The assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, by a Bosnian-Serb terrorist in Sarajevo on 28th June 1914, precipitated the July crisis that brought war to Europe . Yet none of the great powers, in the days following the murder, believed it would lead to war. Extraordinarily, the Austro-Hungarian regime's first reaction to the outrage was relief: the incumbent emperor Franz Joseph loathed the archduke, his nephew, and opposed the accession. In fact, as Paul Ham writes, in this extract from his book 1914: The Year the World Ended , Vienna used the murder to manufacture a case for war on Serbia - with the full support of Germany's famous 'blank cheque' and reckless disregard for the consequences for Europe.