When Martines was born, and for the first thirty-six years of her life, a woman ruled the Austrian Monarchy. Empress Maria Theresa proved herself one of the most able and energetic monarchs of her era. Her territories stretched precariously from the North Sea to the Adriatic, from the borders of France to those of Russia and the Ottoman Turks. In them lived not only Germans but Hungarians, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs, and smaller Slav nationalities. She was the mother of sixteen children whom she managed as instruments of her rule. In 1765 she allowed her twenty-four-year-old son Joseph to become the Emperor Joseph II, but only in joint rule with her. During the fifteen years that he shared the throne with her, few doubted where the real power lay. But despite examples of women's rule going back to antiquity, Vienna saw Maria Theresa's reign as an exception, an extraordinary result of the Pragmatic Sanction (1740), promulgated by her father Charles VI because he had no male heir. Although she might have stood as a formidable model for women, she was no social reformer. She had quite enough on her hands trying to discourage the Prussian King Fredrick II, called “the Great,” from snatching bites out of her Silesian and Bohemian territories. She did not choose to alter the status of women or to disturb the existing social order.

Marianna evidently understood the limitations imposed on her by society and by her class. The amazement that her music excited in Viennese connoisseurs and in audiences in Naples measures the distance between her time and ours. In an age in which Dr. Johnson could without fear of censure utter his witty but misogynistic observation about a woman's preaching (“Like a dog's walking on his hinder legs, it was not done well; but you were surprised to find it done at all”) she accepted as a compliment the astonishment of audiences reported in the Wienerisches Diarium in 1761 and by Mattei from Naples in 1770.

By the end of 1772 Martines could look back on many accomplishments but forward to very little.