Empress Elisabeth (Sisi)

The Austrian empress known as "Sisi," who sympathized with Hungary, spent her life wandering, and was ultimately assassinated.

Life

Bavarian princess

Elisabeth was the daughter of a Duke in Bavaria, and her family called her Sisi. In 1854, at sixteen, she married her cousin Franz Joseph; she struggled to adapt to the elaborate etiquette of the Viennese court, and her relations with her mother-in-law, Archduchess Sophie, were tense.

Queen of Hungary

She loved Hungary, learned Hungarian and sympathized with Hungarian demands for autonomy, and had some influence on reaching the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867; that same year she and her husband were crowned King and Queen of Hungary in Buda.

Wandering and assassination

She was passionate about riding, travel and exercise, and spent long periods roaming abroad. After her son Rudolf's suicide in 1889, she wore black for the rest of her life. In 1898 she was assassinated on the shore of Lake Geneva by an Italian anarchist.

Legacy

After her death Empress Elisabeth became a romantic legend, and the Sissi films made her a household name around the world, but the real woman was far more complex than the films.

Did you know? Her assassin had originally meant to kill another royal, and turned on her only because that person changed their travel plans.

Key dates

• 1854Marries Franz Joseph
• 1867Crowned Queen of Hungary
• 1889Her son Rudolf dies
• 1898Assassinated in Geneva