The root causes of the First World War are still debated, though there is no doubt who its first victims were, or that a scruffy student — a serf in an empire propped up by the poor — pulled the trigger. But, as journalist Hamida Ghafour writes in this excerpt from a new Star ebook, The Winter Before the War, the signs of menace were muted as a severe winter gripped Europe a hundred years ago. The cafés were busy, the intermarried aristocracies’ social season was in full if apprehensive swing. An archduke preened, his wife fretted, and Gavrilo Princip sat freezing.

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The winter social season held much promise for Sophie, the humiliated wife of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

The couple had just arrived from a triumphant visit to England, where Sophie charmed the king and queen, the aristocracy and the press. Perhaps now, in Vienna, her icy relatives would warm to her, too.

In February 1914, the couple attended a court ball, a glittering affair at Schoenbrunn, Emperor Franz Josef’s 1,400-room Baroque palace. Ferdinand, then 51, was the emperor’s nephew and heir. Sophie, 45, should have been the belle of the ball. Instead, she was snubbed by most of the guests and spent much of the evening talking to the emperor’s sympathetic youngest daughter, 46-year-old Marie Valerie, one of the few friendly figures at court.

Then something amazing happened. The emperor called for Sophie to sit with him for a few minutes. “It was a gesture both trivial and momentous,” one observer said, according to Greg King and Sue Woolmans’ The Assassination of the Archduke. Everyone in the room noticed.

Franz Josef had been responsible for Sophie’s misery. She was a lowly Bohemian countess who had dared to defy the emperor and his 600-year-old Habsburg dynasty, not to mention the formidable, stratified world of Viennese high society, by capturing the heart of the heir.

That February, Sophie’s fortunes looked like they were changing in the wake of the couple’s visit with King George V and Queen Mary. Of course, it was in the interest of the British royals to cosy up to Ferdinand. Emperor Franz Josef was then 84 and sick. Expectations were growing that Ferdinand would soon inherit the empire and its 52 million subjects. He was already head of the imperial army.

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On Feb. 17, Ferdinand agreed to an invitation to Sarajevo to watch army manoeuvres. The visit to the restive capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina would take place on June 28, and Sophie would join him. “This Bosnian trip was a big deal,” says Tim Butcher, author of an upcoming biography of Gavrilo Princip titled The Trigger: Taking the Journey that Led the World to War in 1914. “Normally, she couldn’t go on these imperial trips, but because it was remote and far away from Vienna, she could.”

The acceptance of the invitation was also a triumph for Gen. Oskar Potiorek, governor general of Bosnia-Herzegovina, because it would “bolster his regime and give it the stamp of imperial approval,” according to King and Woolmans.

Potiorek’s predecessor, perhaps understandably, had retired after he was targeted by a young Bosnian Serb suicide attacker in 1910. By 1914, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s parliament was suspended, all laws had been annulled, Serbian nationalist parties were banned and troops had been called in.

While the aristocrats in Vienna obsessed over archaic social codes such as whether a princess should be greeted at the top or bottom of the stairs, the future of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was looking uncertain. The army had a sorry record of losing wars, the empire was a hodgepodge of nationalities and there were hostilities between the Austrians in Vienna and the Hungarians in Budapest.

Historian Max Hastings, author of Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War, writes that 10 languages were spoken in parliament in Vienna but there were no interpreters, and tensions were so high that sometimes fistfights broke out (a spectacle a young Adolf Hitler witnessed while visiting).

Meanwhile, the Habsburgs looked in fear at the decaying Ottoman Empire, which had become so weak that its Serb subjects broke free and established an independent country, Serbia. The memory of the Balkan Wars terrified the Habsburgs. In October 1912, the people of Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece had seized their opportunity to overthrow the Ottoman yoke and declared war. Within a month, the Turks had been driven out of their European territories.

The great powers were shocked and surprised. In both Balkan Wars, Serbia, supported by Russia, was victorious. The Habsburgs were worried their own Serb subjects would also rise up. Two million ethnic Serbs lived throughout Austro-Hungarian dominions, and an uprising would bring down the empire.

