This Day in World War 1 History: MAY 26, 1914 : GAVRILO PRINCIP SETS OUT FROM BELGRADE FOR SARAJEVO

On May 26, 1914, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip sets out from Belgrade on a 10-day-long journey through rough countryside, heading towards Sarajevo and a planned rendezvous with fellow young nationalist agitators.

Born in 1894 in the hamlet of Gornji Obljaj in western Bosnia, near Dalmatia, Princip was a Bosnian Serb who left home when he was 13 to study in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. Slight and frail, he volunteered for Serbian military service in the Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913, but was turned down by an officer who told him he was too weak. Bitterly disappointed, Princip found refuge in radical nationalism, joining on with the so-called Young Bosnia movement, a loose grouping of students and apprentices with revolutionary aspirations.

When Princip and his comrades learned in the spring of 1914 of the upcoming visit by Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Sarajevo that June, they hatched a plan to assassinate him. Such plots had been attempted before, most recently the previous January, and had failed. As a prominent symbol of the Austrian regime, Franz Ferdinand was a likely target for Slavic nationalists angry over the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 and anxious about the possibility of further aggression by the empire in the Balkans; in fact, Franz Ferdinand was the leading advocate for peace and restraint within his country’s political and military establishment.

With weapons—including bombs, revolvers and cyanide capsules with which to commit suicide after their murderous work was done—supplied by members of the shadowy Serbian terrorist organization Narodna Odbrana, or the Black Hand, Princip left Belgrade on May 26, 1914, and traveled through secret channels, also facilitated by the Black Hand, for nearly 10 days before meeting up with his fellow conspirators in Sarajevo. Less than a month later, on June 28, Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie made their official appearance in Sarajevo to review the maneuvers of the 15th and 16th Corps of the Austrian army. After a bomb thrown by Princip’s cohort failed to achieve its deadly objective, rolling off the back of the royal car and wounding an officer and some bystanders, the archduke’s procession took a wrong turn. Their car happened to stop on a corner where Princip was loitering; he fired on Franz Ferdinand and Sophie at point- blank range, killing them almost instantly and sparking a chain of complicated events that would lead not only Austria-Hungary and Serbia but a host of great and small nations in Europe and beyond into the devastating conflict that would become known as the First World War.

Article Details:

May 26, 1914 : Gavrilo Princip sets out from Belgrade for Sarajevo

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  May 26, 1914 : Gavrilo Princip sets out from Belgrade for Sarajevo

• URL

  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/gavrilo-princip-sets-out-from-belgrade-for-sarajevo

• Access Date

  May 26, 2015

• Publisher

  A+E Networks

This Day in World War 1 History: MAY 25, 1915 : LARGE-SCALE DEPORTATIONS OF ARMENIANS BEGIN IN TURKEY

On this day in 1915, in the latest of a disturbing series of Turkish aggressions against Armenians during World War I, Mehmed Talat, the Ottoman minister of the interior, announces that all Armenians living near the battlefield zones in eastern Anatolia (under Ottoman rule) will be deported to Syria and Mosul. Large-scale deportations began five days later, after the decision was sanctioned by the Ottoman council of ministers.

As the oldest Christian state (Christianity was established as the state religion some 20 years before the founding of the Roman Empire), Armenia had a long and turbulent history with the Ottoman Empire, stretching back to the 11th century. For this reason, Armenia had welcomed a strong Russian presence in the Caucasus region; indeed, when Russia conquered the eastern part of Armenia, previously held by Iran, in 1828-29, many Armenians moved into that eastern region. In 1896, encouraged by Russia, Armenians living to the west, in eastern Anatolia, had rebelled against Turkish rule; they were met with a vicious response, including the massacre of an estimated 200,000 of their number. Despite expressing support for their Armenian neighbors in the face of Ottoman repression, Russia too exercised strict rule over the Armenians under their control, forbidding them to establish their own schools or speak their own language and deporting nationalist leaders to Siberia.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Armenia became a battlefield for Russian and Turkish armies. Meanwhile, with the rise to power of the so-called Young Turks in the years before the war, Armenia and its people became even more of an affront to the accompanying movements of militant Islam and pan-Turkism, which sought to liberate and unify all the diverse peoples of Turkish heritage and Islamic religion living across southern and eastern Europe, many under Christian rule. Some 150,000 Armenians who lived on the Russian side of the frontier enlisted in the czar’s army during World War I, and all Armenians—inside and outside the Ottoman Empire—were seen as dangerous threats to the Turkish war effort. In the heat of battle, bitter at losses suffered at the hands of the Russians and desperate to squash the enemy within as well as without, the Turks determined to take action against Turkey’s Armenian population.

