Johann Salvator von Österreich-Toskana

Johann Salvator of Austria-Tuscany, also known as Archduke Johann Salvator and, after leaving the House of Habsburg, as Johann Orth, was born on November 25, 1852, at Poggio Imperiale Palace in Florence. He belonged to the Tuscan line of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine. His father was Leopold II, the last reigning Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his mother was Leopold’s second wife, Maria Antonia of Bourbon-Two Sicilies. Johann Salvator was the youngest of their ten children. His siblings included Ferdinand Salvator, who later became nominally the last Grand Duke of Tuscany as Ferdinand IV, the naturalist Ludwig Salvator, and several sisters who married into European ruling families. His father’s first marriage had also produced three half-siblings. His childhood was shaped by political upheaval. In 1859, when Johann was seven, an uprising directed against Austria broke out in Florence shortly before the Sardinian War. Leopold II was forced to abdicate and fled with his family. They settled in Austria and lived in Salzburg. After his father’s death in 1870, Archduke Albrecht, an experienced and conservative field marshal, was appointed Johann’s legal representative and guardian. There was a marked contrast between the sober military man and the imaginative, art-loving young archduke. Johann Salvator began his military career as a lieutenant in the imperial-royal army in 1865. He was promoted to captain as early as 1867, to major in 1872, and to lieutenant colonel in 1874. From 1876 to 1878 he was stationed in Komárom as a colonel. In 1879, at the age of 27, he took part in the campaign in Bosnia as commander of an infantry brigade. Later that same year he was promoted to field marshal lieutenant. Alongside his military career, Johann displayed wide-ranging cultural interests from an early age. As a young man he composed a waltz that was performed publicly by Johann Strauss the Younger. Johann Salvator used the pseudonym Johann Traunwart, while his true identity was kept secret. For the ballet “The Assassins,” he wrote the text and created a scene in which he and Crown Prince Rudolf exposed the fraud of a spiritualist named Bastian at Vienna’s Hofburg. Johann shared a close and confidential friendship with Rudolf, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. He is said to have inspired Rudolf to undertake the extensive book series “The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Picture.” The richly illustrated work, published between 1887 and 1902 and later known as the Crown Prince’s Work, presented the monarchy’s countries, landscapes, and peoples. Johann contributed to it not only as an initiator but also as an author and editor. He lived near Gmunden in Upper Austria, at Ort Castle. Like other members of the Tuscan Habsburg line, he held progressive, liberal, and anticlerical views. These convictions increasingly brought him into conflict with the Viennese court and the imperial government. After the death of Prince Alexander of Bulgaria in 1886, Johann was offered the Bulgarian crown, but he declined it. The following year he left the imperial-royal army. Rudolf’s suicide in January 1889, followed by the court’s attempt to conceal the circumstances of the tragedy, deeply shook Johann. He declared that he wished to renounce voluntarily his military rank, his title of archduke, his place in the line of succession, and all privileges and financial payments associated with them. He thereby left the imperial family permanently and adopted the civil name Johann Orth. Later that year he traveled to England with his longtime lover, Ludmilla, known as Milli, Stubel. She was a ballet dancer at the Vienna Opera who came from a modest background. They married there. Under the strict family regulations of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, Johann was now regarded as an outcast and was no longer permitted to return to the territory of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. He subsequently turned to seafaring. In Hamburg, or according to another account in Fiume, he obtained a captain’s license and purchased the merchant ship “Santa Margherita.” Together with his wife, he set out on a voyage around the world. The first stage took them to the mouth of the Río de la Plata, between Uruguay and Argentina. The ship then continued toward Chile. It was there that the last trace of Johann Orth and his wife disappeared. The “Santa Margherita” never reached its destination, and no wreckage was found. Contemporary investigations suggested that the ship had probably sunk on July 12, 1890, during a winter storm in the region around Cape Horn, possibly near Cabo Tres Puntas in eastern Patagonia. Johann Orth, his wife, and the entire crew were presumed to have perished. His mother, Maria Antonia, never believed that her favorite son had died and did not go into mourning for him. Johann Orth was not officially declared dead until 1911. His estate was auctioned in Berlin in 1912 and 1913. The precise circumstances of his disappearance remained unresolved. The former archduke’s mysterious fate inspired numerous writers. Jules Verne created, in the character of Sándor Mátyás, a figure who bears similarities to Johann Salvator and his brother Ludwig Salvator. Mór Jókai also incorporated Johann’s story into his novel “Where Money Is Not God.” In András Dékány’s novel “The Lost Island,” the mystery is given a fictional solution: an Austrian warship fires on Johann’s vessel and sinks it. In 2007, reports of an alleged Norwegian court judgment once again attracted attention. According to those reports, Johann Orth had supposedly continued living in Norway under the name Alexander Hugo Köhler, started a family, and died there in 1945. Two self-proclaimed descendants subsequently claimed his inheritance, especially Ort Castle. They initially declared themselves willing to undergo genetic testing, but suspended their claims after learning about the expected costs of exhumation and DNA analysis. No conclusive evidence for the claim was produced.