Causes of World War I corrective." British Diplomat Arthur Nicolson wrote in May 1914, “Since I have been at the Foreign Office I have not seen such calm waters.” On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead, by two gun shots in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, one of a group of six assassins (five Serbs and one Bosniak) coordinated by Danilo Ilić, a Bosnian Serb and a member of the Black Hand secret society. The assassination is significant because it was perceived by Austria-Hungary as an existential challenge
Austria-Este and the present heir is Franz, Duke of Bavaria. However, Francis V had decided to retain the Este name in the Habsburg family, and left most of his huge estate to his young cousin Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, with certain conditions, one of which is that the heir and future heirs use the name of Este. The non-territorial property of the Este family thus fell to the line of Archduke Charles Louis, younger brother to then Emperor Francis Joseph, Austria-Este then becoming a sort of "secundogeniture" title within the Austrian imperial family. Although the first heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand