In the spring of 1864, a young Austrian archduchess sailed for Mexico with her husband, convinced they were bound for an empire. Charlotte of Belgium, born a princess and married into the House of Habsburg, was about to become Empress Carlota of Mexico. Within three years, her husband would face a firing squad and she would be confined to a castle in Belgium, convinced that poisoners were hunting her and that she was already dead. Charlotte was born on June 7, 1840, at Laeken Castle near Brussels, the only daughter of Leopold I, the first king of the newly established Belgian state.

Her mother, Louise, was a daughter of King Louis Philippe of France. When Charlotte was ten, her mother died of tuberculosis, and her upbringing passed to a noble friend of the royal family. At seventeen, she was married to Archduke Maximilian of Austria, a brother of Emperor Franz Joseph. The early years were happy.

Charlotte charmed the imperial court in Vienna, and the couple spent much of their time in northern Italy, where Maximilian served as viceroy of Lombardy and Venetia. Their comfortable life was interrupted by events in Mexico. The republic had defaulted on debts owed to European powers, prompting France, Spain, and Britain to invade in 1861. Spain and Britain withdrew, but Napoleon III of France remained, nursing a grander scheme.

Conservative Mexican politicians, backed by Napoleon, offered the Mexican crown to Maximilian. He was an ideal candidate, a Habsburg whose family had ruled Spain when Mexico was first conquered. Maximilian was reluctant, but Charlotte pushed hard. She was ambitious and believed they could thrive as rulers of a Central American empire.

In October 1863, he agreed, and the couple sailed for the Americas. They were not welcomed. Many Mexican factions refused to recognize them, and civil war broke out between conservatives backing the empire and republicans fighting to preserve the republic. Charlotte attempted real work as empress.

She learned Spanish, took an interest in Mexican culture, and even visited the Yucatan to view Mayan ruins. She and Maximilian adopted two grandsons of Mexico’s first emperor to establish a line of succession. But it was not enough. Their rise had been made possible by the American Civil War, which distracted the United States.

With that war over, Washington began favoring the republicans. Napoleon III, increasingly worried about Prussia in Europe, withdrew French support. By the summer of 1866, the regime was collapsing. Charlotte sailed for Europe on a desperate mission to rally support.

In Paris, she met Napoleon III several times, but he refused to recommit and even advised Maximilian to abdicate. She went to Rome, hoping the Pope would support her cause and bring Europe’s Catholic powers with him. Pius IX was reluctant. All was lost.

Charlotte began to break. In Paris, she had briefly believed a passing farmer was an assassin, a possible sign of paranoid schizophrenia. In Rome, she feared being poisoned, refused food and drink, and suffered fits of hysteria and agoraphobia. In one of the strangest episodes, she stole a goblet from the Pope’s apartments and used it to drink from Rome’s public fountains.

Meanwhile, in Mexico, the war turned against Maximilian. In May 1867, he was captured at Querétaro and executed by firing squad on June 19. Charlotte was not told of her husband’s death. In the summer of 1867, she was moved back to the palace at Trieste where she and Maximilian had once lived.

Her brother, King Leopold II of Belgium, and her brother-in-law, Emperor Franz Joseph, had learned of her deteriorating mind. Reports in the British Medical Journal described her severe melancholia and paranoia, including delusions that poison was being put in her food. In January 1868, she finally learned of Maximilian’s execution. She never recovered.

In nearly four hundred letters, she declared herself dead at the fall of the Mexican Empire. She was brought back to Belgium and established at Bouchout Castle, a royal residence dating to the twelfth century. She disappeared from public life, spending most of her time indoors, taking walks, doing embroidery, playing cards, and listening to her gramophone. Her lady-in-waiting described her as absorbed in long silences or, at other times, in heated discussions in French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish with imaginary interlocutors.

She could burst into fits of rage, destroying vases and tearing up books. Relatives and servants who died were kept secret from her, lest her condition worsen. She lived at Bouchout for over fifty years. On January 19, 1927, at the age of eighty-six, Charlotte died of pneumonia and influenza.

