Empress Sisi's Family and Descendants

Elisabeth was a Bavarian duchess who married the Emperor of Austria at sixteen, bore four children, and outlived two of them. The family she married into is the reason the Hofburg looks the way it does; the family she came from is the reason she never settled into it.

Bavaria, and the sister she displaced

She was born a Duchess in Bavaria, into a Wittelsbach household that was aristocratic and unusually informal — a childhood in the countryside rather than at a court, which is the standard explanation for how badly Vienna went for her afterwards.

The marriage was arranged for someone else. Franz Joseph’s mother, Archduchess Sophie, wanted a Wittelsbach alliance — she was a Wittelsbach herself — and had chosen her sister Ludovika’s eldest daughter, Helene, four years younger than the emperor.

Franz Joseph met Helene’s fifteen-year-old younger sister Elisabeth, fell in love, and insisted on marrying her instead. Sophie gave way despite doubts about whether Sisi was suitable consort material, and the couple married on 24 April 1854 in the Augustinerkirche, inside the Hofburg complex.

Sophie’s doubts were not baseless, and the conflict between the two women over how Elisabeth’s children would be raised became the defining struggle of her early years in Vienna. She lost it.

Franz Joseph

Her first cousin, eight years older, and the man who ruled Austria for sixty-eight years. The marriage was, by every account, unequal in feeling: he was passionately in love with her, and it was not returned.

She never acclimatised to court life and was frequently in conflict with the imperial family. She travelled almost continuously and was rarely seen in Vienna. From 1885 Franz Joseph had a companion in the actress Katharina Schratt — a friendship of thirty-four years that Elisabeth tolerated to a degree and that all accounts describe as platonic.

When the telegram came from Geneva in 1898, his first fear was that she had killed herself. He never fully recovered. “You’ll never know how important she was to me,” he told his relatives.

The four children

Sophie, born 1855, died as an infant. Elisabeth’s grief was severe enough that she refused food for days — a pattern that recurred through the rest of her life.

Gisela, born 1856, who married and had children and lived a conventional royal life.

Rudolf, born 1858, the crown prince and the only son.

Marie Valerie, born 1868 — the child Elisabeth was allowed to raise herself, and the one she was close to. It is Marie Valerie’s diary that records much of what we know about her father’s reaction to family deaths.

Rudolf and Mayerling

The crown prince died by suicide at the hunting lodge at Mayerling in January 1889, at thirty, together with Baroness Mary Vetsera.

The event ended the direct succession and the rest of the dynasty’s story follows from it: with Rudolf dead and Franz Joseph’s brother Karl Ludwig dead in 1896, the heir presumptive became Archduke Franz Ferdinand — whose assassination at Sarajevo in 1914 started the First World War.

Elisabeth wore mourning for the rest of her life. Contemporaries considered the shock of Rudolf’s death less intense publicly than the outrage at hers nine years later, but for the family it was the break from which nothing recovered.

Mayerling is about 30 km south-west of Vienna, in the Vienna Woods, and can be visited.

Living descendants

Yes, in quantity. Elisabeth was survived by her husband, two children and nine grandchildren, and the line continues: the Habsburg-Lorraine family is extensive, well documented and entirely private today.

The head of the house is Karl von Habsburg. The family formally abandoned all claim to the throne on 31 May 1961, when Otto von Habsburg — grandson of Franz Joseph’s brother’s line, and the last crown prince of Austria-Hungary — renounced it.

The most recent Habsburg burial in the Imperial Crypt was on 7 October 2023: Archduchess Yolande of Austria, who died at 100 years and 5 months, the longest-lived person entombed there. The crypt is still in use, and it has one space left.

Where the family is buried

Split three ways, which is the Habsburg custom and easier to see in Vienna than anywhere else.

The bodies went to the Imperial Crypt under the Capuchin church on the Neuer Markt, five minutes from the Hofburg — where Elisabeth lies beside Franz Joseph and Rudolf, in the chamber Franz Joseph built for his sixtieth jubilee in 1908.

For about a third of them, the heart went to the Herzgruft in the Augustinerkirche, inside the Hofburg, in the Loreto Chapel to the right of the main altar. It holds the hearts of 54 members of the imperial family.

The intestines and other organs went to the Ducal Crypt in the catacombs of St Stephen’s Cathedral.

All three are within a ten-minute walk of each other, and doing them in that order is the clearest way to understand what this family thought a death was.