On the morning of January 30, 1889, Princess Stephanie of Belgium received news that would define the rest of her life. Her husband, Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary, and his young mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera, had been found dead at Mayerling, a secluded hunting lodge near Vienna. The official story would eventually confirm what many suspected: Rudolf had shot Vetsera and then turned the gun on himself. Stephanie was twenty-four years old, a widow, and already unable to have children because of diseases her husband had given her.
She had been born into privilege on May 21, 1864, at the Palace of Laeken in Brussels. Her father was Prince Leopold, heir to the Belgian throne, who became King Leopold II after his father’s death in 1865, when Stephanie was barely a year and a half old. To the outside world, Leopold II appeared as a visionary statesman who raised Belgium’s standing on the global stage, filling the country with grand palaces and civic buildings. Behind that glittering public image, however, lay a darker reality.
He turned the Congo into his private possession, ruling it brutally and exploiting its people for profit. Millions of Congolese were enslaved on rubber plantations under his rule, and disease and famine brought a devastating decline in the population. Stephanie’s family wealth was built in part on that bloodshed. Her mother, Maria Henriette of Austria, came from the Habsburg dynasty.
She and Leopold had four children: Louise in 1858, their only son Leopold in 1859, Stephanie in 1864, and Clementine eight years later. Despite the size of the family, the royal household was not happy. The marriage had been arranged for political reasons, and the couple had little in common. Over time, the queen distanced herself from her husband and spent much of the 1870s apart from him.
Stephanie’s early life was marked by loss. In January 1869, her four-year-old brother, the heir to the Belgian throne, died, plunging the family into mourning and deepening the rift between her parents. Two years later, an outbreak of typhus swept through Brussels, and Stephanie, not yet seven, fell gravely ill. For weeks she drifted between life and death, feverish and unconscious, but she survived.
Her education was rigorous and multilingual, though it came with strict discipline. From 1875 onward, with her older sister married and her mother often absent from the capital, Stephanie frequently served as the highest-ranking female royal at court. In the winter of 1878, when she was barely fourteen, she was introduced to Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, the only son of Emperor Franz Joseph and heir to the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire. The meeting was no accident.
Negotiations for a marriage were already underway, with the Austrians seeking a bride who could secure the succession by producing male heirs. After prolonged discussions, the arrangement was settled, and on May 10, 1881, just days before her seventeenth birthday, Stephanie married Rudolf in a grand ceremony in Vienna. Married life was not a fairy tale. There was no deep affection between the couple, only duty.
At first their relationship was cordial, but cracks quickly appeared. Rudolf had a volatile personality, and Stephanie found herself trapped in the palace, constantly watched and given little freedom. In September 1883, she gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth Marie. Rudolf met the news with thinly veiled disappointment; he had wanted a male heir for the empire.
She would be their only child. By the mid-1880s, Stephanie was sterile. The cause lay with her husband. Rudolf was an alcoholic and a rampant philanderer, carrying on affairs across Vienna.
He contracted numerous sexually transmitted diseases, and historians generally agree that he passed both syphilis and gonorrhea to Stephanie, leaving her unable to bear children at just twenty-two. Doctors initially blamed peritonitis, as Rudolf had kept his illness secret. By the time Stephanie learned the truth, it was too late. Betrayed and humiliated, she refused to share a bed with him.
He stumbled home at dawn, reeking of liquor and other women, while his behavior grew even more erratic, possibly because of the worsening syphilis. Among Rudolf’s many mistresses, one became prominent: Baroness Mary Vetsera. In 1888, at just seventeen, she became involved with the thirty-year-old crown prince. The pair spent much of their time at Mayerling, a hunting lodge Rudolf had bought and turned into a private retreat from the imperial court.
On January 30, 1889, they were found dead there. Rumors of conspiracy, assassination, and political intrigue swirled for years, but the investigation ultimately concluded that Rudolf shot his mistress and then took his own life. After his death, Stephanie hoped to return to Belgium, but the imperial court refused to let her daughter leave Vienna. Elisabeth Marie was a Habsburg princess, and Stephanie, now the dowager crown princess, was stuck in a city where she was unwanted.
