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.