Far across the Indian Ocean, another queen faced a similar collision with European power, with a different ending. Ranavalona III became Queen of Madagascar on November 22, 1883, her twenty-second birthday. She was the niece of Queen Ranavalona II and had been raised as a ward of the court with a Christian education. Her kingdom, ruled by the Merina dynasty, had expanded over centuries from the central plateau to dominate the island.

But by the late nineteenth century, it was caught in a trap. For decades, Britain and France had both viewed Madagascar as a target for colonization. The Merina had tried to modernize, but the monarchy’s power had eroded, with authority increasingly resting in a cabinet-style government. Ranavalona’s political marriage to the prime minister, Rainilaiarivony, made her largely a ceremonial figure.

The pretext for French intervention came when the Merina government attempted to revoke the Lambert Charter, concessions granted to the French during the previous reign. The first Franco-Hova War began in 1883, with a French squadron bombarding the east coast and occupying Toamasina. A treaty in January 1886 imposed a large indemnity and allowed a French representative at the queen’s court. The Merina government tried to sidestep the treaty, petitioning President Grover Cleveland for American aid, but the timing was poor.

In 1890, Britain and France agreed that Madagascar fell within the French sphere of influence in exchange for British control of Zanzibar. The kingdom was isolated. The second expedition came in 1894. A French force of some twenty thousand troops arrived the following year.

There was little direct fighting, but thousands of French soldiers died of typhoid and malaria. The expedition succeeded because of a significant contingent of Algerian and African troops who could bear the climate, and because the invasion sparked regional revolts against Merina rule. A bedraggled French force surrounded the capital, Antananarivo, and bombarded it with modern artillery. Queen Ranavalona surrendered.

On October 1, 1895, Madagascar became a French protectorate. The queen was allowed to remain as a figurehead, but her husband was exiled to Algeria, where he died a year later. A popular uprising broke out within months. The Menalamba revolt was largely rural, directed as much against westernization and Christianization as against the French, but it was enough to convince Paris to end the pretense.

The Merina Kingdom was formally abolished, and a military government was installed. Ranavalona was exiled to Réunion, a small island east of Madagascar. She was sent with several relatives, including her fourteen-year-old niece, who was pregnant with the illegitimate child of a French soldier. When her niece died after giving birth, Ranavalona adopted the baby girl.

In 1899, fearing the British could use her to challenge French control, the French moved the exiled family again, this time to Algeria. She was given a villa, servants, and a sizable allowance, and she adapted well to her westernized life. She petitioned repeatedly to return to Madagascar, but was refused. On May 23, 1917, she died suddenly of a severe embolism at the age of fifty-five.

In 1938, her remains were returned to Madagascar, over forty years after she had been sent into exile. A generation earlier, Britain had its own royal tragedy, one that quietly redirected the course of its history. Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales was born on January 7, 1796, the only legitimate child of George, Prince of Wales, and Caroline of Brunswick. Her parents detested each other from the start.

George, deeply in debt and caught between a long relationship with a Catholic commoner and his father’s demands for an heir, had married Caroline only under pressure. The couple produced Charlotte and then, by George’s own account, never shared a bed again. From her first day, her father schemed to separate her from her mother. Charlotte was raised in her own household, shuttled between her parents’ separate homes, with her grandfather, King George III, frequently intervening to protect her and preserve her access to her mother.

The king had leverage because his son constantly needed money to pay gambling debts. Charlotte was second in line to the throne and, given her grandfather’s recurring bouts of psychological collapse, she mattered. When the king slipped into a final, ten-year dementia in 1810, George became regent, and Charlotte, then fourteen, became the next in line. Her father restricted her correspondence and limited her contact with her mother to one supervised visit every two weeks.

But Charlotte had her own will. When her father refused to form a government from the Whig party, she publicly blew kisses to the Whig leader, Lord Grey, at the opera. Her father was furious and further restricted her household and finances. By 1812, cheering crowds greeted her whenever she appeared in public.

She was the future queen, and the people loved her. Her marriage became a matter of state. Her father arranged a match with William, Prince of Orange, to secure British influence in northwestern Europe. Charlotte reluctantly agreed, then broke it off, fearing that she would be taken to Holland and her mother left entirely at her father’s mercy.

