Prince Lorenz (69), husband of Belgian Princess Astrid, carried a big secret with him for a long time.
For a century, a precious crown jewel of his family, the Habsburgs, had vanished without a trace from the outside world.
Together with two cousins, however, the prince had been aware of the hiding place for years.
Where is the legendary Florentine diamond?
That question has occupied jewel and jewelry experts for a century. The crown jewel is the private property of the Habsburgs, the absolute pinnacle of European nobility, but had been missing since the end of the First World War. Recently, after more than a hundred years, all speculation came to an end. Three grandsons of the last Austrian imperial couple, including Prince Lorenz, revealed that the family has always known where one of the most important gemstones in the world was located. And they also revealed its hiding place: a bank vault in Canada.
Special diamond
But what makes the Florentine diamond so special? It is a 137-carat stone that stands out for its pear shape and shiny, yellow-gold color. Besides its size and shape, the diamond’s illustrious history makes it so precious. According to tradition, it was made in the fifteenth century for Charles the Bold, the last Duke of Burgundy. He was wearing it when he fell in the Battle of Nancy in 1477. A peasant or soldier found the glittering object on the Duke’s body and sold it.
Art theft in the Louvre
Historians had been searching for it for well over a century. It is Prince Lorenz and his cousins who are now revealing the truth: the diamond has always remained in family possession. Why was that a secret? After the death of Emperor Charles I in 1922, his widow Zita ordered the hiding place to be kept secret for a hundred years for security reasons. Only two family members were allowed to know: her sons Robert and Rudolf. According to family records, the brothers passed this information on to their own sons before their deaths: Archduke Lorenz of Habsburg, son of Robert, and Simeon, son of Rudolf. Robert died in 1996, which means that Lorenz had known about it for at least thirty years. They only informed another cousin last year: Charles, son of Crown Prince Otto and the current head of the Habsburgs. Everything recently gained momentum following the art heist at the Louvre. This sparked renewed interest in mysteriously vanished art treasures. It got Charles of Habsburg thinking. Now that the hundred-year promise has been fulfilled, he judged that the great family secret had to be revealed.
Smuggled into Canada
How did this crown jewel end up in Canada? Let’s go back to the end of the First World War. Emperor Charles I ordered this and other family jewels to be removed from the vaults in Vienna and brought to safety in Switzerland. After his death, his widow Zita and their children moved to Spain and, in 1929, to Belgium. As tensions in Europe rose, Zita and her eldest son Otto fiercely opposed the growing Nazi threat under Hitler. Fearing that Germany would invade Belgium, Zita fled with her eight children via the United States to Canada. She smuggled the jewels along in a small cardboard suitcase to hide them in a vault in the province of Quebec. They remained there when Zita returned to Europe in 1953.
