~ My little old world ~ gardening, home, poetry and everything romantic that makes us dream.: Mayerling ~ Wednesday, January 30, 1889

venerdì 30 gennaio 2026

Mayerling ~ Wednesday, January 30, 1889

On the morning of January 31, 1889, the people of Vienna awoke to a shocking news that chilled the streets, veiled by the icy winter fog, into silence. On every newspaper of the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire front-paged appears the news of the tragic death of the heir to the throne, Archduke Rudolf, which had occurred the previous morning from a heart failure while he was at his hunting lodge in Mayerling, in the Vienna Woods. Time seemed to stand still for a moment, for Vienna, for the whole Old Continent, for the entire world. As the hours passed, it was discovered that he wasn't alone, he was together with his lover, Marie Vetsera, and they had both died from gunshot wounds.

~ My Little Old World ~ has already dealt with this topic some years ago (click HERE to read the post published on January 30, 2014), but new developments prompt me to retract it. Let's look at what happened in order. At 6:30 that morning, the prince's personal valet, Johann Loschek, hears a shot coming from the room where Rudolf was sleeping. He had spent merrily the previous evening with his usual companions: the inseparable Josef Bratfisch, his personal coachman, a good-natured, singing man with a quick wit; Count Joseph Theodor von Hoyos, his aide-de-camp; and Johann Loschek, of course. Before retiring to his room at about midnight, Rudolf had bidden farewell, asking the latter to wake him at 7:00 a.m. He had to have breakfast and then meet up with the friends who accompanied him whenever a hunting trip was planned: Count Hoyos, already in Mayerling, and his friend and brother-in-law, Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who would be joining them from Vienna that early morning. Hearing the shot, Loschek rushes to the door of his room but finds it bolted from the inside. A first question arises here: why would Rudolf have locked the door from the inside with the latch, thus making it unopenable from the outside, when the night before he had instructed Loscheck to be woken at a very specific time? But let's return to the story of the events of that fateful morning: Loscheck is unable to open the door of Rudolf’s room by himself. It takes the strength of two men and the aid of a lever. He then turns to Hoyos for his help. Once the door is open, the scene that unfolds before their eyes is nothing short of horrifying, so much so that they cannot explain it, much less comprehend it: the small window bangs forcefully in time with the gusts of the icy north breeze caressing the snow that has continued to fall throughout the night; someone has entered through that very window, forcing the handle, and, from there, quickly escaped, leaving the ladder he used to go up and down leaning against the windowsill. The table that was against the wall now appears torn down in the center of the room, in a pool of blood; the other furniture has also been moved and stained with blood. In all honesty, blood is everywhere. Generous splashes distressingly paint the walls, especially the one supporting the bed on which lie the lifeless bodies of Rudolf and his very young lover, the seventeen-year-old Baroness Marie Vetsera, who had followed him there and joined him the night before. There were traces left by large men near the window, and footprints and blood were also visible on the ladder, demonstrating that the prince had not only resisted for a long time before surrendering to death, but had also wounded one of his attackers. But above all, it is on the floor, in the center of the room, that there is a huge pool of it...

