BOOKS OF MY LIFE: "If you have ever wondered why marrying your uncle is inadvisable, the Habsburgs can enlighten you."

I'll be purchasing this one.

Indeed, it sometimes seems as if my entire motivation for traveling in Europe has been to track down the legacy of the Habsburgs, particularly in their final iteration as overlords of the Austrian (and later, Austro-Hungarian) empire: from Sarajevo to Konopiště, and Rudolf's Mayerling to Madeira (Karl's island of exile).

In 2003 during the Danube River bicycle ride my friend Bob and I bicycled up the hillside to Artstetten, the heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand's castle. As we were leaving, I mentioned to the gift shop attendant that I'd visited Vienna for the first time in 1985 and learned that Franz Ferdinand's grave wasn't there because he could not be buried with his beloved wife in the "official" imperial crypt owing to their morganatic marriage.

Their final resting places were at Artsetten, hence my visit, albeit 18 years later. I very much wanted to view the crypt at Artstetten.

Franz Ferdinand's marriage is relevant to the book review below, because here was an instance of a Habsburg marrying for love, quite apart from the wishes of the realm. That's why family protocol denied their children rights to the throne, and cruelly withheld from the couple many of the ceremonial perks of royal existence.

The attendant regretted there was no public access to the final resting place of this Habsburg. I understood and didn’t ask for favors. When I started to leave the facility she called to to me; I walked back to the desk and she silently pushed a key across and winked.

That was very nice of her. I was respectful of my time with the victims of Princip at Sarajevo, and took a photo (above). This is the first time it has been seen on the internet.

A breed apart: The Habsburgs’ marriages consolidated lands as well as faulty genes (at The Economist)

European history is unimaginable without the once-imperious family

The Habsburgs. By Martyn Rady. Allen Lane; 416 pages; £30. To be published in America by Basic Books in August; $32.

Martyn Rady’s new book is billed as “the definitive history” of the clan. Not, it must be said, a hotly contested title. Once the names of Europe’s most powerful families—the Bourbons and Battenbergs and Garibaldis—were known across the world. Today, beyond the biscuit tin, they are largely forgotten.

Except, that is, for their eccentric matchmaking. If you have ever wondered why marrying your uncle is inadvisable, the Habsburgs can enlighten you. For centuries they experimented with marriages between first cousins, second cousins and cousins so multiply intertwined that the traditional familial vocabulary breaks down. A mother might double as a cousin; the wife of Leopold I referred to him throughout their marriage as “Uncle”.

The result was less a family tree, branching and widening, than a convoluted web. At one point the mortality rate of Habsburg children reached 80%, four times the average of the time. Of those who lived, many were hideously misshapen, with the infamous drooping lip and jutting Habsburg jaw. It is one of the abiding puzzles of European history that its aristocrats, so good at breeding horses, should have been so bad at breeding themselves.

ON THE AVENUES: My Franz Ferdinand heritage trail, 30 years ago in Sarajevo.

ON THE AVENUES: My Franz Ferdinand heritage trail, 30 years ago in Sarajevo.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Today's column is one in a series documenting my 1987 summer in Europe. Previously, Slobodan Praljak's suicide prompted a digression about war crimes during the 1990s-era Yugoslav civil war. Coming next, Sarajevo yielded to Mostar as I traveled toward the coast.

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So young ... so thin.

50 pounds and 30 years later, during the summer of 2017, I had the brilliant idea of using newly digitalized slides from my 1987 European travels to guide a daily narrative about the trip.

This being Roger and not a trained librarian, hiccups were many, and the project wasn't undertaken with the Colin Powell doctrine in mind. Both planning and execution left much to be desired, although I managed to finish the narrative -- or so I thought.

As it turns out, I'd posted photos on social media but not the blog, omitting most of the Yugoslavian portion of the trip. With 2017 drawing to a close, I'm determined to make sense of this so I can move forward to the 1989 slides -- which I'll digitalize first, then start telling the tale at the beginning.

Seriously, I can get organized; I just can't remain organized.

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Picking up the story on Monday, 18 May 18 1987, I'd arrived in Sarajevo from Zagreb and found cheap, legal lodgings ($5.50 per night) in the spare room within the apartment of a man named Mickey (real name: Milenko Ćurčić). At the time, the street address was Ulica J.N.A. 37, or the Yugoslav People's Army Street. Now it's Ulica Branilaca Sarajeva 37 (the Defenders of Sarajevo Street).

Dinner was taken at a down and dirty workers' cafeteria, and local draft Sarajevsko Pivo (beer) then gratefully consumed for roughly 25 cents per mug.

