were weak, lacked constancy, were not wise, but rather often full of vice and deceit, still virtues were never restricted only to the male sex and women could compensate their female ‘defects’ by manly care. Thus, Lipsius's conclusion was that women were capable of governing unless the law or the ancestral custom commanded otherwise.Footnote 21 The local custom however, seemed quite confusing in Hungary.
A dissertation, published in 1666, by Johann Andreas Lochner, a Hungarian student at Tübingen, examined the question as to whether a woman would be capable to rule the Hungarian kingdom.Footnote 22 While considering Lipsius's ideas and those of other early modern theorists debating on the question of female rule, Lochner argued that the example of Mary I demonstrated that gynecocracy was formerly accepted in Hungary, although he acknowledged that it caused a lot of turmoil. While an early eighteenth-century commentator on Lochner's work, János Jóny, argued that the fact that the noble estates accepted gynecocracy for some political reasons did not necessarily entail that they considered women fit to rule. He reminded his readers of the passages where Thuróczy demonstrated that Mary I was given royal power ‘against the customs of the country’, and that her weak rule caused civil war.Footnote 23 Jóny agreed with the German political philosopher, Henning Arnisaeus, who thought that it was better to exclude women entirely from royal succession. Thus, the legacy of Mary I was quite ambivalent and seemed to convince political thinkers to avoid rather than embrace gynecocracy.
A 1729 play from Szeged demonstrates the prevalence of such ideas about female rule in the first half of the eighteenth century. The title of the work Muliebris imperii infelicitas/ Das Weiber-Regiment nihmt selten ein guts End (The misfortune of female rule) briefly summarizes the moral of the story. Following the death of her husband, the main character, Laodice of Cappadocia, kills six of her seven children in order to prolong her reign. However, the youngest child manages to escape and ultimately ascends the throne, while Laodice is murdered.Footnote 24 According to an advertisement for the stage play, the drama was inspired by a chapter in Lipsius's Monita et exempla politica, which hoped to illustrate why women were not suitable for political power.Footnote 25
While such ideas were widespread among the Hungarian political and intellectual elite in this period, the theoretical question of female rule soon became a practical problem too, when the new emperor, Charles VI, unexpectedly became the ruler of the eastern Habsburg dominions in 1711. In the midst of the War of Spanish Succession, a secret dynastic pact (1703) between Emperor Leopold I and his sons, Joseph and Charles, laid down the principles of dynastic succession, just before Charles was sent to Spain to fight for his inheritance. Among other things, this agreement stated that if either Joseph or Charles failed to father male descendants, the dominions of the extinct male line would be automatically transferred to the other male line. More importantly, this pact also discussed the possibility of female succession, echoing earlier Habsburg Hausgesetze. It was stated that, in the event that the male line which unified the territories left no male heir, but only female successors, then the oldest daughter would inherit the lands and the kingdoms of the dynasty.Footnote 26
In 1711 – while Charles was still in Barcelona – his brother Emperor Joseph I unexpectedly died. In accordance with the resolutions of 1703, Charles left Spain and was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in December 1711, eventually arriving in Vienna the next month.Footnote 27 In 1713, the former secret pact was made public, and the so-called Pragmatic Sanction announced that Charles's descendants, either male or female, would inherit the lands of the dynasty. Only if he failed to father children would Joseph's, and then Leopold's successors inherit the dominions. It is crucial to stress that the Leopoldine pact of 1703 was a dynastic agreement which applied to only Leopold and his sons, who pledged to uphold it. In the Holy Roman Empire, women had no right to become regent empresses. In the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia, where succession to the throne was determined by local laws, the pact of 1703 and its proclamation in 1713 had no legal binding either. As a result, Charles spent most of his life – but especially after 1717, when Maria Theresia was born – seeking to have the Pragmatic Sanction accepted across his dominions and to obtain the assent of foreign powers.Footnote 28
