The great Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, the man who takes credit for the unification of Germany in 1871, once said “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” It went as he predicted and how right he was. On August 1, 1914, four days after Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, two more great European powers—Russia and Germany—declare war on each other; the same day, France ordered a general mobilization. This event is widely acknowledged to have sparked the outbreak of World War I on July 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was shot to death with his wife by the Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo. Following the assination, …show more content…
Though Serbia accepted all but two of the ultimatum’s terms, and Russia declared its intention to back Serbia in the case of such a conflict, Austria-Hungary went ahead with its war declaration against Serbia on July 28, one month after the assassinations. June 28 was Franz Ferdinand’s wedding anniversary, but now we know it as the last straw that allowed WWI to occur. His beloved wife, Sophie, a former lady-in-waiting, was denied royal status in Austria due to her birth as a poor Czech aristocrat In Bosnia, however, due to its limbo status as an annexed territory, Sophie could appear beside him at official proceedings. On June 28, 1914, then, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were touring Sarajevo in an open car, with minanume little security, when Serbian nationalist Nedjelko Cabrinovic threw a bomb at their car; it rolled off the back of the vehicle and wounded an officer and some bystanders. Later that day, on the way to visit the injured officer, the archduke’s procession took a wrong turn where one of Cabrinovic’s cohorts, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, happened to be