From Assassination, to Diplomatic Dispute, to Crisis, to Global War
In the resultant war, that contemporaries called The Great War until a bigger one came along a few decades later, over seventy million men were mobilized and ten million were killed. Four empires vanished, and the global center of power shifted from the Old World to the New. A staid age of aristocracy and traditional forms of government came to an end, and a new fervent and fast paced era of democracies juxtaposed with radical ideologies and totalitarianism emerged in its place. The dispute triggered by the Black Hand’s bullets in Sarajevo irrevocably changed the world.
The Serbs did not fare well. They stood off an initial Austrian onslaught, but in 1915 the Germans joined and helped the Austrians overrun Serbia. One fifth of Serbia’s population perished during the war – the highest casualty percentage suffered by any country in WWI. Serbia’s prime minister finally had enough of the Black Hand, which had grown too powerful and too meddlesome. In 1917, its leaders were arrested and tried on trumped up charges for conspiracy to murder the Prince Regent. They were convicted, sentenced to death, and executed, and the group was outlawed.
