The Assassination of Julius Caesar
(Ides of March, 44 BCE)
Judging the young Gaius Julius Caesar, nobody in ancient Rome expected him to develop into a great national leader. He spent his youth (he was born in July 100 BCE) as a fashionable fop: writing poetry, perfuming and curling his hair, and indulging in numerous love affairs—with men as well as women, according to his enemies. His fellow Romans regarded him as a clever socialite but not a man likely to achieve high office. For all his artistic pretensions, however, Caesar was, at heart, a warlord.
The death of Caesar
The Radical Fop
In 65 BCE Caesar was elected as an aedile: the master of ceremonies in public celebrations. The Roman Senate still thought of him as a fop and a political lightweight, but Caesar put the posting to good use. He borrowed large sums from Crassus, a millionaire friend, and staged some spectacular public shows. One of them featured 320 pairs of gladiators.
Caesar was already immensely popular with the plebeians (the teeming, non-noble population of Rome) because, although of a high patrician (noble) house himself, he seemed to genuinely care about the lot of Rome’s poor. That’s why Crassus was willing to bankroll his friend almost without limit—Caesar wielded considerable political clout with the reformist populares party.
Rome’s foremost military hero, Pompey the Great, came back from his conquests in the East in 62 BCE. Caesar suggested an alliance. He was the most popular man in Rome, Crassus was the richest, Pompey was its greatest hero; together they could do what they liked. This oddly assorted trio—the ambitious millionaire, the egotistical general, and the still rather foppish man of the people—entered into a partnership that would make them masters of Rome.
Bust of Julius Caesar. Caesar began his public life in the post of master of ceremonies in the Roman republic. He proved to have a gift for organizing dazzling spectacles for celebrations and holidays.
The Three-Headed Monster
Pompey, shown above, formed the triumvirate with Crassus and Caesar.
The people could overrule the Senate, if the plebeian leaders spoke with one voice—an event so rare that the Senate had never made any real attempt to strengthen its position against the populares. Their friends knew Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar as “the triumvirate”; their enemies called them “the three-headed monster.”
In the following year, 59 BCE, the three-headed monster achieved the first of its aims: in the teeth of bitter opposition from the patricians, Caesar was elected consul (the name given to the two leading magistrates who ruled the Roman Republic). Caesar then used his power to get Pompey what he most wanted: land for his retiring soldiers. Then Pompey and Crassus were appointed heads of a commission to administer new laws—positions that allowed them to target their enemies with selective legislation. Thus the three triumvirs emerged as the most powerful men in Rome.
Conquest
Caesar battles the Britons on the shores of the English Channel.
The Senate’s endless backbiting and infighting wearied Caesar, so he marched off to Gaul (present-day France) looking for adventure and glory. He found both over the next seven years. His army, in a stunning series of battles, subdued the Gauls from the border of Spain to the North Sea, then crossed the English Channel and defeated the southeastern Britons.
Back in Rome, Pompey and Crassus viewed these triumphs with mixed feelings. The three-headed-monster could only remain stable as long as none of the heads grew too big. So Crassus, determined to win some military glory, tried to outdo Caesar by invading the Parthian Empire (in what is modern-day Iran).
The campaign proved a disaster; Crassus badly misjudged the situation. Sweltering in heavy armor beneath the blazing sun, Roman legionnaires stood defenseless against mounted enemies, who fired volleys of arrows and then rode away before any chance of counterattack. The Parthian army’s hit-and-run tactics destroyed the Romans. Crassus himself was captured and executed.
Traitor or Liberator?
In 49 BCE the Roman Senate appointed Pompey (far right) sole consul, setting the stage for Caesar’s revolt.
On hearing the news of Crassus’s defeat and seeing that now was their chance to break the populares stranglehold on government, the patricians offered to make Pompey sole consul of Rome. The aging Pompey must have feared that he couldn’t handle Caesar without Crassus to balance matters. Pompey decided to betray his political partner. The Senate ordered Caesar to leave his army and return to Rome.
Despite all he had done for the Republic, Caesar knew just how vindictive the patrician Senate could be: if he returned to Rome without his army to protect him, he’d be dead within days. He decided to disobey orders and marched part of his army to the banks of the river that divided Gaul from Italy—the Rubicon. There he waited, hoping that matters might still be smoothed over. But when Pompey and the Senate threw down the gauntlet, ordering him to disband his army or be considered a public enemy, Caesar gave the order to cross the Rubicon.
