In 1918, as World War I was ending, Charles I — the emperor of Austria-Hungary and a member of the Hapsburg dynasty — sensed the end of the empire.
Charles, a nephew of Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination had incited the conflagration, recognized mounting threats from Bolsheviks and anarchists. To safeguard jewels that the ruling Hapsburgs had owned for centuries, he had them transported to Switzerland.
One gem in the collection was a particular prize, a 137-carat diamond admired not only for its pear shape and yellow hue but also for its illustrious history. Before the Hapsburgs, it had been owned by the Medici family, the rulers of Florence.
The diamond’s allure only grew when, soon after Charles and his family left Vienna for exile in Switzerland, it was thought to have disappeared.
For decades, it was rumored to have been stolen, or perhaps recut. Several films and novels, such as “The Imperfects,” have anchored their plot on its disappearance.
But the real story of what happened to the diamond, now told for the first time by the descendants of Charles I, is that it never really went missing. It’s been in a bank vault in Canada since the family fled there in the midst of World War II, according to three Hapsburg relatives who last month invited The New York Times to inspect the diamond and other jewels.
Karl von Habsburg-Lothringen, 64, a grandson of Charles I, said in an interview that the secret had been kept out of respect for Charles’s wife, the Empress Zita. She told only two people — her sons Robert and Rodolphe — about the diamond’s location, he said, and asked that, as a security precaution, it be kept undisclosed for 100 years after Charles’s death in 1922. Before they died, the brothers passed the information to their own sons, according to the family.
In the ensuing years, if anyone asked about the diamond, the family said it declined to respond out of a desire to guard the jewel.
“The less people know about it, the bigger the security,” said Mr. von Habsburg-Lothringen, whose family prefers the original spelling of the Habsburg name. He said he had only recently learned of the existence of the jewels from his two cousins — Robert’s son, Lorenz von Habsburg-Lothringen, 70, and Rodolphe’s son, Simeon von Habsburg-Lothringen, 67.
“Over the years, I am sure all of us has been asked at one time or another” about the diamond, Karl von Habsburg-Lothringen said. “For me, I was not even aware of the existence of the diamond until recently so it was easy to answer those questions honestly.”
But now, with the vow fulfilled, the family wants to display the Florentine Diamond and other jewels in Canada to thank the country for taking in the empress and her children.
“It should be part of a trust here in Canada,” Mr. Habsburg-Lothringen said. “It should be on exhibition in Canada sometimes, so that people can actually see those pieces.”
On a recent rainy afternoon, the family gathered at the bank in Canada where the jewels have long resided in a vault. Standing with his two cousins around a table, Mr. Habsburg-Lothringen slowly opened the battered suitcase put before them. Gingerly, he removed the yellowed paper in which each jewel was wrapped, eventually coming to the diamond itself, still glittering and arresting.
All three men now live in Europe, and this was the first time they had actually viewed the diamonds. The Florentine Diamond was wrapped separately from the others, but it could be set into a large, jeweled brooch that was among the items.
Christoph Köchert of A.E. Köchert jewelers, once Austria’s imperial court jewelers, examined the diamond and attested to its authenticity.
“Its cut pattern corresponds almost exactly to representations in historical sources,” he said in a statement. Citing additional factors, he added, “All of this gives me certainty that this is the genuine, historical ‘Florentine Diamond.’”
The collection includes a number of other items of jewelry, including a diamond-encrusted Order of the Golden Fleece, the house order of the Hapsburg family.
Karl Habsburg-Lothringen said he was most moved by the medal commemorating the order, founded in 1430 in Bruges, Belgium, by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy.
“That’s something where I’m very much ingrained into the history of it and the role it played for the family,” he said.
With the extinction of the male Medici line, the Florentine Diamond became the property of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, established in 1736 through the marriage of Francis Stephen and Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria, the parents of Marie Antoinette. The diamond adorned Francis Stephen’s crown during his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in 1745. The house produced every Holy Roman Emperor from 1440 to 1806, with the exception of the brief Wittelsbach interregnum of 1742-45. And the family provided emperors of Austria from 1804 to 1918.
