Her husband was dead, and her son had inherited his war. She was forty-three when she refused to leave Munich as her cousin's troops advanced into Bavaria.
She had been born in Vienna on 22 October 1701, the younger daughter of the future Emperor Joseph I and Wilhelmine Amalia of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Eleven weeks earlier, their only son, Leopold Joseph, had died at nine months old. His little coffin bore the Austrian arms beneath an archduke's crown. The family now had two daughters and no son: Maria Josepha and the newborn Maria Amalia.
The distinction mattered in a dynasty whose arrangements began with sons. In 1703, her grandfather Emperor Leopold I and his sons Joseph and Charles agreed how their inheritance should pass. If both male lines failed, Joseph's daughters would come before Charles's daughters. Maria Josepha was the elder sister. Maria Amalia stood behind her, but both belonged to the senior branch of the family.
Her father became emperor in 1705. Six years later he died of smallpox, leaving Maria Amalia fatherless at nine. His brother succeeded him as Charles VI. Their mother pressed her daughters' interests at the Viennese court, where the question of whose children came first was becoming rather less theoretical.
Charles settled it in favour of his own line. His Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 kept the Habsburg lands together and gave his future daughters precedence over his nieces. He had no children when he made those arrangements. Maria Theresa, the daughter who would eventually inherit, had not yet been born.
Maria Amalia's place had been moved to make room for a cousin who did not yet exist.
When she married Charles Albert, the Bavarian heir, in Vienna on 5 October 1722, she was twenty. Before the wedding she had recognised the succession arrangements and renounced her claims. Bavaria acknowledged them too. Vienna had required the promises because a marriage to Joseph's daughter offered the Bavarian dynasty precisely the connection from which a future challenge could be made.
The wedding celebrations continued in Munich for nearly three weeks. The bride entered the city on 17 October, five days before her twenty-first birthday. There were operas and banquets, and festivities at the Bavarian palaces. It was an expensive welcome for a woman whose inheritance had supposedly been dealt with already.
Her ancestry remained useful.
In 1726 Charles Albert became Elector of Bavaria, one of the princes entitled to choose the Holy Roman Emperor. When Charles VI died in 1740, Maria Theresa inherited the Habsburg territories. Maria Amalia's husband challenged that inheritance with French support, using her descent among the arguments for his claims. He also pursued the imperial crown, a separate prize that had to be won by election.
He obtained it. On 12 February 1742, Charles Albert was crowned in Frankfurt as Emperor Charles VII. Maria Amalia's own coronation followed there on 8 March. By then Austrian troops had occupied Munich. At forty, she received an imperial crown while the city that had celebrated her marriage was in enemy hands.
The crown could not keep their country safe.
Bavaria changed hands more than once as the war swung back and forth. The emperor got back into Munich in the autumn of 1744, and he died there on 20 January 1745. His son Maximilian Joseph succeeded him as elector at seventeen. He inherited a country damaged by war and burdened with debt, with the struggle still unfinished.
His mother now pressed for a settlement. During the Austrian advance that spring, she refused to leave Munich. Her remaining there put pressure on her son to change course. She also intervened repeatedly in the negotiations, defending Bavarian interests while working towards an agreement with the cousin whose inheritance her husband had challenged.
There were other voices urging peace, among them senior soldiers and ministers. Austrian military success made their case increasingly difficult to resist. Maximilian turned eighteen in March. The young ruler who had begun by continuing his father's policy was brought to terms that April.
On 22 April 1745, the settlement at Füssen took Bavaria out of the war. Maximilian accepted the Pragmatic Sanction and abandoned the claims to the Austrian inheritance. He promised his vote for Maria Theresa's husband, Francis of Lorraine, in the coming imperial election. Austria recognised his dead father's imperial dignity and agreed to withdraw its troops.
The inheritance Maria Amalia had renounced before her wedding was renounced again by her son. This time the renunciation brought Bavaria peace.
She remained in Bavaria. In 1754 she supported the establishment of a community of Elisabethine sisters there, whose work included caring for the poor and sick. The elector's ecclesiastical council approved their foundation on condition that they train lay sisters in nursing. Their first home was a house in a garden near the Sendlinger Gate.
The sisters moved into that house in the spring of 1755, set up a chapel and opened a provisional hospital. Ten years earlier, Maria Amalia had refused to leave the city with an enemy army on the way. Now it had a place to take in its sick, and she had helped to put it there.
