In 1914, Austria-Hungary swiftly invaded Serbia in order to root out and destroy the Black Hand, the extreme Serbian nationalist group responsible for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. While several prominent members were apprehended and executed, the cult as a whole moved deeper underground. The Black Hand's ranks swelled as Serbs from every walk of life chafed under the humiliation of Austrian occupation. By the time Austria-Hungary withdrew in 1916, Serbian nationalism was at a boiling point.



1918 saw a military coup motivated by the Black Hand take power from parliament, claiming to do so in the name of king Aleksandar while effectively imprisoning him in his palace. The new prime minister Ljubomir Stojanović sets out on an aggressive program to create

a union of Balkan peoples under Serbian domination. By 1920, Serbia had annexed Montenegro and Albania and started making threatening noises towards its old enemy Bulgaria. Meanwhile, the Black Hand affiliate Young Bosnia was staging bolder and bolder terrorist attacks every day in the name of Serbian populations in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.







An engineered border incident in 1921 sent Serbia and its ally Greece into the Third Balkan War against Bulgaria. A lightning campaign brought Sofia under occupation after a month, and the whole of Bulgaria under occupation after a year.





1923 and 1924 where dominated by an escalating espionage and terror war between the Black Hand and the

Stojanović sparked fury by refusing to yield Bulgarian territory promised to Greece, leading Greece to declare war on Serbia. In the following Fourth Balkan War Serbia conquered Thessaly, reducing Greece to its 1881 borders.Habsburgs. The severe curtailment of South Slavic self-governance in the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the death of Franz Ferdinand caused massive resentment of throughout the Balkans. In 1925 a massive uprising occurred simultaneously in Sarajevo, Novi Sad, Zadar, Zagreb, and Ljubljana. Serbia immediately declared solidarity with the "freedom fighters" and moved to aid them. The resulting war between Austria and Serbia ended in the defeat of Austria-Hungary and the almost complete liquidation of her Balkan empire.In 1930, Serbia stands triumphant and arrogant. The Serbs considers themselves full-fledged members of the Entente, or perhaps even its leader, and publicly the others accommodate this position. Behind closed doors, however, Britain and France harangue Russia for losing control of its volatile little protectorate. Meanwhile, many Croats, Slovenes, and Muslim Slavs are coming to regret siding with Serbia. Ardent in a policy that Serbs are the only true South Slavs, Belgrade has outlawed the Croat and Slovene languages and the catholic and muslim right. And the thousands of Greeks, Turks, Romanians, Germans, Magyars, Italians, Albanians, Macedonians, Jews, Gypsies, and Bulgars and suffering even worse.Serbia is ascendent, but the future is as uncertain as ever.