Empress Elisabeth, called Sisi, one of the daughters of Duke Maximilian in Bavaria and his wife Maria Ludovika (herself the daughter of King Maximilian I of Bavaria), was born on 24 December 1837. Emperor Franz Joseph I met the Bavarian Ducal family at Bad Ischl in August 1853 and immediately fell in love with his sixteen year old first cousin Sisi who was reported to be the most beautiful princess in Europe. His marriage with "Engels-Sisi" took place in Vienna in 1854. Sisi first visited Hungary in 1857 and was crowned Queen of Hungary seven years later. Of her three surviving children, Gisela, the eldest, married Prince Leopold of Bavaria whilst the youngest, Marie Valerie, married the Archduke Franz Salvator. The suicide of her son Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889 at Mayerling was a shock from which she never recovered. Never as passionate about jewellery as about horses, it is said that after her son's death she gave away the more elaborate of her jewels. Sisi died in 1898, stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist as she was strolling along the Lake Geneva opposite the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in 1898.

The bracelet depicts the coat-of-arms of the K. u. K. Monarchie at the height of its extension in the 19th Century. It is interesting to note that one of the shields is of Lombardy, a province Emperor Franz Joseph I lost in the war against Sardinia and France only five years after his marriage to Sisi.