Few if any assassinations have had a greater impact than did the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo by Serbian Black Hand assassins. It set in motion a chain of events that triggered World War I, which ended one era and ushered in a new one. Incredibly, as seen below, such a monumental event came about at the end of a comedy of errors, in which various assassins tried but failed to kill Ferdinand.
A Comedy of Errors
The first Black assassin to have a go at the Austrian archduke threw a bomb that didn’t harm its target. He then attempted to commit suicide by swallowing cyanide that had expired, and finally tried to drown himself in a river that was only inches deep. Fate eventually intervened, however, when the royal’s convertible took a wrong turn that brought it within a few feet of Gavrilo Princep, an assassin who had given up on the affair and gone to grab a bite. Princep stepped up to the open vehicle, and fired two shots that killed the archduke and his wife.
That triggered a diplomatic dispute that morphed into a full blown crisis, and Austria eventually declared war on Serbia. Russia, as Serbia’s protector, rushed in to fight Austria. That in turn drew in Germany, Austria’s ally. So France, Russia’s ally against Germany, mobilized its army. That prompted Germany to invade France via Belgium. That in turned gave Britain a more palatable justification to join. It declared war as an outraged guarantor of Belgium’s violated sovereignty, instead of on realpolitik European balance of power considerations which would have compelled her to fight Germany anyhow.
The Assassination of Franz Ferdinand Might Have Been a Comedy of Errors, but it Had Tragic World-Changing Consequences
In the resultant war, that contemporaries called The Great War until a bigger one came along a few decades later, over seventy million men were mobilized and ten million were killed. Four empires vanished, and the global center of power shifted from the Old World to the New. A staid age of aristocracy and traditional forms of government came to an end, and a new fervent and fast paced era of democracies juxtaposed with radical ideologies and totalitarianism emerged in its place. The dispute triggered by the Black Hand’s bullets in Sarajevo irrevocably changed the world.
The Serbs did not fare well. They stood off an initial Austrian onslaught, but in 1915 the Germans joined and helped the Austrians overrun Serbia. One fifth of Serbia’s population perished during the war – the highest casualty percentage suffered by any country in WWI. Serbia’s prime minister finally had enough of the Black Hand, which had grown too powerful and too meddlesome. In 1917, its leaders were arrested and tried on trumped up charges for conspiracy to murder the Prince Regent. They were convicted, sentenced to death, and executed, and the group was outlawed.
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Some Sources & Further Reading
Hastings, Max – Catastrophe, 1914: Europe Goes to War (2014)
History Halls – The Men Who Made Ancient Athens: The Tyrant and the Democrat
ThoughtCo – The Black Hand: Serbian Terrorists Spark WWI
