Fortress of Arad their honor. The most famous prisoner in the fortress of Arad was undoubtedly Gavrilo Princip, who on 28 June 1914 killed the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo, which led to the outbreak of World War I. About the inhuman conditions in which prisoners were held in the fortress of Arad warned Ştefan Cicio Pop, deputy of the Romanian National Party in an interpellation to the Hungarian parliament in Budapest during 1917. After the first World War, the fortress was occupied by allied Serbian and French troops under French command, until
Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand wife planned to visit Sarajevo to open the state museum in its new premises there. Duchess Sophie, according to their eldest son, Duke Maximilian, accompanied her husband out of fear for his safety. As Sophie, although of high aristocratic birth, was not from a dynastic family, her union with the Habsburg heir presumptive could only be a morganatic marriage. Emperor Franz Joseph had only consented to their marriage on the condition that their descendants would never ascend the throne. The 14th anniversary of their marriage fell on 28 June. As historian A. J. P. Taylor observes: Franz Ferdinand was an