"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
--John 15:13


"And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."
--Matthew 16:18


Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.


In memoriam September 11th, anno Domini 2001.

Empress Sisi
Today is the anniversary of a sad event in Austrian history. On 10 September 1898, Empress Elisabeth of Bavaria was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist while on holiday at Lake Geneva. The beautiful but unhappy empress (better known by her affectionate nickname "Sisi") was dear to the Austrian people and remains so today, more than a century after her assassination.


For Emperor Franz Josef, who loved his wife deeply, this was the third violent death in his immediate family during his reign. First his charismatic younger brother, Archduke Maximilian, the Emperor of Mexico, had been shot by rebels under Benito Juarez in 1867. Then, most painful of all for the imperial family, there was the incident at Mayerling. In the winter of 1889, Archduke Rudolf -- the only son of Franz Josef and Elisabeth and heir to the throne -- died under mysterious circumstances alongside his young mistress at the imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling. Although it was officially declared a suicide, some -- including the last empress, Zita of Bourbon-Parma -- believed it to have been the fruit of a conspiracy against the Hapsburg family. Whatever the truth of the matter, Elisabeth never recovered from her son's death, and, like Queen Victoria after the death of her consort, Albert, wore mourning clothes and largely secluded herself for the rest of her life. (The emperor, for his part, demolished the hunting lodge and built a Carmelite convent on its site.)


Although Franz Josef and his Austrian subjects could not know it at the time, their beloved empress would not be the last member of the imperial family to meet a violent end. The most fateful assassination of them of all, of course, was yet to come.