The Mayerling Incident & the Tragedy of the House of Austria
In 1889, the violent deaths of Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his lover Mary Vetsera would have grave implications for Vienna, and beyond...
136 years ago today, on the 30th January 1889, horror and scandal gripped the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For on that morning, amid the woods just 15 miles outside Vienna, a grisly discovery was made in the hunting lodge at Mayerling:
In a darkened room, locked from the inside, were found the bloodied bodies of the 30 year old Crown Prince Rudolf von Habsburg, son and heir of Emperor Franz Joseph, and the 17 year old Baroness Mary Vetsera.
With no hint of outside involvement, and whispers of a murder-suicide pact spreading, crisis spiraled into ever more acute tragedy for the House of Habsburg — before another violent death in the family, twenty five years later, would tip all Europe into war.
The truth of what happened that day has long been a battleground of memory. But the road to Mayerling was paved with decades of human trauma.
Let us retrace those steps now, and venture into the darker halls of the 19th century…
But first — today we are hosting a video livestream about the Mayerling Incident with historian Lucy Coatman. Visit Evan’s X profile at 9am ET to join us live!
The stream will last ~2hrs, and will be added to our Member’s Only Video Archive for replay after the live broadcast.
The Wounded Eagle

The life of Rudolf was torn by tragic contradiction from the moment of his birth. For while he first opened his eyes on the 21st August 1858, in the rustic idyll of the Blaue Hof palace at Laxenburg, the imperial heritage he inherited was an already poisoned chalice.
As the only son of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth, Rudolf stood at the head of a monarchy whose prestige was near unequalled on Earth. Yet by the mid-19th century, over sixty years after the French Revolution had witnessed its unholy consecration, nationalism had wrought havoc upon the many lands of the Austrian Empire.
Just months after Rudolf’s birth, Austrian Lombardy would be a casualty of Italian ‘Unification’. By his ninth birthday, the aggression of Prussia had robbed Austria of her historic primacy in Germany, and had so radicalised Budapest that to stave off further violence, a ‘compromise’ had given birth to a new ‘Austro-Hungarian’ realm in 1867.
As a ‘solution’, however, all it would achieve was the angering of the other nationalities within the Empire, whose aspirations the new Hungarian governments would hypocritically quash. Soon, unity in the Empire, so troubled elsewhere, existed only in common loyalty to the person of the Emperor himself.
Crown Prince Rudolf — A Tortured Soul
Bearing helpless witness to these seemingly unstoppable catastrophes would eat away at the soul of the young Crown Prince. The mind of Rudolf trod an ever delicate balance, and one already upset in his earliest days, in the form of an especially brutal education.
Militarised from the cradle, the young Rudolf first wore uniform at the age of two, and his tutor, Major-General Count Leopold Gondrecourt, would spare no severity in his attempts to drill all traces of sentiment out of the boy. In the middle of the night at random, Rudolf would be awoken by pistol shots, and torrential rain, sleet, and snow would be no impediment to hours upon hours of relentless military exercise.
His mother the Empress, who herself struggled with the rigours of court, was seldom in Vienna, and upon her return in 1865, found her son on the brink of psychological collapse. Alarmed, she presented an ultimatum to the Emperor — yield control of Rudolf’s education to her, or else she would depart the court forever.
Franz Joseph, whose own upbringing had been scarcely more lenient, nevertheless agreed. Gondrecourt was then substituted for the far more mildly mannered Count Joseph Latour von Thurmburg, whose liberal political leanings would find fertile ground in the shattered confidence of the Crown Prince.
In place of militarism, von Thurmburg steered Rudolf towards the sciences, and the Crown Prince would ever after harbour a particularly attuned interest in natural history. Indeed his passion for ornithology (the study of birds) would extend far more than private curiosity, as the lauded treatises he later published on the subject attest.
The strongly liberal views, however, that continued to grow within Rudolf would ensure an ever more fractious relationship both with his father the Emperor and the court. He frequently voiced his beliefs publicly, and even went so far as to publish them in the newspaper, albeit under a pseudonym.
Unhappy Marriage

