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The Mayerling Incident is the series of events leading to the apparent murder–suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria (21 August 1858 – 30 January 1889) and his lover Baroness Mary Vetsera (19 March 1871 – 30 January 1889). Rudolf was the only son of Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria and Empress Elisabeth, and heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Rudolf's mistress was the daughter of Baron Albin Vetsera, a diplomat at the Austrian court. The bodies of the 30-year-old Archduke and the 17-year-old baroness were discovered in the Imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods, fifteen miles southwest of the capital, on the morning of 30 January 1889.〔Twilight of the Habsburgs: The Life and Times of Emperor Francis Joseph. By Alan Palmer. ''Atlantic Monthly Press''. pp. 246-253〕 The death of the crown prince had momentous consequences for the course of history in the nineteenth century. It had a devastating effect on the already compromised marriage of the Imperial couple and interrupted the security inherent in the immediate line of Habsburg dynastic succession. As Rudolf had no son, the succession would pass to Franz Joseph's brother, Karl Ludwig and his issue, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.〔 This destabilization endangered the growing reconciliation between the Austrian and the Hungarian factions of the empire, which became a catalyst of the developments that led to the assassination of the Archduke and his wife Sophie by Gavrilo Princip, a Yugoslav nationalist and ethnic Serb at Sarajevo in June 1914 and the subsequent drift into the First World War. ==Incident== By 1889, many people at the court, including Rudolf's parents and his wife Stephanie, knew that Rudolf and Mary were having an affair. His marriage to Stephanie was not a particularly happy one, and had resulted in the birth of only one daughter, Elisabeth, known as Erzsi. On 29 January 1889, Franz Joseph and Elisabeth gave a family dinner party prior to leaving for Buda, in Hungary, on 31 January; Rudolf excused himself, claiming to be indisposed. He had arranged for a day's shooting at Mayerling early on the morning of the thirtieth, but when his valet Loschek went to call him, there was no answer. Count Joseph Hoyos, the Archduke's hunting companion, joined in, with no response. They tried to force the door, but it would not give. Finally Loschek smashed in a panel with an axe to find the room shuttered and half-dark. Rudolf was found sitting (by some accounts, lying) motionless by the side of the bed, leaning forward and bleeding from the mouth. Before him on the bedside table stood a glass and a mirror. Without closer examination in the poor light, Loschek assumed that the crown prince had drunk poison from the glass, since he knew strychnine caused bleeding. On the bed lay the body of Mary Vetsera, white, ice-cold, and already quite rigid.〔Corti, Egon, Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, Yale University Press, 1936, p. 391.〕 The mistaken impression that poison was involved, and even that the baroness had poisoned the crown prince and then killed herself, would persist for some time. Hoyos did not look any closer, but rushed to the station and took a special train to Vienna. He hurried to the Emperor's Adjutant General, Count Paar, and requested him to break the appalling news to the Emperor. The stifling protocol that characterized every movement in the Hofburg swung ponderously into action; Paar remonstrated that only the Empress could break such catastrophic news to the Emperor. Baron Nopcsa, Controller of the Empress' Household, was sent for, and he in turn sent for Countess Ida von Ferenczy, Empress Elisabeth's favorite Hungarian lady-in-waiting, to determine how her majesty should be informed. Elisabeth was at her Greek lesson, and was impatient at the interruption. White to the lips, Ferenczy announced that Baron Nopcsa had urgent news. Elizabeth replied that he must wait and come back later. The countess insisted that he must be received immediately, finally being forced to add that there was grave news about the crown prince. This account comes from Ferenczy herself and Archduchess Marie Valerie, to whom Elisabeth dictated her memory of the incident, in addition to the description in her diary.〔Corti, Egon, Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, Yale University Press, 1936, p. 392.〕 The countess entered the room again to find Elisabeth distraught and weeping uncontrollably. At this point, the Emperor appeared outside her apartments, and was forced to wait there with Nopcsa, who was visibly controlling himself only with great effort. The Empress broke the news to her husband in private; he left the room a broken man. The Minister for the Police was summoned and the national security services sealed off the hunting lodge and the surrounding area. The body of Mary Vetsera was interred as soon as possible, without judicial inquiry and in secret; her mother was not even allowed to attend her burial. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Mayerling Incident」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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