The question of extending the hereditary succession to the female line of the Habsburg dynasty in the Hungarian kingdom was first raised publicly in 1712, before the Hungarian coronation of Charles, by a Croat committee which assembled in Zagreb on 9 March to give commands to the delegates being sent to Pressburg, where the Hungarian Diet had been convoked.Footnote 29 During the negotiations there, Imre Esterházy, the bishop of Zagreb, unexpectedly raised the question of female succession that the Diet accepted after long discussion.Footnote 30 The final document, which is sometimes called the ‘Croat Pragmatic Sanction’, presented arguments as to why it would be important to extend the Habsburg dynasty's right of hereditary succession – that Leopold I secured for the male line already in 1687 – also to the female line in the kingdom of Hungary. The reasons for the Croatian enthusiasm for female succession – which could have surprised Charles himself – can be found, on one hand, in that Croatia enjoyed the financial and military protection of southern Austria during the Ottoman period, thus the Croatian estates were afraid of the prospect of Habsburg rule ceasing in Hungary, exposing them once again to the threat of Ottoman campaigning. On the other hand, the developing discourse of Croat patriotism, most eminently represented by Pavao Ritter-Vitezović, envisaged a Croatian revival within the Habsburg empire.Footnote 31
Consequently, the Croat conference suggested that the right of freely electing a king in a case when the male line of the Habsburg dynasty died out would only leave the entire kingdom in confusion.Footnote 32 To avoid the fatal consequences of a possible interregnum, they proposed to extend the hereditary succession to the female line of the dynasty. They argued that if Louis I had merited the right from the Hungarians to make his daughter, Mary I, ‘successor of the crown and king’, the Austrian House deserved this even more from the gens Croata.Footnote 33 This proposal, however, did not have any further consequence, because the Hungarian Diet did not decide on these issues.
In fact, it seems that the Hungarians were having quite different reflections on a possible female succession. It is worth examining the resolutions of another conference, which was convoked in Pressburg by the palatine, Pál Esterházy, on 7 July 1712, following the request of Charles. Under certain conditions, the conference could accept if a female member of the Habsburg dynasty inherited the throne. However, the first condition was already unacceptable for Charles, because they demanded that he name just one woman in the dynasty in whose favour all other female members were to renounce their right of succession. Of course, Charles, who had nieces and no nephews at that time, had to decline this offer. Had he accepted these terms, his future daughters would have been excluded from the succession, thus he decided to postpone the question altogether. Curiously, the conference also demanded that besides the chosen female member, her husband had to be crowned as co-rex.Footnote 34 It seems that in 1712, the leading Hungarian political figures abhorred the idea of having a woman on the throne, and probably thought of the example of Mary I and the calamitous period that her rule caused.Footnote 35 These different stances aptly represent the ambiguous opinions which were associated with female succession and gynecocracy in the early eighteenth century: whereas the Croat nobility regarded the Habsburg female rule as a possible key for future political stability in the region, the Hungarian palatine and his circle saw in that the roots of more confusion to come.
