A Balkan assassination ignited a four-year world war
From late July 1914 to mid-November 1918 the Allies and Central Powers fought the Great War, killing an estimated fifteen to twenty-two million people. Gavrilo Princip's late-June Sarajevo shots against Archduke Franz Ferdinand snapped Balkan tensions that imperial rivalries and arms races had already wound tight.
Europe's balance cracked after Prussia beat France in 1870–1871 and Bismarck built a German Empire. His system aimed to isolate a vengeful France: the League of the Three Emperors in 1873, the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary in 1879, Italy's accession in 1882, and a secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1887. When Wilhelm II pushed Bismarck out in 1890 and let that treaty lapse, France secured a Russian alliance in 1894, a British entente in 1904 and, with the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, a Triple Entente.
Arms spending surged alongside. Admiral Tirpitz, a devotee of the American naval writer Alfred Thayer Mahan, built a fleet to rival the Royal Navy, but HMS Dreadnought in 1906 made every battleship obsolete and Berlin conceded the race in 1911. Money shifted to armies: Germany added 170,000 troops in 1913, France stretched conscription from two years to three, and real military budgets of the six great powers climbed by over 50% between 1908 and 1913. The Balkans, shaken by the 1908 Bosnian annexation and two Balkan Wars, earned the name "powder keg of Europe."
The fuse was lit in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Young Bosnia conspirators armed by the Serbian Black Hand lined the archduke's route; a grenade failed, but an hour later his car took a wrong turn past Gavrilo Princip, whose two shots killed Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July, Russia mobilised, Germany declared war on Russia and France, and Britain joined after Belgium was invaded.
The fighting lasted until 11 November 1918 and killed an estimated 15 to 22 million people. Verdun, the Somme and Passchendaele could not break the trench line; the United States entered in April 1917 over unrestricted submarine warfare, and Bolshevik Russia made a separate peace in March 1918. After the Hundred Days Offensive and the Kaiser's abdication on 9 November, the Paris conference of 1919–1920 disarmed Germany and redrew the map with Poland, Finland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The German biologist Ernst Haeckel had already coined "first world war" in September 1914.
Source: World War I
