archduke franz ferdinand of austria drawing assasination

After all, it was an age of successful attacks on high-profile targets, which had included a Russian czar, an Austrian empress, an Italian king, two prime ministers of Spain and an American president. Oddly, the immediate reaction to the assassination was muted. Within weeks, Europe's great powers would be at war, soon drawing in the rest of the globe and ultimately remaking the world order in ways that echo to this day. Instead the boy was going to kill the Archduke and his wife that day in Sarajevo, and the world was never going to be the same. Or he might have emigrated to North America, as so many from the Balkans did in the years before 1914. He might have become a teacher or perhaps a minor functionary in the Austrian empire.

The boy was clever and at first did well in school. In time, he sent for young Gavrilo and paid for his education. Change was coming, though, and an older brother left the farm and got a job near Sarajevo. Life was hard and six of his siblings died in childhood. Gavrilo Princip was born into a Serb peasant family in an obscure village in western Bosnia. When his aging uncle Emperor Franz Joseph died, he would inherit so many titles that the Austrians would have simply put 'etc.' after the first several. The first was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, a centuries-old empire that included most of central Europe. The younger had no fixed address but moved from one humble boarding house to another, sleeping on friends' floors when he was particularly hard up. The older man was surrounded by luxury and deference he owned palaces, castles, hunting lodges, art works. One was stout, middle-aged and powerful the other undernourished, barely out of his teens and a non-entity. On a summer day 100 years ago today, two men crossed paths in Sarajevo.

Archduke franz ferdinand of austria drawing assasination