The Habsburgs: A New Order in Europe

In the year 1914, the ancient Habsburg dynasty stood on the edge of a precipice. The bomb in Sarajevo did not kill the heir to the throne, but it tore away the empire’s last shred of decency: a dozen peoples, a dozen languages, two parliaments, and an army that had no idea whom it was supposed to obey. Franz Ferdinand rose from the smoke, eleven stitches in his right arm. He looked down at his ring. He had worn it when he married a woman beneath his station, a choice that had led the entire Viennese court to shun him for fourteen years. A crown prince in isolation. An empire torn apart by nationalism. A war postponed, but never called off. Everyone thought his survival was nothing but luck. No one asked: What would he do now that he had survived? As Russia assembled a hundred divisions on the border, Germany demanded control of the Austro-Hungarian army, and Hungarian nobles called him a tyrant in parliament, Croats, Czechs, and Poles asked the same question in different languages: “Is this empire worth fighting for?” Ferdinand had to do what his great-uncle had failed to accomplish in sixty-eight years: Give a flawed empire the right foundations before it perished. This is not a story of an empire’s comeback. It is a story of repair: mending a wall that had been cracking for four hundred years, mending a vow that said “I choose you,” mending a country that did not even know why it existed. And history had left him only three years. 1914. Before the double-headed eagle fell, the Habsburgs’ final gamble began.