On Tuesday morning, my Franz Ferdinand obsession took root, and I embarked on a self-guided walking tour of those parts of Sarajevo's core that prominently figured into the fateful day in 1914 when the Habsburg heir and his wife were killed. The following, originally written as part of my 1985 beer blog travelogue about Vienna, hasn't been published at NAC previously.

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The Habsburg dynasty reigned in various European configurations and locales from the 1400s through its war-ravaged finale in 1918, famously stockpiling its geographical components through strategic marriage ceremonies far more often than armed conflict -- which the Habsburgs often lost.

There’s something to admire in wedding banquets as opposed to bloodletting, although unfortunately, hard-learned lessons were forgotten at the very end.

By the dawn of the 20th century, the Habsburg Empire had been rebranded as Austria-Hungary, and occupied a large chunk of Central Europe – from the Alps to what is now Belarus and the Ukraine, and from Poland to the Adriatic.

The empire was populated by numerous ethnic groups speaking just as many languages, representing most major religions and a few minor ones, and held together largely by a steadily eroding inertia, otherwise known as “divine right” in the person of the venerable emperor, Franz Joseph, who was 84 years old in 1914 and had ruled since the age of 18 in 1848.

His own son having committed suicide, Franz Joseph’s successor was his nephew, Franz Ferdinand – and Franz Ferdinand was a famously complicated individual.

The history of the Habsburgs was a major reason for my visit to Vienna in 1985, with the single most important objective being the city’s military history museum, appropriately located in a complex of 19th-century buildings called the Arsenal. I wanted to learn more about Franz Ferdinand’s life, and chose to begin with his death.

Upon arrival in Vienna, and after the cursory stowing of gear at the Hostel Ruthensteiner and a quick coffee, the Arsenal was my opening afternoon attraction. Happily for an inexperienced tourist often too disorganized to eat, the museum boasted a small, efficient canteen operated by its citizen support arm.

The counter was manned by an elderly mustachioed gentleman who served fat local sausages with a roll and mustard, accompanied by a blue collar Schwecator lager, and all of it available at a very reasonable price. Restored to metabolic equilibrium, it was off to the exhibits.

First came the obligatory suits of armor and medieval skull-busters, followed by racks of muskets, Napoleonic-era uniforms and affiliated ephemera. Modern times drew steadily closer, and then I spotted the relics that occasioned my visit: Franz Ferdinand’s blood-stained tunic, the restored Gräf & Stift automobile in which he rode to his murder in Sarajevo, and numerous facsimiles of photographs taken before and after the assassination.

This was one of the images, and it triggered a lasting personal obsession.

Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie are shown exiting the town hall in Sarajevo. In little more than ten minutes, they’ll be dead, dispatched by two improbably well-placed gunshots fired by a youthful Serb terrorist, Gavrilo Princip.

When the photo was taken, the Archduke’s visit to Sarajevo already had careened far off the rails. It was about to get even worse, with misfortune ranging far beyond the shortened lives of the royal couple, to victims all over the world about to be claimed in an unprecedented conflagration.

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand comes to us as a blunt, obnoxious, violent and generally unlikable human being, who in his spare time enjoyed slaughtering wildlife under the flimsy guise of hunting.

But had Sigmund Freud been asked, the Viennese doctor surely would have pointed to deeper currents. While not exactly enlightened, Franz Ferdinand’s views on the future of the empire were not at all uniformly in sync with those of his uncle’s conservative coterie. He had his own ideas and advisers, and chafed at waiting his turn, at least in part because of an under-appreciated aspect of his character.

Improbably, Franz Ferdinand was a closeted romantic, and he did something decidedly uncommon among his royal brethren: He fell madly in love, and remained just as madly in love, with a woman of minor nobility who was decreed by the hidebound royal court as inadequately marriageable for the esteemed likes of Franz Ferdinand -- and so of course, he married her anyway.

Doing this triggered severe sanctions from Franz Ferdinand’s own family. He was humiliatingly compelled to endure a morganatic marriage, renouncing the path of succession for his two young children, and explicitly acknowledging that Sophie could not ever participate in the intensively choreographed trappings of royal life.

To the otherwise boorish Franz Ferdinand, who perversely was the perfect family man at home, the sheer idiocy of dynastic protocol became a daily slight. It was an unceasing and mocking insinuation that his beloved wife did not even exist, and it isn’t surprising he nursed a collection of smoldering grudges.

