ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century Empress Maria Theresa of Austria strategically manoeuvred the Habsburg family’s dominance in Europe through the great royal marriage alliances she planned for her children. In this context, the marriage of Maria Theresa’s daughter, Maria Carolina, to Ferdinand IV of Naples signalled the Habsburgs’ intention to seize control of the Mediterranean. In the Kingdom of Naples, we see the beginning of a historical cycle inaugurated by the entry into public life of the cumbersome figure of Queen Maria Carolina, who went on to play an essential role in the internal management of the kingdom in the last decades of the eighteenth century. At that time, the government took the bold step of initiating radical reforms, although it did not entirely abandon the despotic tendency towards centralization.
