43.9°N 18.4°E Balkans Assassination at Sarajevo
Briefing
On 28 June 1914 the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie. Within six weeks the alliance system dragged Europe's great powers into general war — turning a political murder in the Balkans into a catastrophe that would kill some seventeen million people.
Books Covering This Event (4)
Popular History
A day-by-day narrative of the war's first month, from the funeral of Edward VII to the Marne.
A single-volume military history of the entire war by the most influential military historian of the 20th century.
A global history of the war that ranges far beyond the Western Front to Africa, the Middle East, and the seas.
The War in Books: Sarajevo
Two shots, five weeks, and a century of argument about who was to blame.
The murder itself takes only a page to tell. The hard part, and the reason the books on Sarajevo keep coming, is explaining how the death of one archduke became a war that killed millions. For decades the question was framed as a verdict: which government was guilty? Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, published in 2012, changed the terms. It treats the July Crisis as a chain of decisions made by capable, anxious men in several capitals, each of them reading the others badly, and it declines to hand the blame to any one of them.
Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August comes at the same summer from the other end. Where Clark is forensic, Tuchman is dramatic: her book is about the plans, the personalities and the momentum once the mobilisation orders went out. Clark’s is the better guide to why it happened, Tuchman’s to what it felt like when it could no longer be stopped. Readers who want the argument should start with The Sleepwalkers, and those who want the story should start with The Guns of August. Taken in that order, they make a single narrative of how a political assassination in the Balkans ended the world that produced it.