Mayerling incident

The Mayerling incident is the series of events surrounding the apparent murder–suicide of Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria (August 21, 1858 –January 30, 1889) and his lover, Baroness Mary Vetsera (March 19, 1871 – January 30, 1889).

Rudolf, who is married to Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, is the only son of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth, and is heir apparent to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Rudolf's mistress is the daughter of Baron Albin Vetsera, a diplomat at the Austrian court.

The bodies of the thirty-year-old Archduke and the seventeen-year-old baroness are discovered in the Imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods, 26.6 kilometers (sixteen and a half miles) southwest of the capital, on the morning of January 30, 1889.

The death of the crown prince interrupts the security inherent in the direct line of Habsburg dynastic succession.

As Rudolf has no son, the succession will pass to Franz Joseph's brother, Archduke Karl Ludwig, and his eldest son, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

This destabilization endangers the growing reconciliation between the Austrian and Hungarian factions of the empire.

Succeeding developments lead to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by Gavrilo Princip, a South Slav nationalist and ethnic Serb, at Sarajevo in June 1914, and the July Crisis that leads to the start of the First World War.