In 1875, a 17-year-old Belgian princess married a German prince more than a decade her senior. The union, arranged for diplomatic reasons, quickly turned abusive, and the princess eventually fled her husband—an act that led to her being confined in a psychiatric asylum for over six years. Princess Louise of Belgium was born on February 18, 1858, in Brussels, the eldest daughter of the future King Leopold II and his Austrian Habsburg wife, Marie Henriette. Her father once joked that she had dark eyes and a big nose, which he claimed made her his daughter in every way.
That affection did not last long, as the royal household grew tense and fractured after the death of Louise’s only brother, Leopold, in 1869, at age nine from complications of pneumonia following a fall into a pond. Leopold II, left without a male heir, grew increasingly bitter. His marriage to Queen Marie Henriette deteriorated further after she suffered a miscarriage in 1871 and then gave birth to a third daughter, Clementine, in 1872. Since only males could inherit the Belgian throne, Leopold spent much of his reign acutely aware that he had no direct male successor.
As the king’s eldest daughter, Louise was expected to marry into a prominent royal or aristocratic family to strengthen Belgium’s diplomatic position among the great European powers of the time. After France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 dashed plans for a match with the French imperial heir, negotiations settled on Prince Philippe of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a member of a prestigious German dynasty with ties to French and British royalty. The couple married in Brussels on February 4, 1875, when Louise was 17 and Philippe was 31. Louise had initially been charmed by Philippe, but the marriage quickly proved catastrophic.
She later recalled in her memoirs that she had no idea what awaited her on her wedding night, describing the experience as so painful that she fled the palace in her nightgown the next morning and hid in a greenhouse. She described a troubling routine in which Philippe made her pour wine for him while he read from pornographic books. After settling in Vienna at the Coburg Palace, Louise painted a grim picture of her new home, which she said was dark, strangely furnished, and dominated by her controlling mother-in-law. The couple had two children, Leopold Clement in 1878 and Dorothea in 1881, but Louise increasingly escaped her unhappy domestic life through lavish spending and long absences from the palace.
By 1883, Louise had begun a passionate affair with her husband’s military attaché. After he died in 1888, she transferred her affections to his successor, Baron Nicolas Dori, a relationship that ended in 1893 when Dori’s wife discovered it. In 1895, Louise began another intense affair, this time with Geza Mattachich, a Croatian officer nine years her junior. When rumors of the relationship spread, the scandal erupted across the Habsburg court.
On February 18, 1898, Prince Philippe, desperate to salvage his honor, challenged Mattachich to a duel and was quickly defeated. Weeks later, Philippe took a more destructive route—he declared Louise insane, persuaded Emperor Franz Joseph I to have her committed, and gave her a brutal choice: return to the Coburg Palace or spend the rest of her life in a psychiatric institution. Louise chose the asylum and was sent to a facility in Döbling near Vienna. Mattachich was arrested on forgery charges and imprisoned shortly afterward.
News of Louise’s confinement leaked, and the Austrian press responded with widespread sympathy for the fallen princess. Concerned by the growing scandal, Philippe quietly moved Louise in 1899 to an institution in Saxony, where she faded from public view. For years, she saw none of her family, except for one heartbreaking visit from her daughter Dorothea in February 1903. Meanwhile, Mattachich, still in prison, began an unexpected relationship with Maria Stöger, a 23-year-old married woman who worked at the prison specifically to meet him.
She devoted herself to securing his release, hiring lawyers and mobilizing the press. Her persistence paid off, and Mattachich received a pardon in August 1902. He tried to rally support for Louise, but nothing changed until the summer of 1904, when Louise was sent to Bad Elster in Saxony for health treatment, where supervision was notably lax. Mattachich seized the opportunity and, with Maria’s help, smuggled Louise across the border into France.
After more than six years of confinement, Louise was finally free. The following year, Louise’s sanity was officially affirmed, and in 1906, her long-delayed divorce was settled. Prince Philippe granted her a respectable monthly allowance, but Louise, accustomed to a life of luxury, quickly sank into debt. She and Mattachich remained together for the rest of their lives, though they never married.
