Franz Ferdinand might have become a fair and fine king, but instead, he became the reason for hundreds of battles and thousands of deaths. Following his assassination in 1914, the Astro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia, starting World War I.
As the Archduke of the Empire, he was expected to inherit the crown after the death of his cousin, Franz Joseph, the Emperor of Austria, and King of Hungary and many others. He would probably have been a more popular King than his relative, who led the countries strictly. Or maybe he would have been even worse, but we will never know.
On Sunday, 28 June 1914, Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Countess Sophie Chotek were killed in Serbia. As the royal couple traveled in their car on the streets of Sarajevo, a guy named Gavrilo Princip shot them in the head. They both died right then. The event led to a chain of events that eventually triggered World War I.
Serbia was known to be a dangerous country to visit for the royal family. Terror groups like the Black Hand were really famous due to the unpopularity of the Astro-Hungarian Empire, that occupied Serbia in 1908. However, the route of the Austrian march got public a few days before, making the planning for the terrorists quite easy. Before Gavrilo, some fanatics attacked the couple with a hand grenade. No one was injured, and the attackers got caught, but the atmosphere got even icier.
Gavrilo himself had “luck”: the car stopped near the coffee house he sat in, to rearrange it’s route. After firing the gun, he tried to kill himself using a cyanide pill, but it was out-of-date. He was 19 years old by that time, too young to receive a death penalty. He was sent to prison for twenty years, but died two years later in tuberculosis.
The Astro-Hungarian Monarchy and Germany used the assassination as a casus belli, aka a reason to start the war. They wanted to conquer some Eastern-European countries for a long time, since they didn’t get to have any colonies in Afrika or Asia, unlike England and France. II Nicholas, the Russian Tsar was happy to help the Serbians, and fight the Germans, since the two countries traditionally had a bad relationship. But none of them thought, that the war will be one of the biggest in Europe, lasting 4 years and killing thousands.
Read the previous part of our Most Infamous Assassinations series HERE.