What does it mean? Perhaps Rudolf and Marie didn't die in the bed they were found in? That doesn't really appear to be the scene of a suicide, but, for everyone, it had to become such. Count Hoyos appears to gather courage and offers himself to bring the news of the incident to the emperors. He then sets out on foot to the Baden station where he awaits the first train to the capital. Rudolf's other three companions—Loschek, his coachman Bratfisch, and Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who had arrived in the meantime and had witnessed his heartbreaking state—ride home and will arrive in Vienna before him. But no one will ever know it. Why does Hoyos act so calmly? He should have ridden as fast as the wind to the Hofburg. Instead, he will be the last to arrive in Vienna. A few hours after hearing the news of the tragedy, the emperor summons four men before him—THE MAYERLING WITNESSES—to buy their silence. They should never have confided to anyone what they had seen in the hunting lodge where Rudolf was still laying on his deathbed. Only one man will not keep his promise, and he will do so because he feels a heavy conscience: it will be Hoyos, complicit in the death of the crown prince who had blindly trusted him. He will confess the incident and his guilt to his brother Ladislaus, and from him the truth about Mayerling will be passed from father to son for several generations. It was never made known. Until the year 2022, when the journalist François Varay published the book Mayerling, la vérite révélée. Un secret de famille dévoilé, for the Parisian publisher Michel de Maule. He was the younger half-brother of the Franco-Austrian journalist Ladislas de Hoyos, known as the man who tracked down Klaus Barbie, the Nazi leader and head of the Gestapo in Paris during the World War II, who had taken refuge in Argentina. From then on, this descendant of Rudolf's aide-de-camp went on gaining fame in France, even hosting the news on the TF1 television channel. Having no children, he orally passed on all his knowledge to the author of this book, and, obviously, what is revealed goes beyond conjecture and represents one piece of a very complex mosaic. Although these are oral evidences, that is not supported by written documents, they're are anyway worth to be considered, for they're quite interesting and make us think.

It was 13 June, 1886, when King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Sissi's forty-one-year-old beloved cousin, also known as "The Fairytale King," was found dead under suspicious circumstances. That case, too, was considered a suicide, or rather, a suicide by drowning—hard to believe, given that he was an excellent swimmer—but the proofs were silted- up. Everything was quickly hushed up. The King of Bavaria, though politically absent, was somewhat of a nuisance to Wilhelm II of Prussia, which aspired to create a confederation of German States. For his chancellor, Count Otto von Bismarck, who was his shadow, or perhaps it's better to say his right hand, it would have been easy to get rid of that man of singular sensitivity and intellect, which were never understood and were interpreted as clear signs of madness. By becoming a patron of Wagner, of whom he was a fervent admirer, he had saved him and his family from absolute poverty. His only concern was spending exorbitant sums to surround himself with castles built in keeping with medieval chivalric ideals married to Norse mythology, legends that his musician friend would adapt into operas to be performed in theaters. Given his lifestyle and the mental illness that, it was said, was afflicting him for so long, few would have believed his passing to be accidental. In everyone's eyes, he was an extremely fragile and vulnerable man. On 13 June, at 6:30 PM, he asked to take a walk with Dr. Bernhard von Gudden, whom his ministers, who thought their king to be incompetent, always wanted him to accompany him. The latter accepted, telling the guards not to follow them. The two men never returned: both were found prone, lifeless, in the waters of Lake Starnberg half an hour before midnight. But there were two others Bismarck had to "eliminate" on the orders of his Kaiser: one of them was none other than Rudolf. Two and a half years had passed since the disappearance of the King of Bavaria, first on the "Iron Chancellor's" list, and perhaps the time had come to organize another plot to eliminate the second one. United with Austria and Russia in the Triple Alliance, Prussia aspired to the most ruthless conservatism, which is why it enjoyed the sympathies of Emperor Franz Joseph, sympathies that were clearly mutual. Wilhelm II, on the other hand, harbored a clear antipathy for Crown Prince Rudolf, also mutual. In IL PICCOLO on January 30, 2019, on the occasion of the publication of the essay Mayerling, Anatomia di un Omicidio, written by Fabio Amodeo and Mario José Cereghino for Mgs Press, the following was stated:

«According to the great Hungarian-born French historian François Fejtö, author of Requiem per un impero defunto (Mondadori), it was actually the German Kaiser Wilhelm II who hatched the plot. Rudolf's sworn enemy was reciprocated: ‘At most, I would gladly meet Wilhelm on a hunting trip to rid the world of him in an elegant manner,’ Rudolf had stated. In short, a state crime, disguised as suicide, in which poor Vetsera was implicated as an inconvenient witness to be eliminated.»