Leopold II died on December 17, 1909. He left an estate worth only $6 million to be divided among Louise and her sisters, while the bulk of his fortune went to his longtime mistress, Caroline Lacroix, whom he married just five days before his death. Louise and her sisters contested the will, launching a bitter legal battle. In 1914, after years of litigation, they were granted just over 5 million francs each—far less than they expected, as much of Leopold’s wealth had been hidden in holding companies outside Belgium specifically to make challenges difficult.
When World War I broke out in 1914, Louise and Mattachich were expelled from Vienna, since Belgium was under German occupation and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was allied with Germany. They settled in Munich, where Louise learned that her son, Leopold Clement, had been shot and had sulfuric acid poured over his head by his mistress in October 1915. He survived initially but lost an eye and suffered severe injuries; he died in April 1916 after six months of agony. In August 1916, Mattachich was arrested and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Budapest.
Louise, now in increasingly dire financial straits, returned to the empire to plead his case, but Belgium’s occupation cut off her income, and by early 1917 her debts had grown to 30 million marks. Declared bankrupt, she watched her remaining possessions sold at auction and survived only with help from her daughter Dorothea and sister Stephanie. Mattachich was released after the war, and the couple moved to France as the Habsburg Empire disintegrated. Penniless, Louise wrote her memoirs, published in 1921 as “Around the Thrones I Saw Fall.
” Mattachich died in the autumn of 1923 in Paris. Louise moved to Germany but died in poverty in Wiesbaden on March 1, 1924, at age 66. Her daughter Dorothea had no biological children, and when she died in 1967, Louise’s biological line came to an end. Princess Charlotte of Belgium lived an extraordinary early life, marrying an Austrian archduke before she was 18 and becoming Empress of Mexico in the 1860s.
But a series of tragic circumstances caused her to lose her mind, and she spent the rest of her life isolated from the world. Charlotte was born on June 7, 1840, at Laeken Castle near Brussels, the only daughter of Leopold I, Belgium’s first king, and his wife Louise, a daughter of King Louis Philippe of France. Her mother died of tuberculosis in October 1850, when Charlotte was just 10, and she was subsequently raised by a noblewoman friend of the royal family. On July 27, 1857, Charlotte married Archduke Maximilian of Austria, a 25-year-old who was close in the line of succession to his brother, Emperor Franz Joseph I.
The early years of the marriage were relatively happy. Charlotte was praised for her beauty and her ease navigating the imperial court in Vienna, while the couple also spent time in northern Italy, where Maximilian served as viceroy of the Austrian provinces of Lombardy and Venetia. After those provinces were lost, they moved to a residence near Trieste on the Adriatic coast. Their idyllic start was violently interrupted by events far away in Mexico.
The country had won independence from Spain in 1821 but was governed as a republic. In early 1860s, France, Spain, and Britain invaded Mexico over unpaid debts. While Spain and Britain quickly withdrew, France remained, and Emperor Napoleon III began crafting a plan for deeper intervention in Mexican politics. As early as October 1861, conservative Mexican politicians, backed by Napoleon, sent a message to Europe offering Maximilian the Mexican crown.
He was seen as a highly suitable candidate—not only a member of a European royal family, but also a member of the Habsburg dynasty that had ruled Spain when the Spanish first conquered Mexico. After long negotiations, Maximilian accepted in October 1863, and Charlotte’s influence is widely believed to have been decisive. She was ambitious and believed they could thrive as rulers of a Central American state. In the spring of 1864, the couple sailed to the Americas, where Charlotte became known as Empress Carlota.
But they received a poor reception, and civil war broke out between conservatives supporting the new empire and liberals and republicans fighting to preserve the republic. Carlota made genuine efforts as empress—learning Spanish, showing interest in Mexican culture and history, visiting the Yucatán in 1865 to see Mayan ruins, and adopting two members of the Iturbide family to establish a line of succession. But support began to evaporate by the mid-1860s. The United States, occupied with its own civil war until 1865, began intervening more actively on behalf of the republicans afterward.