The Hungarians’ aversion to female rule had not changed much and caused constant troubles for Vienna, where the issue became more and more pressing. At the secret conference of 12 March 1714, when arrangements were made once again to convoke the Diet at Pressburg, Count Starhemberg suggested that it would have been better to delay the issue of female succession altogether, for no one liked it in Hungary, not even those who were otherwise loyal to Charles, because ‘the Hungarians want kings, not queens, and whenever this question is raised, unrest evolves’.Footnote 36 Similarly, the discussion at the conference of 28 February 1714 reveals that the Hungarians continuously asked Charles to name the husband of the would-be heiress. They enquired whether the future husband would become a king and whether he would remain in his position in case his wife died without an heir.Footnote 37 These discussions cast light on the central issue – as Gustav Turba pointed out – that for the Hungarians, the main question was the king, not the heiress of the throne, as they wanted only male governance.Footnote 38
Thus, the puzzle Vienna had to solve seemed impossible: how to assure the Hungarians that they would have a fully legitimate rex, even if she turned out to be a woman? The ingenious solution was devised by Ferenc Szluha, a former kuruc rebel and legal expert of the palatine who at the Diet of 1722 – having been persuaded by the palatine, Miklós Pálffy, and Cardinal Imre Csáky to stand for the case of female succession – delivered an address to the Hungarian estates after which they finally, as the last ones in the Habsburg realm, accepted the Pragmatic Sanction. Szluha argued that the daughter of Charles would be
man in the person of a woman, by the best Law: For the Fundamental Law of the Fatherland transforms women into men…Other princes count amongst the royal entitlements that they are free from law; our law, however, can transform a first-born girl – as yet little but still majestic – into a man, a king! Such is the power of the Fatherland's Law, that it can accomplish this kind of metamorphosis!Footnote 39
The curious law that could turn a woman into a man was a medieval private law procedure called praefectio. It was a royal privilege granted to noblemen whose only legitimate heirs were women. In such situations (defectus seminis), the land and family fortune would automatically revert to the king, because women could not inherit landed property. For these cases, praefectio was introduced, by which the daughter of the nobleman could legally become a man, thus the family fortune could be preserved.Footnote 40 Szluha was toying with this idea and applied this mechanism of private law to the public law case of royal succession. His goal was to prove that it was not against the Hungarian customary law if a woman inherited the throne and ruled the country. Also, with these arguments, he was able to provide a legal theoretical explanation as to why a queen could be addressed as rex.
Szluha was, however, not the only one in 1722 to use the legal tool of jus praefectionis to strengthen the case of the Pragmatic Sanction. The legal scholar Mihály Bencsik, in a grand theoretical work, written in an absolutist spirit, suggested that in case the male line of the Habsburg dynasty should die out, the female line should ‘per Praefectionem’Footnote 41 inherit the throne of Hungary. He cited a paragraph from the laws of the Diet in 1547, where the Hungarian estates declared that they submitted themselves to the heirs and successors of Ferdinand I.Footnote 42 Since the customary law permitted daughters to be called ‘heirs’, they could have the right of royal succession by prafectio. According to Bencsik's explanation, Mary I also attained royal power by this legal act.Footnote 43
These efforts were in theory important for pushing through the Pragmatic Sanction which was accepted by ‘Vivat!’ exclamations at the Diet in 1722. However, it is important to emphasize that Maria Theresia did not become the ruler of Hungary per praefectionem, but by the virtue of the Pragmatic Sanction. The argument about praefectio was needed only to convince the Hungarian estates that the female hereditary succession was not in any way contrary to their laws. Nevertheless, in the period and beyond it was believed by many that behind the rex title of Mary I and subsequently Maria Theresia, the transformative legal forces of praefectio operated, for when they were granted royal power, they also legally became a man.Footnote 44
Therefore, by the time of Maria Theresia's succession, the parallels between Mary I and the future ruler had become widely known. The historian and geographer, Mátyás Bél, on 27 October 1740 – a week after the death of Charles VI – wrote the following in a letter: ‘the heavenly god granted us a queen, who is educated, merciful and well-disposed towards literature, in a way which is beyond the female sex. If I am not mistaken, we will call her Mary II which will be decided by the Diet that shall be convoked soon.’Footnote 45
III
