June 28 in History

A teenage assassin with a pistol and a borrowed sandwich stop killed an archduke and started a war that destroyed four empires. On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist, shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie at point-blank range as their motorcade took a wrong turn in Sarajevo. The double murder triggered a chain of ultimatums, mobilizations, and treaty obligations that plunged Europe into the deadliest conflict the world had ever seen. Franz Ferdinand was heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and had traveled to Sarajevo to observe military maneuvers, arriving on the Serbian national holiday of Vidovdan, a date loaded with symbolic provocation. A group of six assassins from the Black Hand, a Serbian nationalist organization, had positioned themselves along the archduke’s motorcade route. The first attempt, a bomb thrown by Nedeljko Čabrinović, bounced off the archduke’s car and exploded under the vehicle behind, wounding several people. Franz Ferdinand continued to city hall, furious but unharmed. The assassination succeeded only through an extraordinary accident. After the ceremony, the archduke’s driver took a wrong turn onto Franz Josef Street and stalled the car while trying to reverse. Princip, who had given up and wandered to a nearby delicatessen, found himself five feet from the stationary vehicle. He fired two shots: one struck Sophie in the abdomen, the other hit Franz Ferdinand in the neck. Both died within the hour. Austria-Hungary, backed by Germany, issued an ultimatum to Serbia that was designed to be rejected. Serbia’s partial acceptance was deemed insufficient, and Austria declared war on July 28. Russia mobilized to defend Serbia, Germany declared war on Russia and France, and Britain entered when Germany violated Belgian neutrality. Within six weeks, most of Europe was at war. By the time the fighting ended in 1918, more than 20 million people were dead, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires had collapsed, and the political map of the world had been permanently redrawn.

Seoul fell in three days, and the speed of the collapse stunned military planners who had assumed South Korea could hold for weeks. On June 28, 1950, North Korean forces captured the South Korean capital after crossing the Han River bridges, which South Korean engineers had prematurely demolished while thousands of their own retreating soldiers and civilian refugees were still crossing. An estimated 500 to 800 people died on the bridges, and much of the South Korean army’s heavy equipment was trapped north of the river. The North Korean advance was spearheaded by 150 Soviet-built T-34 tanks, against which the South Korean army had no effective defense. The Republic of Korea possessed no tanks, no anti-tank weapons capable of penetrating T-34 armor, and no combat aircraft. South Korean soldiers, many of whom had never seen a tank, broke and fled when the armored columns appeared. President Syngman Rhee’s government had evacuated Seoul the previous day, and the decision to blow the bridges was made in panic by a South Korean army colonel who was later court-martialed and executed. North Korean troops entering Seoul immediately began rounding up government officials, police officers, and anyone associated with the Rhee regime. Over the following three months of occupation, North Korean security forces executed an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 South Korean civilians, burying many in mass graves that were not discovered until after the city’s recapture. The occupation also destroyed much of Seoul’s infrastructure, as the retreating South Koreans had burned government buildings and the advancing North Koreans looted what remained. General MacArthur’s amphibious landing at Inchon on September 15, 1950, cut North Korean supply lines and forced the rapid abandonment of Seoul. The city was recaptured on September 28, then lost again to Chinese forces in January 1951, and retaken a final time in March 1951. By the end of the war, Seoul had changed hands four times, and roughly 75 percent of the city lay in ruins.

Mike Tyson leaned into a clinch and bit a chunk out of Evander Holyfield’s right ear on live television, producing the most bizarre moment in boxing history and ending his own career as a credible heavyweight contender. The incident occurred during the third round of their WBA Heavyweight Championship rematch at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas on June 28, 1997, with more than 16,000 spectators and a pay-per-view audience of nearly two million watching in disbelief. Tyson entered the fight desperate to avenge his loss to Holyfield seven months earlier, a match that had been stopped in the eleventh round after Holyfield dominated with superior boxing skills and relentless head movement. Tyson’s camp had complained that Holyfield used deliberate headbutts throughout the first fight without penalty, and Tyson appeared to stew over the perceived injustice for months. When the rematch began, Holyfield again employed aggressive tactics that kept Tyson off balance. The first bite came two minutes into the third round. After a clinch, Tyson spat out his mouthpiece and bit down on Holyfield’s right ear, tearing off a piece of cartilage roughly one inch long and spitting it onto the canvas. Referee Mills Lane deducted two points but allowed the fight to continue, a decision he later called the biggest mistake of his career. Seconds later, Tyson bit Holyfield’s left ear. Lane stopped the fight and disqualified Tyson, who had to be restrained by security as a near-riot erupted in the arena. The Nevada State Athletic Commission revoked Tyson’s boxing license and fined him $3 million, the maximum allowed. His license was restored after fifteen months, but Tyson never recaptured the devastating form that had made him the youngest heavyweight champion in history at age 20. He fought for another eight years, losing to Lennox Lewis and Danny Williams before retiring in 2005. The ear-biting incident became the defining image of his career’s decline, eclipsing a record that included 44 knockouts in 50 victories.

