WI/AHC: Friedrich the great marries Maria Theresia

Make Friedrich the great of prussia marrieing Maria Theresia and uniting the realms of Prussia and Austria in a personal union and lets assume they get an heir. How would the HRE/Europe develop/react?
 

Asami

Banned
ASB if you want a personal union since you'd have to overcome all religious differences, the fact that a PU between those states would cause a massive Coalition against said new union, and the fact that the Hapsburgs wouldn't just sign away their empire to the Hohenzollerns.

The only possible way to have Maria Theresa and Frederick II to marry is by her fathering having a male progeny, therefore removing her from the line of succession for the Hapsburg domain. Then you'd still have to do the Catholic-Protestant tango, which would either mean Maria converts to Protestantism, or Frederick returns Prussia to the bosom of the Catholic Church. Neither is likely.

But saying you get all those conditions, there's still a bunch of European states who would want to break up that Union. You'd probably see some lengthy wars of Coalition before the end of the PU.

Within the PU itself, it'd be horribly one-sided. Austria's much larger stature and clout would smother Prussia, and Prussia would be infected by the inept Habsburg bureaucracy and the multi-cultural strife that Austria was plagued with up until the final days of the Dual Monarchy. Prussia was a rather backwater country at the time, a hodpodge of small princedoms cobbled into a little kingdom that was beset on all sides... Austria was the big daddy of the HRE (as weak as it was by the time of M-T and FdG)
 
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