ELIZABETH [AMELIE EUGENIE] con sort of Francis Joseph, emperor of Austria and king of Hungary, was the daughter of Duke Maximilian Joseph of Bavaria and Louisa Wilhelmina, daughter of Maximilian I. of Bavaria, and was born on Dec. 24, 1837 at the castle of Possenhofen on Lake Starnberg. She inherited the quick intelligence and artistic taste displayed in general by members of the Wittelsbach royal house, and her education was the reverse of conventional. She accom panied her eccentric father on his hunting expeditions, becoming an expert rider and climber. The emperor of Austria, Francis Joseph, met the Bavarian ducal family at Ischl in Aug. 1853, and immediately fell in love with Elizabeth, then a girl of 16, and reported to be the most beautiful princess in Europe. The mar riage took place in Vienna on April 24, 1854. In the early days of her married life she frequently came into collision with Vien nese prejudice, while her predilection for Hungary offended German sentiment. There is no doubt that her influence helped the establishment of the Ausgleich with Hungary, but outside Hungarian affairs the empress took small part in politics. She first visited Hungary in 1857, and ten years later was crowned queen. Her popularity with the Hungarians remained unchanged throughout her life. Elizabeth was one of the most charitable of royal ladies, and her popularity with her Austrian subjects was more than restored by her assiduous care for the wounded in the campaign of 1866. The tragic death of her only son, the crown prince Rudolph, in 1889, was a shock from which she never really recovered. She was also deeply affected by the suicide of her cousin Louis II. of Bavaria, and again by the fate of her sister Sophia. The empress had shown signs of lung disease in 1861, when she spent some months in Madeira ; but she was able to resume her outdoor sports, and for some years before 1882, when she had to give up riding, was a frequent visitor on English and Irish hunting fields. In her later years her dislike of publicity increased. Much of her time was spent in travel or at the Achil leion, the palace she had built in the Greek style in Corfu. She was walking from her hotel at Geneva to the steamer when she was stabbed by the anarchist Luigi Luccheni, on Sept. 1 o, 1898, and died of the wound within a few hours.
See A. de Burgh, Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, a Memoir (London, 1898) ; E. Friedmann and J. Paves, Kaiserin Elisabeth (Berlin, 1898) ; and the anonymous Martyrdom of an Empress (1899), containing a quantity of court gossip.