Archduke Franz Ferdinand

Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este was the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary from 1896 until 1914. A nephew of Emperor Franz Joseph, he was a conservative, short-tempered and ambitious figure who planned to reshape the monarchy once he became emperor. Instead, his assassination with his wife Sophie in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 set off the crisis that led to the First World War.

Franz Ferdinand was born on 18 December 1863 in Graz, the eldest son of Archduke Karl Ludwig, a younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph I, and his second wife, Maria Annunziata of the Bourbon-Two Sicilies family. He was not expected to rule. In 1875, aged eleven, he inherited the fortune of the last Duke of Modena on condition that he add "Este" to his name, which made him one of the richest men in Austria. Like other archdukes he entered the army as a boy and was promoted quickly without serious staff training.

In January 1889 Crown Prince Rudolf, the emperor's only son, killed himself and his young lover at the hunting lodge of Mayerling. The succession passed to Karl Ludwig, and on his death from typhoid in 1896 to Franz Ferdinand. He had already toured the world in 1892 and 1893, travelling through India, Australia, Japan and the United States, and he collected antiquities and hunting trophies on a huge scale: his game books record well over two hundred thousand animals shot. He had also recovered from tuberculosis, which had made many at court doubt his fitness to reign.

The emperor and his heir never got on. Franz Joseph was cautious and formal; Franz Ferdinand was impatient, suspicious and quick to anger, and he resented being kept away from real decisions. From the Belvedere palace in Vienna he built up his own circle of advisers, a kind of shadow government, and he gained increasing influence over the army. He secured the appointment of Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf as chief of the general staff in 1906, and in 1913 he was named inspector general of all the armed forces.

In the 1890s Franz Ferdinand fell in love with Countess Sophie Chotek, a Czech noblewoman serving as lady-in-waiting to an archduchess. The Choteks were an old aristocratic family, but not a royal one, and by the rules of the House of Habsburg she was not of equal birth. Franz Ferdinand refused to give her up, and after a long struggle the emperor agreed to a morganatic marriage. On 28 June 1900 Franz Ferdinand swore that none of their children would inherit the throne, and they married on 1 July at Reichstadt in Bohemia. No other archduke attended.

The marriage was happy, and the couple had three children who survived infancy. Sophie, later made Duchess of Hohenberg, was nonetheless humiliated at court, where she ranked below every archduchess and could not ride in the imperial carriage or sit beside her husband at official occasions. The family preferred to live at Konopiště, their castle in Bohemia south of Prague.

Franz Ferdinand was a devout Catholic, an absolutist by instinct and a convinced enemy of liberalism, but he believed that the Habsburg monarchy would not survive in its existing form. He regarded the Compromise of 1867, which had given Hungary self-government within a dual monarchy, as a disaster, and he disliked the Hungarian gentry who dominated the kingdom's Slovak, Romanian, Serb and Croat populations. His advisers discussed several schemes for reducing Hungarian power, including a "trialist" system with a third, South Slav unit, and a federation of autonomous national states under a strong crown. How far he would actually have carried out any of these plans is unknown.

In foreign affairs he was more cautious than many of the generals he promoted. He feared that war with Russia would destroy the monarchy, and during the Balkan crises of 1912 and 1913 he repeatedly restrained Conrad, who wanted a preventive war against Serbia.

In June 1914 Franz Ferdinand attended army manoeuvres in Bosnia, which Austria-Hungary had annexed in 1908, and on Sunday 28 June he and Sophie made an official visit to Sarajevo. The date was Vidovdan, the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo of 1389, a day of great significance to Serbian nationalists. Six young conspirators, most of them Bosnian Serbs linked to the Young Bosnia movement, armed with pistols and bombs supplied through the Black Hand, a secret society of Serbian officers led by Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, waited along the route.

As the motorcade drove along the Appel Quay, Nedeljko Čabrinović threw a bomb, which bounced off the archduke's car and wounded people in the car behind. After a reception at the town hall, Franz Ferdinand decided to visit the wounded in hospital. His driver, not told of the change of route, turned into a side street near the Latin Bridge and stopped to reverse. Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb student, stepped forward and fired twice from close range, hitting Sophie in the abdomen and Franz Ferdinand in the neck. Both died within minutes. Princip was too young to be executed and was sentenced to twenty years in prison, where he died of tuberculosis in 1918. The archduke and his wife were buried together at Artstetten Castle in Lower Austria, since Sophie could not lie in the Habsburg crypt in Vienna.

The murder gave the leaders in Vienna the pretext they wanted to crush Serbia, which they held responsible. Assured of German support by Wilhelm II in early July, Austria-Hungary delivered an ultimatum to Belgrade on 23 July that was designed to be rejected, and declared war on 28 July, exactly one month after the assassination. Russia mobilised in support of Serbia, Germany declared war on Russia and France and invaded Belgium, and Britain entered the war on 4 August. The First World War that followed killed some 17 million people and destroyed the monarchy Franz Ferdinand had hoped to save.

Franz Ferdinand is remembered almost entirely for the manner of his death, and historians still debate how the reign of so difficult a man might have turned out. His plans for reform remained on paper, and his death removed one of the few voices in Vienna's leadership arguing against war. The car in which he was shot and his bloodstained uniform are displayed in the Museum of Military History in Vienna.