Now all it would take would be a single accident or, say, a single assassin’s bullet, and 19-year old Karl would be the heir presumptive. On November 1, 1906, Karl’s father Otto passed away from syphilis, making Karl second in line, behind only Franz Ferdinand. In the grand, Czech city, Karl absorbed ideas and attitudes alien to his family becoming a cosmopolitan reformist, even as he held onto his strong Catholicism.Īt first, the emperor must’ve consoled himself that the throne was still a long way from the boy’s grasp. It was too late to stick Karl on the military track, so his parents allowed him to go to university in Prague, to get a regular education. Enraged by the match, Franz Josef excluded Franz Ferdinand’s future children from the line of succession.Īnd just like that, it dawned on everyone that Karl really would be emperor one day. Now, Sophie was a Czech countess, but for a family as absurdly royal and absurdly Austrian as the Habsburgs, “Czech countess” was practically synonymous with “trailer trash tramp”. In 1900, Franz Ferdinand married Sophie Chotek. He was allowed to skip the standard Habsburg military upbringing, and instead attend a regular school.īut, events would soon conspire to keep Karl’s place in the succession. So no-one made any special effort to start preparing Karl for life at the top. It was fully expected that he would marry and start creating mini-Habsburgs that would knock Karl back out of the running to be emperor. Since Ferdinand was childless, that meant Karl was now third in line to the throne.įranz Ferdinand was only childless because he was still young. Because Rudolf had been Emperor Franz Josef’s only son, the line of succession passed to Karl’s uncle, Franz Ferdinand. So that was the family set-up: a not-so abnormal tale of parental division that could’ve gone unchanged for decades… had Rudolf not fired those fatal shots.
It was a habit that would instill in the young boy a deep affinity for Catholicism. From the moment Karl was born, she avoided her husband in favor of their son, taking him to mass almost every day. Princess Maria Josepha was a strict Catholic who couldn’t believe her real-life Disney prince had turned out to be Gaston minus the muscles.
Naturally, this didn’t sit well with his wife. But while both the Franzes were famous for their pious, Catholic lifestyles, Karl’s father was infamous for treating life like one giant frat party. His father, Archduke Otto, was the nephew of Emperor Franz Josef, and younger brother of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It set Karl on a collision course with destiny.īorn a year and a half earlier, on August 17, 1887, Karl was a young boy from a side-branch of the Habsburg royal family. It created a scandal that engulfed Vienna, and emotionally broke the emperor, Franz Josef. There, the two had made a suicide pact, before Rudolf shot her and then turned the gun on himself. Two shots fired in a palatial hunting lodge outside Vienna one cold, miserable night in January 1889.Įarlier that day, the disturbed young heir to the Austrian throne – Crown Prince Rudolf – had requested his 17-year old lover join him at the lodge. Well, specifically, it started with two bullets. An emperor who killed his empire, a soldier who may become a saint, this is the fascinating story of Austria’s last emperor.įittingly for a man whose reign revolved around war, Karl’s story started with a bullet. In his short reign, he first tried to hold his disintegrating world together… before finally surrendering to its destruction. Made emperor before he was 30, Karl inherited an empire on the losing side of one of the greatest wars in history. But a combination of freak tragedies had seen him propelled to the height of power. Before he dynamited his own empire, Karl had been an obscure royal from a side branch of the Habsburg dynasty.
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