Austria 100 Schilling Silver Coin 1999 Crown Prince Rudolf

Austria 100 Schilling Silver Coin 1999 Crown Prince Rudolf

Obverse: Standing portrait in uniform of Crown Prince Rudolf, 3/4 left
Obverse Designer: Herbert Wähner
Reverse: Hearse with military honor guard
Reverse Designer: Andreas Zanaschka

Series: Habsburg Tragedies - Crown Prince Rudolf - Kronprinz Rudolf
Composition: Silver
Fineness: 0.9000
Weight: 20.0000g
ASW: 0.5787oz
Diameter: 34mm

The obverse shows a portrait of Crown Prince Rudolf in the dress uniform of a Hungarian general after a painting by Wilhelm Gause 1886. It indicates Rudolf document for Hungary and his sympathy with the Hungarian political aspirations. On his chest he wears the Star of the Order of St. Stephen.

The reverse is the removal of the body from Mayerling on the night of January 30, 1889 is, according to a contemporary newspaper image (v. K. Trill). The coffin draped in black is accompanied by court officials bearing torches. In the background is the hunting lodge. Emperor Franz Joseph turned in a Carmelite convent of penance. To date, the nuns of Mayerling pray for Rudolf and the imperial family.

Rudolf (21 August 1858 – 30 January 1889), who was Archduke of Austria and Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, was the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire from birth. In 1889, he died in a suicide pact with his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera, at the Mayerling hunting lodge. The ensuing scandal made international headlines and remains a cause of speculation more than a century later.

Mayerling Incident
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 Austrian-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.
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.