Anton Victor was the son of
Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor, and
Maria Luisa of Spain. He was born in
Florence and died in
Vienna. He never married and died without issue. After the death of his uncle,
Maximilian Franz,
Archbishop and
Prince-Elector of
Cologne and
Prince-Bishop of Münster, Anton Victor was chosen on 9 September 1801 as Prince-Bishop of Münster and on 7 October as Archbishop and Prince-Elector of Cologne. The Electorate's Rhenish territories had been occupied by the French in 1794 and had in 1800 become part of France (in Cologne's case as sub-prefecture of the new , centred on
Aix-la-Chapelle/Aachen), this state of affairs preventing Anton from taking his seat in Cologne Cathedral (which had in any case been reduced by the revolutionaries to the status of a parish church, a status which it had up till then never possessed, but which it retained even after reinstatement of the archdiocese in 1821 until very recently) and leaving him in control only of the
Duchy of Westphalia, as well as of the Prince-Bishopric of Münster. His reign was to prove a short one - in the reorganisation of the
Holy Roman Empire as provided by its law of 1803 (at the time of writing still nameless) enacting the so-called (, , "chief recommendation of the select committee of the Reichstag"), the archiepiscopal electorates of Cologne and Trier were abolished and Anton's remaining territories secularised, Münster being partitioned between the Prussians and various minor princes and Westphalia claimed by the
Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt. Anton Victor became
Grand Master of the Teutonic Order in 1804. The order's German lands, centred on
Mergentheim, were secularised in 1809, but Anton remained its Grand Master until his death. Between 1816 and 1818 he was
Viceroy of the
Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia. ==Ancestry==