“It was an existential crisis because there were as many Serbs within the empire as there were in Serbia,” says historian Sir Hew Strachan.

“Such an ancient monarchy and such an ancient army cannot perish ingloriously,” said Conrad von Hotzendorf, the Austro-Hungarian army chief of staff. The hawkish Conrad, a pure social Darwinist, was spoiling for a war to smash the Serbs. According to Strachan, Conrad urged war on Serbia 26 times between Jan. 1, 1913, and June 1, 1914. Conrad hated Russia too, which supported Serbs because they were fellow ethnic Slavs.

The Germans were allies. In February, Conrad wrote again to Gen. Helmuth von Moltke, chief of general staff in Germany, about war.

But one man was dead set against war: Ferdinand.

The Serbs may have hated him, but the archduke was a vociferous advocate for peace with Serbia because he believed the weakening empire was in no condition to fight. “A war between Austria and Russia would end with either the overthrow of the Romanovs, the overthrow of the Habsburgs or both,” he warned. Ferdinand urged officials not to listen to Conrad’s war-mongering. He wrote to Leopold von Berchtold, his foreign minister, “Do not let yourself be influenced by Conrad. Let’s not play the Balkans warriors ourselves.”

Ferdinand believed some sort of constitutional rearrangement could save Austria-Hungary’s awkward and unsustainable structure. “He would rather quite sensibly see an internal domestic solution rather than a war to resolve the structural problems of the empire,” says Strachan.

But Conrad had another agenda. He was in love with the wife of a brewery magnate and believed if he could lead Austria into a great military victory he could persuade her to divorce her husband. He hoped for a “war from which I could return crowned with success that would allow me to break through all the barriers between us and claim you as my own dearest wife,” he said in a letter.

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On March 27, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Ferdinand and Sophie. The kaiser was one of the few who had accepted the archduke’s wife — Austria-Hungary’s future emperor was too important a figure to snub. On their first meeting some years back, Wilhelm had given Sophie a fragrant bouquet of orchids.

As the winter of 1914 drew to an end, there were signs that perhaps complete acceptance of the duchess was not far off. George V and Queen Mary even promised to visit Sophie and Ferdinand that autumn.

The start of 1914 rang in harsh and biting cold in Obljaj, a hamlet in the woodlands of western Bosnia, a place so small it barely registered on maps of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There was no church, not even a shop to distinguish the place, only a graveyard at the end of the road.

It was here, at his parents’ farm, that 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip spent the winter studying for the exam he needed to pass to get into university.

Concentrating on books was not easy: Princip’s lungs were racked with the tuberculosis he had contracted as a child, and his fingers were stiff from the cold. But he was determined to make something of his life.

The people of Obljaj, Orthodox Christians, lived with their livestock: animals were kept on the ground floor and humans slept above. Princip’s mother gave birth to nine children on the beaten dirt floor of their hovel. Six died in infancy. Villagers were serfs — Princip was owned by two local feudal lords — and had to pay an annual tithe. Because of his poverty, Princip never had enough to eat, and he remained physically weak all his life.

Princip may have been born in a primitive village on the scruffy edges of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but he had come a long way since his father, a hardscrabble farmer and postman, made the decision to send his clever boy away to be educated. In 1907, when Princip was 14, he had walked 130 miles to the nearest railway station to board a train to Sarajevo, where he would attend primary school. His education was paid for by older brother Jovo, a successful timber merchant. Princip was a quiet boy who excelled at school, getting straight A’s.

His father’s decision had another consequence: Princip would become a revolutionary in Sarajevo.

Bosnia-Herzegovina had been ruled by the Ottoman Empire until 1878, when it was occupied by Austria-Hungary, which went on to annex the province in 1908. The Christian rulers had promised to bring education and modernity to the backward inhabitants who, in the occupiers’ view, had had the misfortune to be ruled by the Ottoman Muslims, says Tim Butcher. But no such thing happened, and by the time Princip was born, life was as brutish as ever.

