Maria Leopoldine of Austria

Maria Leopoldine of Austria-Tyrol (6 April 1632 – 7 August 1649) on 6 April 1632 as the third (but second surviving) daughter and the fifth and youngest child of Leopold V, Archduke of Further Austria, and Claudia de' Medici. Her father died on 13 September 1632, when she was five months old. On her father's side, her grandparents were Charles II, Archduke of Inner Austria and his wife and niece Princess Maria Anna of Bavaria; on her mother's side, her grandparents were Ferdinando I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany and his wife Princess Christina of Lorraine. In addition to her full siblings, she had an older half-sister, Vittoria della Rovere, born from her mother's first marriage to Federico Ubaldo della Rovere, Duke of Urbino.

Maria Leopoldine's oldest brother, Ferdinand Charles, inherited Further Austria, but Dowager Archduchess Claudia assumed regency because of her son's minority. In a letter written to his mother, Elizabeth of England, on 8 September 1641, Charles Louis of the Palatinate (later Elector Palatine) mentioned the possibility of a marriage between the 9-year-old archduchess and himself; the marriage between them would be to end "all grudges betweene our families". However, the union never took place because he was a Protestant, and the staunchly Catholic Habsburgs never allowed any marriages between their members and Protestants.

Empress and Queen

In Linz on 2 July 1648 Maria Leopoldine married the widowed Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III, thereby becoming Empress of the Holy Roman Empire, Queen of the Germans, Queen of Hungary and Queen of Bohemia. The wedding ceremony was splendid. The composer Andreas Rauch celebrated the marriage as "anticipating (with the help of Divine Providence) the most beautiful end of the Thirty Years' War" and an opera titled I Trionfi d'Amore, produced by Giovanni Felice Sances, was meant to commemorate the event, but the Prague premiere was canceled at the last moment when King Władysław IV Vasa (Ferdinand III's brother-in-law) died within two months of the wedding; the planned Pressburg performance apparently never took place. and ultimately succumbed to inbreeding.

Soon after her wedding, Maria Leopoldine became pregnant, and was depicted as such in the 1649 painting by the Italian painter and poet Lorenzo Lippi. The Imperial couple's only child, Archduke Charles Joseph of Austria, was born on 7 August 1649. The childbirth was extremely difficult, ending in the death of the 17-year-old empress. Her husband remarried within two years, while their son died childless aged 14. She is buried in tomb 21 in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna. The writer Wolf Helmhardt, Baron von Hohberg, then at the beginning of his career, sent to Emperor Ferdinand III a poem written in honour of the late Empress, called "Poem of tears" (de: Klag-Gedicht).

Ancestry