In 1898, Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha gave his wife a choice. She could return to the dark, confining rooms of the Palais Coburg in Vienna, where his mother controlled everything, or she could live in a mental institution. Louise of Belgium, 40 years old, the eldest daughter of King Leopold II, chose the institution. She had been declared insane by her husband, and Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria had been persuaded to authorize her confinement.

The decision came first. The medical label came after. Louise had not always been a woman to be locked away. In 1875, at 17, she was married to Prince Philip, a man of 31.

She was a treaty with a pulse, a diplomatic arrangement for a small nation that had only become independent in 1830 and understood the lesson of 1870, when Prussia crushed France and took Alsace. Strong marriages meant safety. Louise was never meant to be a person in this plan. Her home life had not prepared her for love.

Her father was silent and distant, her only brother Leopold had died at nine years old after a fall into a pond led to pneumonia, and her mother, Queen Marie-Henriette, spent so much time at a spa town that people nicknamed her the queen of the spas. A girl who had learned that love was something that disappears was handed to a stranger 14 years older than her. Louise later wrote that she did not know what to expect on her wedding night. She said it was so distressing that the next morning she ran from the palace in her nightgown and hid in a greenhouse.

The move to Vienna brought no comfort. She lived with Philip’s parents in rooms she described as dark and frightening. She had two children, Leopold Clement in 1878 and Dorothea in 1881, and suffered two miscarriages. Slowly, Louise turned into something Vienna did not forgive.

She became a loud, extravagant, social woman who spent money like water. In 1883, Louise began an affair with her husband’s own military attaché. When he died in 1888, she moved on to his successor, Baron Nicholas Dory, and that affair lasted until Dory married in 1893. The whispers crossed Europe.

Her father was furious, and this mattered because Leopold had become one of the richest men on earth through his personal rule of the Congo, and Louise was counting on a giant inheritance. Every scandal made that money drift further away. In 1895, Louise, now 37, met a Croatian officer named Count Geza Mattachich. He was 27, handsome, and fearless.

The Habsburg court exploded. On the 18th of February 1898, Prince Philip challenged Geza to a duel, and Geza won. Louise fled to France. When she returned, her children were taken from her and her marriage was over.

Then Philip made his move. He had her declared insane. Confined near Vienna, Louise saw almost no one. Geza himself was arrested and accused of forging documents.

But when the Austrian press found out, the public sided with Louise. Philip panicked. In 1899, he quietly moved her out of the empire to an institution in Saxony, where she vanished from public life. For years, her daughter Dorothea visited only once, in February 1903.

In prison near Vienna, Geza was befriended by a 23-year-old married woman named Maria Stöger, who took a job at the prison just to meet him. She became his lover, and then she became his rescuer. She hired lawyers and stirred up the press, and even after she was fired, she kept fighting from outside. In August 1902, Geza was pardoned.

In the summer of 1904, Louise was sent to Bad Ems for a health cure, and the guards there were careless. Geza and Maria Stöger took her. The three of them crossed the border into France. After more than six years, Louise was free.

She was officially declared sane the next year, and in 1906, her divorce came through. First the label of madness, then a cell, then almost casually, a document saying it was never true. Freedom did not bring peace. Louise was used to palaces, and the pension from Philip was never enough.

She fell into debt. Her father died on the 17th of December 1909, only days after marrying his long-term mistress Caroline Lacroix. His will left his daughters about six million francs in value, while most of his wealth went to Caroline. Louise and her sisters fought in court for years.

In 1914, they were granted just over five million francs each, but much of the fortune had been moved into holding companies outside Belgium. The real prize was already out of reach. Then the First World War arrived. Germany invaded Belgium, and the Austrians no longer wanted the daughter of the Belgian king in Vienna.

Louise and Geza moved to Munich. In October 1915, her son Leopold Clement was shot by his own mistress, and acid was poured over his head. He survived for six months in agony and died in April 1916. Geza was arrested and sent to a prisoner of war camp.

With Belgium occupied, her money was cut off, and by early 1917, her debts had reached 30 million marks. Her belongings were sold at auction. In 1921, she published her memoir. Geza died in 1923.

Louise died in poverty in Germany on the 1st of March 1924, aged 66. Her biological line ended with her daughter Dorothea in 1967. In her story, nobody ever asked a doctor to look at her mind first. Now travel to the palace of Miramar near Trieste, and then across an ocean to Mexico.

Princess Charlotte of Belgium was born in 1840, the only daughter of King Leopold I. Her mother, Queen Louise, died of tuberculosis when Charlotte was 10. At 17, in July 1857, she married Archduke Maximilian of Austria, brother of Emperor Franz Joseph, and their early years were happy. In Vienna, people praised her beauty and her skill at court.

