On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist, assassinated the Austri
On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist, assassinated the Austrian heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo.
To understand the importance of this event, imagine the Prince of Wales and his wife being assassinated while visiting a dominion of the British Empire.
This outrageous act of brutality was aimed at undermining the Austro-Hungarian Empire which had annexed Bosnia into its multi-ethnic Empire in 1908.
The murder of the royal couple ushered in the so-called July Crisis which ended with the outbreak of war in August 1914.
The assassination has been described as the spark that would set light to a continent that was riddled with international tensions.
However, a European war was not inevitable. Right until the last moment, some European statesmen were desperately trying to avoid an escalation of the crisis by advocating mediation, while others did everything in their power to ensure that a war would break out.
The murder of the Archduke caused widespread international outrage even though assassinations of prominent individuals were rather more common than they are today: for example, the Austrian Emperor, Kaiser Franz Joseph, nearly succumbed to an assassin in Sarajevo in May 1910, while an Italian anarchist had murdered his wife Empress Elizabeth in 1898.
Other royal assassination victims included the Serbian King Alexandar and his wife in 1903, the Italian King Umberto in 1900, and the Greek King George I in 1913.
However, we do not remember these acts of violence because their consequences were less serious; on the other hand, we remember the date and place of this infamous assassination in Sarajevo because the events that followed it led directly into the First World War.
Why did the Archduke become a victim of a violent conspiracy?
The assassins can be traced back to the Serbian capital Belgrade, where each of the six young men who waited for the hapless Archduke in Sarajevo along the pre-published official route were radicalised by Serbian nationalist and irredentist organizations.
Serbia had been a threat and irritant to Austria-Hungary, particularly since it won the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 and as a consequence had nearly doubled its territory and increased its population from 3 to 4.5 million.
The government’s aim was to unite even more Serbian territory and people with Serbia—and those people happened to live in multi-ethnic Austria-Hungary, including Bosnia, which had been annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908.
Three of the young conspirators had left impoverished lives in Sarajevo for Belgrade. Trifko Grabež, Nedeljko Čabrinović and Gavrilo Princip were all members of the revolutionary organisation Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia). In the Serbian capital they succumbed to the anti-Habsburg propaganda of several underground organisations such as the ‘Black Hand’ (its official title was ‘Union or Death’), a conspiratorial officers’ group which stood for the idea of a