Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria - Background

Background

Further information: History of Serbia, History of Modern Serbia, and Ottoman Empire

Under the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, Austria-Hungary received the mandate to occupy and administer the Ottoman Vilayet of Bosnia while the Ottoman Empire retained official sovereignty. Under this same treaty, the Great Powers (Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, and Russian Empire) gave official recognition to the Principality of Serbia as a fully sovereign state, which four years later transformed into a kingdom under Prince Milan IV Obrenović who thus became King Milan I Obrenović. Serbia's monarchs at the time from the royal House of Obrenović that maintained close relations with Austria-Hungary were content to reign within the borders set by the treaty.

This changed in May 1903 when Serbian military officers led by Dragutin Dimitrijević stormed the Serbian Royal Palace. After a fierce battle in the dark the attackers captured General Laza Petrović, head of the Palace Guard, and forced him to reveal the hiding place of King Alexander I Obrenović and his wife Queen Draga. The King and Queen opened the door from their hiding place. The King was shot thirty times; the Queen eighteen. MacKenzie writes: "The royal corpses were then stripped and brutally sabred." The attackers threw the corpses of King Alexander and Queen Draga out of a palace window, ending any threat that loyalists would mount a counterattack." General Petrović was then killed too (Vojislav Tankosić organized the murders of Queen Draga's brothers; Dimitrijević and Tankosić in 1913–1914 figure prominently in the plot to assassinate Franz Ferdinand). The conspirators installed Peter I of the House of Karađorđević as the new king.

The new dynasty was more nationalistic, friendlier to Russia and less friendly to Austria-Hungary. Over the next decade, disputes between Serbia and its neighbors erupted as Serbia moved to build its power and gradually reclaim its 14th-century empire. These conflicts included a customs dispute with Austria-Hungary beginning in 1906 (commonly referred to as the "Pig War"), the Bosnian crisis of 1908–1909 in which Serbia assumed an attitude of protest over Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (ending in Serbian acquiescence without compensation in March 1909), and finally the two Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 in which Serbia conquered Macedonia and Kosovo from the Ottoman Empire.

Serbia's military successes and Serbian outrage over the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina emboldened nationalistic elements in Serbia and Serbs in Austria-Hungary who chafed under Austro-Hungarian rule and whose nationalist sentiments were stirred by Serbian "cultural" organizations. In the five years leading up to 1914, lone assassins – mostly Serbian citizens of Austria-Hungary – made a series of unsuccessful assassination attempts in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina against Austro-Hungarian officials. The assassins received sporadic support from Serbia.

On 15 June 1910 Bogdan Žerajić attempted to kill the iron-fisted Governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, general Marijan Varešanin. Žerajić was a 22-year-old Orthodox Serb from Nevesinje, Herzegovina, who made frequent trips to Belgrade. (General Verešanin went on to crush the last Bosnian peasant uprising in the second half of 1910.) The five bullets Žerajić fired at Verešanin and the fatal bullet he put in his own brain made Žerajić an inspiration to future Serbian assassins, including Princip and Princip's accomplice Čabrinović. Princip said that Žerajić "was my first model. When I was seventeen I passed whole nights at his grave, reflecting on our wretched condition and thinking of him. It is there that I made up my mind sooner or later to perpetrate an outrage."

In 1913, Emperor Franz Joseph commanded Archduke Franz Ferdinand to observe the military maneuvers in Bosnia scheduled for June 1914. Following the maneuvers Ferdinand and his wife planned to visit Sarajevo to open the state museum in its new premises there. Duchess Sophie, according to their oldest son, Duke Maximilian, accompanied her husband out of fear for his safety.

As a "Czech countess was treated as a commoner at the Austrian court". Emperor Franz Joseph had only consented to their marriage on the condition that their descendants would never ascend the throne. The 14th anniversary of the morganatic oath fell on 28 June. As historian A. J. P. Taylor observes:

could never share rank … could never share his splendours, could never even sit by his side on any public occasion. There was one loophole … his wife could enjoy the recognition of his rank when he was acting in a military capacity. Hence, he decided, in 1914, to inspect the army in Bosnia. There, at its capital Sarajevo, the Archduke and his wife could ride in an open carriage side by side … Thus, for love, did the Archduke go to his death.

Franz Ferdinand was an advocate of increased federalism and widely believed to favor trialism, under which Austria-Hungary would be reorganized by combining the Slavic lands within the Austro-Hungarian empire into a third crown. A Slavic kingdom could have been a bulwark against Serb irredentism and Franz Ferdinand was therefore perceived as a threat by those same irredentists. Princip later stated to the court that preventing Franz Ferdinand's planned reforms was one of his motivations. The day of the assassination, 28 June, is 15 June in the Julian calendar, the feast of St. Vitus. In Serbia, it is called Vidovdan and commemorates the 1389 Battle of Kosovo against the Ottomans, at which the Sultan was assassinated in his tent by a Serb; it is an occasion for Serbian patriotic observances.