Indeed, on 19 June 1741, the day before Maria Theresia's entry to the city of Pressburg, the question was raised in the higher chamber of the Diet as to which exclamation the queen should be greeted with during her coronation ceremony. Unfortunately, we do not have a long account of this debate, but one of the participants of the Diet and an eyewitness of the coronation, Gábor Kolinovics, briefly described the discussion in his diary. We learn from Kolinovics that Imre Esterházy – the former bishop of Zagreb and promoter of the Croat proposal in 1712, who had in the interim become archbishop of Esztergom – raised the question of whether ‘Vivat Rex’ or ‘Vivat Regina’ should be shouted in St Martin's Church, following the coronation. In the original programme, sent from Vienna, ‘Vivat Regina’Footnote 46 was given. According to Esterházy, the sex of the queen and the royal dignitas could be part of the same exclamation only if the formula would be ‘Vivat Domina et Rex noster’. The bishop of Eger, Gábor Erdődy, who preferred the rex word included in the exclamation, argued that although the second article of the Pragmatic Sanction accepted both male and female successors as heirs, the word regina did not convey the same meaning as rex. To support this argument, the bishop referred to a golden medal that a student at the University of Vienna had received for his dissertation that he dedicated to the queen. On the medal the following was written: ‘Maria Theresia Dei gratia Ungariae, Bohemiae etc. Rex’.Footnote 47 Thus, finally – wrote Kolinovics – the Diet agreed on the new formula: ‘Vivat Rex Domina nostra’.Footnote 48
The estates sought to stress that the Holy Crown would be placed on the head of Maria Theresia as it was in the case of kings who possessed full royal power, whereas at the ceremonies of queen-consorts, the Holy Crown merely touched their right shoulder.Footnote 49 In 1613, Péter Révay, a Hungarian crown guard and ardent reader of Lipsius, explained this custom by arguing that the power of women should be moderated and limited; the duty of a queen, as a companion, is to help in carrying the heavy burden of governance, as ‘the glory of obeying is suitable to the weaker sex’.Footnote 50
In 1741, however, Maria Theresia not only helped in governing the land, but – literally and symbolically – carried the burden of royal power herself, an important distinction that had to be made clear in her royal title, following on from the precedent of Mary I. The Hungarian estates were afraid that the legal and political order of the country would not be reflected properly if only a regina took the throne.Footnote 51 This is the reason why the archbishop greeted Maria Theresia on her arrival at the Hungarian border with the following words: ‘We adore Your Majesty as our lady, regarding your sex, and – regarding your power – in accordance with the customs of our forefathers or the fatherly sanction… – as our king and lord.’Footnote 52
With the words ‘customs of our forefathers’, Esterházy undoubtedly evoked the rex femineus tradition developed by Thuróczy, while by mentioning the ‘fatherly sanction’, he referred to the Pragmatic Sanction. Thus, he provided a subtle explanation as to why Maria Theresia had to be addressed as rex: on one hand, the Pragmatic Sanction stated that the female descendants of Charles had to be acknowledged as successors to the Hungarian throne; on the other hand, the medieval history of Mary I was an example as to why the newly crowned female ruler should be addressed as rex. Therefore, Esterházy and the Hungarian estates found in the Vivat Domina et Rex noster formula a compromise where the Hungarian tradition of kingship was reconciled with the political reality of Habsburg hereditary rule in Hungary. When on 25 June 1741, Esterházy placed the Holy Crown on the head of Maria Theresia, he could also celebrate the success of his own political programme, for Esterházy promoted the female hereditary succession of the Habsburg dynasty already when he was the bishop of Zagreb.
Maria Theresia's coronation followed the ritual order of the previous ceremonies performed by male rulers. It was emphasized in Vienna and Pressburg that she must be crowned, not simply as the wife of a king, but as a king.Footnote 53 While the visual and narrative representations stressed by both contemporaries in the eighteenth century and historians today underline the heroic act of how Maria Theresia underwent a male ritual,Footnote 54 closer scrutiny of sources can reveal that many had doubts if the queen could successfully fulfil her new role of a king. The diaries of the Diet and eyewitness accounts describing Maria Theresia's splendid dress that she wore when leaving the church, did not fail to mention that she showed the signs of ‘observable fatigue’Footnote 55 under the heavy coronation regalia that weighed some 40 kg (88.185 lb).Footnote 56
Another critical event in the ceremony was the Royal Hill, where the queen had to ride up to the top with the sword of St Stephen in her hand and point towards the four cardinal directions, representing that she was willing to defend the country from all enemies. On 8 April 1741, the Hofkonferenz in Vienna discussed how Maria Theresia should perform this act. There was agreement that this was an indispensable part of the ceremony, and it was suggested that the queen should be carried to the top of the hill in a sedan chair, since there was not enough space to use a chariot for that purpose.Footnote 57 The queen, however, changed her mind and began to practise horseback riding to perform the coronation act in its entirety.Footnote 58 The queen's unusual riding lessons became so well known, that even the London-based The Gentleman's Magazine informed its readers about them.Footnote 59
No wonder then that Maria Theresia's depiction on the horse became a favourite topic in the representations of the coronation ceremony. A memorial medal of the ceremony shows the queen on horseback with the inscription, ‘Nec priscis regibus impar’: she is not inferior to the old kings.Footnote 60 This imagery expressed the idea in the most telling way that Maria Theresia, as a rex femineus, was well beyond the capabilities of the female sex and that, in spite of her female body, she was capable enough to rule like a man.
