Hapsburg Tragedy Part II: The Mayerling Mystery

The tragedy prone Hapsburgs of Austria-Hungary would be hit hard again 22 years after the Emperor Maximilian’s tragic death in Mexico. In 1889, marriages and lives of the principle members of the Hapsburgs would be battered. The dynasty would be shattered by an event so terrible and mysterious that even now, over a century later, historians still do not know fully what happened at a place called Mayerling.

The Mayerling Mystery’s main characters are Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia and his teenage mistress, Baroness Maria Vetsera. More later about Vetsera.

Crown Prince Rudolf, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the son of the Emperor Franz Joseph I and his wife Empress Elizabeth, who was one of the most fascinating and beautiful women of her day. The Crown Prince was also the nephew of Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico. Rudolf was born near Vienna on August 21, 1858 . His father made sure that his son was taught by the best tutors of the empire. As a child, Rudolf showed an aptitude for natural science, starting a mineral collection at a young age. Portions of this collection became the property of the University for Agriculture in Vienna following his death. As an adult, Rudolf even wrote scientific articles to leading scientific journals in the empire.

Rudolf’s family was a classic dysfunctional family. He felt that neither his father nor mother truly loved him. Though his political ideas were liberal and very similar to that of his beautiful and eccentric mother, his father’s views were as different from his as night and day. Franz Josef was a reactionary conservative. He despised and feared his son’s new ideas and saw them as a threat to the empire and the dynasty. Being this kind of person, I am sure he feared for the future of the empire after his death, and envisioned his son placating socialists, anarchists, just about every type he saw as a threat to long held traditions. Indeed, Rudolf’s ideas were very advanced for his time. He once wrote:

"The principle of nationalism rests on the most base of human instincts. It is a victory of primitivism over the noble ideals of equality. The national and racial animosities are a step backward. It is characteristic that these principles are most often used by the most divisive elements of our society. As the science is cosmopolitan, so should be the just societies."

Rudolf obviously could see where the winds were blowing, and that if the imperial family did not start changing, it would be swept away. Like his uncle Maximilian’s toying with liberalism, Rudolf’s toying became a constant irritant to his father.

Rudolf did not clash completely with his mother on political principles, however. The problem was that the empress just did not have time for her son. The empress Elizabeth had developed highly erratic behavior for someone in her position. She traveled extensively and was away from her son and her husband for long periods of time. Rudolf naturally felt neglected.

One area of solace in his childhood had been his relationship with his elder sister Gisela. Both Gisela and Rudolf were raised by their maternal grandmother Sophie. The two little children loved each other dearly. Even when they were separated when Rudolf was 6 so he could begin training to be the next ruler of the empire, the two remained close. They stayed so until Gisela married and left Vienna.

Rudolf married Princess Stephanie of Belgium in 1881. In the beginning, Rudolf seemed to love his new wife, but his mother had only distaste for her. It is said Empress Elizabeth referred to her daughter-in-law as “a clumsy oaf’ and “a dull-witted prude.” Rudolf and Stephanie had one child, a daughter. Eventually, the marriage started to crumble, and the couple drifted apart. Looking for comfort and attention, Rudolf turned to women and drink.

During this swirl of womanizing, Rudolf met a young woman who may or may not have been the love of his life. The details on whether the liaison was one of real passionate love are disputed. Nevertheless, the affair of Crown Prince Rudolf and Baroness Maria Vetsera would determine the fate of an empire.

Baroness Maria Vetsera was either 17 or 18 when she met Rudolf who was 30. They met at the Prater which is a large amusement park in Vienna. Another story says that Maria contacted him by letter telling him how much she admired him, and that the letter led to a first meeting. Maria was the daughter of Baron Albin Vetsera and his wife Helene. Baron Vetsera was a diploma at the Austro-Hungarian court. Maria at the time of her meeting Rudolf appeared to be much older than her age. She was attractive and highly sensual. Whether Rudolf passionately loved Maria has been disputed by some. However, there has been no doubt about Maria’s feelings for Rudolf. She absolutely adored and worshipped the Crown Prince, and was willing to do whatever he asked her.

As the affair heated up, Rudolf’s cousin Countess Marie Larisch became the go-between of the two. Countess Larisch was the niece and confidante of Rudolf’s mother Empress Elizabeth. She was the daughter of Elizabeth’s brother Duke Ludwig Wilhelm and an actress named Henriette Mendel. Born illegitimate, the countess’s father had renounced his rights as the first born in his family to marry his lover. With such a background, Countess Larisch was a prime candidate for such an intrigue. Her father had rebelled again the norm, so she would too even letting Maria into the Hofburg Palace so she could meet secretly with Rudolf.

