The moment when the Austrian archdukes, following the first attempt against their lives, arrived at the City Council (of Sarajevo), where they were received by the mayor and the municipal corporation

Prince Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and hsi wife,were assassinated in Sarajevo. The Archduke had been on a visit to Bosnia. The assassin was a Serbian nationalist whose co-conspirators were in Belgrade. The Serbians wanted to detach Bosnia from the Austro- Hungarian Empire.

Archduke Frans Ferdinand was the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was also the inspector general of the army. As inspector General decided to visit Sarajevo, the capital of the province of Bosnia. He had been warned that visiting Sarajevo might be dangerous. On June 28, 1914, Ferdinand and his wife visited City Hall, there a bomb was thrown the car. They were unijured, but one officer was hurt. They continued with the visit, and a second bomb was thrown, but this one did not explode. The car made a wrong turn and intersected with Gavrilo Princip, who was the third member of a group that wished to assassinate Ferdinand. He’s saw his opportunity and took out his pistol and fired two shots. One was fatal for Ferdinand and the second for his wife.

Princip was not representing the Serbian government; instead, he was part of a dissident group that opposed the government. Ultimately that made little difference, for it was a Serbian that killed the Archduke and future leader of Austria Hungary. The world was shocked by the assassination, which was not the first assassination to take place in the Balkans during this period. In the British House of Commons, Prime Minister HH Asquith described the killing, “ One of those incredible crimes which almost makes us despair of the progress of mankind.”

Despite the shock of the assassination, nobody could’ve predicted how this one assassination would lead to a World War that would change the world forever.