“Despite the persistent image of a spontaneous murder in some wild, remote, and regressive country, Bosnia was a vital component of a geopolitical conundrum going back for more than a century.”

By Paul Miller-Melamed 

SHOT THROUGH THE neck, choking on his own blood with his beloved wife dying beside him, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, managed a few words before losing consciousness: “It’s nothing,” he repeatedly said of his fatal wound. It was June 28, 1914, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.

One month later, what most Europeans also took for “nothing” became “something” when the Archduke’s uncle, Emperor Franz Joseph, declared war on the Kingdom of Serbia for allegedly harbouring the criminal elements and tolerating the propaganda that prompted the assassination. The First World War—“the seminal catastrophe of the [20th] century,” as American diplomat/historian George Kennan called it—had begun not with the bang of Gavrilo Princip’s gun, but with the whimper of European statesmen unable to resolve the July [diplomatic] Crisis that ensued.

The history of the Sarajevo assassination and the origins of World War I rest on a rude irony: the vast disproportionality between a single deadly act and an act of war that would leave millions dead. Consequently, the Archduke’s murder has assumed mythic proportions—the “first shots of the First World War” fired by a “fanatic Serb nationalist” backed by the “secret” Black Hand “terrorist” society in the “primitive, violence prone Balkans.”

In Misfire, my new book on the old question of the war’s origins, I narrate the history of the Sarajevo assassination in a demythologized context. By this, I do not simply mean telling hard truths about the assassination—like the fact that, contrary to popular and even academic accounts, the Bosnian (not “Serbian”) Princip was not eating a sandwich when the Archduke just “happened” to drive up! After all, language like the “first shots of the First World War” is meant metaphorically, even if it distorts the historical record regarding the resolvable July Crisis. Rather, by embedding the events of June 28, 1914 in their complex long-term context, Misfire aims, as its title implies, to recalibrate a renowned act whose elaborations are legion—from how, when, and where it happened, to who was behind it, why they did it, and what was effected.

Gavrilo Princip himself has been subjected to several mythic interpretations, including murderous terrorist, heroic freedom fighter, degenerate criminal, pop cultural icon, and “post-pubescent hooligan.” And his alleged weapons suppliers in Serbia have been turned into the actual instigators of the “epic” intrigue—the “fanatic [Serb] terrorists” of the “ultranationalist” Black Hand “secret” society.

As for the physical setting of the Sarajevo assassination, Europe’s “dangerous” Balkan periphery seems never able to able stereotypes of its primitive, violent, and unruly essence. What else could one expect from this “savage patch” of “civilized Europe,” wrote a British historian and politician in 1935, than the deadly spark for World War I? Nearly 80 years later, another scholar depicted the murder as “a random event in an Austro-Hungarian backwater.”

Like the relentless onslaught of climate change, the global crisis of 1914 did not randomly arise in some murky Balkan “backwater” far removed from the consciousness and concerns of political elites. The Habsburg Empire, a European Great Power, became directly involved in the development of Bosnia-Herzegovina after assuming its administration from the Ottoman Empire in 1878. When the Dual Monarchy annexed the dominion in 1908, the imperial domain for which Sarajevo was capital gave rise not only to one of the most severe diplomatic crises in pre-war Europe, but also to numerous assassination plots. Despite the persistent image of a spontaneous murder in some wild, remote, and regressive country, Bosnia was a vital component of a geopolitical conundrum going back for more than a century and serious enough to earn a name—the Eastern Question, or what would become of the European lands long controlled by the waning Ottoman Empire (aka the “Sick Man of Europe”)?

Just as with the pre-war context, the intervening and all-important post-June 28 period receives appreciable attention in my book. In most narratives, the Sarajevo assassination is signalled as the “spark” for a war that was long in the making. Yet if authors are to pursue Princip’s impassioned mindset to the extent of trekking through Bosnia in his footsteps and tracking down his report card, if Franz Ferdinand’s happy marriage can by hyped as “the romance that changed the world,” if journalists can compare the Archduke’s political murder to everything from a mass murder in a Florida nightclub to Russia’s invasion of Crimea, and if scholars can analogize Sarajevo to 9/11, then it is also critical to investigate the varying convictions of the veritable decision makers. The penniless assassin inadvertently set off an international crisis, but it was a prosperous group of powerful statesmen who lit the illustrious powder keg.