In 1914, Franz Ferdinand had the chance to attend military maneuvers in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a disputed region of mixed ethnicity once occupied by the Ottoman Turks, and recently annexed by Austria-Hungary to the growing dissatisfaction of the neighboring Kingdom of Serbia, where there existed a body of opinion that all Serbs should be united under direct Serbian rule.

In such a highly charged atmosphere, the war games seemed a provocation to many people in the region. It was not necessary for Franz Ferdinand to make the trip, but naturally he did.

Among the reasons for Franz Ferdinand’s decision was this: As defined geographically by the same royal court protocol the heir detested so intensely, Bosnia-Herzegovina was outside the reach of official mandated etiquette. It was a veritable loophole, allowing what amounted to a pleasure trip on company expense, and a chance for him to treat his wife to the perks otherwise denied her. No doubt he chortled at the clever turnabout, and her servants began filling crates.

Meanwhile, this background meant nothing to a young group of nationalistic Bosnian revolutionary conspirators, who were being trained and financed by the Black Hand, a covert group of Serbian army officers. As the days passed prior to Franz Ferdinand’s arrival in Sarajevo, a motley crew of inflamed and malnourished terrorists plotted a tragicomic ambush of the Archduke.

As Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade rolled through Sarajevo, one of the inexperienced terrorists managed to keep his wits and inexpertly toss a bomb. It bounced off the hood of the Archduke’s car and ignited atop the vehicle behind it, injuring a subaltern.

The bomb thrower sought first to drown himself, jumping from an adjacent bridge into the knee-deep river; thwarted, he then tried to ingest poison that wasn't poisonous enough. He was quickly arrested and the group dissolved in panic, with Princip – a true believer if ever there was one – adjourning to the curb outside a coffee house to morosely consider the failures of the botched performance.

But ominously, he kept his gun safely in his pocket.

Meanwhile, in spite of the bomb attempt and further warnings that security could not be guaranteed, the supremely annoyed Archduke elected to finish his official visit at Sarajevo's town hall, where his epic tirade ended only after soothing words from the always helpful, calming Sophie.

Sarajevo City Hall (Vijećnica).

Hence the photo: A bedecked Austrian royal, veins still visibly bursting, descending the stairs while local minor officials in vests and fezes offer tepid and embarrassed salutes. The fear in their eyes is palpable even in ancient black and white. A bad moon is about to rise, and they all seem to know it.

Confusingly, the motorcade resumed. Although Franz Ferdinand’s staff had altered the return route to make it safer, the changes were not communicated to the drivers. The Archduke’s Gräf & Stift made a wrong turn, and its driver was told to halt.

The car stopped on the street directly outside the coffee shop where Princip now emerged to find his original target, seated stock still only 20 feet away, as though serenely posing in the cross hairs. He managed just two shots, each inexplicably perfect, and within moments both heir and wife were gone.

Princip's supposed foot steps,
and the commemorative plaque.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination provided the pretext for European hawks to settle accounts. Six weeks after his death, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia as a heavy favorite, but was mauled repeatedly by the outnumbered Serbs until German forces came to the rescue. Meanwhile, general conflict had erupted throughout Europe, the nasty unforeseen consequences of which endure a century later.

In retrospect, irony abounds. Franz Ferdinand may have been an unsympathetic, disagreeable figure, and yet his unquestioned love for his wife was in part responsible for their passing.

Moreover, he understood perfectly what so many of his royal compatriots did not: Austria-Hungary was not at all equipped to fight a modern, industrial war. Counter-intuitively, the first casualty of war was his country's prime voice for peace.

Soon millions of others would perish, although initially, only two funerals were required. In death as in life, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary went his own cantankerous way, with a little “help” from his hidebound royal family.

That’s because as noted previously, Franz Ferdinand’s final resting place is not among the Habsburg bloodlines deep within Vienna’s Kaisergruft. The same infuriating protocol forbade the presence of Sophie in the crypt, so Franz Ferdinand’s testament called for the couple’s burial together at his family’s castle in Artstetten, a half-day’s bicycle ride up the Danube from Vienna.

In 1985, I was just getting to know Franz Ferdinand’s story. By 2003, almost two decades later, I’d visited several other places connected to Franz Ferdinand: His chateau in Benesov, Czech Republic; the official residence at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna; and of course Sarajevo, where I followed the motorcade route and saw the scene of the crime.

In 2003 a friend and I bicycled to Artstetten. As we were leaving, I mentioned to the gift shop attendant that in 1985, I’d gone to Vienna looking for Franz Ferdinand's grave, only to find he wasn’t there, which was the reason I’d finally made it to Artstetten.

