Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, occurred on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo when they were mortally wounded by Gavrilo Princip. Princip was 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 political objective of the assassination was to break off Austria-Hungary's South Slav provinces so they could be combined into a Yugoslavia. The assassins' motives were consistent with the
Prince Lorenz of Belgium, Archduke of Austria-Este to male primogeniture by declaration of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria on 31 October 1914 (following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este) and was confirmed by Imperial Austrian letters patent, both of which conferred it (with the traditional coat-of-arms of the House of Austria-Este) upon Lorenz's father, Archduke Robert, on 16 April 1917, and has been confirmed for Lorenz by specific reference in Article IX.1 of the constitution of the Kingdom of Belgium. The "Este" suffix descended by male primogeniture and is borne by Lorenz and his successors as heads of the Austria-Este cadet branch of the