The diaries of the Hungarian Diet, however, offer a somewhat different picture. The queen mounted on a horse which was ‘pro eo actu instructo’ – meaning seemingly that the horse was already trained to perform the task.Footnote 61 More importantly, however, another diary mentioned that when Maria Theresia wanted to ride up to the hill, the horse in the beginning seemed to resist the queen's command, but then without greater hesitation they galloped to the top.Footnote 62 The hint that the horse did not want to follow the command of the queen is extremely revealing. This short anecdote demonstrates that some observers were looking out for the ways in which the queen's body was not capable to play the role of a male monarch. Showing good skills in horse-riding was essential for early modern rulers. Paul Kléber Monod demonstrated that the portrayals of kings on horseback testified their capacity to rule, for the horse represented the kingdom as well as the people.Footnote 63
Similar concerns about female rule were expressed by a rumour mentioned in Gábor Kolinovics's work. He was told by a very erudite friend that 12,000 coins were spread in Hungary and the neighbouring regions, showing the queen's image on one side, and the Hungarian coat of arms on the other. However, through the error of the curators in the mint, or maybe ‘divine providence predicted a bad sign’, the coat of arms was broken, and the queen's effigy was distorted by thousands of points as if smallpox had attacked her.Footnote 64 This short anecdote, along with the fatigue of the queen and the little misadventure when horse-riding, reflects the distrust and maybe the ill-will of those who doubted the future success of Maria Theresia's gynecocracy which during the War of Austrian Succession was not entirely groundless.
These fears were explicitly addressed by a canon, Márton Padányi Biró, who was a celebrated preacher during the Diet of 1741. At Christmas in the year following the coronation, he gave a sermon where he compared the powerless baby Jesus with Maria Theresia:
Although, like your almighty child King, who took up weak human nature, your King on the earth seems also weak and powerless for she is a woman, but do not worry…The choice of kings is in the hand of God, he gave her to you as your king, thus do not be afraid, and trust even more in her weakness, because here not man, but God achieves the victory.Footnote 65
What comes through these lines is that despite the official rhetoric, people were unsure about how their female king would perform the royal duties. What could have bothered many is that although Maria Theresia was crowned as rex, and might have had male qualities which elevated her above other women, she was still ‘just’ a woman. She did not have a body politic, just a natural female body which was subject to failures and shortcomings like that of every other woman. The female body was a source of anxiety that tradition and legal fiction of kingship tried to alleviate.
Nevertheless, Maria Theresia's coming to the throne also challenged inherited conceptions about femininity. The Dominican friar Pius Füsi,Footnote 66 in his laudatory Carmen pastoritium (1741), reflected on the unusual situation that the rex femineus and the introduction of gynecocracy caused in Hungary. In the poem, three female figures, Galatea, Phyllis, and Amaryllis, known from Virgil's Eclogues are discussing the coming to the throne of Maria Theresia. They not only celebrate the event with great joy, but also proclaim the ‘emancipation’ of the female sex and a rebellion against men. They state that from then on, they do not want to do housework, and men will be subordinated to women:
Amongst the triumph of the female sex, Amaryllis reminded them that Maria Theresia's position will not open the road for every woman to leave behind their place in society.
