Marriage
After a lengthy series of negotiations, Maria Anna was betrothed to Archduke Ferdinand, the younger brother of her first fiancé and heir of Emperor Ferdinand II in 1626. That same year Ferdinand was crowned King of Hungary and in 1627 he was crowned King of Bohemia. Despite the desire of the groom for Maria Anna's confessor to be the Jesuit Ambrosio de Peñalosa, the appointment eventually went to Capuchin Diego Quiroga. In the marriage contract signed by both parties in 1628, Maria Anna was granted the right to retain her rights of inheritance over the Spanish throne, a marked contrast to her elder sister Infanta Anna, who was forced to renounce her rights of inheritance when she married King Louis XIII of France in 1615.
Maria Anna left Madrid for Vienna in December 1629, fully three years after her engagement and nearly five years after the proposal for marriage was first mooted. The journey itself took close to a year to complete and was riddled by complications and crises. In Genoa an outbreak of the plague in the Italian Peninsula prevented the infanta's party from stopping in Bologna, where Cardinal Antonio Barberini, nephew of Pope Urban VIII, was waiting for the infanta to give her the Golden Rose. (The award was later given in Naples) The Infanta crossed the Papal States after she had made a pilgrimage to the Basilica della Santa Casa. On that section of her journey, Maria Anna was accompanied by Roman aristocracy, led by another nephew of Pope Urban VIII, Taddeo Barberini, Prince of Palestrina. On 26 January 1631, she arrived in Trieste, where she met Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, her future brother-in-law, who would first stand in for his brother at a wedding by proxy and then escort the infanta to Vienna. Maria Anna was married to King Ferdinand of Hungary and Bohemia per procura, with Archduke Leopold Wilhelm serving as the proxy.
King Ferdinand, not trusting the previous portraits that he had seen of the infanta, secretly accompanied the royal Oberhofmeister to an audience with the infanta hidden among a group of nobles. Struck by Maria Anna's beauty, King Ferdinand immediately revealed his identity and began a conversation with her in Spanish. The love and respect that the future emperor felt for his wife seemed to last throughout their marriage, and he took no mistresses nor sired any illegitimate children.
In Vienna on 20 February 1631, Maria Anna was married to King Ferdinand of Hungary-Bohemia and the match was celebrated with a month of festivities. Maria Anna was described by peers as happy-tempered, friendly and intelligent, and her contemporaries felt that she cheered and comforted the rather melancholic Ferdinand.
