On 28 June 1914 a teenage Bosnian Serb shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife on a Sarajevo street. Five weeks later, most of Europe was at war. Who was the heir he killed?
Franz Ferdinand was Emperor Franz Joseph's nephew and his designated heir after the older man's only son had killed himself at Mayerling in 1889 — that was Crown Prince Rudolf. Karl I was Franz Ferdinand's nephew and became the last Habsburg emperor in 1916. Otto, Karl's son, was born in 1912 and was technically still in the line of succession in 2007, when he renounced it. Franz Ferdinand was the unlucky one.
Read the full facts →World War I was a global war fought from 1914 to 1918, primarily between the Allied Powers (France, Britain, Russia, Italy, the United States and others) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria). It killed approximately 20 million people and reshaped the political map of Europe and the Middle East.
Related questions
- World War One started after the assassination of a specific person in a specific city. Who, and where?
- Whose assassination triggered the start of World War I?
- What treaty formally ended World War I between the Allied Powers and Germany?
- How old was Gavrilo Princip when he shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914?