In April 1915, with the Russian army steadily approaching, Armenian resistance in the Van province was quickly and brutally crushed. Talat’s announcement of May 25, 1915—which he justified by saying the deportation was a military necessity required to preserve civil order—came the day after a note of international protest, prepared by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, claiming that the Armenian population of over 100 villages had been massacred. Clearly, Russia had a stake in exaggerating the numbers killed, and in implicating agents of the Ottoman government—which Sazonov did—but the events that followed lent weight to the note’s claims. On May 27, the Ottoman council of ministers told the Turkish senior army command that if they encountered armed resistance or even opposition to the deportation from the local population they had the authorization and obligation to repress it immediately and to crush without mercy every attack and all resistance.

As the war continued, Turkish brutality towards Armenians only increased; that violence, in turn, provoked more of the insurrection it was designed to smash, and the bloody cycle continued. Meanwhile, famine and disease killed many more people, including some 75 percent of those deported to Asia Minor, as the Ottoman Empire was ill-equipped to supply and transport its own armies, let alone handle large-scale deportations. Many other Armenians fled the country, with some 200,000 to 300,000 escaping to Russia. International warnings to the Turkish government—including from the United States, where the New York Times carried headlines decrying Turkey’s Policy of Extermination—went unheeded. As U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote to President Woodrow Wilson, it is one of the blackest pages of the history of this war.

It is impossible to state exactly how many Armenians died in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, due in part to the uncertainty about how many were living there before the war. The number of dead—and the degree of intent and responsibility of the Turkish government—is disputed to this day: some calculations range from 1.3 million to about 2.1 million, and others are much lower. It seems, though, that estimates of one million are reasonable.

Article Details:

May 25, 1915 : Large-scale deportations of Armenians begin in Turkey

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  May 25, 1915 : Large-scale deportations of Armenians begin in Turkey

• URL

  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/large-scale-deportations-of-armenians-begin-in-turkey

• Access Date

  May 25, 2015

• Publisher

  A+E Networks

This Day in World War 1 History: MAY 21, 1911 : SECOND MOROCCAN CRISIS

Six years after the First Moroccan Crisis, during which Kaiser Wilhelm’s sensational appearance in Morocco provoked international outrage and led to a strengthening of the bonds between Britain and France against Germany, French troops occupy the Moroccan city of Fez on May 21, 1911, sparking German wrath and a second Moroccan Crisis.

In March 1911, French authorities claimed, rebel tribes staged an uprising in Morocco, endangering one of the country’s capital cities, Fez. The sultan appealed to France for help restoring order, which led the French to send their troops to Fez on May 21. Germany, however, wary of French power in Africa, believed the French had fomented the tribal revolt to create an excuse to occupy Morocco. The German foreign secretary, Alfred von Kiderlen-Wachter, neglected to consult key personnel, including the chiefs of the armed forces, before sending a naval cruiser, the Panther, to anchor in the harbor of Agadir on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, asserting Germany’s claims of French aggression on July 1 in an attempt to encourage resistance against the French among the native population.

Though, as in the First Moroccan Crisis, Germany had counted on France’s isolation and eventual submission, this did not prove to be the case, as Britain once again backed France, its partner in the Entente Cordiale of 1904. David Lloyd George, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, made this clear in a public address in London at a banquet at the Mansion House on July 21. After Russia too gave its support to France, though somewhat ambiguously, and Austria-Hungary failed to lend Germany even its diplomatic support, the Germans were forced to back down. In the ensuing negotiations, concluding November 4, Germany reluctantly agreed to recognize the French protectorate over Morocco in return for territorial concessions—which they deemed inadequate—in other regions of Africa.

Meanwhile, military talks began between the British and French, and it was decided that their two navies would divide responsibilities, with the French taking control of the Mediterranean and the British the North Sea and the English Channel. As the two countries moved from friendship to alliance—counting Russia as well on their side—in the wake of the Second Moroccan Crisis, a powerful Germany found itself increasingly isolated, with only tenuous support from its fellow Triple Alliance members, Austria-Hungary and Italy. As Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the German general staff, wrote to the German chancellor, Theobald Bethmann von Hollweg in a memorandum dated December 2, 1912: All sides are preparing for European War, which all sides expect sooner or later.

Article Details:

May 21, 1911 : Second Moroccan Crisis

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  May 21, 1911 : Second Moroccan Crisis

• URL

  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/second-moroccan-crisis

• Access Date

  May 21, 2015

• Publisher

  A+E Networks