Napoleon III, increasingly concerned about events in Europe, began shifting French interests away from Mexico, leaving Maximilian and Carlota isolated. In the summer of 1866, in a desperate final attempt to save the regime, Carlota sailed to Europe while Maximilian remained in Mexico. Her mission was to rally support among European royal houses. She first went to Paris in August, where she failed to convince Napoleon III to renew his support—he even advised Maximilian to abdicate.
She then traveled to Rome, hoping to persuade Pope Pius IX to back Maximilian, a move that could have drawn the support of Europe’s Catholic powers. But the pope was reluctant. Everything seemed lost, and Carlota tragically began to lose her mind. Signs of her deteriorating health had appeared in Paris, but they fully manifested on the way to Rome.
At one point, she became convinced a passing farmer was a hired killer, a possible sign of paranoid schizophrenia. In Rome, she repeatedly feared she was being poisoned, refused to eat or drink, and suffered from fits of hysteria. Perhaps her strangest act was stealing a cup from the pope’s apartment in the Vatican and using it to drink water from Rome’s public fountains. Meanwhile, events in Mexico turned against Maximilian.
He was captured in May 1867 and executed by firing squad on June 19, 1867. A new republic replaced his short-lived empire. It is not clear how much Carlota understood of these events. By the summer of 1867, Carlota had been returned to Trieste, where she was cared for by a team of specialists.
It was decided not to tell her of her husband’s death when news arrived in June 1867. In 1867, several reports in the British Medical Journal documented her deteriorating mental state—she suffered from severe melancholia, what we would call depression, and paranoid delusions that her food was poisoned. Modern assessment would likely diagnose her with a severely debilitating form of paranoid schizophrenia, but in the late 19th century, with psychology in its infancy, little could be done. In January 1868, Charlotte finally learned of her husband’s execution, causing a further psychological collapse.
In a series of nearly 400 letters, she declared that she had died with the fall of the Mexican Empire. Charlotte was eventually brought back to Belgium and housed at Bouchout Castle, a 12th-century royal estate near Meise. There, she disappeared completely from public view, spending most of her time in her castle, seeing only a few family members. She occupied herself with walking, embroidery, card games, and listening to her gramophone.
Her lady-in-waiting described how Charlotte would sink into long silences or, conversely, become engaged in sharp, disjointed discussions in French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish with imaginary interlocutors. She often made confusing comments, talked to herself, and sometimes flew into rages, smashing vases and tearing books—interrupted by periods of calm. She spent more than 50 years at Bouchout Castle, her condition reportedly improving somewhat over time, but she could never return to a normal life. She died on January 19, 1927, at age 86.
In 1357, a strange event took place at the Portuguese royal court in Lisbon. Shortly after ascending the throne, King Peter I oversaw the coronation of his queen, a Spanish noblewoman named Inês de Castro. There was one obstacle: Inês had been dead for two years. Inês was born around 1325 in the kingdom of Galicia in northwest Spain, the daughter of Pedro Fernández de Castro, Lord of Lemos and Sarria, and his mistress Aldonça Lourenço de Valadares.
Because her mother was not married to her noble father, Inês was followed by accusations of illegitimacy. Her family had connections to the royal houses of Galicia and Portugal, and her grandmother was an illegitimate daughter of King Sancho IV of Castile. In 1340, Constanza Manuel, a high-ranking Castilian noblewoman, married Peter, Crown Prince of Portugal. Constanza had been a childhood companion of Inês, and when Constanza left for Lisbon, Inês went with her as one of her ladies-in-waiting.
Soon, Peter, Constanza’s new husband, was drawn to Inês instead of his wife. By 1342 or 1343, it was an open secret that the two were involved in an extramarital affair. Peter’s father, King Afonso IV, was disturbed by the situation. He feared it would damage political ties with Castile and that Peter’s Galician favorites were gaining too much influence over the future king.
He also worried that Portugal, surrounded by larger neighbors, could be dragged into Spanish conflicts. In 1344, Afonso took drastic action and exiled Inês from the Portuguese court. But Peter simply began visiting her regularly in Galicia and Castile, and it was eventually decided to bring Inês back to Lisbon where the couple could be monitored. Constanza died in November 1345, likely from complications after childbirth.
