In this episode we keep following the downward spiral into violence in the years after 1910. There was the violence of the Suffragettes and the brutal treatment handed out to them in return. There was the growing threat of violence as opposing sides armed in Ireland, and some initial outbreaks of actual violence. Meanwhile, though, real violence was shaking the other end of the European continent, when war broke out in the great tinderbox, right down to the present day, of the Balkans. And not just one war but two, as the four nations that first fought Turkey (the Ottoman empire) fell out with each other over the division of the spoils.

That all led to increasingly hostile relations between Serbia, one of the new independent Balkan states, and Austria Hungary, which had major Balkan holdings, including right next to Serbia.

We’ve seen the regular three-yearly crises that afflicted Europe, from Tangier in 1905, to Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia in 1908, to the Agadir crisis in 1911. Now the fourth one came along, on 28 June 1914, when a Bosnian Serb assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, then an Austro-Hungarian province.

I think we all know what that triggered…

Illustration: Aftermath of carnage: the scene of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Public Domain

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.