François Fejtö's simple but acute intuition will be confirmed by Count Hoyos's descendant. As we have seen and will see as we read further, Count Hoyos was not only informed of the detailed course of the Mayerling conspiracy, because he was supposed to be part of it; he also knew the details of the entire plot hatched by Bismarck, of which Mayerling was merely an "episodic moment." But how did events really unfold at the hunting lodge located in the Vienna Woods of Niederösterreich (Lower Austria)?

A few days before the tragedy, some witnesses noted, in a chalet near Rudolf's castle in Mayerling, the presence of two men they had never seen before. They spoke with a remarkable Prussian accent and claimed to be hunters, but they were not carrying hunting rifles: they were two of Bismarck's snipers, tasked with eliminating the crown prince of the Danubian Dual Monarchy, one of the pawns Bismarck had placed on his chessboard. Obviously, Rudolf did not surrender to death that fateful morning. This is why the scene that originally presented itself to the first four witnesses was not that of a suicide, but rather that of a fight; and this is why Hoyos himself offered to carry news of the tragedy to the imperial palace: he had been chosen as the Prussian snipers' accomplice. He was the other pawn. At this point, it's easy to understand why he chose the longest route to Vienna: he had to stall. As soon as he left Mayerling, he passed through the neighboring village of Alland. Here he contacted the carpenter and the blacksmith, who had their workshops there, and tasked them with restoring the room where the bodies of Rudolf and the young Marie lay lifeless, prematurely stiffened by the cold that entered through the broken window. They needed time to repair it by replacing the broken handle from the outside and the shattered glass; replace the floorboards in the central part of the room, which were irreparably stained with blood; repair the furniture and put it back in its place.

«It was Bismarck who had the prince assassinated. The Emperor of Austria knew about it, but he could do nothing. The Germans sent spies who killed the prince and his mistress. And it was my ancestor, Count Hoyos, who made things easier for them by later providing false deposition. [...]» (François Varay, Mayerling, la vérite révélée. Un secret de famille dévoilé Éditions Michel de Maule, Paris, 2022, p. 174.).

The author goes so far as to compare the story to a Greek tragedy in which the king sacrifices his own son in the name of the unity of the kingdom (see François Varay, Mayerling, la vérite révélée: Un secret de famille dévoilé, op. cit. p. 183.). Indeed, enriched with these final details, Mayerling's tragedy possesses all the elements of a Greek tragedy.

The third man Bismarck had his eye on was Johann Salvator, Rudolf's great-cousin, a member of the Tuscan branch of the Habsburg-Lorraine family, his confidant and inseparable companion. Upon hearing the tragic news of what had happened at Mayerling, Franz Josef wanted to travel there to see for himself the situation, which, moreover, had already been duly distorted. Perhaps only then did he truly realize how much he had been unable to prevent it. Karl Salvator, his trusted cousin and Johann Salvator's older brother, accompanied him. When the latter learned of the tragedy, which was reported to him in detail by a direct and reliable source, he was inevitably struck by panic: he could not believe that Rudolf had disappeared in such a dramatic way and sensed that soon he too would suffer a similar fate to that of the prince he loved like a brother and with whom he shared liberal and democratic ideals. This was why they were both considered subversive and potential threats to the political stability of the empire, as well as being regarded with suspicion. As soon as he regained control of his actions and his clarity, Johann Salvator approached the emperor, asking for the renunciation of his noble titles and the privileges associated with them, which by right of blood were his, and for a new surname: he wanted to be called Johann Orth. Only by changing his identity would Johann Salvator become untraceable. Not only that, he could finally fulfill his dream of marrying his beloved Ludmilla-Milly Stübel, the ballet dancer at the Vienna State Opera: he had long been engaged to her, but his rank prevented him from joining her and starting a family.

Franz Josef granted him everything he had asked, but ordered him never to return to any territory of the empire. For him, this will not be a problem at all: after reaching London and taking the more Anglicized name of John, he got married and sailed for the South Americas. He disappeared by faking a shipwreck (see Daniela Lasagnini, Il figlio americano di Rodolfo D'Asburgo, Mgs Press, Trieste, 2021, chap. IV, John Orth, pp. 53-62).

