FRANCIS II. (1768-1835), the last Roman emperor, and, as Francis I., first emperor of Austria, was the son of Leopold II., grand-duke of Tuscany, afterwards emperor, and of his wife Maria Louisa, daughter of Charles III. of Spain. He was born at Florence on the 12th of February 1768. In 1784 he was brought to Vienna to complete his education under the eye of his uncle the emperor Joseph II., who was childless. Joseph was repelled by the frigid and retiring character of his nephew, and is said to have treated him with an impatient contempt which confirmed his natural timidity; but after the marriage of Francis to Elizabeth of Wuerttemberg (1788) their relations improved. At the close of his uncle's reign he saw some service in the ill-conducted war with Turkey, and kept a careful diary of his experiences. The death of his wife in childbirth on the 18th of February 1790 was followed by the death of his uncle on the 20th; and Francis acted as regent with Prince Kaunitz until his father came from Florence. On the 19th of September he married his first cousin Maria Theresa, daughter of Ferdinand, king of Naples, by whom he was the father of his successor Ferdinand I., of Maria Louisa, wife of Napoleon, and of the archduke Francis, father of the emperor Francis Joseph. After her death (1807) he married Maria Ludovica Beatrix of Este (1808), and when she died he made a fourth marriage with Carolina Augusta of Bavaria (1816). He succeeded to the Austrian dominions and the empire on the death of his father on the 1st of March 1792. The position was a trying one for a young prince twenty-four years of age. The dominions of the house of Austria, widely scattered in the Low Countries, Germany and Italy, were exposed to the attacks of the French revolutionary governments and of Napoleon. He was dragged into all the coalitions against France, and in the early days of his reign he had to guard against the ambition of Prussia, and the aggressions of Russia in Poland and Turkey. For long he had no adviser save such diplomatists as Prince Kaunitz and Thugut, who had been trained in the old Austrian diplomacy. His own best quality was an invincible patience supported by reliance on the loyalty of his subjects, and a sense of his duty to the state. (For the general events of this reign till 1815 see EUROPE, AUSTRIA, NAPOLEON, FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY WARS, &c.) The emperor's firmness averted what would have been an irreparable loss of position. Seeing that the Empire was in the last stage of dissolution, and that, even were it to survive, it would pass from the house of Habsburg to that of Bonaparte, he in 1804 assumed the title of hereditary emperor of Austria. The object of this prudent measure was double. In the first place, he guarded against the danger that his house should sink to a lower rank than the Russian or the French. In the second place, he gave some semblance of unity to his complex dominions in Germany, Bohemia, Hungary and Italy, by providing a