Shot in Sarajevo: The Spark That Ignited WWI

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.