Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo (1914)

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand took place in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, when the 19-year-old Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife Sophie as they drove through the city. The killing was carried out by a small group of young nationalists armed with help from a secret society in Serbia. Within five weeks it had set off a chain of decisions that plunged Europe into the First World War.

Background: Bosnia, Serbia and the Habsburgs

Bosnia and Herzegovina had been an Ottoman province for centuries before Austria-Hungary occupied it in 1878 under the Congress of Berlin. In 1908 Vienna formally annexed the territory, provoking fury in neighbouring Serbia, which hoped to unite the South Slavs, including the large Serb population of Bosnia, under its own leadership. The annexation crisis left deep bitterness in Belgrade and St Petersburg.

Serbia’s victories in the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 doubled its territory and boosted Serb nationalism. Many in Vienna came to see Serbia as a mortal threat to a multinational empire that contained millions of Slavs. In Bosnia itself, a loose movement of students and young radicals known as Young Bosnia (Mlada Bosna) dreamed of overthrowing Habsburg rule, and some of its members admired political assassination as a weapon.

Franz Ferdinand, born in 1863, had become heir to his uncle Emperor Franz Joseph after the death of Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889 and of his own father in 1896. He was known as an abrasive but serious figure who favoured reforming the empire to give more weight to its Slav peoples. His marriage in 1900 to Countess Sophie Chotek was morganatic: she was not considered of equal rank, and their children were excluded from the succession.

The plot

The conspiracy brought together Young Bosnia and the Serbian secret society Unification or Death, better known as the Black Hand. Its leading figure was Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, nicknamed Apis, who was also head of Serbian military intelligence. Through Black Hand contacts, including Major Vojislav Tankosić, three young Bosnians living in Belgrade, Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Čabrinović and Trifko Grabež, received four pistols, six bombs and some cyanide, and were smuggled back across the border into Bosnia in late May and early June 1914.

In Sarajevo the local organiser, Danilo Ilić, recruited three more men: Muhamed Mehmedbašić, Vaso Čubrilović and Cvjetko Popović. Most of the conspirators were teenagers or in their early twenties, and several were seriously ill with tuberculosis. How much the Serbian government knew remains disputed. Prime Minister Nikola Pašić appears to have heard something of the plot, and Serbia’s minister in Vienna gave a vague warning, but there is no evidence that the government ordered the killing.

28 June 1914: the bomb, the wrong turn and the shots

Franz Ferdinand travelled to Bosnia in his role as Inspector General of the armed forces to watch army manoeuvres, and agreed to visit Sarajevo afterwards. The date, Sunday 28 June, was Vidovdan (St Vitus’s Day), the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, a powerful date in Serbian national memory. Security was light, and the route of the motorcade along the Appel Quay beside the Miljacka river had been published in advance.

The six-car procession set out at about 10 o’clock. Several conspirators lost their nerve or had no clear chance to act. At around 10:10 Čabrinović threw a bomb at the archduke’s open car. It bounced off the folded roof and exploded under the following vehicle, wounding officers in that car and a number of bystanders, roughly 16 to 20 people in all. Čabrinović swallowed his cyanide, which only made him vomit, and jumped into the river, which was shallow in summer; he was quickly arrested.

The archduke continued to the Town Hall, where he angrily interrupted the mayor’s speech of welcome before composing himself. Afterwards he decided to visit the officers wounded by the bomb in hospital. The governor of Bosnia, General Oskar Potiorek, agreed that the cars should drive straight along the quay and avoid the narrow streets of the city centre.

Nobody told the driver of the archduke’s car, Leopold Lojka. At the Latin Bridge he followed the original route and turned right into Franz Joseph Street. Potiorek shouted that he had gone the wrong way, and the car stopped in order to reverse. It halted almost in front of Moritz Schiller’s food shop, where Princip happened to be standing.

Princip stepped forward and fired two shots from a Belgian-made FN pistol at a distance of little more than a metre or two. One bullet struck Franz Ferdinand in the neck; the other hit Sophie in the abdomen. The car sped across the river to the governor’s residence, the Konak, but both were dead within roughly a quarter of an hour, at around 11 o’clock in the morning.

