BBC News Brasil Mayerling Incident: How a Suicide Triggered World War I 17/12/2022 07:34

The Crown Prince of Austria and his mistress catalyzed a series of events that led to the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in a supposed suicide pact.

In a so-called suicide pact in 1889, Austria’s heir Rudolf and his mistress catalyzed a series of events that led to the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. and the beginning of the First World War.

It was supposed to be an ordinary morning on January 30, 1889 for Loschek, the servant of Archduke Rudolf of Habsburg, Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Loschek, as usual, was responsible for waking the prince for hunting at the Imperial Hunting Lodge in Mayerling, a rural area about 25 km from Vienna. His mistress, Baroness Maria Vetsera, had also spent the night in Mayerling’s royal apartments.

But silence was all Loschek took as he tried to wake the Archduke. The maid then contacted Rodolfo’s hunting friend Count Joseph Hoyos.

Together they discussed what to do.

Both agreed to take responsibility for breaking the bedroom door, but it was only Loschek who entered the room and found a scene that would mark the Habsburg empire: Rodolfo, 30, lying dead. With him was the lifeless body of 17-year-old Maria Vetsera, with a gunshot wound to the head.

Rudolf was the only son of the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph I and Empress Elizabeth, who made him heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His death, in addition to shocking the court at the time, provoked a series of conspiracy theories that tried to explain what had happened and glossed over the most likely hypothesis: Rodolfo and Maria made a suicide pact with the prince killing and taking away his lover. then take your own life.

The tragedy became known as the Mayerling Incident.

However, the Crown Prince’s premature death not only had a devastating effect on his parents, but also changed the course of history and marked the impending end of the Empire.

Since Rudolf did not have a male heir but only a daughter, death interrupted the immediate succession to the Austro-Hungarian throne. The succession fell to Archduke Carlos Luís, brother of his uncle Francisco José I, who abdicated in favor of his son, Archduke Francisco Ferdinand.

If the name sounds familiar, it’s no coincidence: Archduke Franz Ferdinand has become a central figure in the instability between Austria and nationalist groups. And on 28 June 1914 he was killed by a Serbian nationalist in the city of Sarajevo. The truth was the main trigger of the start of the First World War.

Theories and History

There are many conspiracy theories about what happened in Mayerling, and most of them are due to the Imperial Family’s lack of transparency.

At first, the maid Loschek imagined Rodolfo committing suicide by drinking poison when he noticed a glass on the nightstand.

However, the court medical commission, which arrived in Mayerling that afternoon, determined that the crown prince had died from a ruptured aneurysm in his heart.

According to Lawrence Sondhaus, historian and professor at Indianapolis University (USA), the strongest historical evidence points to a murder-suicide.

Sondhaus claims that Austria was a highly Catholic country at the time and that taking one’s own life was considered a major sin. However, if the deceased is proven to be out of his mind, suicide can be tolerated.

“The Imperial Family created a grand narrative to suppress the story. Shortly after his death it was said that it was a heart problem, but the official version of the heart attack was quickly abandoned by the press. So the family admitted to suicide, but that Rodolfo was not mentally gifted. claims”.

He was later buried with his Habsburg family in the Capuchin Church in Vienna.

Another long-held theory was that Rodolfo was killed for political reasons and even by Austrian or German secret agents. Sondhaus explains that Otto Von Bismarck, then German Imperial Chancellor, was essentially a conservative governor and even worried about a possible reign of Rudolf. This would open the door to a host of conspiracy theories that Bismarck was behind an assassination of the Crown Prince of Austria.

But the historian reinforces that there is ample evidence that the archduke was in a suicidal mood. According to him, Rodolfo suffered from alcohol and drug addiction, including morphine.

“He was also known as a womanizer, had several mistresses throughout his life. The testimonies of royal officials and doctors, many of whom sided with the prince after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, indicated that he was infected with gonorrhea, syphilis, or both. And these diseases were cured.” It is clear that if left untreated, it can cause mental problems.”

The story is also known that Rodolfo tried to persuade one of his other lovers to commit a “double suicide”. However, as we know it today, it was the young Maria Vetsera who accompanied the prince that night.

