An Assassination in Sarajevo Sets Europe on the Road to War

On the morning of 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, arrived in Sarajevo alongside his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. The imperial couple traveled in an open car along the city riverfront, after the archduke had inspected army maneuvers in Bosnia. Security along the route remained minimal and was left largely to local police rather than army troops. Six young assassins, coordinated in Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb schoolteacher Danilo Ilić, waited among the onlookers along the Appel Quay. They aimed to end Habsburg rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina and promote the unification of South Slavs into a shared state.

The plot almost collapsed during the morning procession. One conspirator, Nedeljko Čabrinović, threw a hand grenade at the imperial automobile. The device bounced off the folded vehicle cover and detonated beneath the following carriage, leaving a crater in the street and wounding officers in that car and a number of bystanders. Čabrinović swallowed a cyanide pill and jumped into the shallow Miljacka River, but the poison merely sickened him, and onlookers beat him before police took him into custody. Several other conspirators stationed along the quay failed to discharge their weapons as the remaining cars accelerated toward the Sarajevo Town Hall, where an unsettled archduke publicly reprimanded the local mayor before attending the official reception.