There was no public access to the final resting place of the Habsburg and his wife, and I didn’t ask for favors.

She handed me the key, anyway ... and I had my moments with them, alone.

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Following are a few other 1987 photos from Sarajevo. It can be safely assumed that much of what you see in these views was damaged during the fighting during the siege of the city in the early 1990s. I haven't been back. Maybe some day.

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Recent columns:

December 7: ON THE AVENUES: Say goodbye to all that, and expect the bayonet.

November 30: ON THE AVENUES: The 29 most influential books in my life.

November 23: ON THE AVENUES: A few thanks to give before we return to our regular resistance programming.

November 16: ON THE AVENUES: Harvest Homecoming chairman of the board David White replies to Cisa Kubley's column of November 2.

Make that 102 years.

History.

It just refuses to end.

"Sophie, Sophie, don't die! Stay alive for the children."

"Sophie, Sophie, don't die! Stay alive for the children."

This is the image that started it all for me. It shows the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary and his wife, exiting the town hall in Sarajevo and unwittingly preparing for an appointment with destiny via two well-placed gunshots from Gavrilo Princip.

It was 100 years ago today, and the people pictured above are not happy. It was about to get worse.

The irony of the Archduke's death is that it provided the pretext for the cataclysm of the Great War (now known as World War I). Franz Ferdinand may have been an unsympathetic, disagreeable figure in many ways, but he understood what so many other did not: His empire was not equipped to fight a modern, industrial war. Six weeks after his death, Austria-Hungary invaded tiny Serbia, and was mauled repeatedly by the Serbs until Germany came to the rescue. Meanwhile, general conflict had erupted throughout Europe, the consequences of which endure a century later.

From 1985 through 2006, the life of Franz Ferdinand was a recurring motif in my Central European travels. In 2008, I attempted to explain it, at least in part. It is my hope some day to have the chance to retrace these steps, all in one trip through the former Habsburg lands.

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Readers of history already know the emperor Franz Joseph's nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as the man whose 1914 assassination in Sarajevo lit the fuse for the Great War. As for me, since my very first visit to Europe in 1985, when I made a visit to Austria's national military museum for the sole purpose of viewing the Archduke's blood-splattered tunic and the automobile he and his wife were using to drive through Sarajevo when Gavrilo Princip's bullets ended their lives, visiting the various Central European locales on the Franz Ferdinand heritage trail has been a constant attraction.

The military museum was first, and also in 1985, I walked through the crypt of the Austrian emperors in Vienna precisely to see where Franz Ferdinand and his wife are not buried – and this absence is a very important part of the overall story.

The Archduke was a blunt, obnoxious, violent, unlikable and repressed human being who in his spare time enjoyed slaughtering wildlife under the guise of hunting.

He also did something decidedly uncommon among his brethren European royalty of the age: He fell madly in love, and remained just as madly in love, with a woman decreed by the royal court to be inadequately marriageable for an heir to the throne, and so he married her anyway, even though doing so forced him to renounce the path of succession for the children, and to acknowledge that Sophie could not participate in the normal trappings of royal life … or enjoy an eternal resting place alongside the properly accredited Habsburg family members.

Inexplicably, the otherwise indefensible Franz Ferdinand was transformed into the perfect family man at home in various estates and castles scattered throughout the realm … but, not unexpectedly, his perceived mistreatment at the hands of protocol rankled, and he nursed a smoldering grudge until the end of his life, which came in Sarajevo during a journey of largely unnecessary semi-official business that was undertaken because it geographically placed he and his wife outside the direct control of the court, inside a province that had been annexed only a short time before, and enabled him to provide his wife, albeit it briefly, with the "official" perks denied her otherwise.

All this meant less than nothing to a young group of nationalistic Bosnian revolutionary conspirators who detested the empire and were being trained and financed by a covert arm of the independent Serbian kingdom's military arm in Belgrade ("Black Hand"), and thus we are brought back to Sarajevo, where the motley crew of inflamed and malnourished terrorists plotted their tragicomic ambush of the Archduke.

To start, a bomb was inexpertly tossed. It bounced off the hood of Franz Ferdinand's car and ignited on the one following it, injuring a subaltern. The bomb thrower sought first to drown himself, jumping from an adjacent bridge into the two-foot-deep river, then, thwarted, tried to ingest poison that wasn't poison. He was quickly arrested and the group dissolved in panic, with Princip adjourning to the curb outside a coffee house to morosely consider the failures of the botched performance.

