The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia, by nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb member of the nationalist secret society known as the Black Hand. The assassination set in motion the chain of ultimatums, mobilizations, and alliance obligations that produced the First World War within six weeks. The attack was not originally successful — an earlier conspirator in the motorcade route threw a bomb that bounced off the Archduke's car and exploded under a following vehicle. The Archduke continued to City Hall for his scheduled visit, and on the way to visit the injured from the earlier bomb attempt, his driver made a wrong turn and stopped to reverse — precisely in front of Gavrilo Princip, who had stepped into a delicatessen thinking the day's mission had failed. Princip fired twice at point-blank range. Both the Archduke and Sophie died within an hour. Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia for the assassination and issued an ultimatum widely regarded as designed to be rejected. Serbia's partial refusal triggered Austrian mobilization, which triggered Russian mobilization, which triggered German mobilization under the Schlieffen Plan, which brought France and then Britain into the conflict. Within six weeks of the shots in Sarajevo, Europe was at war. Over sixteen million people would die in the conflict that followed. Princip was too young to be executed under Austrian law and was sentenced to twenty years in prison. He died in prison in April 1918 of tuberculosis, four months before the war he helped start finally ended. His legacy remains deeply contested — viewed as a terrorist by some and a nationalist hero by others. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand stands as perhaps the single most consequential political murder in modern history.