George dismissed her household and banished her to Cranbourne Lodge in Windsor Forest, where she was allowed only one visitor, her mother, once a week. In a noble act, Caroline chose to leave England and return to Germany. With her gone, Charlotte’s treatment improved. When she traveled to the seaside in 1814, crowds lined the route, and illuminations proclaimed, “Hail, Princess Charlotte, Europe’s hope and Britain’s glory.

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In 1815, she met Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. They married on May 2, 1816, before huge crowds, and settled at Claremont in Surrey. It was a happy union. When Charlotte became pregnant in 1817, her troubles seemed over.

The pregnancy was complicated. In early November, she went into labor, which lasted fifty hours and produced a stillborn son. A few hours later, she began vomiting violently, complained of abdominal pain, and her bleeding would not stop. Her physician, Sir Richard Croft, called for Leopold, but by the time her husband reached her, Charlotte was dead.

She was twenty-one. The public grief was immense. Linen drapers ran out of black cloth. Shops closed for two weeks.

Even the poor tied black armbands to their clothes. Henry Brougham wrote that it was as though every household in Britain had lost a favorite child. Her physician, so criticized, took his own life a few months later. Her death ended the direct line of succession.

George III had twelve living legitimate children but no legitimate grandchildren. A race began among the royal dukes to marry and produce an heir. When George III died in 1820, his son became George IV, whose only legitimate child was already dead. His brother William IV succeeded him in 1830 but had no legitimate heir either.

When he died in 1837, the throne passed to the eighteen-year-old daughter of the Duke of Kent, Princess Victoria. Had Charlotte lived and produced an heir, Queen Victoria would never have become queen. The history of Britain, and of Europe, would have been very different. There were queens who died with their kingdoms, and those who died for them.

Marie Thérèse Louise of Savoy-Carignano, the Princesse de Lamballe, was the daughter of a wealthy and well-connected princely family. Born in Turin on September 8, 1749, she was well educated, spoke several languages, and loved reading Italian poetry, Machiavelli, and Dante. At seventeen, her portrait was shown to the Prince de Lamballe, and her fate was sealed. She arrived in France on January 30, 1767, was greeted by her future husband, and married him the same day.

The marriage quickly soured when he engaged in affairs with two actresses. A year later, he died of venereal disease before reaching twenty-one. She had forgiven him and cared for him tenderly until the end. Her father-in-law, the Duke of Penthièvre, treated her as a daughter.

She remained faithful to her dead husband for the rest of her life, joined her father-in-law in his charitable works, and earned the nickname “the angel of Penthièvre. ” In 1770, the Dauphin Louis married Marie Antoinette, and when Louis ascended the throne in 1774, the queen found her new confidant in the Princesse de Lamballe. The following year, the princess was proclaimed superintendent of the Queen’s household. She accompanied the queen on excursions and to parties, and acted as hostess for visiting international royalty at her father-in-law’s estate.

The French monarchy was hurtling toward catastrophe. King Louis XVI, personally kind but indecisive, was trying to manage a bankrupt state. The people, suffering from failed harvests and food shortages, blamed the queen. Marie Antoinette became a public hate figure.

In 1789, the king summoned the Estates-General, which had not met since 1614, to impose new taxes. The middle class demanded a constitution. The king refused. The Third Estate took the Tennis Court Oath, formed a National Assembly, and was joined by nobles and clergymen.

The king sacked a minister who worked on behalf of the poor. Thousands of Parisians stormed the Bastille and beheaded its governor. It was the first time the peasants of France had revolted against the absolute power of the king and won. The royal family was taken to the Tuileries palace, where the people could watch them.

They attempted to escape in June 1791, were stopped at Varennes, and brought back to Paris. The Princesse de Lamballe, who had been in England seeking protection, wrote to the king when he begged her not to return: “The queen needs me, and I must live or die at her side. ” She returned. On August 10, 1792, the monarchy was overthrown.

The princess was imprisoned with Marie Antoinette in the Temple prison, then transferred to La Force. She was ordered to take an oath denouncing the monarchy and the queen. She refused. On September 3, she was dragged outside the prison and struck repeatedly by the mob.

