Bloody Road to Sarajevo

At the end of July 1914, Franz Joseph I signed the manifesto To My Peoples, which served as a prelude to the four-year inferno of the World War. At that moment, he could reflect on his more than sixty-five-year reign (1848–1916), during which the final act of the Habsburg throne's destiny began to unfold. Franz Joseph was not the idyllic ruler that admirers of Austro-Hungarian history portray, nor was he the caricatured "Old Man Procházka" that many readers know from Hašek's Švejk. The inhabitants of "waltzing Europe" in the latter half of the long 19th century experienced wars and personal tragedies, which did not spare the noble ruling families. Franz Joseph could rightfully sigh that he had been spared nothing. At the beginning of 1853, his life was threatened by an assassination attempt carried out by the Hungarian tailor's apprentice János Libényi; his younger brother Ferdinand Maximilian's life ended before the rifle barrels of Mexican republicans (1867); the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Rudolf, committed suicide under scandalous circumstances (1889); and Empress Elisabeth (Sissi) was murdered by an Italian anarchist (1898). His murderous attack was just one link in a long chain of assassinations of crowned heads and prominent politicians that paved the way to Sarajevo. The assassination in June 1914 by young Bosnians, whose victims were the heir to the Austrian (and Bohemian) throne, Franz Ferdinand d'Este, and his wife, Sophie Chotek, became the immediate signal that opened the path to the world war in which the fate of the Habsburg throne was sealed.