A Continent on Edge

By 1914 Europe was already a powder keg — rival alliances, an arms race, and clashing empires. The Sarajevo shooting did not create those tensions. It lit a fuse that decades of rivalry had already laid.

The plot itself was small: a handful of young nationalists tied to the Black Hand, a secret Serbian group. Yet their act triggered treaty obligations written years earlier by diplomats who never expected them to be tested all at once.