Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie were assassinated on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo. This pivotal event acted as the immediate trigger for World War I. A Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, carried out the assassination during the Archduke’s official visit to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. This act of violence ignited a chain reaction that plunged Europe into a devastating global conflict by early August of the same year.
The Archduke’s visit to Sarajevo in June 1914 was to inspect the Austro-Hungarian imperial armed forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Austria-Hungary had annexed these territories in 1908, a move that deeply angered Serbian nationalists. These nationalists believed that Bosnia and Herzegovina should have been part of Serbia. Fueled by this resentment, a group of young nationalists plotted to assassinate the Archduke during his visit to Sarajevo. Despite initial setbacks in their plan, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip seized an unexpected opportunity. As the Archduke and his wife were traveling in their official motorcade, a wrong turn placed their vehicle directly in front of Princip. He fired at point-blank range, killing both the Archduke and Sophie almost instantly.
The assassination unleashed a rapid sequence of events. Austria-Hungary swiftly placed blame on the Serbian government for supporting the attack. With the backing of Russia for Serbia, Austria-Hungary sought assurance from Germany that they would support Austria-Hungary against Russia and its allies, which included France and potentially Great Britain. On July 28, 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. This declaration shattered the fragile peace that had tenuously held among Europe’s major powers, marking the commencement of World War I.
After four years of intense fighting and immense bloodshed, World War I concluded on November 11, 1918, with Germany, the last of the Central Powers, surrendering to the Allied forces. In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Allied leaders convened with the stated aim of establishing a post-war world that would be safe from future large-scale wars. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919—a somber anniversary, exactly five years after the Archduke’s assassination—tragically failed to achieve this ambitious goal. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s vision of an international peacekeeping organization materialized as the League of Nations, but it proved ineffective in practice. Even more detrimentally, the harsh conditions imposed on Germany by the treaty, deemed the primary instigator of the war, fostered widespread resentment within Germany towards the treaty and its architects. This deep-seated resentment ultimately contributed to the rise of extremism and the outbreak of World War II two decades later.