Füsi threw cold water on the heated fervour of those who believed that Maria Theresia's succession could be seen as the redefinition of what women were. These verses desperately wanted to emphasize that the new queen's case did not reveal any novelty about female nature, and that her royal power must be seen as nothing else than a glorious exception. Despite these efforts, Füsi's poem indicated that Maria Theresia's kingship began to push the boundaries of established views about what women were like.
Soon, the rex femineus tradition itself was questioned. In 1742, the historian Károly András Bél began to doubt that the long-standing interpretation of Thuróczy's chronicle about the ‘female king’ was correct. In a short treatise, Bél attempted to convince his readers by referring to charters and to a medieval coin that when Mary I acquired full royal power, her official title matched her sex and therefore she was called regina and not rex. According to his interpretation, in Thuróczy's text – ‘Omnis vulgus concordi animo hanc virginem regem apellat’ – the word ‘vulgus’, which referred to the people who addressed Mary I as ‘rex’, stood for the common folk, not the nobility who had the right to grant her such a title. In his review, the German historian and numismatist, Johann David Köhler, argued that the word vulgus should be understood as a reference to the barons and noblemen, who rightfully called Mary I their rex.Footnote 69
In his response to Köhler, Bél wrote that he came to the idea of examining this question when Maria Theresia was crowned in Pressburg, because he had heard about the debates on whether the new ruler should be called regina or rex. Most people then – explained Bél – invoked the example of Mary I.Footnote 70 According to Bél, people were shouting both ‘Vivat Maria Theresia Rex’ and ‘Vivat Maria Theresia Regina’ on the streets of Pressburg. In his view, Thuróczy could have recorded a similar confusion among the common people.Footnote 71 Bél thought that since Maria Theresia did not call herself rex in either documents or charters, it was futile to argue for her rex title and it was incorrect to call her ‘king’.Footnote 72 Thus, Bél extended his criticism of the rex femineus conception to his own time. A corollary of this debate was nothing less than that a queen could stand on her own ground as a ruler and did not need to ‘cover’ her female sex with the male title.
Nevertheless, Bél and Köhler's contemporaries saw the debate as entirely fruitless. The eighteenth-century historian, István Katona, in opposition to the views of both Köhler and Bél, argued that Mary I as well as Maria Theresia were interchangeably called regina and rex. According to Katona, the title regina is appropriate if referring to the queen's sex, whereas she should be called rex, if referring to her power.Footnote 73 Thus, although Maria Theresia called herself regina in royal decrees and charters, nothing prevented people from addressing her as rex during her coronation, like in the case of Mary I, because – as Katona put it – ‘we consider in her not the sex, but the dignity, not of queens, but that of kings’.Footnote 74
A similar view was expressed about this debate by the Viennese legal scholar, Christian August Beck. He was professor at the Theresian Academy, which provided legal courses on public law and the legal system of the Habsburg Empire.Footnote 75 He was convinced that the struggles between Bél and Köhler were only about words and not the issue itself. Beck echoed Pufendorf's idea, arguing that ‘the king is a moral person, the name of the power and dignity which fall on both sexes’.Footnote 76 As Ben Holland summarized, the moral persons for Pufendorf ‘are composites of duties, rights and capacities that we can call roles or offices’.Footnote 77 Thus, in the Pufendorfian system, the physical sex became entirely irrelevant, because kingship as a persona moralis can be embodied by men and women alike. Looking at from this perspective, being a king, a wife, a mother, etc., did not mean anything else than taking different roles and with them different responsibilities, rights, and obligations. Therefore, in a world of fixed gender roles, natural law theories and legal processes like the praefectio could open up the opportunity for transgressing the seemingly insurmountable differences between the assigned roles of men and women. However, it must also be stressed that, although ‘kingship’ – as Kantorowicz put it – became ‘abstract’ in Hungary, it was certainly not gender neutral.Footnote 78 It was still coded as masculine, deriving the symbolism of monarchy from the male body.
