Assassination of Franz Ferdinand
On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie were shot dead in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The killer was Gavrilo Princip, a young Bosnian Serb nationalist. The assassination set off a diplomatic crisis that, within about five weeks, drew the major powers of Europe into the First World War.
The background lay in the tangled politics of the Balkans. Austria-Hungary had occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878 and formally annexed it in 1908, angering Serbia, which hoped to unite South Slavs in a single state, and alarming its patron Russia. Serbia's territorial gains in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 increased Austrian fears of a rival on its southern border. Europe was also divided into two alliance blocs: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side, France and Russia on the other, with Britain linked to France through a looser understanding. Arms races and a series of earlier crises had left the continent tense.
Franz Ferdinand traveled to Sarajevo to observe military maneuvers, and the visit fell on Serbia's national day of remembrance, a date many saw as provocative. A group of young conspirators, several of them Bosnian Serbs armed with weapons obtained in Serbia, waited along the motorcade route. One threw a bomb that missed the archduke's car. Later, after the procession's route was disrupted, the archduke's driver took a wrong turn near a café where Princip happened to be standing. He fired at close range, killing both the archduke and his wife.
Austria-Hungary suspected Serbian official involvement. Historians still debate how far Serbian officials knew of or supported the plot; the conspirators had connections to a secret nationalist network, but the extent of government knowledge remains contested. After obtaining a assurance of support from Germany, often called the "blank cheque," Vienna sent Serbia a harsh ultimatum in late July. Serbia accepted most terms but not all, and Austria-Hungary declared war on 28 July. Russia mobilized in support of Serbia, Germany declared war on Russia and France, and Germany's invasion of Belgium brought Britain in.
The war that followed lasted more than four years and killed millions of soldiers and civilians. It toppled the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, redrew the map of Europe, and created conditions that contributed to the Second World War. Historians continue to argue over the relative weight of the assassination itself versus deeper causes such as militarism, nationalism, and imperial rivalry, but few dispute that Sarajevo supplied the spark.