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Birth
 Mayerling IncidentBirths, Marriages, Deaths
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This article is about the Mayerling incident. For other uses, see Mayerling (disambiguation).
 The Mayerling Incident refers to the series of events leading to the apparent murder-suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and his lover Baroness Mary Vetsera. Prince Rudolf was the only son of Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria, and therefore heir to his father as Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, and King of Bohemia. Rudolf's mistress Mary was the daughter of Baron Albin Vetsera, a diplomat at the Austrian court. The couple's bodies were discovered at Mayerling, Rudolf's hunting lodge, in Lower Austria on January 30, 1889.
The incident
By 1889, many people at the Court, including Rudolf's wife Stephanie and his father Franz Joseph, knew that Rudolf and Mary were having an affair. Rudolf's marriage to Stephanie had resulted in the birth of one daughter, Elisabeth, and was not particularly happy. Rudolf had no male heir. On the morning of January 30, 1889, Rudolf and Vetsera were found dead at his hunting lodge Mayerling. The death of their only son devastated Franz Joseph I and Elisabeth of Bavaria. As Rudolf had no son, the next male heir was Franz Joseph's brother, Karl Ludwig and his issue. The initial official explanation for the incident was that Rudolf had suffered heart failure; Vetsera was not mentioned and her body was secretly buried. However, the official story did not hold up well. The court later admitted that Rudolf had committed suicide. Many stories were floated about the pair’s death; the most widely accepted was that the two lovers had carried out a suicide pact after Franz Joseph demanded they separate. Police investigation suggested that Rudolf shot his mistress in the head, then sat by her body for several hours before shooting himself. A special dispensation from the Vatican was obtained to declare Rudolf to have been in a state of “mental imbalance”, so that he could be buried in the sacred Imperial Crypt. Alternative theoriesMainstream historians generally dismissed the idea that there was more to the Mayerling Incident than a simple murder-suicide. However some[who?] have argued that the official story may be incorrect. Empress ZitaNotably, it has been rumoured[who?] that Empress Zita, (1892 - 1989), widow of the last Emperor, Karl (r: 1916-1918) and last surviving Crowned head from The Great War, claimed that the Crown Prince was murdered, and the crime was disguised as a double suicide.[citation needed] In A Heart for Europe (Gracewing, 1990; reprinted 2004), the authors James and Joanna Bogle mention that in a rare public interview with the Empress Zita in 1988, she said that the Mayerling deaths were not suicide but part of a political plot. It is thought the crime was the work of foreign agents who may have been Austrian security officials, in response to the Prince’s suspected pro-Hungarian sympathies. Or, it may have been that French agents were responsible because Rudolf refused to participate in the deposition of his pro-German father: It was known Rudolf opposed his father on certain issues, including liberalising voting and allowing more scope for the activities of national groups within the Empire. This was seen in some quarters in France and elsewhere as an opportunity to weaken the Empire by playing son against father. Since Rudolf refused to agree to any suggestion that he depose and replace his father, the theory has it that he had to be killed to maintain the secrecy of the plot (Bogle & Bogle, p 3, citing Erich Feigl's biography of the Emperor Charles, Vienna, 1988). Although it has been stated that no evidence has been discovered to support either of these theories, differing accounts of the physical evidence (see below) leaves room for conjecture. Although Empress Zita was not yet born at the time of Mayerling, her strong Catholic faith and loyalty to her family would most likely preclude her acceptance of the suicide theory, particularly in the absence of incontestable evidence.[citation needed] Political conspiracyThe idea that the Prince was killed for political reasons, with Vetsera’s death used to cover up the crime, is one of the more popular theories surrounding Mayerling.[citation needed] This theory rests in part on the idea that the affair between Vetsera and Prince Rudolf was an open secret in the Imperial Family. Indeed, Rudolf’s wife, Princess Stéphanie, was carrying on her own affair.[citation needed] Thus, the Emperor’s demand that the couple separate was not a serious concern for the two, making a lover’s pact unnecessary. A resulting re-examination of files about the death of the Crown Prince revealed major discrepancies between the claimed manner of the deaths and the factual evidence.[citation needed] At one point it was claimed that six shots were fired from the weapon, which did not belong to Rudolf. The initial report stated that only one shot was fired, instantly killing the Crown Prince, which raises the question of how the remaining five bullets were fired. This information suggests that Rudolf had engaged in a violent struggle before his death. However, an examination of the Papal Dispensation issued to allow Rudolf’s Christian burial asserts that only one shot was fired.[citation needed] However, this theory[citation needed] has one major problem. By ruling Rudolf’s death a suicide, the Imperial Family was required to petition the Pope for permission to bury Rudolf in the family crypt. Critics of the conspiracy theory claim that the Imperial Family would have seized on any shred of evidence that might have indicated Rudolf did not kill himself in order to avoid the scandal of petitioning the Pope.[citation needed] The following is from The Secrets of the Hohenzollerns by Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves, published in 1915 (Graves claims to have been a German spy who reported directly to Kaiser Wilhelm II):
Suicide
Apart from the straightforward lover’s pact cited in the official report, a lover’s quarrel has also been postulated.[citation needed] It has been said[who?] that Vetsera was murdered by Crown Prince Rudolf, who then killed himself; that they both committed suicide; that they killed or murdered one another, and that she may have been pregnant at the time of her death. One variant[citation needed] states that Mary died during a botched abortion and the grief-stricken Rudolf killed himself.[citation needed] Examination of the bodies[citation needed] indicated that Mary had likely died several hours before Rudolf, implying that he had killed her (or she had killed herself) and sat next to the body until he finally shot himself.[citation needed] Rudolf's final letter to Princess Stephanie also supports the suicide hypothesis. In it, Rudolf bids farewell to her and his friends, saying that only death can save his good name. This letter raises at least as many questions as answers, since Rudolf does not give a reason why he must kill himself, nor is there any mention of Mary Vetsera. During funeral the corpse of the Crown Prince wore gloves and his mother was not allowed to see his hands, since it was said they presented defensive wounds. AftermathGiven the age of the case, the delicate nature of the Rudolf and Mary’s deaths (both politically and personally), conflicting initial reports[citation needed] and conflicting official versions, the mystery of the Mayerling Incident will likely never be solved. Much of the evidence was destroyed or concealed at the time, for fear of scandal, hampering later inquiries. All the major players in the Incident have died, most without publicly commenting on the tragedy. A major obstacle to all of these theories, alternative and official, is the question of why any of these stories would be suppressed. The apparent suicide of the heir to the throne was at least as damaging as any other story, thus it would be illogical to conceal one painful or damaging truth with another. Political ramificationsRudolf's death may have brought ruin to his parents' marriage, changed the imperial succession, and perhaps contributed in a small way to the end of the ancient house of Habsburg in 1918. The mysterious death of Archduke Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria and Hungary, immediately caused a dynastic crisis. Since he was the only male heir to Franz Joseph, Rudolf’s uncle Archduke Karl Ludwig, became heir-presumptive, a role inherited after his death in 1896 by his son Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and then, after the latter's assassination, by Karl Ludwig's grandson Archduke Karl, who would ultimately succeed his grand-uncle as Emperor in 1916. The removal of the liberal Rudolf made Franz Joseph's conservative policies easier to pursue. Gallery
In the mediaThe Mayerling affair has been dramatized in:
See also
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