Europe’s century of catastrophe need not have happened

• July 23, 2026
• Brendan Simms

• Themes: Europe, History

Rajiv Joseph’s ‘Archduke’ at London’s Royal Court reminds us that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and the continent’s cascade into war, were not inevitable.

Have you ever wanted to turn the clock back in history, not to go back to some supposedly halcyon age, but to head off hell? I have always dreamed of being transported back to 1913 – to a time that was awash with problems, to be sure, but also full of promise. Even in retrospect, the world appeared to be going in the right direction, with chattel slavery on the way out, parliamentary government on the increase, especially in Germany, and a wider war so far averted over Morocco (1906 and 1911), the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (1908), and the Balkans (1912-1913).

Then the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by the Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip, in Sarajevo. The resulting First World War became, in George Kennan’s phrase, the ‘great seminal catastrophe’ of the century. It not only killed more than fifteen million soldiers and civilians but led directly to the Russian Revolution and the scourge of communism, to the rise of Hitler and thus the Holocaust, and to many other bad outcomes. While we cannot be sure how things would have developed without the assassination, the shots fired by Princip changed the course of history, overwhelmingly for the worse (so far as we can tell).

In this context, Rajiv Joseph’s new play Archduke, now running under the direction of Lyndsey Turner at London’s Royal Court Theatre, is a welcome re-imagining of the fateful days leading up to Sarajevo. It is both a ‘whydunnit’ and a ‘what if he hadn’t dunnit’. The cast is small, including Serb nationalists Gavrilo Princip (played by Stanley Morgan), Nedeljko Cabrinovic (Chris Walley), Trifko Grabez (Abraham Popoola), Dragutin ‘Apis’ Dimitrijević (Marc Wootton), and Apis’ cook and general factotum Sladjana (Janice Connolly); with the exception of the latter, all are historical characters.

The performances were uniformly excellent, but the extraordinary Apis, whose charisma, brutality and determination are excellently captured, is the most compelling figure in the play. His description of his role in the gruesome assassination of the Austrophile Serbian royal couple in 1903, when the conspirators slaughtered them both before throwing them off the balcony, is not easily forgotten. The audience palpably squirmed as Apis spoke of eating part of the King’s lung and then sawing off the doomed man’s fingers as he clung to the balustrade.

The playwright takes considerable liberties with the historical record. Some of this is dramatic licence: for example, when he turns the three bullets pumped into Apis by a loyal officer into three slugs from Draga’s revolver fired as she was dragged from her hiding place. Some of this is misleading, however, such as when it is suggested that Apis radicalised the conspirators, when in fact they had decided of their own volition to kill the Archduke; Apis merely provided the weapons and logistical help. If, as some reviewers claim, this play is <a href="https://absafricatv.com/five-key-facts-about-wafcon-2026/” title=”Five key facts about Wafcon 2026″>about how elites whip up populism, the Sarajevo conspirators are not a particularly good example.

None of the above matters much, provided one does not treat the play as a reliable record of events. What the play does very effectively is to help us imagine not how history ‘actually was’ but – as Ranke wanted – ‘as it essentially was’. The toxic cocktail of paranoid nationalism, over-wrought Orthodox religiosity and machismo which characterised the Serb patriot milieu is brilliantly communicated. I don’t know if Apis ever described Austria-Hungary as ‘A two-headed abomination with German leadership in the west and Hungarian in the east’, or as ‘A twisted Siamese piglet forever defecating into the mouth of its unfortunate twin’, but it sounds like something he might have said.

Archduke also challenges the notion of inevitability. In the play, Sladjana vigorously contradicts Apis’ teleology that the martyrdom of the three boys is pre-ordained. She slyly suggests that the conspirators might get off the train ‘before’ or ‘after’ Sarajevo. In order to encourage them to avoid their rendezvous with destiny she even makes each of them a sack full of goodies to sustain them after they have broken free of Apis. An outraged Gavrilo hurls the sack into the flames, and while Nedeljko and Trifko eat the sweetmeats somewhat shamefacedly, they too want to keep their appointment with fate.

The die, however, is not yet cast. En route, Nedeljko and Trifko confess that they would like to ‘get off’ in Sarajevo in a different sense. Both of them – like Gavrilo – are virgins, and they propose using the short window before the planned assassination to visit one of the city’s brothels. This is not a completely ridiculous proposition. After all, the Third Crusade got off to a famously bad start when the advance party at Marseilles spent the campaign money on prostitutes.

Wisely, the play does not depict the assassination itself. Instead, it ends with the three conspirators imagining an alternative future that nearly came to pass. History tells us that Trifko Grabez did not, as the play suggests, miss the assassination because he spent the day ‘in the arms of a woman’; rather, he was too distracted to detonate his bomb or use his pistol as the Archduke’s cavalcade passed by and was later arrested at home. Nedeljko Cabrinovic threw his bomb, but it bounced off the vehicle and exploded under an escorting car.

At this point, things could still have taken a different turn. ‘What if I didn’t?’ Gavrilo asks. What indeed? ‘So two people don’t get shot and killed!’, he continues, ‘Ain’t the end of the world’. As the train approaches Sarajevo and the play its conclusion, Gavrilo announces that ‘Maybe the world don’t have to end at all. We can just get off the train… Meet some women. Maybe we survive. Have some children. We can tell ’em we took a train once. We got off the train and didn’t kill no-one. Instead, we had them’. Even as he levels his gun at the Archduke and his wife, Gavrilo can imagine not shooting. ‘Don’t do it’, Sophie says.

Of course, it happened differently. Princip got off the train, and when the Archduke’s car by unhappy coincidence slowed down in front of him, fired the fateful shots. Sophie did not say anything, and the only children that are recorded being spoken of were those of the couple. In his final words, the Archduke urged Sophie to survive for the sake of ‘our children’. Princip later died in an Austro-Hungarian prison aged 23. He had no offspring, but we are all, in a sense, his children because we still live in a world he helped to make.

Archdukewill be performed at the Royal Court Theatre until 25 July.

Brendan Simms

Brendan Simms is Professor in the history of European International Relations at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Centre for Geopolitics. His most recent books are ‘Hitler: Only the world was enough’ and ‘The Return of the Great Powers’.
Read more by Brendan Simms

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