Unless you slept through all of your history classes, you all know that WWI was started when a Serbian nationalist assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Less well-known are [url=http://allkindsofhistory.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/curses-archduke-franz-ferdinand-and-his-astounding-death-car/]the circumstances[/url] that resulted in the shooting: [quote] To say that all this is well-known is a bit of an understatement. Seen from the Fortean perspective, however, the events of that day in Sarajevo have interesting aspects that often go unremarked. The appalling combination of implausible circumstance that resulted in assassination is one; Franz Ferdinand had survived an earlier attempt to kill him on the fateful day, emerging unscathed from the explosion of a bomb that bounced off the folded hood of the his convertible and exploded under a car following behind him in his motorcade. That bomb injured several members of the Imperial entourage, and these men were taken to hospital. It was Franz Ferdinand's impulsive decision, later in the day, to visit the wounded in hospital - a decision none of his assassins could possibly have predicted - that took him directly past the spot where Gavrilo Princip, the man who actually killed him, had decided pretty much at random to position himself. It was chauffeur Leopold Lojka's unfamiliarity with the new route that led him to take a wrong turning and, confused, pull to a halt just six feet from Princip himself. For the Archduke to be presented, as a stationary target, to the one man in a crowd of thousands still determined to kill him was a remarkable example of sheer bad luck, but, even then, the odds still favoured Franz Ferdinand's survival. Princip (seen in the photo at the head of this entry being manhandled away just after the shooting) was so hemmed in by the crowd that he was unable to pull out and prime the bomb he was carrying. Instead, he was forced to resort to his pistol, but failed to actually aim it. According to his own later testimony, Princip confessed: "Where I aimed I do not know," adding that he had raised his gun "against the automobile without aiming. I even turned my head as I shot." Even allowing for the point-blank range, it is pretty striking, given these circumstances, that the killer fired just two bullets, and yet one struck Franz Ferdinand's wife, Sophie - who was sitting alongside him - while the other hit the heir to the throne. It is absolutely astonishing that both rounds proved almost immediately fatal. Sophie was hit in the stomach, and her husband in the neck, the bullet severing his jugular vein. There was nothing any doctor could have done to save either of them. [David James Smith, [i]One Morning in Sarajevo: 28 June 1914[/i] (London, 2008) pp.182-3, 187-90][/quote] TL;DR: The assassination planned for that day was foiled. However, members of his entourage were injured. The archduke decided to go visit them in the hospital. By complete chance, his car happened to come to a stop in a crowd of people directly next to one of the assassins. Had Ferdinand not been concerned for the well-being of his entourage, he never would have gone down that street, not been shot, and it's likely WWI would not have started (at least it would have been delayed until a later time, after a successful assassination). Thoughts?