Her in-laws turned their backs on her, seeing her as a painful reminder of Rudolf’s disgrace. During that lonely period, she found comfort in a romance with Count Artur Potocki, a Polish nobleman who had stood by her through the darkest days. But fate struck again. Potocki, still under forty, suffered from laryngeal cancer.
A failed surgery left him unable to speak, and by March 1890 he was dead. Stephanie, still grieving Rudolf’s violent end, was once again plunged into mourning. She traveled extensively, drifting through the Mediterranean, Malta, Tunisia, Sicily, and Corfu, searching for distraction and perhaps a new beginning. Her father, King Leopold II, had grand plans of his own.
He wanted Stephanie to marry Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the new heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, but that match never happened. Instead, in the late 1890s, Stephanie found love with Count Elmer Lónyay, a Hungarian aristocrat. This was a marriage of affection, not political alliance. Elmer even converted to Roman Catholicism to win King Leopold’s approval.
It did not work. In a fierce letter, her father flatly refused to sanction the marriage, unwilling to allow his daughter to marry beneath her station. Stephanie defied him. On March 22, 1900, she married Elmer at Miramare Castle near Trieste, losing her imperial titles in the process.
By then, her father had grown old. With no surviving direct male heir, plans were in place for his nephew, Prince Albert, to succeed him as King Albert I. Leopold had long been furious with his daughters for marrying beneath their rank and had all but disowned them. His resentment ran so deep that he forbade Stephanie from attending her mother’s funeral in 1902 and refused to see her before his own death.
When Leopold died in 1909, Stephanie and her sisters expected to inherit a share of his immense fortune. Instead, they discovered that he had left most of his wealth to Caroline Lacroix, his much younger mistress, whom he had secretly married just five days before his death. Enraged, Stephanie and her sisters launched a fierce legal battle that dragged on for five years. In the end, Stephanie secured a settlement of five million francs.
In the summer of 1914, while on a state visit to Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the man her father had once wanted her to marry, was assassinated by a Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip. His death triggered a crisis that spiraled into the First World War. Weeks later, Germany invaded neutral Belgium, and Stephanie’s homeland remained under German occupation for four years. Living in Austria-Hungary, an ally of Germany, she found herself in an uncomfortable position, especially since she had become convinced that Emperor Franz Joseph had been in some way involved in the assassination of his own heir.
By then, however, Stephanie and Elmer were far from Vienna. In 1906, they had settled at Rusovce mansion, in what is now Slovakia, one of the few places untouched by the war. There Stephanie devoted herself to charitable work. When Emperor Franz Joseph died in 1916, she and Elmer returned to Vienna for his funeral and the coronation celebrations of the new ruler.
Two months later, Elmer was made a prince within the Hungarian aristocracy. But their world soon crumbled. In October 1918, Austria-Hungary lost the war and collapsed into separate nations. While most Habsburg royals were exiled, Stephanie and Elmer were spared and remained at Rusovce, continuing to travel frequently and living a quiet, happy life together.
Her relationship with her daughter, however, did not survive. Elisabeth Marie had become a socialist and was known in Austria as the Red Archduchess. After a final falling out in 1924, mother and daughter cut ties completely and never spoke again. During these years, Stephanie composed her memoirs, published in 1935 and in English in 1937 under the title I Was to Be Empress.
The book was not a full autobiography; she barely mentioned the half century after Rudolf’s death. It was divided into four parts, with the final section titled “Tragedy Mayerling. ” Her story, at least the one she chose to tell, ended in 1889. In September 1939, the Second World War broke out.
Stephanie and her husband did not live near the front lines, and the surrounding countries were spared the worst of the fighting. Toward the end of the war, however, they were troubled by Nazi plans to convert Rusovce into a field hospital as the Soviet Red Army advanced into central Europe. When the Russians arrived in the late spring of 1945, Stephanie and Elmer took refuge at Pannonhalma Archabbey. She died there on August 23, 1945, at eighty-one.
She had disinherited her daughter a year earlier, and Elisabeth Marie did not attend her mother’s funeral. Stephanie was buried in the abbey’s crypt, and Elmer, who died just under a year later, was buried beside her.