It was chauffeur Leopold Lojka’s unfamiliarity with the new route that led him to take a wrong turn and, confused, pull to a halt just six feet from the gunman.Īrchduke Franz Ferdinand was victim of the most momentous political assassination of the 20th century.įor the archduke to be presented, as a stationary target, to the one man in a crowd of thousands still determined to kill him was a remarkable stroke of bad luck, but even then, the odds still favored Franz Ferdinand’s survival. It was Franz Ferdinand’s impulsive decision, later in the day, to visit them there-a decision none of his assassins could have predicted-that took him directly past the spot where his assassin, Gavrilo Princip, was standing. That bomb injured several members of the imperial entourage, and those men were taken to the hospital. The appalling combination of implausible circumstance that resulted in assassination is one Franz Ferdinand had survived an earlier attempt to kill him on the fateful day, emerging unscathed from the explosion of a bomb that bounced off the folded roof of his convertible and exploded under a car following behind him in his motorcade.
Seen from the historian’s perspective, though, even the most familiar of the events of that day have interesting aspects that often go unremarked.
To say that all this is well-known is an understatement-I have dealt with one of the stranger aspects of the story before in Past Imperfect. Taylor famously described as “ war by timetable,” Europe slid inexorably into the horrors of the First World War as the rival Great Powers began to mobilize against one another. All of this was quite enough to provoke Austria-Hungary into declaring war on Serbia, after which, with the awful inevitability that A.J.P.
The guns and bombs they used to kill the archduke, meanwhile, were supplied by the infamous “ Colonel Apis,” head of Serbian military intelligence. The archduke was heir to the throne of the tottering Austro-Hungarian empire his killers-a motley band of amateurish students-were Serbian nationalists (or possibly Yugoslav nationalists historians remain divided on the topic) who wanted to turn Austrian-controlled Bosnia into a part of a new Slav state. It’s hard to think of another event in the troubled 20th century that had quite the shattering impact of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.
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