Archduke Franz Ferdinand's sudden end and the start of the First World War

It makes a dramatic story. Young Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip shoots the Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo. And in a few weeks the First World War had broken out with all its enormous consequences.

It’s true that this assassination became the nominal cause for Emperor Franz Joseph’s declaration of war against Serbia which was the beginning of the actual military conflict. “Princip’s act gave Austria-Hungary the excuse that it had sought for opening hostilities against Serbia and thus precipitated World War I.”¹

This is a version of that view²:

But the assassination was an excuse, not the reason:

Paul Miller-Melamed argues:

The Sarajevo assassination did not “shock” the world. Nor was it a “flashbulb event” that imprinted itself on the minds and memories of all contemporaries. On the contrary, countless first-hand accounts support the relative apathy and indifference that greeted the murder—a tragedy, certainly, but not one which, as British undersecretary of state Sir Arthur Nicolson wrote eerily to his ambassador in St. Petersburg, would “lead to further complications.” What “changed everything” was not a Bosnian assassin’s poorly aimed bullets, but the historical misfire by Europe’s Great Powers, which first came to light with Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum to Serbia on 23 July 1914. By then, the Sarajevo assassination was slipping from memory—this was an age, after all, in which political murder was all too common; or, as one American newspaper casually put it, there were other Austrian heirs to replace the Archduke. But Austria-Hungary had had enough of Serbian irredentism, despite the fact that its investigators found no evidence whatsoever of Belgrade’s collusion in the Sarajevo conspiracy. And Franz Ferdinand’s final words about his fatal wound—“it’s nothing”—would never seem more ironic than when the “first shots of the First World War” were fired—not in the Bosnian capital on 28 June 1914, as myth has it, but by Austrian gunboats against Belgrade a full month later.³ [my emphasis]

1. Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica (2023). Gavrilo Princip. Encyclopedia Britannica, 24 Apr. 2023, <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gavrilo-Princip> (Accessed 20 June 2023).

2. 1914 RARE Footage of Arch Duke Ferdinand, right before his Assassination which Started World War 1. AdamZ YouTube channel 12/29/2021. (Accessed: 2023-20-06).

3. Miller-Melamed, Paul (2022): Almost “nothing”: why did the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand lead to war? OUPblog 06/24/2022. <https://blog.oup.com/2022/06/the-sarajevo-assassination-in-historical-context/> (Accessed 20 June 2023).