Returning to Mayerling, I resume the discussion with the phrase that Franz Josef uttered after seeing his son torn apart, a phrase that only now takes on a deeper meaning:

«The truth is far worse than one can imagine!»

After the funeral, he insisted that from then on no one would ever mention Rudolf's name again: it was as if his son had never existed, although I believe not a day went by in his life when he didn't think about what he had allowed to happen. In the 1980s, the former Empress Zita, née Bourbon-Parma, consort of the last Austrian Emperor, Karl I, returned to Vienna several times after some sixty years of exile and widowhood. Determined to shed light on the "Mayerling Events," she gave a series of interviews to the Kronen Zeitung and made statements to Austrian television: she was the only one to know what had happened, both through family lineage and marriage, as Nerio De Carlo also argued in his 2013 essay, Non desiderare la patria d'altri, published by the Trieste-based publishing house Holzwege. She maintained that Rudolf had not committed suicide, but had been the victim of a conspiracy and assassinated. She was the first to speak of a conspiracy, and so far her words correspond to the reality we now know. But going further, she claimed that the perpetrators were Austrian and French secret agents, and that the motive, in the first case, was Rudolf's sympathy for Hungary, in the second the friction that had arisen with Clemenceau's France. Zita likely knew the whole truth, but fearing not to be authorized to make it public, revealed only a part of it. The fact remains that she deserves credit for rehabilitating the crown prince, who had been debased first by the theory of suicide and then by the subsequent theory of a mental illness "invented" by the emperor to obtain permission from the Holy Father to celebrate the funeral rite in church. Indeed, history portrayed him as violent towards himself, depressed by the abuse of narcotics, which he took as painkillers, and alcohol, discouraged by his father's exclusion from political affairs, and bored with life. And that night, De Carlo writes in his essay, according to the former empress,

«As a precaution, the window shutters had to remain closed, and not even the telegraph was allowed to work. There was to be no contact, not even telegraphic, with anyone [...] Baroness Mary Vetsera was staying in another part of the building so as not to be compromised. The Prince's room was carefully locked from the inside.» (Nerio de Carlo, Non desiderare la patria d’altri, Holzwege, Trieste, 2016, p. 50.).

Poor Marie was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but she was useful in giving substance to the double suicide hypothesis: murdered elsewhere and many hours before Rudolf, she was then laid next to him. The former Empress Zita knew that Rudolf did not abandon himself to death and fought long before being impeccably struck by his assassins:

«During this struggle, the fingers of the hand that was spasmodically holding the table, which had become his only protection, were severed. When it fell from his hand, he was brutally killed.» (Ibid.)

In the photograph taken of Rudolf's death body and released to the press, we see him not only with his skull wrapped in bandages, but also with his hands bandaged, so that his fingers are not visible. This explains the reason for this bandage, which even Gisella, the deceased's younger sister, could not explain herself. And it also explains why the table lay immersed in a pool of blood: it was the blood that had seeped from his brutally severed fingers, and likely from the blow that took his life. It is likely that Rudolf was mortally wounded there, and then laid on the bed, already lifeless. Even the former Emperor Karl I, while he was alive, worked to shed light on this affair, which, after decades, continued to be shrouded in mystery, and sought concrete evidence. Therefore, Zita also felt compelled to declare that:

«Karl I knew that there must be a telegram in the Vatican explaining the true causes of the heir to the throne's death. The religious authorities had, in fact, prohibited a religious burial as soon as news of the alleged suicide leaked. From his Swiss exile, Karl I attempted to obtain a copy of that clarifying telegram sent to the Holy Father. The response was that the document had indeed existed, but that the newly formed Austrian Republican Government had requested the original be returned immediately after the proclamation of the Republic. The original was returned without a copy being made.» (Nerio de Carlo, Non desiderare la patria d'altri, op. cit., p. 56.).

Hard to believe when the evidence of all the secrets that history has handed down to us are jealously guarded within the walls of the Vatican palaces…