When Princess Louise of Belgium was born in 1858, she was the first child of the man who would become King Leopold II, the ruler whose brutal exploitation of the Congo made him one of the most infamous monarchs of the 19th century. But her own life would spiral into a tragedy marked by a disastrous marriage, a scandalous love affair, and a confinement to a mental institution that lasted more than six years. At 17, Louise was married to the 31-year-old Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. She had initially liked him, but the marriage quickly soured into something she later described as deeply distressing.
In her memoir, Louise would recall a wedding night so upsetting that she fled the palace in her nightgown the next morning to hide in a greenhouse, and a disturbing routine in which Philip had her pour wine while he read from erotic books. The couple settled in Vienna, where Louise found her mother-in-law domineering and her new home dark and terrifying. They had two children, but her restlessness grew, especially after suffering two miscarriages. By the 1890s, she had begun a series of affairs, first with her husband’s military attaché and then his successor.
Her most famous affair began in 1895 with Count Geza Mattachich, a handsome Croatian officer nine years her junior. When the Habsburg court caught wind of the liaison, scandal erupted. In February 1898, Philip challenged Geza to a duel and was swiftly defeated. Just weeks later, Philip took a far more devastating revenge: he had Louise declared insane and persuaded Emperor Franz Joseph to confine her to an asylum.
Louise was given a choice—return to her husband or live out her life in an institution. She chose the asylum. Geza was arrested soon after on charges of forging documents and thrown into prison. While confined, Louise saw almost no one for years except for a single heartbreaking visit from her daughter in 1903.
Inside the prison near Vienna, Geza began a surprising romance with a 23-year-old married woman named Maria Stoger, who took a job there specifically to meet him. She became his mistress and launched a tireless campaign to win his release, which finally came in August 1902. In 1904, with Maria’s help, Geza orchestrated Louise’s escape from a health resort in Saxony where surveillance was lax, and the three fled across the border into France. Louise was officially declared sane the following year, and her divorce was finalized in 1906.
But her freedom came with a bitter financial blow. When her father, Leopold II, died in 1909, he left most of his vast fortune to his young mistress, Caroline Lacroix, and cut Louise and her sisters largely out of the inheritance. The sisters fought the will in court and won a small victory in 1914, receiving just over 5 million francs each. But much of Leopold’s money had been hidden in holding companies abroad, specifically to prevent challenges to his wishes.
Louise’s troubles continued during World War I when her son was brutally attacked by his mistress, suffering acid burns and the loss of an eye before dying of his wounds in 1916. By then, Louise was increasingly destitute, her debts reaching an astonishing 30 million marks. After the war, Louise wrote her memoirs, but neither she nor Geza lived long enough to enjoy any success. Geza died in 1923, and Louise died in poverty in Wiesbaden on March 1, 1924, at age 66.
Princess Charlotte of Belgium faced a different kind of tragedy. The only daughter of King Leopold I, she married Archduke Maximilian of Austria in 1857 at age 17. The early years of their marriage were happy, but they were soon drawn into an ambitious scheme that would destroy them both. In 1861, conservative Mexican politicians, with the backing of French Emperor Napoleon III, offered Maximilian the crown of Mexico.
Initially reluctant, he eventually accepted the offer in 1863, with Charlotte’s strong support. She was reportedly ambitious and believed they could thrive as rulers of a Central American empire. In the spring of 1864, they sailed for Mexico, where Charlotte became known as Empress Carlota. But the new empire was never secure.
Many Mexican factions refused to recognize them, and a civil war broke out between the conservative supporters of the empire and liberal republicans. With the American Civil War over in 1865, the United States began favoring the republicans, and Napoleon III grew distracted by the threat of war with Prussia. By the summer of 1866, Maximilian and Carlota were dangerously isolated. In a final desperate effort to save the regime, Carlota sailed for Europe to drum up support.
In Paris, Napoleon III refused to recommit to Maximilian and even recommended abdication. In Rome, Pope Pius IX was reluctant to use his influence. The mission failed, and tragic signs began to emerge that Carlota was losing her mind. She became convinced that a passing farmer was an assassin and repeatedly feared being poisoned, refusing to eat or drink.
In a strange episode, she stole a goblet from the Pope’s apartments at the Vatican and used it to drink from Rome’s public fountains. Meanwhile, back in Mexico, Maximilian was fighting a losing battle. The civil war turned against him, and in May 1867 he was captured at Querétaro City and executed by firing squad on June 19, 1867. Charlotte’s family chose not to inform her of her husband’s death.
By the summer of 1867, she was back in Trieste, under the care of a team of professionals. Reports in the British Medical Journal described her suffering from severe melancholia and paranoia, including delusions that poison was being put in her food. Today, she would likely have been diagnosed with a debilitating form of paranoid schizophrenia. In January 1868, Charlotte finally learned of Maximilian’s execution, which left her even more broken.
She was brought back to Belgium and established at Bouchout Castle, where she completely disappeared from public life. Her lady-in-waiting described her as absorbed in long silences or heated discussions with imaginary interlocutors in five different languages, her thoughts too incoherent to guess. She would sometimes fly into rages, destroying vases and tearing books, before lapsing into periods of calm. She lived at Bouchout for more than 50 years, never recovering, and died of pneumonia and influenza on January 19, 1927, at age 86.
In 1357, a strange event took place at the Portuguese royal court. Shortly after King Peter I rose to the throne, he oversaw the coronation of his queen, Inês de Castro. There was one serious problem: Inês had been dead for two years. The story of the corpse queen of Portugal began with Inês’s birth in Galicia around 1325, the daughter of a nobleman and his mistress.
