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every protocol martinet in central Europe
     knew, when Franz Ferdinand acted in a military capacity, in this instance as Inspector General of the Austro-Hungarian army
     on a tour of the Bosnian capital's garrison, he—and his wife—had to be given the full panoply of feathered deference, decorous
     bowing, and stylized scraping that Habsburg vanity required. Franz loved his wife, and the cream-puff perquisites of his office.
    Princip loved his cause. June 28,1914, was also the 525th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, the resounding defeat that
     Serbs still perversely celebrate as their nation's brush with greatness and respectability. Today they might mark the occasion
     by gunning down demonstrators—as they did in Sarajevo, to open the latest bout of barbarity in Bosnia; in Princip'sday the
     anniversary usually called for beetle-browed acts of sedition against foreign overlords. In this the Bosnian Serbs were helped,
     surreptitiously, by their brethren in Belgrade, who had enjoyed independence in a sovereign Serbia (or "Servia," as it was
     often called) ever since an earlier conflict had wrested their territory from the control of the Ottoman Turks. And everyone
     in Europe, then as now, got excited when real estate changed hands.
    In fact, all five of the Great Powers—Britain, France, Russia, Austro-Hungary, Germany—were talking Turkey. The Divan, as
     the Ottoman court was known, had once controlled the Balkans, but Turkey was now the so-called "Sick Man of Europe," a tottering
     empire no longer able to restrain its restive peoples. As outsiders greedily looked on, insiders weakened the Ottoman presence
     in Europe. A vocal, dissident faction, impatient with the dotty despots in the Topkapi Palace, agitated for modernization
     under the name of the Young Turks, a term that entered turn-of-the-century English to describe any collection of lean and
     hungry hotheads.
    This Balkan cocktail of Young Turks (many of whom were Bosnian Muslims), angry Serbs, and smitten Habsburgs was the brew that
     sent the Old World on its self-destructive bender of 1914-18. Even though Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had famously
     adjudged the Balkans undeserving of "the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier,"and every political commentator worth his
     postprandial cigar had pointed out that, pace the English humorist Saki, the benighted region produced more politics than could be consumed locally, it was indeed the mountainous,
     hidebound, backward Balkans that ushered in—and would later usher out—the twentieth century.
    To review: Austria was Hungary, so it took a piece of Turkey. The piece was Bosnia-Herzegovina, annexed in 1908. The powers-that-reclined
     in Istanbul, enfeebled by recent wars and undermined by the Young Turks, could do nothing to prevent their former possession
     from slipping away. Serb nationalists in the region were not so listless — they, like most Europeans, knew that Bosnia's latest
     landlord was far from robust. Istanbul's empire might be a frail old man, but Vienna's was no youngster either, the government
     of its eighty-four-year-old Emperor Franz Josef renowned for comic opera intrigues and mind-numbing bureaucracy. Serb nationalists
     in Belgrade and Sarajevo, like their descendants Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, saw a power vacuum and dreamed of
     filling it with a Greater Serbia. The most radical of them formed Ujedinjeje Hi Smrt (Union or Death), a terrorist group also known as the Black Hand. Run by Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, a loose cannon in
     the Belgrade government, the organization abetted would-be assassins wherever they served the cause of Serbian nationhood.
     Dimitrijevic, a bald colossus who today would not look out of place wrestling on TV, went by the name of Apis, the potent
     bull in the pantheon of ancient Egypt. Apis supplied Princip and his fellow conspirators with the guns to do the dirty deed
     in Sarajevo. Thus it was Apis and his bloody-minded