Joseph II 1741-90
Holy Roman Emperor

Born in Vienna, the son of Francis I and Maria Theresa, he was elected King of the Romans in 1764, and after his father's death (1765) Holy Roman Emperor. Until his mother's death (1780) his power was limited to the army and foreign affairs. Although he failed to add Bavaria to the Austrian dominions, he acquired Galicia, Lodomeria and Zips, at the first partition of Poland (1772), and he appropriated a great part of Passau and Salzburg (1780). He declared himself independent of the pope, and prohibited the publication of any new papal Bulls without his permission. He suppressed 700 monasteries, displacing 36,000 monks, prohibited papal dispensations on marriage, and published an Edict of Toleration for Protestants and Greeks in 1781. He also abolished serfdom, freed the press and the theatre, emancipated the Jews, reorganized taxation, and curtailed the feudal privileges of the nobles. In 1788 he engaged in an unsuccessful war with Turkey, and in the same year there were outbreaks of insurrection within his non-German territories, Hungary and the Austrian Netherlands. Although intellectually gifted and well read, he was unworldly, short-tempered and autocratic, and na�ve in his idea of a monarch's capacity for wholesale change.

Bibliography: Saul K Padover, The Revolutionary Emperor: Joseph the Second 1741-1790 (1934)