Peter now wanted to marry Inês, but Afonso was determined to prevent it, partly because Inês was illegitimate. Peter and Inês settled together at Coimbra, while Inês’s brothers and relatives gained increasing influence over Peter. The king grew concerned that Inês’s children from Peter—Beatriz, John, and Denis—might be placed ahead of the legitimate children from Constanza in the line of succession. In late 1354 or early January 1355, Afonso decided Inês had to die.
On January 7, three assassins cornered Inês at the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Velha in Coimbra and beheaded her in front of her young child. One legend says the assassination took place at a nearby estate called Quinta das Lágrimas, where a fountain is said to be stained with her blood, and her ghost is said to haunt the grounds. When Peter learned what had happened, he was enraged and swore vengeance, even rebelling against his father and starting a civil war that lasted two years until a truce was arranged by his mother. In May 1357, King Afonso died.
Peter then declared that he had secretly married Inês in 1354, making her the legitimate queen of the country. He then, so the accounts go, had her body exhumed, dressed it in fine robes and jewelry, and placed it on the throne at the court. Before all the nobles, officials, and ambassadors, Peter crowned his dead mistress queen of Portugal, then made the assembled nobles come forward to kiss her hand and swear allegiance to her corpse. Peter had the body reburied at the Royal Monastery of Alcobaça, where he ordered two tombs built facing each other so they could see each other at the resurrection on Judgment Day.
The phrase “until the end of the world” was carved on the marble. Peter then pursued Inês’s killers, finally catching two of them in 1361 and executing them publicly by having their hearts torn out, claiming they had no real hearts because they caused so much suffering to his heart. Peter died in 1367 at age 46 and was succeeded by his eldest son from Constanza, King Ferdinand I. When Ferdinand died in 1383 without a male heir, the question of who would rule triggered a succession crisis.
This opened the door for the oldest son of Peter and Inês, John, Duke of Valencia de Campos, to claim the throne. The crisis lasted two years until another contender, John of Aviz—an illegitimate son of Peter from a later relationship—took the throne. Thus the crisis caused partly by Peter and Inês’s relationship was resolved, and the Aviz dynasty ruled Portugal for the next two centuries. Inês’s story became famous throughout Europe in the late 14th and 15th centuries.
It was included in “The Lusiads,” the famous epic poem by Luís de Camões in the 1570s, and by the 18th and 19th centuries, Inês was the central character in more than 20 plays and operas performed across Europe. Her story continues to inspire television series and operas to this day. Dona Maria I was the first reigning queen of Portugal and the first queen of Brazil. During her long reign, Portugal experienced turbulent conditions, and the queen eventually suffered from mental illness—the reason she became known as “Maria the Mad.
” Maria was born on December 17, 1734, at the Ribeira Palace in Lisbon, the eldest of four daughters of Crown Prince Dom José and his wife Mariana Victoria. She received an advanced education for the time, including literature, languages, classical studies, and Catholic theology. In 1750, her father ascended the throne as King José I. As the 1750s progressed, it became increasingly clear that one of his daughters would succeed him as the first reigning queen in the kingdom’s long history.
On November 1, 1755, when Maria was 20, one of the most shocking events in Portuguese history occurred. A violent earthquake struck Lisbon, measuring about 7. 7 on the Richter scale. A massive tsunami and subsequent fires swept through the densely populated capital, killing as many as 50,000 people.
Maria and her family survived, but her father was psychologically traumatized. He developed a severe case of claustrophobia and moved the royal court to Ajuda, where it convened in tents for years. By the late 1750s, with no male heir appearing, attention turned to Maria’s marriage. In June 1760, she married her uncle, Infante Dom Pedro, her father’s brother, who was 42 to her 25.
Marriage between close relatives was not uncommon in European royal families of the early modern period, and in this case it was considered justified because the late king’s brother becoming king consort when Maria became queen would ease concerns about rule by a woman. Despite the age gap, Maria and Pedro’s marriage was happy, though tragic. They had seven children, but four died in infancy. Of the three who survived, two—Prince Joseph and Infanta Mariana—died within weeks of each other in late 1788, both from smallpox.
