Two Shots in Sarajevo: The Assassination That Ignited World War I
On June 28, 1914, a 19-year-old student fired two shots in Sarajevo that killed an archduke and set the world on the road to war.
The driver took a wrong turn, and the twentieth century turned with it.
On the morning of Sunday, June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, arrived in Sarajevo with his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, for an official visit. It was the anniversary of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, a day of deep meaning for the region's Serbs, and the archduke's security was thin. The motorcade route had been published in the newspapers, and seven young Bosnian nationalists from a group called Young Bosnia, armed by the Serbian secret society known as the Black Hand, were waiting along it.
The first attempt came at about 10:10 a.m. As the open cars rolled along the Appel Quay beside the Miljacka River, conspirator Nedeljko Cabrinovic hurled a grenade at the archduke's car. It bounced off the folded roof, exploded beneath the following vehicle, and wounded two army officers and several bystanders. The archduke was unhurt, and after attending the reception at Sarajevo's town hall — where he told his hosts they welcomed their guests with bombs — the couple decided to visit the hospital to see the wounded officers.
Their driver had not been told of the change in plans. He followed the original route and turned onto Franz Josef Street by mistake. When he tried to reverse, the car stalled — directly in front of 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, one of the conspirators, who happened to be standing on the corner. Princip stepped forward and fired two shots from his pistol. One struck the archduke in the neck; the other hit Sophie in the abdomen. Both were mortally wounded, and both died that day.
Princip was seized on the spot, and Cabrinovic was caught after fleeing the bombing. That October, the two were tried alongside more than twenty accomplices and convicted of high treason. Both were too young for the death penalty and received twenty years of hard labor instead. Cabrinovic died in prison in 1916; Princip in 1918.
Exactly one month after the shooting, on July 28, 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Alliances cascaded like dominoes across Europe, and within weeks the continent was at war — a war that would kill some 16 million people, topple empires, and redraw the map of the world. Two shots fired in front of a stalled car in Sarajevo remain the most consequential gunshots of the twentieth century.
Photo: Unknown photographer, 1914 — CC0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
