Mayerling incident
1889 CE
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.
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Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, and his mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera commit a double suicide (or a murder-suicide) in the Mayerling hunting lodge on January 30, 1889.
The ensuing scandal makes international headlines.
In Vienna, on May 10, 1881, Rudolf had married Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, a daughter of King Leopold II of the Kingdom of Belgium, at the Augustinian Church in Vienna.
Although their marriage was initially a happy one, by the time their only child, the Archduchess Elisabeth, was born on September 2, 1883, the couple had drifted apart, and he found solace in drink and other female companionship.
Rudolf started having many affairs, and wanted to write to Pope Leo XIII about the possibility of annulling his marriage to Stéphanie, but the Emperor forbade it.
In 1886, the spouses were diagnosed with gonorrhea, which rendered Stéphanie sterile.
In the same year, Rudolf had bought Mayerling, a hunting lodge.
In late 1888, the thirty-year-old crown prince had met the seventeen-year-old Baroness Marie Vetsera, known by the more fashionable Anglophile name Mary, and had begun an affair with her.
As suicide would prevent him from being given a church burial, Rudolf is officially declared to have been in a state of "mental unbalance", and he is buried in the Imperial Crypt (Kapuzinergruft) of the Capuchin Church in Vienna.
Vetsera's body is smuggled out of Mayerling in the middle of the night and secretly buried in the village cemetery at Heiligenkreuz.
The Emperor will have Mayerling converted into a penitential convent of Carmelite nuns and endow a chantry so that daily prayers will eternally be said by the nuns for the repose of Rudolf's soul.
Vetsera's private letters will be discovered in a safe deposit box in an Austrian bank in 2015, and they will reveal that she was preparing to commit suicide alongside Rudolf, out of love.