Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria

• 1. A Coat Sewn Shut

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  Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was shot in Sarajevo wearing a coat that his own aides could not open. When they tried to loosen it, they discovered that they needed scissors. The outer lapel had been sewn to the inner front of the jacket, so that it would sit smoothly and look better to the public. Whether that obstacle cost him precious time is unclear. He was the heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his assassination is considered the most immediate cause of World War I. Yet the man himself is far less familiar than the event that ended his life. Who was he before that morning? Why did his own household resist the woman he chose to marry? And what did he actually intend to do with an empire he expected to rule?

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• 2. The Unexpected Heir

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  Franz Ferdinand was born in Graz on the 18th of December 1863, when the city was still part of the Austrian Empire. He was the eldest son of Archduke Karl Ludwig, a younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph I. His mother was Karl Ludwig's second wife, Princess Maria Annunziata of Bourbon-Two Sicilies.

  In 1875, when he was eleven years old, his cousin Francis V, Duke of Modena, died and named him heir. One condition came with the bequest: the boy had to add the name Este to his own. From the 20th of November 1875 he was styled Archduke of Austria-Este, and the inheritance made him one of the wealthiest men in Austria.

  The path to the throne itself opened through two deaths. In 1889, his cousin Crown Prince Rudolf died by suicide at his hunting lodge in Mayerling, which left Karl Ludwig first in line. Karl Ludwig died of typhoid fever in 1896, and Franz Ferdinand became heir presumptive. Not long before that, in 1892, he had left Europe on a journey that would take him around the entire planet.

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• 3. Trophies and Antiquities

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  After India, the archduke spent time in Australia hunting kangaroos and emus. His route then carried him on to Nouméa, the New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, Sarawak, Hong Kong and Japan. He crossed the Pacific from Yokohama to Vancouver aboard the RMS Empress of China. In North America he travelled by rail on the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad in a private Pullman car named Mascotte. He reached the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and stayed at the Lexington Hotel. From there he continued to New York and sailed home. The Sea Voyage Medal of 1892-1893 later recorded the trip among his honours.

  His diaries reveal a passion for hunting that was excessive even by the standards of European nobility in his day. He recorded 272,511 game kills, and 5,000 of them were deer. About 100,000 trophies were displayed at his Bohemian castle of Konopiště. The same castle was crammed with antiquities, his other great passion.

  In the autumn of 1913, Franz Ferdinand and his wife spent a week with George V and Queen Mary at Windsor Castle. They then stayed another week with the Duke of Portland at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, arriving on the 22nd of November. During a shoot on the estate, a loader fell, and both barrels of the gun he carried went off. The shot passed within a few feet of the archduke and the duke. In his memoirs, Men, Women and Things, Portland wrote that he had "often wondered whether the Great War might not have been averted, or at least postponed" had the archduke died there. Instead, the archduke would die in Sarajevo the following year.

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• 4. Sophie Chotek

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  In 1894, Franz Ferdinand met Countess Sophie Chotek, a lady-in-waiting to Archduchess Isabella. Isabella was the wife of Archduke Friedrich, Duke of Teschen. Franz began visiting Friedrich's villa in Pressburg, which is now Bratislava. When he was recovering from tuberculosis on the Adriatic island of Lošinj, Sophie wrote to him there. The two kept the relationship secret until Isabella discovered it.

  The obstacle was a rule of dynasty. To marry into the House of Habsburg, a person had to belong to a reigning or formerly reigning European dynasty, and the Choteks did not. Deeply in love, Franz Ferdinand refused to consider anyone else. In 1899, Emperor Franz Joseph finally agreed, on strict terms. The marriage would be morganatic, and their descendants would have no succession rights to the throne. Sophie would not share her husband's rank, title, precedence or privileges. She would not normally appear in public beside him, ride in the royal carriage, or sit in the royal box at the theater.