In Sarajevo, Princip became a South Slav (Serbs, Slovenes, Croats and Muslims) nationalist. As he testified at his October 1914 trial for treason and murder, he was angry about all the “torments which Austria imposed upon the people” of the Balkans and believed in the “unification of all South Slavs in whatever form of state and that it be free of Austria.” He was committed to pursuing that goal by “means of terror.”

A tough existence like Princip’s was typical for the millions of Europeans at the bottom of the social heap.

“Europe was not about democracy and the Enlightenment; it was about empires propped up by people at the dirt end of the scale,” says Butcher. “Princip lived that life, and I call him my everyman.”

But change was in the air. In coffee houses and newspapers, there was passionate discussion of revolutionary developments that were knocking the world off its axis: women demanding the right to vote, workers striking for better wages and, most potent of all for Princip, ethnic Serbs wanting to oust their Austro-Hungarian rulers.

“A lot of Serb nationalists believed Austria-Hungary had acted illegitimately against their interests in annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina, which they saw as belonging to Serbs even though a lot of people there weren’t Serbs,” says Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan.

Princip was an impressionable teenager, and Sarajevo was a turbulent city on the fault line between East and West, home to mosques, churches and synagogues.

A studious boy, Princip read Nietzsche and owned a library of anarchist literature, writes David Fromkin, author of Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914. He fell in with a revolutionary crowd, spraying anti-imperial graffiti and attending demonstrations with his Bosnian Serb friends, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, loud-mouthed and arrogant, and the more thoughtful Trifko Grabez.

The debate among the young revolutionaries was this: if you get rid of the Austro-Hungarian rulers, whom do you replace them with?

Hardcore Serb nationalists, including the violent Black Hand group, wanted all the lands in which ethnic Serbs lived to be ruled by Serbia. But another group that included Princip believed it should be a more inclusive state.

Next-door Serbia was a young country, finally independent after a long and bloody struggle with the Ottomans. The ethnic Serbs still under imperial rule were inspired.

One incident in particular changed Princip’s life. In 1910, a young Bosnian Serb tried to assassinate the governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina on a bridge near Princip’s home in Sarajevo. He fired five bullets from a revolver but failed to kill the governor, and then turned the gun on himself.

“Princip saw the blood on the flagstones of the bridge,” Butcher notes.

When the Balkan Wars broke out in 1912 and 1913, he travelled to the Serbian capital, Belgrade, to enlist with Serb fighters. The city was awash in weapons and men coming in from the front, boasting of battlefield victories. But the Serbs laughed at the small, frail Princip.

Humiliated, Princip returned to his books, remaining in Belgrade. But he decided to let everyone believe he was stupid and to prove them wrong by doing something important. “Wherever I went, people took me for a weakling,” he once said, according to MacMillan’s book, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. “And I pretended that I was a weak person, even though I was not.”

Serbia increased its territory at the Ottoman Empire’s expense in both Balkan Wars, and that inspired Princip and his friends to “think that the final triumph of the South Slavs was not far off,” says MacMillan.

In late March 1914, after his winter stay at his parents’ house, Princip returned to Belgrade. He meant to finish his exams and prepare for university.

But soon after arriving, a newspaper story caught his eye. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a Habsburg and heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, Duchess Sophie, would visit Sarajevo on June 28 to inspect the troops. For Princip, it was like a slap in the face: on June 28, Serbs marked the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, when they were defeated by Ottoman Turks. The day was an important part of Serb national identity.

Fromkin writes that Princip had heard rumours (which were false) that the archduke’s visit was designed to mask a surprise attack on Serbia. Princip shared the news with his friends Cabrinovic and Grabez. The upcoming visit was the talk of Belgrade’s coffee shops, and some spoke of striking a blow against the Habsburgs.

Pamphlets were distributed in Serbia’s Orthodox churches describing the archduke as a “dog” and Sophie as a “monstrous filthy Bohemian whore,” according to King and Woolmans in The Assassination of the Archduke.

“How about arranging an assassination?” Princip asked Cabrinovic, according to the transcript of Princip’s trial. Towards the end of March, the amateur terrorists agreed to a pact. The archduke would die.