She fell to her knees, blood gushing over her dress, was hit over the head until unconscious, and the mob stripped and mutilated her body beyond recognition. Her head was cut off, stuck on a pike, and paraded in front of Marie Antoinette’s cell. She was forty-two. The darkest royal fates in this story began in fourteenth-century Spain.

Inés de Castro was born around 1325 in Galicia, the daughter of Pedro Fernández de Castro, Lord of Lemos and Sarria, and Aldonza Lorenzo de Valladares, his mistress. Because her mother was not married to her father, accusations of illegitimacy attached to her from a young age. She was raised in Galicia and sent to the Castilian court, where she became a childhood companion of Constanza Manuel. In 1340, Constanza was married to Pedro, the crown prince of Portugal, and Inés went with her as a lady-in-waiting.

Prince Pedro soon became attracted to Inés rather than his new wife. By 1342 or 1343, their affair was an open secret. Although Pedro and Constanza had children, securing the royal line, his heart lay with Inés. King Afonso IV of Portugal was perturbed.

The affair threatened his political ties and, worse, led his son to favor Inés’s Galician relatives and compatriots at the Portuguese court. He feared the rise of powerful factions at a time when Portugal was wary of being swallowed up by its larger neighbor, Castile. Constanza attempted to separate the lovers by proposing that Inés become godmother to their daughter, a relationship that would have made their union unconscionable. The ploy failed.

In 1344, King Afonso banished Inés from court. Pedro simply began visiting her in Galicia, and eventually it was decided to bring her back to Lisbon, where she could be watched. In late 1345, Constanza gave birth to a son and died thirteen days later. Pedro was determined to marry Inés.

His father was equally determined he would not, largely because she was illegitimate. Pedro and Inés settled down together anyway, living at Coimbra. Inés’s brothers and relatives gained ever greater influence over the prince. The king feared civil war, particularly that Inés’s children with Pedro might be placed ahead of Constanza’s in the line of succession.

In late 1354, shortly after the birth of Inés’s third child, he decided to have her murdered. On January 7, 1355, three assassins cornered Inés in the monastery of Santa Clara-a-Velha in Coimbra and decapitated her in front of her small child. One legend claims the murder took place at a nearby estate, Quinta das Lágrimas, where a fountain, the Fonte das Lágrimas, is said to be stained with her blood. Pedro was furious.

He swore revenge and revolted against his father, dragging Portugal into a two-year civil war until his mother arranged a truce. In May 1357, King Afonso died. Then came one of the strangest events in European royal history. After his coronation, Pedro declared that he had secretly married Inés in 1354.

He exhumed her body, dressed it in rich robes and jewels, and had it seated on the throne. Before all the assembled nobles, courtiers, servants, and ambassadors, he crowned his deceased lover queen of Portugal, then had the nobles come forward to kiss her hand and swear fealty to her corpse. He had her body moved to the royal monastery at Alcobaça, where he built two tombs facing each other, so that at the Last Judgment they would see each other rising. The words “until the end of the world” were inscribed on the marble.

He then hunted down her killers. In 1361, he executed two of them publicly by ripping out their hearts, claiming they had no real hearts, given the suffering they had inflicted on his. The third is believed to have escaped and died in 1383. In 1361, Pedro legitimized his children with Inés, despite the fact that, by all accounts except his own, they had never actually married.

Pedro died in 1367 at the age of forty-six. He was succeeded by his eldest son with Constanza, King Ferdinand I. When Ferdinand died prematurely in 1383, leaving only a ten-year-old daughter, a succession crisis erupted. Pedro and Inés’s eldest son, John, Duke of Valencia de Campos, had a claim.

The crisis dragged on for two years before the throne passed to another contender, John of Aviz, a son born to Pedro and another woman after Inés’s murder. The House of Aviz would rule Portugal for the next two hundred years. Inés de Castro’s story spread across Europe in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the 1570s, it appeared in Luís de Camões’s epic poem The Lusiads.

In the late seventeenth century, it became popular among female writers in Britain, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Inés was the central character of more than twenty plays and operas across Europe. The story of Inés and Pedro continues to inspire television series and operas to the present day.