Maria Fritz

The manga never gives Maria a detailed portrait. She surfaces only in brief glimpses of Eldia's ancient past, one of three royal daughters shown at the Fritz King's side roughly two thousand years before the main story.

No dialogue or inner life survives for Maria; the story records her actions instead. Everything shown points to obedience to the Fritz line: she consumed her mother's corpse when her father demanded it, apparently supported his campaigns of conquest, and accepted his dying command to bear many children and let them inherit her power in turn, so that Eldia's dominion would never lapse.

Around two millennia before the fall of Wall Maria, the girl who would give that Wall its name was born to Eldia's king, Fritz, and his enslaved concubine Ymir, the first of all Titans, along with her sisters Rose and Sheena. When Ymir died shielding the king from an assassin's spear, he ordered the three girls to eat their mother's body immediately so her power would not be lost. The grim ritual worked; Maria and her sisters each came away carrying the power of the Titans. She presumably helped drive the empire's expansion, and on his deathbed the king instructed her to produce as many heirs as possible and to have her spine devoured after death, repeating the cycle down the generations so Eldia could rule the world.

Her inheritance passed to unknown successors and, together with her sisters' lines, eventually fractured into the Nine Titans that served Eldia thereafter. More than 1,800 years after her death, Karl Fritz used countless Colossus Titans to erect three ringed Walls across Paradis Island, naming each for one of the daughters and giving the outermost ring to Maria.