Sarajevo assassination
Main article: Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
On 28 June 1914, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. A group of six assassins (Cvjetko Popović, Gavrilo Princip, Muhamed Mehmedbašić, Nedeljko Čabrinović, Trifko Grabež, Vaso Čubrilović) from the nationalist groupMlada Bosna, supplied by the Black Hand, had gathered on the street where the Archduke's motorcade would pass, with the intention of assassinating the Archduke. Čabrinović threw a grenade at the car, but missed. Some nearby were injured by the blast, but Franz Ferdinand's convoy carried on. The other assassins failed to act as the cars drove past them.
About an hour later, when Franz Ferdinand was returning from a visit at the Sarajevo Hospital with those wounded in the assassination attempt, the convoy took a wrong turn into a street where, by coincidence, Princip stood. With a pistol, Princip shot and killed Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. The reaction among the people in Austria was mild, almost indifferent. As historian Zbyněk Zeman later wrote, "the event almost failed to make any impression whatsoever. On Sunday and Monday (28 and 29 June), the crowds in Vienna listened to music and drank wine, as if nothing had happened."[29][30]
Arms race
German industrial and economic power had grown greatly after unification and the foundation of the Empire in 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War. From the mid-1890s on, the government of Wilhelm II used this base to devote significant economic resources for building up the Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial German Navy), established by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, in rivalry with the British Royal Navy for world naval supremacy.[22] As a result, each nation strove to out-build the other in capital ships. With the launch ofHMS Dreadnought in 1906, the British Empire expanded on its significant advantage over its German rival.[22] The arms race between Britain and Germany eventually extended to the rest of Europe, with all the major powers devoting their industrial base to producing the equipment and weapons necessary for a pan-European conflict.[23] Between 1908 and 1913, the military spending of the European powers increased by 50%.
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