The circumstances of her illegitimacy would create problems later in life, but her family was among the most well-connected noble lineages in the Iberian Peninsula. In 1340, Inês traveled to Portugal as a lady-in-waiting for Constanza Manuel, who was marrying Crown Prince Peter. The plan went badly wrong: Peter fell in love with Inês instead of his new wife. By 1342 or 1343, the affair was an open secret at the Portuguese court.
King Afonso IV was deeply perturbed, fearing that Peter’s obsession would drag Portugal into the conflicts of the Spanish kingdoms and that Inês’s relatives would gain too much influence. In 1344, the king banished Inês from court, but Peter simply visited her in Galicia and Castile. Eventually, it was decided it was better to have her back in Lisbon where she could be watched. Late in 1345, Constanza died after giving birth, and Peter became determined to marry Inês.
His father was equally resolute that this would not happen, largely because Inês was illegitimate. In January 1355, the king decided to act. Three assassins cornered Inês in a monastery in Coimbra and decapitated her in front of her small child. One legend claims the murder took place at a nearby estate, where a fountain is said to be stained with her blood and her ghost is still heard crying.
Peter was furious when he learned of her death, swore revenge, and even revolted against his father, creating a civil war that lasted two years until his mother arranged a truce. When Afonso IV died in May 1357, Peter became king. He then declared that he had secretly married Inês in 1354, making her the lawful queen. In one of the strangest scenes in European royal history, he had her body exhumed, dressed in rich robes and jewels, and seated on the throne.
Before all the assembled nobles, he had her crowned Queen of Portugal, then made the nobles kiss the hand of her corpse and swear fealty to it. Peter had Inês reburied in the royal monastery at Alcobaça, where two tombs were constructed facing each other so they would see each other when rising at the Last Judgment. The words “until the end of the world” were inscribed on the marble. He then set out to find her killers, executing two of them in 1361 by ripping their hearts out, claiming they had no real hearts for inflicting such suffering on his.
The third escaped and died years later. In 1361, Peter also legitimized his children with Inês, despite the fact that they had almost certainly never actually married. This decision would create a serious succession crisis when Peter’s legitimate son died in 1383 with only a 10-year-old daughter surviving, opening the possibility that Inês’s eldest son might claim the throne. The crisis dragged on for two years before the crown eventually passed to another contender, the founder of the House of Aviz, which would rule Portugal for the next 200 years.
Inês’s tragic story became famous across Europe and has been retold in plays, operas, and poems for centuries, including in the work of Portugal’s national poet, Luís de Camões, and in Ezra Pound’s Cantos. More than four centuries later, another Portuguese queen would also be remembered for losing her mind. Dona Maria, born in 1734, became the first queen regnant of Portugal and the first monarch of Brazil. When her father succeeded to the throne in 1750, it became increasingly evident that one of his daughters would eventually rule the kingdom, as he and his wife produced no sons.
In 1755, a massive earthquake struck Lisbon, killing as many as 50,000 people. Maria and her family were largely unscathed, but her father was psychologically scarred and developed an extreme fear of enclosed spaces, moving the court into tents outside the city. In 1760, at age 25, Maria married her own uncle, 42-year-old Infante Dom Pedro, an arrangement considered acceptable at the time and intended to ease any reservations about a female monarch. Maria and Pedro’s marriage was happy but marked by tragedy.
They had seven children, four of whom died in infancy. Of the three who survived, two died of smallpox within weeks of each other in 1788. When her father died in 1777, Maria became the first queen regnant of Portugal. She quickly made her mark by dismissing the powerful Marquis of Pombal, her father’s chief minister, and restoring the role of the Catholic Church in government.
Her early reign saw several successes, including the diplomatic acquisition of Delagoa Bay and involvement in forming the League of Armed Neutrality. But in 1786, her husband died, and Maria took it badly. Her mental health began to deteriorate sharply, oscillating between intense depression and mania. The deaths of two of her children and her confessor in 1788 pushed her further into erratic and oppressive behavior.
Some historians have pointed to her incestuous ancestry, noting that two of her sisters had similar conditions and that her grandfather and uncle fell into madness at the end of their lives. Medical help was sought, including from the physician who had treated King George III of Britain, but no effective treatment was found. Likely suffering from severe clinical depression, exacerbated by the multiple tragedies of the late 1780s, Maria was effectively sidelined by the government in 1792, with her only surviving son, Prince John, taking an increasingly significant role. Her condition fluctuated between violent excitement and complete catatonia.
One visitor claimed to have heard the most agonizing shrieks she had ever felt. Maria also attacked her servants and was subjected to treatments like bloodletting and enemas to no avail. As the wars following the French Revolution swept across Europe, Napoleon decided to take direct control of Spain and Portugal in 1807. Prince John took the decision to flee to Brazil, moving the royal court to Salvador de Bahia.
Maria, in her early 70s and suffering from dementia, thought she was being kidnapped and refused to board the ship, so she was forcefully carried aboard by the fleet commander. It is claimed she spent much of the three-month voyage screaming. She spent the last years of her life presiding over the Portuguese court in exile in Brazil. In 1815, Prince John elevated Brazil from a colony to a separate kingdom, a key step toward Brazilian independence in 1822.
Maria died on March 20, 1816, at age 81, and was succeeded by her only surviving son, who became King John VI. While there is no consensus on her exact mental illness, research suggests she likely suffered from bipolar disorder. Despite being remembered as “Maria the Mad,” she is largely well thought of today, particularly in Brazil, where she is viewed as an important figure in the formation of the Brazilian state.