As heir to the Empire, the matter of the Crown Prince’s marriage was of course one of paramount concern. Unfortunately, the choice of spouse would only compound the burgeoning tragedy at the heart of the Habsburg Monarchy.
It was hoped by his parents, after all, that the wedding of Rudolf to Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, on the 10th May 1881, would steady the temperament of the twenty one year old Crown Prince. Alas, it would do precisely the opposite. The highly protective Empress, who had far more in common with her son than did his father, received her daughter-in-law coldly.
Just as Stéphanie, whose personality chafed with the Viennese court, began to embrace her new station as Crown Princess, Rudolf fell ever deeper into melancholy and disillusionment with all he stood to inherit. While Stéphanie relished the trappings of noble tradition, Rudolf loathed them, preferring the company and customs to be found in the city taverns, which he sought to visit in cognito.
Hopes were kindled when Stéphanie gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth, on the 2nd September 1883. The Emperor, overjoyed, received the news with particular elation. But it was no more than a fleeting illusion, for the marriage was already in ruins.
Rudolf, deaf to the stern reprimands of his father, threw himself into the arms of one woman after another. By 1886, his indiscretions had borne unholy fruit, with his contraction of syphilis fated to hasten the decline of his body and mind. His subsequent infection of Stéphanie with this venereal affliction, rendering her permanently infertile, would be the death knell of the remaining bonds which still united them.
Rudolf, wracked by guilt and the pain of his disease, turned to ruinous substances in a doomed attempt to dull both. The Crown Prince was all but lost, to his country.
Mary Vetsera
On the 12th April 1888, Rudolf attended the races. It was there that the already broken Crown Prince was first spotted by the woman who would soon accompany him to hereafter — the seventeen year old Baroness Mary Vetsera, in whom a lethal passion was born.
Young, impressionable and in love with literature and the idea of love itself, Mary was besotted with the Crown Prince before she had even met him. The daughter of Albin von Vetsera, a recently ennobled Slovak diplomat in Austrian service, and Helene Baltazzi, the ambitious French-born daughter of Theodor Baltazzi, a wealthy banker and financial advisor to the Ottoman Sultan, Mary grew up in a typical example of a family held to be parvenus. The stereotype was largely reinforced by her mother, whose extravagant soirées, particularly after her husband’s death in 1887, cemented Helene’s reputation as a socialite and an aggressive social climber.
The true character of Mary Vetsera, however, has long been veiled by the fallout of Mayerling. Was she a ruthless temptress, “a girl who wore too much jewelry and flirted with married men”, as Joan Haslip described her, or a naive romantic, blind to the consequences of impulsive teenage infatuation?
Certainly, upon realising the depth of her daughter’s obsession, Helene took Mary to London in the hopes of blunting it. It was a strategy which failed absolutely, for on her return to Vienna, she devoted her existence to meeting the Crown Prince, penning a letter of unrestrained passion to the object of her desire that would prove fatal to her and ruinous to the House of Austria.
The Affair

The courier of this deadly letter would be the Countess Marie Larisch, a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Elisabeth, and cousin to the Crown Prince himself, who by chance had pursued an affair with Mary’s uncle, Heinrich Baltazzi. Through this latter indiscretion she would have opportunity to befriend the girl.
The Countess duly consigned the letter to her damaged cousin, who was so taken by the rawness of its contents that he at once expressed a desire to meet its author. As a result, on the 5th November 1888, Larisch bore Mary to the Hofburg Palace, and the apartments of the Crown Prince.
The state of the Crown Prince’s soul was indicated by the presence of a skull and a revolver upon his desk. Indeed as curiosity drew the already conquered Mary close to the morbid objects, Rudolf moved to intercept, whereupon she declared that she was unafraid of such things.
The Crown Prince, perhaps as taken by the thought that her own soul was as tortured as his own as much as by her beauty, was sufficiently pleased with the meeting that he asked that a second be arranged at the earliest possibility. Whatever the true nature of their bond, the jaws of Fate had already sealed around both.
Larisch did not act out of selfless fidelity in the chaperoning of this affair. Indeed she, as aware as anyone of the magnitude of the scandal that it might breach, used her knowledge of and leverage over the connection to blackmail the Crown Prince. Rudolf, however, was too far gone to care for things as material as money.
Our ability to reconstruct the sincerity of Rudolf’s feelings for Mary, alas, are complicated by the fact that his letters to her were destroyed as soon as they were read. Nevertheless, from the two Mary herself transcribed, he appears to have expressed to her a conviction that the definitive end of his mind would result were he unable to see her again. It did not take long for their passion to intertwine with thoughts of death:
“If I could give my life to make him happy, then I would gladly do it, for what does life mean to me?”
Baroness Mary Vetsera on the Crown Prince Rudolf
The Crown Prince, not long after, gifted to Mary an iron ring, inscribed with the letters “I.L.V.B.I.D.T”, signifying a declaration as ominous as it was romantic — “In Liebe vereint bis in den Tod”, or “United in Love until Death”.
The intensity of this relationship would ensure that suspicion would not escape Mary’s family for long, though its true extent and trajectory remained obscure. Upon discovering an engraved cigarette case that Mary had intended to gift to Rudolf, however, suspicion turned to alarm for her mother Helene — if her daughter was having an affair with the Crown Prince, a married man, it could destroy the entire family.
Her fears were at least partially allayed, however, by the ultimately cruel lies of the Countess Larisch — who promptly covered for Mary by claiming the cigarette case as her own.
To Mayerling — and to Death
As the January of 1889 approached its sunset, the omens grew darker. Mary was taken over by ever greater anxiety after visiting a fortune-teller, who revealed to her that someone in her family was soon to die.
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