Meanwhile, in spite of the bomb attempt and further warnings that security could not be guaranteed, a supremely annoyed Archduke elected to finish the official visit to Sarajevo's town hall, resulting in one of the most incredible photos you'll ever see, with the bedecked Austrian royal visibly bursting veins while minor officials in vests and fezes offer tepid and embarrassed salutes. The fear in their eyes is palpable even in the ancient black and white photo. A bad moon is about to rise, and they know it.

But nothing can be done when it comes to fate, especially in the Balkans.

Sure enough, perhaps an hour later, the motorcade resumed without the Archduke's staff having communicated to the lead driver a slight change in route undertaken to make the return safer. Having missed the turn, the cars were halted on the street directly outside the coffee shop where Princip now emerged to find his original target stock still and seated only 20 feet away, posing for the crosshairs. Princip fired two shots, one each for Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, both inexplicably perfect in aim, and within moments, the heir and his wife were both dead.

Throughout my subsequent travels, I've visited the Archduke's "hunting lodge" in Benesov, outside Prague, consumed the beer brewed in his name nearby, returned to Vienna to tour the Belvedere Palace (his official residence), and finally in 2003, arduously climbed the steep side of the Danube valley on a bicycle for the privilege of seeing the ancestral castle at Artstetten, and being presented the key to the mausoleum by the lady on duty so that after twenty-two years, the couple's graves could at last be viewed and my respects offered.

But Sarajevo in 1987 remains the benchmark. The town hall, the bridge and the museum located where the coffee shop had been … the footprints in the concrete sidewalk to show where Princip stood when he struck his blows against the empire … and the ambience of this strange old town with minarets and church spires both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, not to mention synagogues, nestled together on a hillside, with the sprawling newer town encompassing a winter Olympics complex.

Hopeful news: "Sarajevo reopens historic city hall and library destroyed in war."

Another of my pilgrimage stops in 1987 was the library in Sarajevo, which served as city hall in 1914 when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited.

His day didn't end well.

Gavrilo Princip and the June 28 day.

22 years ago, the library was destroyed during the Yugoslav wars that dissolved a country formed after WWI, which Princip's bullets helped start. The Reuters report has good before and after photos.

Sarajevo reopens historic city hall and library destroyed in war (Reuters)

Sarajevo City Hall, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been attending a reception shortly before he was shot dead and which was destroyed in 1992 by Serb shelling, reopens

Sarajevo's City Hall, a stately neo-Moorish edifice marked by the violence of two 20th-century wars, has returned to its old glory after being destroyed by Serb shelling during the siege of the city in 1992.

The building, first opened in 1896, has been restored to mark the centenary of the start of the First World War, triggered by the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand just after he left a reception there in June 1914.

Converted into the National Library in 1949, it went up in flames in August 1992, destroying almost two million books including many rare volumes reflecting its multicultural life under the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires.

Gavrilo Princip and the June 28 day.

I've finished reading The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, Christopher Clark stunning "forensic" examination of the dominoes that fell in the aftermath of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination.

Now comes a book dealing ostensibly with the life and motives of triggerman Gavrilo Princip, except that as seems to be the custom in topics concerning the Balkans, nothing is simple; witness the opening of Clark's book, set a dozen years prior to Princip's shots, as a king and queen are brutally murdered.

At some point, there'll be time for a review of Sleepwalkers. Given my enduring fascination with this topic (see "Red Stars, Black Mountains: What’s Habsburg got to do with it?" for proof), there'll almost have to be a personal reflection on June 28, when the centenary arrives. But how? I'll be thinking about that.

The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War – review, by Tim Butcher (Guardian)

Tim Butcher brings his own experience of Yugoslavian conflict to bear on this revelatory portrait of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassin, Gavrilo Princip

At around 10.45 on the morning of Sunday 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip fired twice at point-blank range into the car bearing the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek. The first bullet tore through the collar of Franz Ferdinand's uniform, boring into his neck and opening the jugular vein. The second, aimed at Oskar Potiorek, the Austrian governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, went wide, probably because members of the crowd were already trying to restrain the assassin. The bullet flew through the door of the car and was deflected into the abdomen of the archduke's wife. She was already falling into a coma as the driver reversed the car away from the scene and sped towards the governor's residence. The archduke remained conscious for long enough to address his wife with words that would soon be reported across the world: "Sophie, Sophie don't die, stay alive for our children." Within half an hour both of them were dead.

Amazingly, little is known of the young Bosnian Serb whose shots triggered the escalations that brought war to Europe in 1914.