*13.08.1752 Vienna  -  †08.09.1814 Vienna

Archduchess of Austria

Queen of Naples-Sicily

Maria Karoline was the 13th child of Empress Maria Theresa and Francis I. Stephen of Lorraine. After her sister Maria Josepha Maria Josepha died of smallpox shortly before her marriage to Ferdinand IV. of Naples on 15 October 1767, she married him in 1768.

The wedding procession, consisting of 57 carriages, set off from Vienna to Naples on 7 April 1768. Four young men of the Noble Guard rode in full dress on magnificent white horses alongside Karoline's six-horse carriage. They were sent ahead later so that the contrast with Karoline's future husband would not be so stark. For the childish, uneducated Ferdinand – nicknamed ‘Il Re Nasone’ by the Neapolitans because of his large nose – was anything but an attractive man.

The court in Naples was frequented by important figures from the cultural life of the time: Russian Count Andreas Rasumofsky was amiable, witty, extensively educated, with a sophisticated manner, and one of the most colourful characters in diplomacy. Karoline's circle of confidants also included Sir William Hamilton, the envoy of the English court, and his first wife, as well as his second wife, a beauty of uncertain origin who became famous as Lady Hamilton, primarily through her love for Horatio Nelson, the victor of Abukir. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose friend Jacob Philipp Hackert was royal court painter in Naples, also met Sir William and Emma Hamilton during a trip to Italy.

In 1780, Maria Karoline ran an academy of sciences.

Maria Karoline was a passionate opponent of Napoleon and also offered the strongest resistance to the French in Naples. However, when Naples was conquered in 1799, the royal couple fled to Sicily. After bloody battles, they returned to Naples, but were forced to leave the country again after the Peace of Pressburg. The mainland part of the empire was handed over to Joseph Bonaparte in 1806 and later to Joachim Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law, in 1810.

Maria Karoline did not live to see Ferdinand IV.'s return to the Neapolitan throne. She died at the beginning of the Congress of Vienna on 8 September 1814 at Hetzendorf Palace in Vienna.

In her will, Karoline had stipulated: ‘I command that my body shall in no way be embalmed or opened ... I wish to be buried in black robes, the habit of the sorrowful Madonna. In life as in death, I have hated all pomp and ceremony. A sack with a veil over it would suffice. The remembrance and prayers of my friends and as little pomp as possible will be most dear to me.’

Throughout her life, Maria Karoline had been forced to fight and endure severe blows of fate. The historian Egon Caesar Conte Corti, who had studied her life intensively using various sources, wrote: ‘Yes, God knows, in the way this woman wrote, acted, even missed, something of the spirit of her mother, the great Empress, always flared up in everything and everyone.’

She raised her husband Ferdinand from a boorish, infantile adolescent to a man and king. Duty and obedience had taught her to love him, and she ruled his country passably while he was mostly hunting or indulging in childish games. She bore him 18 children. After her death, her husband ordered six months of court mourning, but two months later he married his long-time mistress, the widow Lucia Migliaccio e Borgia, in a morganatic marriage.

Not far from the Crown Prince's Garden at Schönbrunn Palace is a stone statue group by Thaler. The artist immortalised the facial features of Maria Karoline and her children in his figures.