  The wedding took place on the 1st of July 1900 at Reichstadt, now Zákupy, in Bohemia. Franz Joseph did not attend. Neither did Franz Ferdinand's brothers or any other archduke. The only imperial relatives present were his stepmother, Princess Maria Theresa of Braganza, and her two daughters. Sophie received the title Princess of Hohenberg. In 1909 she became Duchess of Hohenberg, a step up that still obliged her to yield precedence to every archduchess. At court gatherings of the imperial family, she had to stand far down the line, away from her husband.

  The couple had three surviving children: Sophie, born in 1901, Maximilian, born in 1902, and Ernst, born in 1904. A son was stillborn in 1908. Those children would feature in the last words the archduke spoke to his wife.

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• 5. Army and Navy

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  By the age of fourteen, Franz Ferdinand was a lieutenant. He became a captain at twenty-two, a colonel at twenty-seven and a major general at thirty-one. Promotion came quickly, as it did for most male Habsburgs, though he never received formal staff training. He still briefly led the 9th Hussar Regiment, which was primarily Hungarian.

  In 1898, he received a commission "at the special disposition of His Majesty" to inquire into every aspect of the military services. Military agencies were ordered to share their papers with him. Even without a command, he shaped the armed forces through a military chancery that produced and received documents on military affairs. It grew to a staff of sixteen.

  His power showed in 1907, when he secured the retirement of Friedrich von Beck-Rzikowsky, the emperor's confidant and Chief of the General Staff. He personally selected the successor, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf. In 1913, he was appointed inspector general of all the armed forces, with the title Generalinspektor der gesamten bewaffneten Macht. The post outranked the one previously held by Archduke Albrecht and carried presumed command in wartime.

  He also held honorary naval rank, and he became an admiral at the close of naval maneuvers in September 1902. He was a prominent supporter of the Austro-Hungarian Navy when it was little known to the public and sea power was not a priority in foreign policy. After his death, the navy honoured him and Sophie with a lying in state aboard SMS Viribus Unitis.

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• 6. A Difficult Temperament

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  The German historian Michael Freund described Franz Ferdinand as "a man of uninspired energy, dark in appearance and emotion." Freund saw him casting a shadow of violence and recklessness. Karl Kraus, who sometimes admired him, observed that he felt no compulsion to reach out for the region the Viennese call their heart.

  Family and court felt the same edge. Emperor Franz Joseph's personal servant remembered in his memoirs that "thunder and lightning always raged when they had their discussions." As Protector of the Imperial central commission for architectural conservation, the archduke scribbled margin notes on its documents. Those commentaries and orders reveal what has been called "choleric conservatism."

  The Italian historian Leo Valiani offered a mixed portrait. He credited the prince with intellectual gifts and undoubted moral earnestness. He also wrote of an "impatient, suspicious, almost hysterical temperament," which made the archduke's commitment to his projects, and his methods, change often. Yet one idea he repeated in 1895 and again in 1913 with remarkable consistency.

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• 7. An Empire of Many Peoples

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  The idea he repeated to Baron Margutti, Franz Joseph's aide-de-camp, was that the dual system introduced in 1867 had been disastrous. When he took the throne, he said, he would restore strong central government. He believed that goal could be reached only by granting far-reaching administrative autonomy to all the nationalities of the monarchy.

  On the 1st of February 1913, he wrote to Foreign Minister Berchtold about war with Serbia. Irredentism at home, he argued, would cease immediately if the empire's Slavs were given a comfortable, fair and good life. Ten years after the archduke's death, Berchtold wrote that, had he reached the throne, he would have tried to replace the dual system with a supranational federation. In practice, Franz Ferdinand favoured greater autonomy for the Czechs in Bohemia and the south Slavs in Croatia and Bosnia, who had been left out of the Compromise of 1867.