In northern Italy, Maximilian served as viceroy of Lombardy and Venetia, and when those provinces were lost, they moved to a home by the Adriatic. Then came a letter from Mexico. In the early 1860s, Mexico owed money to European powers. In 1861, France, Spain, and Britain invaded to collect it.

Spain and Britain left. France stayed. Emperor Napoleon III saw a chance to build a friendly empire in the Americas. A group of Mexican conservatives offered the throne to Maximilian, a Habsburg from the same family that had once ruled Spain when Mexico was conquered.

Maximilian hesitated. Charlotte did not. In October 1863, he accepted, and in the spring of 1864 they sailed. She became Empress Carlota.

She learned Spanish, studied Mexican art, history, and literature. In 1865, she visited the Maya ruins in the Yucatán. She and Maximilian even adopted two grandchildren of Agustín de Iturbide, Mexico’s first emperor, to show the country there was a clear line of succession. None of it was enough.

Mexico was already in a civil war between conservatives and a coalition of liberals and republicans. When the American Civil War ended in 1865, the United States turned its attention south and favored the republicans. Napoleon III, worried about Prussia, began pulling France away. In the summer of 1866, Charlotte sailed back to Europe alone to save the empire.

In Paris in August, Napoleon refused her and even suggested Maximilian should abdicate. She traveled to Rome to ask Pope Pius IX for help. In late September, he too refused. This is where her mind began to break.

Reports describe her becoming convinced that a passing farmer was an assassin. In Rome, she feared poison, refused food and drink, and had fits of panic. In one famous moment, she took a goblet from the Pope’s apartments and drank water from public fountains with it because she believed that was the only safe water. In the meantime, in Mexico, the war was lost.

In May 1867, Maximilian was captured, and on the 19th of June 1867, he was executed by firing squad. Her family decided not to tell her. She was brought to Trieste, where doctors assembled to examine her. In August 1867, the British Medical Journal reported severe melancholia and delusions about poison in her food.

Some modern writers think her symptoms resemble a severe psychotic illness, such as paranoid schizophrenia. Nobody can diagnose a person from a century and a half away with certainty, but the pattern is real. In January 1868, she finally learned her husband was dead. After that, she wrote almost 400 letters, declaring herself dead at the fall of the Mexican Empire.

A woman writing hundreds of pages from the inside of her own mind while the world outside her window moves on. She was taken back to Belgium and lived for more than 50 years at Bouchout Castle. She took walks. She did embroidery.

She played cards and listened to a gramophone. Her family stopped telling her when relatives died, afraid the news would make her worse. Her lady-in-waiting wrote that Charlotte would spend hours in silence or argue in five languages with people who were not there. Sometimes she destroyed vases and tore up books in a rage, followed by days of calm.

She died of pneumonia and influenza on the 19th of January 1927, aged 86. Louise was declared insane while sane. Charlotte was suffering from a real and terrible illness in a century with almost no treatment for it. But the next woman was never called mad and never locked away.

She was the lover of a crown prince, and the person who truly lost his mind in her story was a king. In 1340, a Castilian noblewoman named Constanza Manuel married Pedro, the crown prince of Portugal. With her traveled her lady-in-waiting and childhood companion, Inês de Castro, born in 1325 in Galicia. Inês was the daughter of a powerful lord, but her mother was his mistress, so her enemies called her illegitimate.

That word would follow her to her grave. Pedro fell for Inês, not his wife. By 1342 or 1343, the whole court knew. Constanza even tried to trap them in a family bond by making Inês the godmother of her daughter, so that the relationship would become impossible by church law.

It failed. King Afonso IV was alarmed, and not because of romance. Inês’s Galician brothers and cousins were gaining influence at court, and the king feared a Spanish takeover of Portugal from the inside. In 1344, he banished Inês.

Pedro simply went to visit her in secret. Eventually, the king decided it was safer to have her where he could watch her. On the 13th of November 1345, Constanza died days after giving birth to her second son, Fernando. Pedro was free.

Pedro and Inês lived together in Coimbra and had children: Beatriz, João, and Dinis. Afonso’s fear became a nightmare. What if these children were placed ahead of Constanza’s sons in the line of succession? On the 7th of January 1355, three men cornered Inês at the monastery of Santa Clara in Coimbra and killed her.

Tradition says she was beheaded in front of her small children. Another legend says it happened at an estate called Quinta das Lágrimas, whose fountain is said to be stained with her blood and where her ghost is still heard crying. When Pedro heard, he rose in rebellion against his father. A civil war followed, lasting around two years, until Pedro’s mother arranged a truce.

In May 1357, King Afonso died, and Pedro became king. Then came the scene. According to the legend, he had Inês’s body dug up, dressed in royal robes and jewels, and sat on the throne. The nobles lined up to kiss her hand and swear loyalty.