“The Archduke had suicidal thoughts. And he clearly wanted to take someone with him,” Sondhaus says.

in the book Twilight of the Empire: The Mayerling Tragedy and the End of the Habsburgs (The Twilight of the Empire: The Mayerling Tragedy and the End of the Habsburgs, free translation), authors Greg King and Penny Wilson say that despite mental problems caused by drug use and venereal disease, Rudolf was anxious from a young age and was moody and like his mother “at once attractive and going from pleasant to reclusive and depressed in a matter of minutes.

However, the prince’s temperament problem has worsened over the years, especially because of his upbringing.

Francisco José, with the task of controlling the crown prince’s nerves, I hired soldier Leopoldo Gondrecourt to help him raise his six-year-old son. Known for his needless brutality, the general adopted methods that emotionally abused Rodolfo. According to King and Wilson, Gondrecourt would enter the prince’s bedroom at night and fire pistols to frighten him. Once, when the general took Rodolfo to the zoo in Vienna and locked him in a cage, saying that a boar was going to kill him, the boy screamed in panic.

The 15-year-old heiress described her suffering in a notebook that was recovered years later: “Sometimes I ask myself: am I already crazy or am I going to be crazy?”

Sondhaus says that despite his unhappy childhood and mental problems, he couldn’t forget that Rodolfo was a murderer. But the story of her lover’s death can only be resolved after the empire ended in 1918.

In 1889, Maria Vetsera’s body was buried without question and in secrecy – not even her mother was allowed to attend the ceremony. Also, the family said that in order not to cause a scandal, Maria would die alone on a trip to Italy.

The road to insurance

For Sondhaus, it’s hard to say what Rudolph’s policies would have been if he had been emperor, as little is known about his ideas at the time, because “he was more concerned with sex, alcohol, and drugs”.

What we do know is that the prince had a very different, liberal mindset from his father in terms of domestic policy. Francisco José I and his son were also known not to have a good relationship due to their different lifestyles and personal philosophies.

According to Mark Cornwall, professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom and a researcher on the Habsburg Empire, Rudolf was more tolerant of different nationalities and, unlike his father, had little interest in the military. “It was a clearly dysfunctional relationship in a dysfunctional family,” he sums up.

However, the emperor was briefly interested in Rudolf’s successor. After the Mayerling Incident and without a direct heir, it was Archduke Francis Ferdinand who was trained for the position. Francis was known for his lack of generosity towards Hungarians, very unlike Rudolf, who, like his mother, had strong ties to Hungary.

The new successor saw Hungarian nationalism as a threat to the Habsburg dynasty and advocated a cautious approach to Serbia. According to Cornwall, the archduke wanted a centralized power in the empire, had a conservative outlook and a reputation for being bigoted.

In fact, tensions in the region were decisive in the archduke’s assassination by Gavrilo Princip, a nationalist who sought to break up the Slavic provinces of Austria-Hungary.

But both Lawrence Sondhaus and Mark Cornwall argue that the attack was the trigger, not the cause, of the First World War: “Had it not been for the murder crisis in Sarajevo, there would have been another crisis – probably in the Balkan region – because the Ottoman Empire was collapsing and a major power in the region. there was a gap”, comments Sondhaus.

In Cornwall’s view, “no one is innocent: France, Russia, Germany, England, they all wanted war”.

According to historians, the Germans had war plans for dominating power in Europe. So in 1914, Germany was looking for an excuse to start a major conflict. And the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand gave them that opportunity.

Cornwall also says the Habsburgs want an opportunity to resolve issues with Serbia, but they don’t want a European war. They were even willing to settle it diplomatically.

“The imperialist race and the great rivalry between Austria, Hungary and Russia for influence in the Balkans were already notable. Also, the naval race, particularly Britain’s growing fear of German power, made the British allies with the French,” says Sondhaus.

Thus, the Triple Entente, an alliance of Britain, Russia, and France, was formed to resist and compete with Germany, whose allies were Austria-Hungary and Italy during the war.

The process resulted in further disintegration of the unstable Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the apparent victory of the Entente in 1918, the national assemblies in the provinces of the empire began to act as independent states, and separatist ethnic groups declared their secession. In desperation, the last Habsburg reigning in Austria, Charles I, renounced all his powers.

“War was a catalyst for the already existing conflicts between the different nations of the empire. And when an empire loses a war, there are always lots of internal changes,” Cornwall concludes.

– This text was published at https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-63946260.