  His feelings toward the Hungarians were far harsher. In 1904 he wrote, "The Hungarians are all rabble, regardless of whether they are minister or duke, cardinal or burgher, peasant, hussar, domestic servant, or revolutionary." He even called the Hungarian statesman István Tisza a revolutionary and a "patented traitor." Officers of the 9th Hussars, whom he commanded, reportedly angered him by speaking Hungarian, although it was the regiment's official language. He distrusted the Hungarian Honvédség, opposed giving it artillery units, and complained that Hungary would not fund the joint army.

  One account describes the basis of his political outlook as clericalism, anti-democratic views and anti-Hungarianism. In it, he is said to have held that politics is a matter only for the ruler, while the masses must obey. He also complained about the glorification of the revolutionary hero Lajos Kossuth in Hungary. He further lamented the decline of the monarchical principle and the supposed dominance there of the Freemasons and the Jewish people. Historians disagree on how to label him. Some stress liberal views on the nationalities, while others stress dynastic centralism and Catholic conservatism.

  On foreign policy, he repeatedly clashed with Conrad von Hötzendorf, the hard-line Chief of the General Staff. He warned that harsh treatment of Serbia would bring open conflict with Russia and ruin both empires. During the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, he was disappointed that Austria-Hungary did not act as a great power. He noted that even "dwarf states like Belgium and Portugal" had soldiers in China.

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• 8. Sarajevo

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  At about 10:45 on the morning of Sunday, the 28th of June 1914, the archduke and Sophie were assassinated in Sarajevo. The city was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The killer was Gavrilo Princip, who was nineteen years old. He belonged to Young Bosnia and to a group of assassins organized and armed by the Black Hand.

  Earlier that day, another Young Bosnia conspirator, Nedeljko Čabrinović, had thrown a grenade at the couple's car. The bomb exploded behind them and injured the occupants of the following car. At the Governor's residence, Franz asked, "So you welcome your guests with bombs!" After a short rest, the couple insisted on visiting the injured at the local hospital. No one told the drivers that the itinerary had changed. When the error was discovered, the cars had to reverse down the street, and the line stalled.

  Princip was sitting at a cafe across the street. He walked over and shot Sophie in the abdomen, then Franz Ferdinand in the neck. His weapon was a pocket-sized FN Model 1910 pistol chambered for the .380 ACP cartridge. It was supplied by Dragutin Dimitrijević, a Serbian Army Military Intelligence lieutenant-colonel and leader of the Black Hand.

  Joachim Remak's book Sarajevo preserves a detailed account of what followed. A thin streak of blood shot from the archduke's mouth onto the cheek of Count Harrach, who stood on the running board. Sophie cried, "For Heaven's sake! What happened to you?" and sank, her face falling between her husband's knees. Harrach and Potiorek thought she had fainted. Despite the bullet in his neck, Franz Ferdinand pleaded, "Sopherl! Sopherl! Sterbe nicht! Bleibe am Leben für unsere Kinder!" The plumed hat on his head fell, scattering green feathers over the car floor. When Harrach asked whether he was suffering badly, he answered, "Es ist nichts." It is nothing. He repeated the phrase perhaps six or seven more times, his voice growing weaker. Both he and Sophie died.

  The killings set off the July Crisis and led Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia. Four weeks after his death, the allies of Austria-Hungary and of Serbia declared war on each other, and World War I began. Historians also point to the arms race, nationalism, imperialism, German militarism and the alliance system as causes. Archduke Karl became the new heir presumptive. The emperor's daughter Marie Valerie observed that her father had placed more trust in his grandnephew. According to her, Franz Joseph confessed, "For me, it is a relief from a great worry."

  Franz Ferdinand was buried with Sophie in Artstetten Castle in Austria. A memorial was erected at the bridgehead of Latin Bridge in Sarajevo on the 28th of June 1917. Austria later minted a 10 euro coin on the 13th of October 2004 with the archduke and the castle as its main motif. Its reverse shows the entrance to the crypt of the Hohenberg family, with portraits of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie below.

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