“The Hapsburgs are the greatest dynasty of modern history — the history of Central Europe revolves around them,” said Richard Bassett, an associate fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, who has written a book on the Hapsburgs and whom the family commissioned to write a report on the diamond’s history.
After Charles I died from pneumonia in Madeira, where the family had moved from Switzerland, Empress Zita and her children relocated to Spain, and then to Belgium in 1929.
As tensions built across Europe, Zita and her eldest son, Crown Prince Otto, vigorously opposed the growing Nazi threat, and Otto offered his services to the increasingly fragile Austrian First Republic as it struggled to remain independent of the Third Reich.
When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, an event known as the Anschluss, Otto was declared an enemy of the state. Concerned that Germany was about to invade Belgium, Zita fled with her eight children, ultimately arriving in the United States in 1940, according to the family.
The empress, family members said, carried the jewels with her in a small cardboard suitcase. Finally, with American help, the family traveled to Canada and settled in a modest house in the province of Quebec.
“My grandmother felt very safe — she could breathe finally,” Karl von Habsburg-Lothringen said. “I assume that, at that stage, the little suitcase went into a bank safe, and that was it. And in that bank safe, it just stayed.”
In 1953, Zita returned to Europe and left the jewels in the care of the Quebec bank. She died in Switzerland in 1989 at 96.
“I think she wanted to make sure that it was not in her lifetime,” Karl von Habsburg-Lothringen said of the jewels’ resurfacing. “I have the feeling she was very glad that some important objects of the family are something that she had saved. That was historically very important for her, because she was somebody who was thinking very much in historic terms.”
The rumored disappearance of the Florentine Diamond has long spawned speculation.
“One theory holds that the Hapsburgs, much like the Romanovs following the Russian Revolution, sold the diamond and other possessions for cash,” an article in Artnet offered last year, “after which it was cut up and sold to unknown buyers.”
“A more hopeful but less likely hypothesis,” the article went on, “holds that the Florentine Diamond wasn’t sold at all, but given to a Hapsburg servant who took it to South America, and that it’s still out there — somewhere.”
There is even a Florentine Diamond brand of perfume. (“An alluring and sophisticated fragrance,” says the London manufacturer Thameen, “weaving the intoxicating tuberose with rich cocoa undertones.”)
Some in the gemology world suspected that the diamond had been recut to conceal its identity — similar to what is feared to have happened to the jewels recently stolen from the Louvre. When a yellow diamond, roughly half the size of the Florentine, surfaced at auction in 1981, many jumped to the conclusion that it had most likely come from the missing gem.
Just how rumors of the diamond’s disappearance originated is unclear; the family says it did not start them. As far back as 1921, The Washington Post reported the diamond as “missing” and offered thoughts on what might have happened to it.
Mr. Bassett’s report says the jewels that Charles I took with him were listed in a separate inventory from the state crown jewels of the Hapsburg monarchy. He said this position — that items taken by the family were the private property of the Habsburg-Lorraine house — was confirmed by a legal advocate for the imperial family in 1921, when the Austrian government put pressure on the Swiss government for their return.
While the First Austrian Republic enacted legislation in 1919 that expropriated the Hapsburg family’s private property in Austria, Mr. Bassett said it did not apply to the jewels because by that time they were outside Austria.
Signage at the Imperial Treasury museum in Vienna, he pointed out, refers to the gems that Charles took with him into exile as those that had been “inventoried as personal jewellry.”
Asked to comment on Austria’s former efforts to reclaim the jewels, a government spokeswoman said she was not able to reach someone immediately who could address the matter.
The family says it wants to display the diamond at a Canadian museum in the next few years. But there is no plan to sell the diamond, it said, and the family declined to speculate on the jewel’s monetary value.
“It’s an extraordinary achievement to have managed to preserve it for 100 years actually incognito,” Mr. Bassett said. “It’s an astonishing tribute to the Empress Zita’s practical determination. And she was a very practical woman.”
Robin Pogrebin, who has been a reporter for The Times for 30 years, covers arts and culture.
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