Rudolf decided to purchase a hunting lodge at Mayerling. By this time his father the emperor had learned about the affair. According to official reports Emperor Franz Josef had demanded that his son end the affair. This was typical of the cold hypocrisy of Franz Josef. He had mistresses, so if he did try to force his son to end the affair, his attitude was of the utmost hypocrisy. But something deeper and more political may have led to the way everything happened next. Angry and defiant, Rudolf left Vienna and took Maria with him to Mayerling on January 29, 1889. The next morning, one of Rudolf’s servants found the couple in their bedroom of the lodge dead. They had been shot. The legend of Mayerling has long been that since Rudolf and Maria realized they would never be allowed to marry, they decided to make a suicide pact. Rudolf is said to have shot and killed Maria, and later he shot himself in the head with his pistol.

The deaths at Mayerling rocked the empire, Europe, and the world. Conspiracy theories began to spring up in the mouths of millions and in the newspapers of the time. Some were outlandish such as Maria castrating Rudolf in his sleep because if she could have his love and his manhood, no one would. The story goes that when Rudolf awakened, in shock and shame, he killed her and then himself. This seems like the impulsive behavior of a teenager, but this is not one of the top theories. Another theory is that Maria had been pregnant by Rudolf and had gotten an abortion. At Mayerling, she had hemorrhaged and died. Distraught, Rudolf had killed himself. Another theory says that two of Maria’s uncles went to Mayerling to confront the lovers. There, in a classic case of honoring killing, they murdered both Rudolf and Maria.

After the suicide pact, the next theory that was put forward came from two members of Rudolf’s family who both claimed they really knew the true story of what happened that night. These two were Countess Larisch and Empress Zita, who became the wife of the last emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Both the countess and the empress told the story of a plot to overthrow Emperor Franz Josef. Countess Larisch claims that Rudolf was complicit in the plot to overthrow his father and establish a more liberal government. An authentic article about her claim can be read online here from an article written in The New York Times in 1913. Another article from The New York Times Archive published in 1910 about how the Crown Prince and the Baroness met can be read here.

Empress Zita claims that Rudolf was approached by pro-French conspirators who wanted the overthrow of Franz Josef since he was pro-German. She stressed that Rudolf had adamantly refused, and had threaten to tell his father about the plot even though he disliked his father’s policies. To silence him, the plotters had gotten into the hunting lodge at Mayerling where they had beaten Maria Vetsera to death and then shot Rudolf six times. When Rudolf’s gun was examined, no one could explain that if he had shot himself, how he could he have shot himself more than one time in the head. The investigation showed that his pistol had been fired six times that night.

After the mysterious deaths at Mayerling, Maria’s body was taken out of the lodge in the middle of the night and secretly buried in cemetery of Holy Cross Abbey in Heiligenkreuz. In 1992 her remains were stolen. After the police finally located them, her skull was examined. There was no evidence that she had been shot in the head as the official story went. Instead it appeared that she had died from violent blows to the head.

Rudolf’s death was the event that finally tore his parents almost completely apart. The Empress Elizabeth had long been an avid traveler. After her son’s death, she never again spent much time at home with her husband.

The Hapsburgs were faced with a terrible dilemma after the death of Rudolf. How could the emperor allow his son be branded with the reputation of being a suicidal murderer? Also being a Catholic, Roman Catholicism does not allow a person who commits suicide to be buried in holy ground and receive holy rites at their burial.
The emperor wrote to the pope, and they came to some sort of agreement. Rudolf was given a Christian burial. What the emperor’s letter contains, no one now knows since to this day the letter is still locked away in the Papal Archive.

The Mayerling Mystery has captured the imaginations of authors and has been the subject of both films and plays. I first became aware of this tragedy when I saw the 1968 film Mayerling. It starred Omar Sharif as Rudolf, Catherine Deneuve as Maria Vetsera, James Mason as Emperor Franz Josef, and Ava Gardner as Empress Elizabeth. The movie was not perfectly put together, but it was highly romantic. Its’ theme song is the stirring Spartacus Suite by Aram Khachaturian which is one of my favorite classical themes.

In 1936, a French version of the story had also been produced. It too was entitled Mayerling, and it starred Charles Boyer as Crown Prince Rudolf. The film was an international success and opened doors to Hollywood for Boyer.






An irony of the entire sordidness of the Mayerling mystery is the fact that after the deaths of Crown Prince Rudolf and Baroness Maria Vetsera, the emperor Franz Josef had his sons’ hunting lodge at Mayerling converted into a convent for Carmelite nuns.


In 2006 the mini-series The Crown Prince was produced in Austria. The cast also included Omar Sharif again, but of course, not as Rudolf this time. A clip from the mini-series can be seen below. The entire production can be purchased on Amazon.com. I cannot give it a thumbs up or down because I have not seen it. Nevertheless, the preview does look interesting.


Was the Mayerling mystery the result of a tragic love affair or the kind of epic tragedy that only politics can bring?