In the summer of 1853, when Elisabeth was 15, she and her sister, accompanied by their mother Ludovika, traveled to Bad Ischl, the Austrian resort. Helene was dubbed “Nene” as a child, while Elisabeth bore the nickname “Sisi.” Elisabeth was close to her older sister, Helene, who married into an equally powerful old German family, the Thurn und Taxis. The pair raised their family at Possenhofen Castle on Lake Starnberg outside Munich, and would have ten children in all. Elisabeth's father, for example, married his cousin, Ludovika, Royal Princess of Bavaria and daughter of King Maximilian I. There is some speculation that such genetic conditions may have been exacerbated by a tradition of intermarriage in the royal dynasty. As cousins, Elisabeth and Ludwig were close, and though she later defended him when he was declared mentally ill, she reportedly feared that she had inherited the same strain of mental illness that ran through their side of the family. During Elisabeth's lifetime, Bavaria was a kingdom ruled by perhaps the most famous Wittelsbach, her cousin King Ludwig II (1845–1886), often referred to as “Mad Ludwig.” Eight years her junior, he ascended to the throne in 1864 and built the fairy-tale castle of Neuschwanstein, later used as the model for the castle of Sleeping Beauty in the Disney theme parks. In possession of vast estates throughout southern Germany, the von Wittelsbachs had been the ruling dynasty in the area since 1180, and played a key role in shaping the region's political destinies. Her father was Maximilian Joseph, a duke from one of Germany's oldest aristocratic families, the House of Wittelsbach. The future empress was born Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie von Wittelsbach on December 24, 1837, in Munich, Bavaria. As the consort of the emperor of Austria-a land that dominated the map of Europe at the time-Elisabeth was a wellknown figure whose exploits were avidly chronicled in the nineteenth-century press much in the same way that Britain's Diana (1961-1997), Princess of Wales, would be a hundred years later. The German-born Elisabeth, Empress of Austria (1837-1898), was the beloved “Sisi,” one of the most famous royal celebrities of her day.
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