Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires Read Free

was it about these women that caused such a stir? How did they manage to steal the spotlight at the biggest royal wedding of the decade? The wedding of Augusta Victoria’s daughter marked the first and only time in history that these three women—the reigning consorts of three of Europe’s four imperial powers—were together at the same time. Many historians have speculated what must have been going through their minds on that warm, sunny day in May 1913, for what would be the last gathering of the “royal mob” before the cataclysm of the First World War only fourteen months later. It is doubtful that they had any prescience about the disasters that lay ahead for each of them.
    As I delved into the lives of the empress, the queen, and the tsarina, I could not help but reflect on what they each experienced as they stood witness to the decisive collapse of Europe’s empires in the first half of the twentieth century. The rule of the tsars was brought to an end by the blood-soaked Russian Revolution in 1917, replaced with the equally repressive Soviet Union. The German Empire was dissolved and reorganized into a republic at the conclusion of the First World War in 1918. Without a doubt, Great Britain enjoyed the easiest—though by no means a bloodless—transition from a vast overseas empire to a commonwealth of nations, the provenance of which began at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and culminated after 1945. As I pondered these women’s lives and their roles as the last empresses, my mind could not help but be drawn to the story of a lesser-known imperial consort whose life was just as impacting as her counterparts and whose legacy has made a profound impact on European affairs. This individual was Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma, empress of Austria, queen of Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, and so on (1892–1989). Her husband’s reign—and her role as empress—came to an end when Austria-Hungary—like Germany—collapsed in 1918. With Zita’s life and experiences coming into focus, I undertook to write this, my latest book. It is the tumultuous story of Europe’s imperial past, a story that will take readers from the opulent world of nineteenth-century royalty to the catastrophic Great War, the various revolutions that swept the continent in its aftermath, and the decades of instability that followed.
    For almost a century, historians, academics, novelists, and journalists have intricately studied the end of the imperial era. Equally scrutinized have been the significant lives and reigns of the husbands of these women—King George V, Emperor Wilhelm II, and Tsar Nicholas II. Despite this incomparable body of literature, there has never been a book that looks at the women who sat on the thrones of these great empires. To that end, Imperial Requiem is a collective narrative of the destruction of Europe’s four empires—Austria-Hungary, Germany, Great Britain, and Russia—the turbulent aftermath, and the birth of the modern world, all filtered through the experiences of the last women who ruled them.
    For all the political, diplomatic, and military factors that are brought to bear in this book, at its heart it remains the story of four extraordinary women. There were, of course, other imperial consorts who were contemporaries of these protagonists. However, my decision in choosing the empresses I did was deliberate. Initially, I had chosen to include Empress Eugénie, wife of Emperor Napoleon III, the last French monarch. Their deposition and exile in 1871 marked the permanent end of monarchy in France. After much thought, I chose to exclude Eugénie because there was a significant generational chasm between her and the other four women—she was already eighty-eight when World War I began, but her counterparts were relatively young women. There is also a generational gap between Zita and the other three. When she became empress, she and Augusta Victoria’s daughter were the same age, but her role in the