However, with the threat of Russian intervention looming and its army unprepared for a large-scale war, it required Germany's help to back up its words with force. In order to maintain its credibility as a force in the Balkan region (let alone its status as a great power), Austria-Hungary needed to enforce its authority in the face of such an insolent crime. The archduke and his wife were rushed away to seek medical attention, but both died within the hour. He then turned the gun on himself but was tackled by a mob of bystanders who restrained him until the police arrived. Seeing his chance, Princip fired into the car, shooting Franz Ferdinand and Sophie at point-blank range. Later that day, the imperial car took a wrong turn near where Princip happened to be standing.
The royal couple was touring the city in an open car, with surprisingly little security one of the nationalists threw a bomb at their car, but it rolled off the back of the vehicle, wounding an army officer and some bystanders. When 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip and his fellow members of the nationalist Young Bosnia movement learned of the archduke's planned visit, they took action: Supplied with weapons by a Serbian terrorist organization called the Black Hand, Princip and his cohorts traveled to Sarajevo in time for the archduke's visit. Two weeks later, on June 28, Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were in Sarajevo to inspect the imperial armed forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
This Triple Entente squared off against the German-Austro-Hungarian alliance meant that any regional conflict had the potential to turn into a general European war.Īustrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a great friend of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, met with him in mid-June 1914 to discuss the tense situation in the Balkans. Meanwhile, Russia had entered into an alliance with France-angry over German annexation of their lands in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71-and Great Britain, whose legendary naval dominance was threatened by Germany's growing navy. Upstart Serbia then doubled its territory in back-to-back Balkan wars (19), further threatening Austro-Hungarian supremacy in the region. This grab for territory and control angered the independent Balkan nation of Serbia-who considered Bosnia a Serb homeland-as well as Slavic Russia.
The slumping Austria-Hungary-in which small minorities (Germans in Austria, Magyars in Hungary) attempted to control large populations of restless Slavs-worried for its future as a great power, and in 1908 it annexed the twin Balkan provinces of Bosnia-Herzogovina. Order in the region depended on the cooperation of two competing powers, Russia and Austria-Hungary. The Balkan Peninsula, in southeastern Europe, was a particularly tumultuous region: Formerly under the control of the Ottoman Empire, its status was uncertain by the late 1800s, as the weakened Turks continued their slow withdrawal from Europe. By 1914, however, a multitude of forces was threatening to tear it apart. Almost exactly a century before, a meeting of the European states at the Congress of Vienna had established an international order and balance of power that lasted for almost a century.
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