Answer:
Explanation:How did a conspiracy to kill an Archduke Franz Ferdinand set off a chain of events ending in the First World War? Explore what sparked the July Crisis.
Franz Ferdinand approaching his Gräf & Stift carOn 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist, assassinated the Austrian heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo.
To understand the importance of this event, imagine the Prince of Wales and his wife being assassinated while visiting a dominion of the British Empire.
This outrageous act of brutality was aimed at undermining the Austro-Hungarian Empire which had annexed Bosnia into its multi-ethnic Empire in 1908.
The murder of the royal couple ushered in the so-called July Crisis which ended with the outbreak of war in August 1914.
The assassination has been described as the spark that would set light to a continent that was riddled with international tensions.
However, a European war was not inevitable. Right until the last moment, some European statesmen were desperately trying to avoid an escalation of the crisis by advocating mediation, while others did everything in their power to ensure that a war would break out.
Ethnicities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1910Creative commons image Icon
The murder of the Archduke caused widespread international outrage even though assassinations of prominent individuals were rather more common than they are today: for example, the Austrian Emperor, Kaiser Franz Joseph, nearly succumbed to an assassin in Sarajevo in May 1910, while an Italian anarchist had murdered his wife Empress Elizabeth in 1898.