Whether every detail happened exactly like this, historians debate, and the earliest sources are not certain. But the legend survived for nearly seven centuries because it feels true to what grief can do to a powerful man. Pedro had two tombs built at the monastery of Alcobaça, facing each other, so that when the dead rise at the last judgment, the first thing each will see is the other. On the stone were carved the words, “Until the end of the world.

” He also hunted the killers. In 1361, he found two of them and had them executed in public with their hearts ripped out, saying that men who inflicted such pain on him could not have real hearts. The third escaped and died in 1383. Pedro claimed he had secretly married Inês in 1354, and in 1361 he declared their children legitimate.

Almost every source says there was no such marriage. After Pedro died in 1367 and his son Ferdinand died in 1383, Ferdinand left only a 10-year-old daughter. Inês’s son João could have claimed the throne. The crisis lasted two years until another son of Pedro, John of Aviz, born from a different woman, took the crown.

His house ruled Portugal for the next 200 years. Her story spread across Europe. In the 1570s, Luís de Camões put it in his epic poem, The Lusiads. In the 18th and 19th centuries, more than 20 plays and operas told it.

Even the poet Ezra Pound wrote about her. The tombs are still there, damaged during the Napoleonic invasions, but one of the most visited love stories in Europe. The last woman lived through a kind of sorrow that stacked up until the crown itself felt like a weight. In 1734 in Lisbon, Maria was born.

She would become Maria I, the first queen to rule Portugal in her own right. She had an excellent education in languages, literature, classics, and religion. Her father José became king in 1750. On the 1st of November 1755, when Maria was 20, an earthquake struck Lisbon.

The quake was followed by a tsunami and then fires that burned for hours. Estimates of the dead run as high as 50,000 in the capital. Modern scientists still study that event using old written records of the waves and computer models, and estimates of the quake’s strength are still debated. What matters for this story is what it did to the king.

Her father developed an extreme fear of enclosed spaces. The court moved outside the city and effectively lived in tents for years. Maria’s marriage came in 1760. She was 25 and she married her own uncle Pedro, who was 42.

Marriage between close relatives was common in European royal houses, and here it served a purpose. A king consort at her side would soften any doubt about being ruled by a woman. It was a happy marriage, but marked by loss. They had seven children, and four died in infancy.

In late 1788, two more, Joseph and Mariana, died of smallpox within weeks of each other at 27 and 19. Only Prince John survived. When her father died in February 1777, Maria became queen and she started strongly. She dismissed the powerful Marquis of Pombal, who had many enemies.

Her government helped create the League of Armed Neutrality in 1782, and through negotiation, Portugal acquired Delagoa Bay in what is now Mozambique, which brought a large trade income from ivory and other goods. Then in 1786, her husband Pedro died. Everything changed. Her mood swung between deep depression and agitation.

She banned cheerful celebrations, and observers said the court felt like a continual funeral. After the deaths of Joseph and Mariana, and then her confessor, she became erratic and harsh. Doctors were called. Francis Willis, the physician who had treated Britain’s King George III, was brought in.

He could not help. Bloodletting and enemas followed, and none of that worked either. In 1792, the government effectively sidelined her, and Prince John took over daily rule. After a royal tent complex burned in 1794, the court moved to Queluz, where one visitor described screams that filled him with horror.

She claimed to be damned and to have the devil inside her. At times she attacked servants. At times she went completely silent. Today researchers lean toward bipolar disorder, though there is no agreement.

Some argue she may have had severe clinical depression made worse by tragedy after tragedy. We still cannot name her illness, but we can name her losses. Researchers use a method called retrospective diagnosis. They read letters, doctor’s reports, and eyewitness notes, then compare the descriptions with modern medical checklists.

Some teams now feed large collections of old records into computer programs that search for patterns a tired human reader might miss. It is powerful, but it has a limit. A computer can only read what someone chose to write down. And the people who wrote about royal women were often the people who benefited from their silence.

In 1807, Napoleon’s armies closed in on Portugal. Prince John decided to move the entire court to Brazil. Maria believed she was being kidnapped and refused to board the ship, so the fleet commander carried her aboard. Accounts say she screamed for much of the three-month voyage.

In 1815, Brazil was raised from a colony to a kingdom. On the 20th of March 1816, Maria died in Rio de Janeiro, aged 81. Today in Brazil, she is seen as an important figure in the road to independence in 1822. The queen history called Maria the Mad actually ruled during years of real success.

Louise was locked up by a husband who needed her silenced. Charlotte and Maria were truly suffering. Inês was never mad at all, but the love around her created madness in others. Louise was declared sane in 1905 after six years of being called insane.

Who in all those years was ever asked to prove that the men who signed her papers were sane themselves?