Towns have been bombarbed in the Society Islands and battles have been fought in all the oceans, from the extremity of South America to the Malay Peninsula, from the heart of Africa to the coast of China. Those two shots brought the world to arms, and the war that followed has brought devastation upon three continents and profoundly affected two others, and the tocsin has sounded in the remotest islands of the sea. The Times described the war’s impact in an article one year after Ferdinand was murdered. What became known as the Great War, or later World War I, would prove to be more devastating than any that had come before. Soon Europe, and much of the world, spiraled into war as one country after another, enmeshed in a web of previously established alliances, took sides - either with the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary and their allies) or the Allies (France, Britain, Russia and others, including, eventually, the United States). He gave up his future children’s claim to the Hapsburg throne to marry the countess, who was of lower station and of whom his uncle, the emperor, Franz Joseph, disapproved.Īfter the assassination Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Such courage, or perhaps obstinacy, was typical for Ferdinand. (Many contemporary accounts say the bomb actually bounced off the car.) He was traveling to visit people injured in that blast when he was killed. Ferdinand was aware of the danger - earlier that day he had deflected a bomb hurled at him by another would-be assassin, The Times reported. Princip, a Serbian nationalist enraged by the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Austro-Hungarian empire, had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, presumptive heir to that empire’s throne, and his wife, the duchess of Hohenberg, as they rode in a motorcade. On June 28, 1914, an 18-year-old student named Gavrilo Princip fired a pistol in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and changed the world.
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