Furthermore, Beck placed the understanding of female rule on a new basis. He rejected the views of Aristotle and his followers, who thought that women were incapable of ruling by nature. Instead, he cited Montesquieu's Spirit of the laws to demonstrate that it can be even beneficial for a state if women exercise political power, for they can achieve a more balanced governance by their mild nature:Footnote 79
It is against reason and against nature for women to be mistresses in the house, as was established among the Egyptians, but not for them to govern an empire. In the first case, their weak state does not permit them to be preeminent; in the second, their very weakness gives them more gentleness and moderation, which, rather than the harsh and ferocious virtues, can make for a good government.Footnote 80
Thus, although Montesquieu here reinforced the old, biased trope about the weakness of women, he also carved out a possible space for them in the workings of political rule.
IV
The way from Lipsius's theories on female rule to Montesquieu's ideas summarizes the processes of change addressed by this article. Initially, the female body supposed a challenge to kingship whose integrity made Maria Theresia blur gender boundaries in her coronation ritual where she had been represented as ‘Serenissimus Rex Maria Secundus’.Footnote 81 It seems that the integrity of inherited ideas associated with the image of kings proved stronger than those concerning the transgressing of gender roles. The rumours around Maria Theresia's coronation stemmed from anxieties about the female body of the queen and her capacity to carry out the burden of the Holy Crown. However, gradually the exercise of royal power became distanced from ideas about the physical body of the ruler. Interpretations stressing the dignitas and the ‘moral person’ of the king aimed to decrease the symbolic charge of the ruler's natural body, although the gendered aspect of monarchical rule has not been lost, and men were still positioned as automatic figures of royal power. Nevertheless, it has also been demonstrated that Maria Theresia's coming to the throne ushered in a period of questioning perceived ideas of female nature. To underscore this point with one example, I wish to return to the legal work, the Facies Juris Publici Hungariae, mentioned in the first half of the article. In a copy held at the National Széchényi Library (Budapest), in addition to Jóny's commentaries, there are other handwritten notes from around the 1760s or 1770s.Footnote 82 At the section where Lochner asked if women were capable to rule in Hungary, the unknown commentator felt that after many years of having Maria Theresia as the ‘king’ of the country, a new response should be given, therefore the person wrote with great confidence that ‘[t]he glorious reign of Maria Theresia is proof enough of how well a woman can rule the Kingdom of Hungary’.Footnote 83
Two years after the Hungarian coronation, Maria Theresia was crowned once again as rex. On 12 May 1743, she symbolically assumed royal power in Bohemia, where she was the first woman to ascend the throne. During the coronation ritual, Maria Theresia was called rex foemina in prayers and made her solemn vows as coronandus Rex.Footnote 84 These acts became apparent in the inscriptions of the coronation coins, where her title was Hungariae et Bohemiae Rex.Footnote 85 The constitutional importance of the rex title compared with that of regina had once again been made clear in the decision at the Hofkonferenz on 10 April 1743, when the question arose whether rex or regina should be written on the memorial coins to be minted for the Erbhuldigung of the Upper-Austrian estates in Linz. The conference suggested rex, because even if Maria Theresia ‘had not received the Hungarian and Bohemian crowns, through pacts and the providence of the ancestors and Austrian privileges as well as through hereditary rights, she would be still Rex and ruler (Herrscherin), but not Regina which refers the wife of a king’.Footnote 86
While Maria Theresia was keen to be crowned as king in both Hungary and Bohemia, she refused in 1745 to be crowned as empress when her husband Francis Stephen of Lorrain became Holy Roman Emperor. The reason for her reluctance, it has been suggested, was that the title of empress would have assigned Maria Theresia a subordinated status which was derived from the dignity of her husband, whereas the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia were acquired by her own hereditary right. With her refusal to undergo the imperial ceremonies, Maria Theresia also demonstrated that in her political worldview, the dynasty and its hereditary lands played an even more important role than did the Reich.Footnote 87
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