Of all the counterfactuals that fascinate amateur historians, few are more poignant than the events of June 28, 1914. When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, drove into Sarajevo, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, things could have unfolded very differently.
Having survived a botched assassination attempt by Bosnian Serb nationalists, the archduke and his wife were driven to the town hall for lunch. There, completely unexpectedly, they decided to change their program and visit the wounded in hospital. But nobody told their driver, who turned the wrong way up a side street. That meant he had to reverse around a corner — the very corner where another would-be assassin, Gavrilo Princip, was loitering miserably outside a delicatessen. We all know what happened next.
