Sarajevo Incident

Sarajevo Incident, assassination by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir apparent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenburg, precipitating World War I.

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, who in his capacity as Inspector General of the Austro-Hungarian Army had been attending manoeuvres in Bosnia, paid an official visit to the capital, Sarajevo, in the company of his wife. Owing to a combination of parsimony, incompetence, and friction between General Oskar Potiorek, the Governor of Bosnia, and the authorities in Vienna, security measures for the visit—a guard of gendarmes, compared with the serried ranks of troops who had lined the streets during the visit of Emperor Francis Joseph I in 1910—were lamentably inadequate. Even so, of the seven assassins who lined the Archduke's route along the Appel Quay leading from the station to the town hall, only one—Čabrinović—managed to take action; but his bomb rolled off the Archduke's car to explode near the following car, wounding some members of the archducal suite. It seemed that the plot had failed, when chance took a hand. After his reception at the town hall, the Archduke changed his plans on the spur of the moment, deciding to visit wounded soldiers in hospital before proceeding to the city museum. Fatally, this information was not conveyed to the Archduke's chauffeur, who turned right from the Appel Quay in the direction of the museum, whereupon he was ordered to stop, reverse the car, and proceed along the quay. In the confusion, Princip, who chanced to be standing disconsolately at that very street corner, found himself suddenly confronted with the stationary archducal car at point-blank range. He fired blind, and killed both the Archduke and—instead of Potiorek—the Archduke's wife. Although the Austro-Hungarian investigating authorities could find no direct connection between the assassins and the Serbian authorities, Vienna decided, with German backing, that the survival of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the ranks of the Great Powers demanded extirpation of South Slav terrorism by the reduction of Serbia to the status of an obedient satellite. This in turn seemed to St Petersburg to challenge the Great Power status of Russia as Serbia's protector, and World War I ensued.