On the hunting expeditions popular with the nobility, his killing of stags would run into the dozens.Ī combination of imperial power, political insensitivity and ego brought the royal couple to Bosnia and Sarajevo in June 1914. Yet, he was anything but a serene pacifist. The Archduke’s views about expanding autonomy to the national groups and his caution about deploying military force put him in the middle and often losing side of Vienna’s political power plays. In the protocol-obsessed court, his wife Sophie never received a proper title because she was considered insufficiently noble. The imperial capital of Vienna with its imposing Rococo architecture, was a city in cultural ferment with an intellectual class whose literary and artistic output was already anticipating decline and catastrophe, where a prosperous Jewish bourgeoisie had been governed by a virulently anti-Semitic mayor, a city that not only produced operettas and waltz music but Theodore Herzl and Sigmund Freud.Īnd now destined to take over all this was Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of the monarch and a political and personal lightening rod in the capital. That set off the chain of events that one by one would draw Russia, Germany, France and ultimately Belgium and Britain and Turkey and Italy into war. And after the assassination, these advisers pushed for an ultimatum to Serbia, accused of harboring and unleashing the killers. The losing streak of the Austrian military was unblemished by victory for nearly a century. At its head was an old man, Franz Joseph, who had been emperor since 1848, a stolid and lonely figure whose wife had been assassinated, whose son and direct heir died in a romantic suicide and who functioned more as bureaucrat-in-chief than as an assertive ruler.Īround the emperor were competing figures vying for power and influence: Hungarian grandees determined to maintain their prime standing in the Dual Monarchy, fractious deputies in a weak parliament trying to expand power for their ethnic groups, especially Czechs and Slovaks, the diplomats and military men closest to the throne always advocating tougher measures in the restive Balkans but lacking the military means or skills to carry out their schemes. Like the Ottoman Empire, the centuries old Habsburg Empire was also tottering, a sprawling multi-lingual, multi-national, multi-ethnic agglomeration that reached from Poland to Italy and that had been falling prey to nationalistic forces unleashed since the Napoleonic Wars a century before. The three decades of chaos that came after and another world war would be a grim sequel in a half century of state-organized violence and murder around the world with a toll of nearly 100 million dead on battlefields, in bombed out cities, in death camps.Īnd it began in Sarajevo, the picturesque provincial capital of the province of Bosnia, a Balkan land annexed in 1908 by the Austro-Hungarian Empire as the great powers vied to grab bits of territory from the crumbling Ottoman Empire. In the four years of conflict that followed, millions would die, millions more would be physically and psychologically maimed for life. What unfolded from June 28 to the outbreak of continental war a month later has been dissected in 25,000 books - the mistakes, the blunders, the misjudgments, the hubris, the blind march that the statesmen involved knew could produce a catastrophe for Europe, even as they lacked the skill or will to stop it. In America and Asia, the news created headlines but seemed remote from the daily cares of leaders or citizens. The German Kaiser already had begun his summer holidays on the Baltic Sea. In London, the political crisis of the moment was Irish Home Rule, in Paris a lurid trial. Perhaps yet another local war in the Balkans, but nothing more. Indeed, even as black bordered newspapers went up in windows in Vienna and news boys in London hawked their sheets with news of the distant assassination, no leader or private individual anywhere in Europe or elsewhere contemplated that this one event would produce such devastating consequences. Those fatal rounds would come to be known as the shots heard round the world, but that colorful wording compresses into one phrase a month of ultimatums and military mobilizations that would lead to a world war and to what has been described as “the primordial catastrophe of the 20th century.” The shots hurriedly fired at point-blank range from the steps of a delicatessen in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, found their royal targets, mortally wounding the heir to the throne of the Habsburg Empire and his wife.
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