Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor

Joseph II was Holy Roman Emperor and sole ruler of the Habsburg lands from 1780 to 1790, celebrated as the most radical and principled of the 'enlightened despots'. Eldest son of Empress Maria Theresa, Joseph was driven by an unyielding philosophical conviction to reconstruct society according to pure reason, creating an ideology known as Josephinism.

In a whirlwind decade of astonishing reform, Joseph abolished peasant serfdom throughout his dominions, proclaimed the revolutionary Patent of Toleration in 1781 granting full freedom of worship and civil rights to Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and Jews, abolished capital punishment, secularized hundreds of contemplative monasteries, and opened royal gardens (like the Prater) to the public. An ardent music lover, he appointed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as court chamber composer. Moving far faster than his conservative subjects could bear, his reforms provoked ferocious backlash from the nobility and clergy. Dying heartbroken at age forty-eight, he penned his own self-critical epitaph: 'Here lies Joseph II, who failed in all he undertook.'