Anna of Austria was born on 7 July 1528 as the daughter of the future Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor and Anna of Bohemia and Hungary. She was the third of their fifteen children.
Anna seemed fine just after her birth, but she fell ill shortly afterwards, and she received an emergency baptism as a result. This baptism was performed by Bishop Bernhard Cles von Trient, who was the court chancellor. Due to her health, she was breastfed by a wet nurse for quite some time, and it was reported she still had one at 16 months.1
Already in the summer of 1531, Anna was being considered as part of an alliance, and Cardinal Matthaus Lang proposed a match between the five-year-old Prince Theodor of Bavaria and three-year-old Anna. However, her father did not agree with the proposal and no agreement was reached. Young Theodor died in 1534, but the Bavarian match was revived later that year with a replacement groom, Theodor’s six-year-old brother Albert. The bride was initially to be Anna’s Maria, but any of the sisters were also a possibility. In the meantime, another match was planned for Anna with Charles, Duke of Orléans – the third son of King Francis I of France. He died in 1545.
After this, Ferdinand pressed for the match between Anna and Albert to take place while another groom was sought for Maria. During the Diet of Regensburg in 1546, both marriages were finally arranged. On 4 July 1546, Anna married Albert, the heir to the Bavarian throne. Her brother Maxilimian accompanied her to Munich, where “Anna saw herself loved and pampered by all her relatives.”2
For the first few years of their marriage, the couple lived at Trausnitz Castle in Landshut. Albert succeeded his father as Duke of Bavaria in 1550. Anna and Albert had seven children together, of which five children lived to adulthood: William (born 1548), Ferdinand (born 1550), Maria Anna (born 1551), Maximiliana Maria (born 1552), Ernst (born 1554), She was a strict mother and did not shy away from corporal punishment.3 Anna kept a close correspondence with her sister-in-law, Maria, the wife of her brother, the future Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor.
Anna and Albert became religious and cultural patrons and even laid the foundation of the Bavarian State Library. In 1552, Anna and Albert commissioned an inventory of all the jewellery they owned, and the subsequent inventory and drawings have survived to this day in the Kleinodienbuch der Herzogin Anna von Bayern.
After she was widowed in 1579, Anna maintained her own court at the Residence in Munich. Anna died on 16 October 1590 in Munich. She is buried in the crypt of the Frauenkirche, which is currently closed.
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