An assassination in Sarajevo triggered World War I
On this day · 28 June 1914
Two shots fired at a street corner in Sarajevo set off the chain of alliances and ultimatums that became the First World War.
At around 11 a.m. on June 28, 1914, a teenage Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip stepped from a Sarajevo crowd and fired into an open car, killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie. It was the second attempt that day; an earlier bomb had bounced off the motorcade. A wrong turn by the driver delivered the couple straight to the waiting gunman.
Princip belonged to a small cell tied to the nationalist movement Young Bosnia, whose aim was to free Bosnia from Austro-Hungarian rule and build a South Slav state.
The killing handed Vienna a pretext. Exactly one month later, on July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, dragging Europe’s rival alliances into the conflict.
The assassination “triggered a chain of events which led directly to the outbreak of the First World War.”
Within weeks, a regional quarrel had become a continental war that would kill millions.
Sources & references
3 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 3 independent sources.
