Two Shots, Millions Dead

Princip fired twice at point-blank range. The first bullet tore into Sophie, the Archduke's wife, in the abdomen. The second struck Franz Ferdinand in the neck, severing the jugular. Sophie died almost instantly; the Archduke within minutes. Two shots from a teenager's pistol had just lit the fuse of a world war.

Princip turned the gun on himself, but the crowd wrestled it away before he could fire. He was nineteen — under the age Austro-Hungarian law required for execution. So he was spared the gallows and given a twenty-year sentence. He died in his cell of tuberculosis in 1918, before the war he set off had even ended.