According to the archduke’s companion Count Franz von Harrach, who was standing on the running board, Franz Ferdinand’s last words were a plea to his wife not to die, for the sake of their children. Princip tried to shoot himself and took his cyanide, but the poison failed and the crowd and police seized him. Within hours anti-Serb riots broke out in Sarajevo, and Serb homes, shops and schools were attacked.

Key people

• Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863–1914): heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne and Inspector General of the armed forces, often seen as a cautious voice against war with Serbia.
• Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg (1868–1914): his wife, killed beside him; because of her rank she rarely appeared with him at official events, making the Sarajevo visit unusual.
• Gavrilo Princip (1894–1918): the Young Bosnia member who fired the fatal shots.
• Nedeljko Čabrinović (1895–1916): threw the bomb that failed earlier the same morning.
• Dragutin Dimitrijević, “Apis” (1876–1917): Serbian intelligence chief and Black Hand leader who helped arm the conspirators; he was executed in Serbia in 1917 after an unrelated trial at Salonika.

Consequences: from Sarajevo to world war

The assassination did not make a general war inevitable, but it gave the war party in Vienna its opportunity. After securing a promise of unconditional German support, Austria-Hungary sent Serbia a harsh ultimatum on 23 July and declared war on 28 July 1914, exactly one month after the shooting. The events of the July Crisis then drew in Russia, Germany, France and, after the German invasion of Belgium, Britain.

The conspirators were tried in Sarajevo in October 1914. Because Princip, Čabrinović and Grabež were under 20 at the time of the crime, they could not be executed; they received 20-year sentences, and all three died of tuberculosis in prison before the war ended, Princip on 28 April 1918. Ilić, Veljko Čubrilović and Miško Jovanović, who had helped hide the weapons, were hanged in February 1915. Mehmedbašić escaped to Montenegro.

Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were buried together at Artstetten Castle in Lower Austria, rather than in the imperial crypt in Vienna, which did not admit Sophie. The war their deaths helped unleash would destroy the Habsburg monarchy itself by 1918.

Myths and facts

Myth: Princip was eating a sandwich when the car stopped. This popular story appears to be a recent invention with no basis in contemporary sources. What is documented is that he was standing near Schiller’s shop when the car halted.

Myth: the assassination alone caused the First World War. Historians agree that the killing was a trigger, not the sole cause. The decisions taken by governments in Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg, Paris and London in the following weeks turned a regional crisis into a European war.

Fact: the car’s number plate is a strange coincidence. The archduke’s car carried the registration A III 118, which some later read as a forecast of the armistice of 11 November 1918. This is simple coincidence, but the plate is genuine and can still be seen in Vienna.

Timeline

• 1908, October: Austria-Hungary annexes Bosnia and Herzegovina.
• 1914, late May – early June: Princip, Čabrinović and Grabež cross from Serbia into Bosnia with weapons.
• 1914, 28 June, c. 10:10: Čabrinović’s bomb misses the archduke’s car on the Appel Quay.
• 1914, 28 June, c. 10:50: Princip shoots Franz Ferdinand and Sophie near the Latin Bridge.
• 1914, 23 July: Austria-Hungary delivers its ultimatum to Serbia.
• 1914, 28 July: Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.
• 1914, October: trial of the conspirators in Sarajevo.
• 1918, 28 April: Princip dies of tuberculosis in Theresienstadt.

Legacy

Few single events have had such enormous consequences. The two pistol shots in Sarajevo are remembered as the opening act of a war that killed around 15 to 20 million people, toppled four empires and reshaped the map of Europe through settlements such as the Treaty of Versailles.

Princip’s reputation has always divided opinion. In interwar and communist Yugoslavia he was celebrated as a national hero, and the Latin Bridge was renamed after him; to others he was simply a terrorist who murdered a husband and wife. The car, the archduke’s uniform and Princip’s pistol are on display in Vienna’s Military History Museum, and a museum near the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo marks the spot.

Why it matters

The Sarajevo assassination shows how a small act of political violence, carried out by a handful of young men, could become the spark for a catastrophe once great powers chose to respond with force. It remains the starting point for understanding the outbreak of the First World War and the collapse of the old European order.