Countdown to war: How a diplomatic crisis in the Balkans led to a Europe-wide conflagration

FROM 28 JUNE 1914 TO 4 AUGUST 1914 28 June – Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, having met his good friend Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany just weeks previously to discuss the tense situation in the Balkans, is assassinated in Sarajevo along with his wife, Sophie. The killer is a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, a member of a violent Serbian nationalist group. Princip tries to kill himself immediately after the assassination but is restrained by bystanders and later arrested. The event inflames the very regional tensions that had so concerned the murdered Archduke. Austria-Hungary resolves to use the royal murder as an