Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria

On June 28, 1914, nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, along with his wife Sophie in Sarajevo. Backed by the Serbian nationalist society known as the Black Hand, Princip intended to liberate South Slavs from Habsburg rule. Instead, the assassination triggered the July Crisis, locking European powers into their mutual defense treaties. Within five weeks, World War I began. The four-year catastrophe cost over twenty million lives, caused the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, and Ottoman empires, and fundamentally redrew the political map of the twentieth century.