Zita of Bourbon-Parma
Empress of Austria from 1916 to 1918
Zita of Bourbon-Parma (Zita Maria delle Grazie Adelgonda Micaela Raffaela Gabriella Giuseppina Antonia Luisa Agnese; 9 May 1892 – 14 March 1989) was the last Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, in addition to other titles. She ascended to these titles when her husband, Charles I, became the last monarch of Austria-Hungary. She was declared Servant of God by Pope Benedict XVI.
Born as the seventeenth child of the dispossessed Robert I, Duke of Parma, by his second wife, Infanta Maria Antonia of Portugal, Zita married Archduke Charles of Austria in 1911. Charles became heir presumptive to Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1914 after the assassination of his uncle Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and acceded to the throne in 1916 after the elderly emperor's death.
After the end of World War I in 1918, the Habsburgs were deposed and the former empire became home to the states of Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, while other parts were annexed to or joined the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Italy, Romania, and a reconstituted independent Poland. Charles and Zita left for exile in Switzerland and, after the failure of attempts to restore royal rule in Hungary, were subsequently removed from that country by the Allies to Madeira, where Charles died in 1922. After her husband's death, Zita and her son Otto served as symbols of unity for the exiled dynasty. A devout Catholic, she raised a large family after being widowed at the age of 29; she never remarried.
Early life
Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma was born at the Villa Pianore in the Italian Province of Lucca, 9 May 1892. The unusual name Zita was given to her after Zita, a popular Italian saint who had lived in Tuscany in the 13th century.
“Zita of Bourbon-Parma” enters the record as empress of Austria from 1916 to 1918. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Zita, Bourbon-Parma and Empress can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zita of Bourbon-Parma” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.