Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

On the morning of 28 June 1914, in Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb student still under 20, shot dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. Princip belonged to a small group of young conspirators who wanted to end Habsburg rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina and unite the South Slavs in one state. Within five weeks the killing had set off the chain of ultimatums and mobilisations that became the First World War.

Austria-Hungary had occupied the Ottoman province of Bosnia under the 1878 Treaty of Berlin and formally annexed it in 1908, to the fury of neighbouring Serbia. After a bloody coup in Belgrade in 1903, Serbia's new Karađorđević dynasty leaned towards Russia and away from Vienna, and Serbian power grew with gains from the Ottomans in the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. Nationalist societies flourished. The most radical, the Black Hand, founded in 1911, was led by army officers including Dragutin Dimitrijević, known as Apis, the head of Serbian military intelligence. In Bosnia itself, loosely organised student revolutionaries, later called Young Bosnia, idolised Bogdan Žerajić, who had tried to kill the province's governor in 1910.

Franz Ferdinand was thought to favour reorganising the empire to give its Slav peoples more weight, a reform that Serb nationalists saw as a threat. In 1914 he came to Bosnia to watch army manoeuvres. His visit to Sarajevo fell on 28 June, the feast of Vidovdan, which commemorates the Battle of Kosovo of 1389 and carried strong meaning for Serb nationalists.

In Belgrade that spring, Princip and his friends Nedeljko Čabrinović and Trifko Grabež resolved to kill the archduke. Through intermediaries they obtained four pistols, six bombs, cyanide pills and training from Major Vojislav Tankosić, a Black Hand officer, and were smuggled into Bosnia along a secret network of agents and safe houses. In Sarajevo, Danilo Ilić recruited three more: Vaso Čubrilović, Cvjetko Popović and Muhamed Mehmedbašić.

On 28 June Ilić posted the six assassins along the riverside Appel Quay. Only about 60 police were on duty. The first two men failed to act. At about 10.10 a.m. Čabrinović threw his bomb, which bounced off the archduke's open car and exploded under the next vehicle, wounding around 16 to 20 people. He swallowed his poison and leapt into the river, but the cyanide failed and the water was shallow; he was captured.

After an angry reception at the town hall, the couple decided to visit the wounded in hospital. The governor, Oskar Potiorek, changed the route but did not tell the drivers. The archduke's chauffeur turned into a side street by the Latin Bridge, was told to stop, and stalled the car close to where Princip happened to be standing. Princip fired twice at point-blank range. Both lost consciousness as the car sped to the governor's residence; Sophie was dead on arrival and Franz Ferdinand died about ten minutes later.

All the conspirators were arrested, though Mehmedbašić escaped from custody in Montenegro. At a trial in Sarajevo in October 1914, Princip, too young for the death penalty, was sentenced to 20 years; he and Čabrinović later died of tuberculosis in prison, and three older accomplices, including Ilić, were hanged in February 1915.

Austria-Hungary, assured of German support, delivered an ultimatum to Serbia on 23 July. Serbia accepted some demands but evaded or rejected others, and on 28 July Austria-Hungary declared war. Russian mobilisation followed on 29–30 July, drawing in Germany and then the other great powers.

In 1917 a Serbian court at Salonika tried Black Hand leaders for treason on charges now widely regarded as fabricated, and three of them were executed; Apis's claim at that time to have ordered the killing has never been proven. Princip's reputation remains contested in the states that emerged from Yugoslavia, where opinion about him largely follows ethnic lines.

Our 1914 map shows Bosnia and Herzegovina inside Austria-Hungary on the eve of war, with Serbia to the east; the 1920 map shows the new South Slav kingdom formed after the empire's collapse.