Click on image for a better view:

Rare photograph of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, assassinated at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Wear as shown, see photo of the back below.

$495.00 plus shipping

"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, was shot to death along with his wife by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June 28, 1914."

"On June 28, 1914, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were touring Sarajevo in an open car, with surprisingly little security, when Serbian nationalist Nedjelko Cabrinovic threw a bomb at their car; it rolled off the back of the vehicle and wounded an officer and some bystanders.

Later that day, on the way to visit the injured officer, the archduke’s procession took a wrong turn at the junction of Appel Quay and Franzjosefstrasse, where one of Cabrinovic’s cohorts, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, happened to be loitering.

Seeing his opportunity, Princip fired into the car, shooting Franz Ferdinand and Sophie at point-blank range. Princip then turned the gun on himself but was prevented from shooting it by a bystander who threw himself upon the young assassin. A mob of angry onlookers attacked Princip, who fought back and was subsequently wrestled away by the police. Meanwhile, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie lay fatally wounded in their limousine as they rushed to seek help; they both died within the hour....His last words after being shot in the neck were to his wife, who was hit in the stomach by a stray second shot. They were: “Sophie! Sophie! Don’t die! Live for our children!“.

He was asked about his condition on the way to the hospital and kept saying “It’s nothing. It’s nothing“, over and over. Sophie died there in the car and he followed 10 minutes after arriving at the hospital.

The assassination of Franz-Ferdinand and Sophie set off a rapid chain of events: Austria-Hungary, like many in countries around the world, blamed the Serbian government for the attack and hoped to use the incident as justification for settling the question of Slav nationalism once and for all..."