“Anything that moved, he was ready to shoot,” said Lebow. Tigers in India, kangaroos, emus and wallabies in Australia and stag and deer in the forests of Austria all met their demise at the end of the archduke’s rifle. Cohen says that this readiness to dismiss the vulnerable nephew as a viable heir planted in him a seed of resentment toward the Habsburg Imperial Court (one that would grow). The coterie who surrounded the emperor - his uncle, Franz Joseph - at one time assumed that Franz Ferdinand would not live to inherit the throne. A whirlwind tour of the Mediterranean, a voyage to Asia and a sightseeing cruise down the Nile all helped to dampen the disease until his lungs healed for good in the late 1890s. The upside of weak lungs? He was sent all over the world for treatment.
Many said this was due to his mother, Princess Maria Annunciata, who died of the disease at age 28. He had bad lungsįranz Ferdinand suffered bouts of tuberculosis during his 20s and early 30s. Cohen is a history professor and director of the Center for Austrian Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Geoffrey Wawro is the author of “A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire” and Richard Ned Lebow is the author of “Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! A World Without World War I.” We also drew from the book “Archduke of Sarajevo: The Romance and Tragedy of Franz Ferdinand of Austria” by Gordon Brook-Shepherd. So who was Franz Ferdinand? We asked three experts who have studied that era.
The killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand would trigger one of the most brutal wars in modern history, eventually pulling in the Russian Empire, Germany, France, Italy, China, the U.S., Japan and beyond into World War I. One month later, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. One hundred years ago, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire and his wife were assassinated by a gunman during a drive through Sarajevo.
0 kommentar(er)
