Kathleen E.’s Reviews > The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Romance that Changed the World > Status Update

"Delivered to the Austrian Embassy in Belgrade shortly before the 6:00 PM deadline on July 25, the Serbian reply was a masterpiece of equivocations. History has usually portrayed it as a near-capitulation, asserting that Serbia agreed to all but two points. In fact, as Fromkin points out, 'historians no longer believe that.'"

"The trio shared remarkably similar backgrounds and ideas. Born Bosnian Serbs, they had all unwillingly become Austrian citizens after the 1908 annexation. All were nineteen; though born Orthodox, none practiced their faith — indeed, Principe was an avowed atheist. They were not members of Dimitrijević's organization but rather identified themselves as part of Mlada Bosna [...] an offshoot of the Black Hand..."

"....One Croat tried to kill Archduke Leopold Salvator during a spring 1914 visit to Zagreb; another student armed with a revolver was arrested boarding a train to Vienna. His target was Franz Ferdinand, 'the enemy of all South Slavs,' he said, 'and I wished to eliminate this garbage which is hampering our national aspirations."

"Franz Ferdinand had reason to avoid Bosnian crowds. In 1910, a student named Bogdan Žerajić had tried to kill the Austrian governor general of Bosnia and Herzegovina. [...] Two years later, an assassin with ties to the Black Hand in Serbia killed the Croatian secretary of education, and in August 1913 the governor general of Croatia was shot and wounded as he left a church..."

"Belgrade had friendly relations with Vienna, thanks in large part to the pro-Habsburg policies of its ruling Obrenović dynasty [...]. This changed in the early morning hours of June 11, 1903, when a group of officers led by Captain Dragutin Dimitrijević, stormed the royal palace in Belgrade. King Alexander was deeply unpopular, and his marriage to his mistress Draga Masin [...led] to a swirl of scandalous rumors..."

"On October 6, 1908, when Austria-Hungary annexed the neighboring provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was the culmination of a long and unhappy struggle for European primacy in the Balkans. Things had begun thirty years earlier, when Tsar Alexander II had gone to war with the Ottoman Empire. The Treaty of Berlin [...established the] Kingdom of Serbia but also granted semiautomony to [...] Bosnia and Herzegovina."

"This became known as the 'Pact of Konopischt.' During the meeting, [journalist Henry Wickham Steed] insisted, kaiser and archduke had agreed to carve up much of the European continent into spheres of influence between hem. According to this story, the end of their planned war would see Franz Ferdinand's son Max crowned as king of an independent Poland, and Ernst crowned as king of Hungary, Bohemia, and Serbia."

"Franz Ferdinand's most public political alliance also became the most controversial. He greatly admired Karl Lueger, Vienna's popular mayor, whose calls to nationalism and overt anti-Semitism found favor among many in the city, including a young Adolf Hitler."

"On September 10, an Italian anarchist stabbed the reclusive Empress Elizabeth to death as she strolled the shores of Lake Geneva. 'No one,' Franz Josef cried in anguish, ' will ever know how much I lover her.'"

"Medical exile soon gave way to familial expediency in May 1896. While traveling with his family in Palestine after their visit to Franz Ferdinand in Egypt, Karl Ludwig was apparently overcome by religious ecstasy. Ignoring warnings, he drank polluted water from the River Jordan; by the time he had returned to Vienna, typhoid had set in."