Of course, the leaders of the Dual Monarchy first did their due diligence, investigating the Sarajevo murders to the greatest, and swiftest, extent possible. Yet the findings came back ambiguous: the weapons were provided by a Serbian officer and state employee; some were manufactured under Serbian license; and the Bosnian conspirators who secured the weapons and were taught how to use them in the Serbian capital of Belgrade slipped across the border and into Bosnia with the illegal assistance of Serbian customs and military intelligence officials. Otherwise, as the lead Austro-Hungarian investigator wired from Sarajevo to Vienna on July 13, there was absolutely no evidence tying official Serbia to the assassination conspiracy.

Had such a smoking gun surfaced during the July Crisis, then Russia would not likely have supported a regicidal “rogue regime,” and the Habsburg Empire would have gotten the war that the head of its armed forces, Conrad von Hötzendorf, had long wanted: a local Balkan bludgeoning of a nation-state that seemed existentially bent on breaking up the Dual Monarchy and enfolding its south Slavic peoples into an expansive Great Serbian (or Yugoslav) state. Such a so-called Third Balkan War—following close on the heels of the first two fought in 1912/1913 among the new Balkan states and the Ottoman Empire—may not have gone easily for Austria-Hungary. Despite Serbia’s smaller size and scarcer resources, its army was highly trained and battle-hardened. Nevertheless, with the other Great Powers out of the picture, it would have been a different kind of conflict altogether.

Instead, the Third Balkan War, better known as the Great War, best known as the First World War, lasted for over four years, spanned six continents, killed more than 10 million people, bankrupted all the original belligerents, and ended in an atmosphere of animus and unfinished business that would not be resolved until the still larger and deadlier Second World War had run its course by 1945. And all because the evidence linking Serbia to the Sarajevo assassination was neither weak enough for the Habsburg Empire, backed by its mighty German ally, to resist using force against the small Serbian thorn in its side; nor strong enough for Russia to risk letting its Balkan partner be assaulted into submission, or possibly obliterated altogether. Europe’s system of “entangling alliances,” Great Power contrivances, and mobilization timetables took care of the rest.

This summary of how “Sarajevo” spawned the cataclysm is examined more closely in Misfire. Yet regardless of who was responsible for the conspiracy itself—be it a “consumptive” “teenage terrorist”; the “fanatic” Serb nationalists of the “secret” Black Hand “terrorist group”; or some other stealthy party (communists, Freemasons, German agents, Habsburg subversives, and so on for conspiracists)—the leaders of Europe’s Great Powers were responsible for the Great War. It may be mentally amusing and morally assuring to ruminate on the famous “wrong” turn in Sarajevo after the failed first assassination attempt, or to overplay the role of the Black Hand “masterminds” behind the “intricate” intrigue. But the Sarajevo assassination stands out historically because of the actions taken by people living in the so-called civilized parts of Europe instead of the “barbaric” and “blood-soaked” Balkans. Had they heeded the palpable perils and swallowed their closely held principles, then history’s “most tragic news story” would have remained another political murder in an age that, unfortunately, abounded in them.

Rather than being regularly invoked as “the first victim of the First World War,” Franz Ferdinand may be remembered today for his dynastic values and political intelligence. Rather than having his footprints stamped into the “street corner that started the 20th century,” Princip may have been a footnote to history. A common statement, like Sarajevo was “arguably the most significant moment in modern history,” speaks reams as to how we grapple with this grievous past. Why is it in other words, that Princip’s precise fire has taken on such mythic proportions, when the world-historical misfire by Europe’s leading elite brought down boundless misery on humanity?

Franz Ferdinand’s final words about his fatal wound—“it’s nothing”—would never seem more ironic than when the “first shots of the First World War” were fired—not in the Bosnian capital on June 28, 1914, as legend has it, but by Austro-Hungarian gunboats on Belgrade a full month later.

Paul Miller-Melamed is the author of Misfire: The Sarajevo Assassination and the Winding Road to World War I. He teaches history at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin in Poland and McDaniel College in the United States. He is also the author of From Revolutionaries to Citizens: Antimilitarism in France, 1870-1914 and the co-editor of Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1914.