Born at the Herberstein Palace in Graz at 7.15 in the morning, Franz Ferdinand was the eldest son of Archduke Karl Ludwig and a nephew of the Emperor Franz Josef I, who had been ruling the Austro-Hungarian empire since 1848. His mother, Maria Annunziata, a Bourbon princess of the Two Sicilies, died when Franz Ferdinand was seven. He was educated at home by private tutors and sent into the army. An enthusiast for shooting, he later particularly enjoyed mowing down kangaroos and emus on a trip to Australia and over his lifetime he accumulated an enormous collection of stuffed animals.

In 1889 Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the Emperor Franz Josef, committed suicide at his hunting lodge in Mayerling, shooting his mistress dead and then himself. This made Karl Ludwig the heir to the throne, but within a few days he renounced it in favour of Franz Ferdinand.

In Prague, at a ball it seems, Franz Ferdinand met Countess Sophie Chotek and the two of them fell in love. A Czech aristocrat, she was not remotely of grand enough lineage to be married to a future Habsburg emperor, but to the fury of his family Franz Ferdinand obstinately refused to marry anyone else. He once remarked to his doctor that Habsburg inbreeding had made half their children ‘either epileptics or idiots’. Eventually in 1900 he and Sophie were allowed a morganatic marriage, which debarred their future children from the succession.

The empire meanwhile was beset by a swelling tide of nationalism among its many non-German subjects, who so outnumbered the Germans that there were 17 official languages. Franz Ferdinand wanted a far greater say in affairs given to the non-Germans, which he hoped would create a stronger belief in the empire and bolster the central government, but fate left him no chance of achieving this aim. He and Sophie were assassinated at Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914, which within a few weeks led to the outbreak of the First World War.