Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor

Youth

Leopold was born in Vienna as his parents' third son. Initially selected for a clerical career, he received an education with a focus on theology. In 1753, he was engaged to Maria Beatrice d'Este, heiress to the Duchy of Modena.

The marriage was never consummated and Maria Beatrice instead married Leopold's brother, Archduke Ferdinand.

Upon the early death of his older brother Archduke Charles in 1761, the family decided that Leopold was going to succeed his father as Grand Duke of Tuscany. Tuscany had been envisioned and designated as a secundogeniture, a territory and title bestowed upon the second born son, which was greater than an appanage. On 5 August 1765, Leopold married Maria Luisa, daughter of King Charles III of Spain and Maria Amalia of Saxony; however, they were already married by proxy on 16 February 1764 in Madrid, more than a year before their in-person marriage. Upon the death of his father, Francis I, on 18 August 1765, he became Grand Duke of Tuscany.

Grand Duke of Tuscany

For five years, Leopold exercised little more than nominal authority, under the supervision of counsellors appointed by his mother. In 1770, he made a journey to Vienna to secure the removal of this vexatious guardianship and returned to Florence with a free hand. During the twenty years that elapsed between his return to Florence and the death of his eldest brother Joseph II in 1790, he was employed in reforming the administration of his small state. The reformation was carried out by the removal of the ruinous restrictions on industry and personal freedom imposed by his predecessors of the House of Medici and left untouched during his father's life, by the introduction of a rational system of taxation (reducing the rates of taxation), and by the execution of profitable public works, such as the drainage of the Valdichiana.

As Leopold had no army to maintain, and as he suppressed the small naval force kept up by the Medici, the whole of his revenue was left free for the improvement of his state. Leopold was never popular with his Italian subjects. His disposition was cold and retiring. His habits were simple to the verge of sordidness, though he could display splendour on occasion, and he could not help offending those of his subjects who had profited by the abuses of the Medicean régime.

But his steady, consistent, and intelligent administration, which advanced step by step, brought the grand duchy to a high level of material prosperity. His ecclesiastical policy, which disturbed the deeply rooted convictions of his people and brought him into collision with the Pope, was not successful. He was unable to secularise the property of the religious houses or to put the clergy entirely under the control of the lay power. However, his abolition of capital punishment was the first permanent abolition in modern times. On 30 November 1786, after having de facto blocked capital executions (the last was in 1769), Leopold promulgated the reform of the penal code and introduced the Leopoldine Code that abolished the death penalty and ordered the destruction of all the instruments for capital execution in his land. Torture was also banned.

In line with the theories of the Age of Enlightenment, he enlarged La Specola with medical waxworks and other exhibits, aiming to educate Florentines in the empirical observation of natural laws.

Leopold also approved and collaborated on the development of a political constitution, said to have anticipated by many years the promulgation of the French constitution and which presented some similarities with the Virginia Bill of Rights of 1778. Leopold's concept of this was based on respect for the political rights of citizens and on a harmony of power between the executive and the legislative. However, it could not be put into effect because Leopold moved to Vienna to become emperor in 1790, and because it was so radically new that it garnered opposition even from those who might have benefited from it.

Holy Roman Emperor

Leopold, during his government in Tuscany, had shown a speculative tendency to grant his subjects a constitution. When he succeeded to the Austrian lands, he began by making large concessions to the interests offended by his brother's innovations. He recognised the Estates of his different dominions as "the pillars of the monarchy", pacified the Hungarians and Bohemians, and divided the insurgents in the Austrian Netherlands (now Belgium) by means of concessions. When these failed to restore order, he marched troops into the country and re-established his own authority, and at the same time the historic franchises of the Flemings. Yet he did not surrender any part that could be retained of what Maria Theresa and Joseph had done to strengthen the hands of the state. He continued, for instance, to insist that no papal bull could be published in his dominions without his consent (placetum regium). One of the harshest actions Leopold took to placate the noble communities of the various Habsburg domains was to issue a decree on 9 May 1790 that forced thousands of Bohemian serfs freed by his brother Joseph back into servitude.

Leopold lived for barely two years after his accession as Holy Roman Emperor, and during that period, he was hard pressed by peril from west and east alike. The growing revolutionary disorders in France endangered the life of his sister Marie Antoinette, the queen of Louis XVI, and also threatened his own dominions with the spread of subversive agitation. His sister sent him passionate appeals for help, and he was pestered by the royalist émigrés, who were intriguing to bring about armed intervention in France.

From the east, he was threatened by the aggressive ambition of Catherine II of Russia and by the unscrupulous policy of Prussia. Catherine would have been delighted to see Austria and Prussia embark on a crusade in the cause of kings against the French Revolution. While they were busy beyond the Rhine, she would have annexed what remained of Poland and made conquests against the Ottoman Empire. Leopold II had no difficulty in seeing through the rather transparent cunning of the Russian empress, and he refused to be misled.

To his sister, he gave good advice and promises of help if she and her husband could escape from Paris. The émigrés who followed him pertinaciously were refused audience, or when they forced themselves on him, were peremptorily denied all help. Leopold was too purely a politician not to be secretly pleased at the destruction of the power of France and of her influence in Europe by her internal disorders. Within six weeks of his accession, he displayed his contempt for France's weakness by practically tearing up the treaty of alliance made by Maria Theresa in 1756 and opening negotiations with Great Britain to impose a check on Russia and Prussia.

Patronage of the arts

As a patron of the arts, Leopold II had an impact on the arts and culture of both Tuscany and Vienna. He was particularly passionate about Italian opera as practised in the city of Florence. While the Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1765 to 1790, he was a major patron of the composer Tommaso Traetta and subsidised the costs of staging many new innovative operas by that composer, including the first staging in Florence of Traetta's 1763 masterwork Ifigenia in Tauride. He also was a patron of the opera singers Giovanni Manzuoli, Giusto Fernando Tenducci, and Tommaso Guarducci.

Upon his succession to the Holy Roman Emperor in 1790, Leopold II brought his passion for Florentine opera to the Vienna court, and brought with him many of the musicians and opera singers he enjoyed in Tuscany to Vienna. Many of the previously active singers, librettists, and composers at the Vienna court, such as librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, were dismissed by Leopold II as he significantly changed the staffing of artists in the Vienna court.

Before Leopold II opera buffa had been the center of the Vienna court, but after his succession and by Leopold's direction opera seria and ballet became the central repertoire of both the Burgtheater and Kärntnertortheate. Following this shift, Mozart, who had previously written the opera buffas The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Così fan tutte (1790) with Da Ponte, created the opera seria La clemenza di Tito which was commissioned by the Estates of Bohemia for the festivities that accompanied Leopold's coronation as king of Bohemia in Prague on 6 September 1791. This shift toward opera seria and ballet continued in Vienna beyond Leopold II's reign decades into the 19th century.

Issue

His mother, Empress Maria Theresa, was the last Habsburg and he was one of 16 children. His brother Joseph II died without any surviving children. Leopold had 16 children, just like his mother, and became the founder of the main line of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine.

Children with his wife Infanta Maria Luisa of Spain (also known as Maria Ludovica of Spain):

Illegitimate children

With Livia Raimondi, a ballerina, he had:

Luigi von Grün (1788–1814).