His mother, Maria Annunziata, was a Bourbon princess who’d done nothing of note. In fact, they were in a period of relative peace that had allowed Ferdinand’s ostensibly-military family to become lazy and boring.įerdinand’s father, Archduke Karl Ludwig, was as staid and conservative as a church belltower.
Not that being enemies meant the empires were at war. Franz Ferdinand, meanwhile, had been born into the chilly air of the Ottomans’ ancient enemy: Austria. You Franz FerdinandĪt the time, Sarajevo was within the orbit of the decaying Ottoman Empire. In today’s Biographics, we’re investigating the life of the man whose death started WWI… and considering what might have happened had he lived.Īt the moment Franz Ferdinad first opened his eyes, on 18 December 1863, not even the greatest seer could’ve predicted the tortured route that would lead to him dying on an anonymous Sarajevo street half a century later. As emperor-in-waiting, Ferdinand implemented reforms and worked on plans that could’ve changed everything… only for an assassin’s bullet to cut him down too soon. Until, one day, tragic events conspired to make him heir to his family’s empire. But who was Franz Ferdinand? Who was this obscure archduke whose death set the world ablaze?īorn into a branch of the Austrian royal family, Franz Ferdinand seemed destined for a life of rich obscurity.
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