Joseph was 27, and Mariana was just 19. Only one of their seven children, Prince John, lived a long life. On February 24, 1777, King José died, and Maria ascended the throne as the first reigning queen of Portugal. Her husband became king consort, a largely honorary role, while Maria was the actual ruler.
Maria quickly made a significant impact. Her father’s 27-year reign had been dominated by his chief minister, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the Marquis of Pombal, a secular politician who had tried to reduce the Catholic Church’s role and introduced liberal Enlightenment reforms. By 1777, he had made many enemies, and one of Maria’s first acts as queen was to remove him from office. Pombal spent the last years of his life in political exile.
Maria formed a new government that revived the Catholic Church’s role. Her first decade also saw notable successes, including the acquisition of Delagoa Bay on the coast of what is now Mozambique through diplomatic negotiation, and involvement in the formation of the League of Armed Neutrality in 1782. Maria faced a severe personal crisis in the mid-to-late 1780s. Her husband Pedro died on May 25, 1786.
His death hit Maria hard, and in the following months, her mental health began to decline sharply. She swung between periods of severe depression and mania, forbade joyful celebrations at court, and observers described the atmosphere around her as a continuous funeral. The situation worsened in late 1788, when two of her surviving children, Joseph and Mariana, died of smallpox within weeks of each other, followed shortly by her confessor. Maria was devastated, and her behavior became increasingly unpredictable.
It has been noted that her inbred ancestry may have contributed to her mental illness—two of her sisters had similar conditions, and both her maternal grandfather Philip V of Spain and her uncle Ferdinand VI went mad at the end of their lives. Medical help was sought. Francis Willis, a distinguished doctor who had treated Britain’s King George III during his mental struggles, was brought in, but he could not help effectively. Maria’s condition was not as severe as George III’s; she likely suffered from severe clinical depression as a result of the multiple tragedies in the late 1780s.
Nevertheless, the Portuguese government decided in 1792 to effectively sideline the queen, though she retained her position. Her only surviving son, Prince John, played an increasingly important role in governing. Maria spent most of her day in her apartments at Queluz, where one visitor claimed to hear her screaming so painfully that he felt a terror he had never experienced. Her manic episodes included shouting that she was cursed and possessed by the devil, and attacking her servants, alternating between violent excitement and complete stillness.
She underwent treatments such as bloodletting and enemas, but nothing helped. While Maria’s mental state deteriorated, Portugal was being dragged toward the conflicts that would consume Europe for a quarter century after the French Revolution of 1789. Portugal was a weak international and colonial power by this time, having lost most of its empire, except Brazil, which had become a major state in the Americas. Portugal’s possession of Brazil became a key factor in Maria’s reign because of the wars emanating from France.
In 1793, the French executed their king and established a republic, leading European powers into war. The wars eventually became the Napoleonic Wars after Napoleon Bonaparte became emperor. Napoleon eventually occupied Spain and Portugal. In 1801, Spain began seizing border towns in Portugal with French encouragement.
In 1807, Napoleon moved to take direct control of Spain and Portugal, and Prince John decided to flee Portugal and move the royal court to Salvador da Bahia in Brazil. As the court fled, Maria believed she was being kidnapped and refused to board the ship, so the fleet commander carried her aboard. She reportedly spent most of the three-month voyage screaming, terrifying the crew. Maria spent the last years of her life presiding over the Portuguese royal court in exile in Brazil.
In 1815, Prince John raised Brazil’s status from a colony to a separate kingdom in recognition of the aid it had provided to Portugal during the wars. Maria died on March 20, 1816, at age 81, at the Carmo Convent in Rio de Janeiro. She was succeeded by her only surviving son, Prince John, who became King John VI. Today, there is no consensus on the exact mental illness Maria suffered, though research suggests she likely had bipolar disorder.
Despite her psychological problems, Maria is regarded today as a largely successful queen in political history. She is particularly revered in Brazil as an important figure in shaping the Brazilian state, since her reign saw the country raised to a kingdom, an important step toward Brazil’s declaration of independence in 1822.