On 28 June 1914 a teenage Bosnian Serb shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife on a Sarajevo street. Five weeks later, most of Europe was at war. Who was the heir he killed?
Franz Ferdinand was Emperor Franz Joseph's nephew and his designated heir after the older man's only son had killed himself at Mayerling in 1889 — that was Crown Prince Rudolf. Karl I was Franz Ferdinand's nephew and became the last Habsburg emperor in 1916. Otto, Karl's son, was born in 1912 and was technically still in the line of succession in 2007, when he renounced it. Franz Ferdinand was the unlucky one.
Read the full facts →World War I was a global war fought from 1914 to 1918, primarily between the Allied Powers (France, Britain, Russia, Italy, the United States and others) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria). It killed approximately 20 million people and reshaped the political map of Europe and the Middle East.
Related questions
- Whose assassination triggered the start of World War I?
- What treaty formally ended World War I between the Allied Powers and Germany?
- In September 31 BC two Roman generals fought a naval battle off western Greece that decided whether Rome would be ruled by a republic or by a single man. The losers fled to Egypt and killed themselves the following summer. Who won the battle?
- The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico in 1519 with about 500 men, sixteen horses, and a few small cannons. The Aztec capital Tenochtitlán — one of the largest cities in the world at the time — fell to him roughly two years later. Specifically when?