Maria Christina Henriette Desideria Felicitas Raineria of Austria[1][n. 1] (Spanish: María Cristina de Habsburgo-Lorena; 21 July 1858 – 6 February 1929) was Queen of Spain as the second wife of Alfonso XII.

[4] After the death of Queen María de las Mercedes in June 1878, King Alfonso XII was determined to remarry to produce an heir.

In early September 1878, the Spanish Government approved the engagement and Emperor Franz Joseph asked his niece to officially relinquish her title of Abbess of the Theresian Convent of Prague as it was necessary for the future queen to abandon all her Austrian appointments.

That same day Maria Christina renounced her succession rights to the Austrian throne before the Emperor and the court according to the tradition imposed to the archduchesses who were to marry a foreign prince.

[5] The arranged marriage (the second of Alfonso XII after the death of his first wife María de las Mercedes of Orléans), was concerted on the basis of the conservative profile espoused by the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as by the prestige attained by the Habsburgs in their previous involvement in the history of Spain, and blocked the possibility of a prospective Austrian endorsement to the Carlist cause.

Designated as regent upon the death of her husband in 1885, Maria Christina swore on the 1876 Constitution on 30 December 1885 at the Palacio de las Cortes, before the two legislative bodies.

She was the leading figure around which the Germanophile stronghold within the Royal Court coalesced during World War I, in contrast to the pro-Entente minority faction represented by her daughter-in-law, the British-born Victoria Eugenie.

Sir Charles Petrie, Alfonso XIII's biographer, maintained that the Queen dowager's death had a disastrous effect on her son, and that the latter never recovered politically from the blow.

Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia described her in her 1932 memoirs as "Queen Christine, a trim vivacious little old lady with an intelligent, sharp face and white hair.