Three thousand soldiers armed with matchlock rifles crouched behind wooden palisades and waited for the most feared cavalry in Japan to charge straight into their guns. At the Battle of Nagashino on June 29, 1575, Oda Nobunaga deployed massed firearms in a defensive formation that destroyed the mounted samurai of the Takeda clan, demonstrating that gunpowder weapons could neutralize even the most elite traditional warriors. The Takeda clan under Katsuyori, son of the legendary Takeda Shingen, had besieged Nagashino Castle in Mikawa Province to expand their territory at the expense of Nobunaga’s ally, Tokugawa Ieyasu. Nobunaga marched to relieve the siege with approximately 30,000 troops, including a contingent of 3,000 ashigaru armed with arquebuses. He chose a position behind the Shidaragahara, a narrow plain crossed by streams and marshland, and ordered the construction of wooden stockades to protect his gunners. Katsuyori, commanding roughly 15,000 troops including his elite cavalry, ordered a series of frontal charges against the stockades. The traditional account holds that Nobunaga arranged his gunners in rotating volleys, with each rank firing while the others reloaded, maintaining continuous fire. Whether this rotation system was actually used is debated by historians, but the result is not: Takeda’s cavalry was shredded by concentrated gunfire as they attempted to cross the open ground. Successive charges broke against the palisades, and the Takeda lost an estimated 10,000 men, including eight of Katsuyori’s senior generals. Nagashino did not introduce firearms to Japanese warfare, as guns had been present since Portuguese traders brought them in 1543. But the battle demonstrated their decisive potential when used in large numbers with proper tactical coordination. The Takeda clan never recovered from the defeat, and Katsuyori was destroyed by a combined Oda-Tokugawa campaign seven years later. Nobunaga’s integration of firepower with disciplined infantry became the template for the armies that would complete Japan’s unification.

Delegates from 32 nations gathered in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles to sign the treaty that ended the Great War and planted the seeds of an even greater one. On June 28, 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles, accepting responsibility for the war and agreeing to punishing terms that would destabilize European politics for the next two decades. The treaty was the product of six months of negotiations in Paris, dominated by the "Big Four": Woodrow Wilson of the United States, Georges Clemenceau of France, David Lloyd George of Britain, and Vittorio Orlando of Italy. Their goals were fundamentally incompatible. Wilson wanted a just peace built around his Fourteen Points and a new League of Nations. Clemenceau, whose country had suffered 1.4 million dead and enormous physical destruction, demanded security guarantees and punitive reparations. Lloyd George navigated between them, seeking to weaken Germany without destroying it. The terms imposed on Germany were severe. Article 231, the "war guilt clause," forced Germany to accept sole responsibility for the conflict. The treaty stripped Germany of 13 percent of its territory and 10 percent of its population, eliminated its air force, reduced its army to 100,000 men, and imposed reparations eventually set at 132 billion gold marks, equivalent to roughly $400 billion today. Germany’s delegation was given no opportunity to negotiate and signed under threat of resumed hostilities. The treaty’s harshest critics proved prophetic. John Maynard Keynes resigned from the British delegation and published "The Economic Consequences of the Peace," predicting the reparations would cripple Germany’s economy and breed resentment. Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France took the opposite view, calling the treaty too lenient and predicting it would last only twenty years. The armistice he predicted expired almost exactly on schedule: Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, twenty years and sixty-four days after Versailles was signed.

James Madison was five feet four and weighed about a hundred pounds. He was the smallest president in American history and possibly the most intellectually consequential. Born on March 16, 1751, in Port Conway, Virginia, he attended the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, completing the four-year course in two years, a pace that reportedly damaged his health. He entered Virginia politics as a protégé of Thomas Jefferson and quickly established himself as the most thorough constitutional thinker in the new republic. His preparation for the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 was extraordinary. He arrived with a detailed plan for a new government, based on months of studying the constitutions of ancient and modern republics. He spoke over 200 times during the convention, more than any other delegate, and kept the most complete record of the proceedings. The Virginia Plan, largely his work, provided the framework for the Constitution. When opposition to ratification threatened to derail the project, he co-wrote the Federalist Papers with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, producing 85 essays in eight months that remain the most authoritative interpretation of constitutional intent. He authored the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, partly as a political necessity to secure ratification from reluctant states. As president from 1809 to 1817, he led the country through the War of 1812, a conflict that nearly destroyed the republic he had helped create. The British burned Washington, D.C., including the White House and the Capitol, in August 1814. His wife Dolley famously saved a portrait of George Washington from the flames. He died on June 28, 1836, at Montpelier, the last surviving member of the Constitutional Convention. The country his document created was still intact.

Both leaders died on the same battlefield, and the myths born from their blood shaped Balkan politics for six centuries. At the Battle of Kosovo on June 28, 1389, Ottoman forces under Sultan Murad I defeated a coalition of Serbian, Bosnian, and other Balkan Christian forces led by Prince Lazar Hrebeljnović, in an engagement that determined the fate of southeastern Europe for the next five hundred years. The battle took place on the Kosovo Polje, the "Field of Blackbirds," near the modern city of Pristina. Murad’s Ottoman army, estimated at 27,000 to 40,000 troops, included elite Janissary infantry and heavy cavalry from across the expanding empire. Lazar’s coalition numbered perhaps 15,000 to 25,000, drawn from Serbian, Bosnian, Albanian, and other Balkan contingents. The battle was the largest military engagement in the region’s history and the first time a major European coalition had assembled specifically to stop Ottoman expansion. Murad was killed before or during the battle, stabbed by a Serbian knight named Miloš Obilić, who either infiltrated the Ottoman camp under false pretenses or fought his way to the sultan during the engagement. Command passed to Murad’s son Bayezid, who completed the victory and had Lazar executed after his capture. The losses on both sides were devastating, but the Ottoman Empire could replace its casualties from its vast territories, while Serbia could not. Kosovo did not immediately end Serbian independence, but it fatally weakened the Serbian state. Serbia became an Ottoman vassal within a decade and was fully absorbed into the empire by 1459. The battle acquired enormous mythological significance in Serbian culture, with Lazar cast as a Christ-like martyr who chose a heavenly kingdom over earthly victory. This mythology was deliberately revived by Serbian nationalists in the twentieth century, most notoriously by Slobodan Milošević in his 1989 speech at the 600th anniversary of the battle, which helped fuel the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.