100 years ago today an assassin, Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist belonging to the Black Hand (Serbia), carried out the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir presumptive, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on their visit to Sarajevo on 28th June, 1914. This event triggered the subsequent course of events that directly led to the outbreak of the Great War, World War I, but it was not the cause of it. 7 Events That Fueled World War I (h/t photo).
The History Channel recaps, Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated:
In an event that is widely acknowledged to have sparked the outbreak of World War I, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of Emperor Franz Josef and heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is shot to death along with his wife by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on this day in 1914.
The great Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, the man most responsible for the unification of Germany in 1871, was quoted as saying at the end of his life that “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” It went as he predicted.