The Empress Cities: Urban Centres, Societies and Economies in the Age of Maria Theresia von Habsburg

The paper deals with the remarkable changes that Milan underwent in his forma urbis during the Theresian age. The first part presents shortly the urbanistic and economic situation of Milan in the middle of the 18th century. The second part refers to the urbanistic changes of Milan in the second half of the 18th century and to the main actors of this transformation: the archduke Ferdinando and the Royal architect Piermarini, on one side, and the local nobility, on the other. The final part considers the economic consequences of such interventions.

Maria Theresa was born on May 13th 1717 in Vienna. In June of the same year, her father, the Emperor, declared the freedom of navigation in the Adriatic Sea. In 1718, he signed the Peace of Passorowitz and reached a commercial agreement with the Ottoman Empire. In 1719, the cities of Trieste and Rijeka were declared free ports. There is a traditional narrative in Trieste, which considers the creation of the free port by Charles VI as the “mythical” starting point of the city’s growth and sees Trieste as the result of the centralistic and modern approach of the Emperor. Without forgetting the role of the Habsburg, however, it is possible to tell the story of Trieste by taking other hypotheses, players, paths and stories into consideration. This interpretation increases the role of Trieste in shaping its history and the importance of local forces, making them protagonists of their fate. Moreover, it traces the growth of Trieste back to the network of the sea routes crossing the Mediterranean.

While the period of Middle Ages is the period of heyday for Košice while the town represents a closed and fully autonomous community, 16th and 17th century is the period of economic and political decline which is typical for the struggle to preserve the original form of urban society. Maria Theresa’s reign represents repeated flourish of the town. The objective of this paper is to ask also about the reasons for this positive development and also to look for an answer to the question whether this was a credit of Maria Theresa or of her court’s policy. Košice paid an involuntary price for this positive transformation in the form of loss of its original identity. The development of the city was positive in many aspects and was changing the town to a modern (in the Early Modern Times context) metropolis of a given part of the country – Northeast Hungary.

The paper deals with the topic of one of the main statistical sources in modern Transylvania, the fiscal conscription from 1750. Recently edited in an exhaustive form by a group of historians working in Cluj-Napoca, this conscription could be valued in many historical ways, offering a large data base regarding Transylvanian society at the middle of the 18th century. The paper underlines the historical and historiographical importance of the conscription as a main sensor of the urban development in 18th century Transylvania, also pointing its capacity to be exploited by updated research methods.

The reader will be able to start a journey through the Empire, from the heart of the Continent to the Italian peninsula, Trieste and Mediterranean and the history of each city and urban system becomes the common thread of history of those areas, of the transformations they underwent and the relationship they had with the Empire. Urban phenomenon could indeed be the starting point for an analysis of the imperial policies and dynamics. The growth of cities and urban systems may be the cause of contradictions characterizing the mythical spaces we commonly call ‘Mitteleuropa’, where past and present have always been in conflict. In fact, the cities were not the passive result of the policies of the Vienna Court, but active protagonists of their own history. In this way, in the context of continue negotiations with the State, they had a profound impact on the imperial policies in the 18th century.

By the mid-eighteenth century Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which had been under the rule of the Habsburgs since 1526, was no longer a royal residence. But although it was losing its importance, it continued to be depicted in various 'images'. This paper provides a brief classification and basic characteristics of different groups of city plans and vedute dating back to the 18th century. The main focus is on two of them, which – combined – illustrate Prague in the reign of Maria Theresa. The first is the commissioned description of the coronation ceremony of Maria Theresa as queen of Bohemia in 1743; especially the first part, the ceremonial entry of the empress and her husband into Prague illustrated with six vedute of the procession captured in carefully chosen public spaces by Jan Josef Dietzler, provides us 'in words and images' with a detailed and lifelike view of Prague. As Prague lacked an orientation plan serving public practical purposes until the 1780s, the most suitable source meeting topographical and aesthetical requirements, originally intended to be printed, is a large 'panoramic' town plan of Prague by Joseph Daniel Huber (1769). An integral part of the paper is a diagram which shows the route taken by Maria Theresa and Francis Stephen of Lorraine on the day of their ceremonial entry into the city, plotted against the city plan and marking the viewpoints, which Dietzler made use of to sketch his vedute.

The contribution presents the main determinants of Vienna’s social, economic, cultural and religious life during the reign of Maria Theresa based on the «Political Comments» of the Aulic War Council. These «Political Comments» were compiled during the «conscription of souls» of 1770–71, a population census that constituted the preparatory steps to a new system of recruitment. They may be regarded as a kind of qualitative addition to the quantitative results of the conscription and provided the Empress and her co-regent Joseph II with a comprehensive scenario of the conditions in the Monarchy from a military perspective, which, in some cases, became the starting point for political measures. The report on Lower Austria, presented in October 1771, also contains some paragraphs on Vienna, which will serve as a starting point to introduce some of the main characteristics and developments of the Monarchy’s capital in the second half of the 18th century.