It meant civil war.
Lone Ruler
Caesar, honored with a banner reading VENI, VIDI, VICI, during his victory parade.
Pompey and his army made a tactical withdrawal to Greece—why battle on home territory when you can devastate somebody else’s land? Caesar entered Rome in triumph and had himself reappointed sole consul by what remained of the Senate—naturally, his most implacable enemies had fled with Pompey.
Caesar then pacified the rest of Italy. The Roman armies of Spain had sided with their old commander, Pompey, so Caesar defeated them before turning to the greatest task. In Greece Caesar defeated Pompey’s vastly superior forces at the Battle of Pharsalus. Pompey escaped to Egypt, but as he stepped ashore, his Egyptian hosts stabbed and beheaded him. Egypt wanted nothing to do with defeated generals, even ones as legendary as Pompey the Great.
In 45 BCE Caesar sailed back to Rome to a magnificent victory parade. The leading chariot bore the words VENI, VIDI, VICI: “I came, I saw, I conquered.” The Senate voted Caesar the title of dictator (then a term that simply meant that he was the sole consul—with no co-consul who might veto his decisions). It was a post that few imagined he would ever give up voluntarily.
The Great Reformer
Now 65 Caesar was growing increasingly imperious and distant in his manner. Many feared that the once fun-loving dandy had developed delusions of grandeur or even kingship.
Yet if he himself was cold, most of his works as dictator of Rome were reforming. He altered the calendar by adding a “leap year” to fix the yearly slippage of a few hours that meant that the midsummer festival was slowly edging into autumn. He settled new towns with his battle-weary ex-soldiers, giving each a generous land grant. He enacted laws that curbed the power of the rich and alleviated the misery of the poor. He also extended Roman citizenship to former barbarian lands, such as areas of southern Gaul. To represent these new citizens, he expanded the number of seats in the Roman Senate, diluting the power of the old patrician families.
Caesar also chose to forgive his surviving enemies, rather than kill them. He clearly meant to smooth over the ruptures of the civil war, and, perhaps, he had developed an aversion to spilling more Roman blood.
The Assassination
Death of Caesar by Vincenzo Camuccini (1773–1844) depicts Caesar’s former friends and allies stabbing him in the Roman Forum.
Less than a year after Caesar’s victory, a conspiracy formed, spearheaded by former enemies of Caesar but also backed by those he considered allies and friends. On the morning of March 15, 44 BCE, a group of senators called Julius Caesar to the Forum, on the pretense of reading a petition. As Caesar began to read, one of the conspirators, Tillius Cimber, pulled at Caesar’s toga. The outraged Caesar cried out, but Casca, another member of the plot, came at Caesar with a dagger, landing a glancing slice on the dictator’s neck. Caesar had no bodyguards, and his friends did nothing to help him. Soon the entire group pounced on him. He initially fought off his 23 attackers until, seeing one called Marcus Junius Brutus stab at him, he exclaimed, “Et tu, Brute?” Then, throwing a fold of his robe over his face, he succumbed to the blades. Brutus, the son of Sevilia, a former lover, was a particular favorite of Caesar’s, and history has remained muddied over Caesar’s last words. Most historians believe he exclaimed, “You too, Brutus?” But the Roman historian Suetonius reported that he actually cried, “You too, my son?”
Much has been made, by William Shakespeare and others, of the “noble” aims of the conspirators—that Caesar hoped to make himself a king, and they wanted to defend republican freedoms. But was this true?
Who’s Your Daddy?
Was Marcus Junius Brutus (one of the leading conspirators in Julius Caesar’s assassination) actually Caesar’s illegitimate son? The answer is almost certainly “no.” Caesar was only 15 years old when Brutus was born; a bit too young for even the amorous Julius to conduct an affair with another man’s wife.
The Reason for Murder
After cremation outside the building, Caesar’s ashes were buried in the heart of the Forum.
Caesar had all the power he needed as “dictator for life” (a position the Senate awarded him only a month before his death), and he had no legitimate children upon which to pass a hereditary monarchy.
Caesar was actually, at the time of his murder, preparing a military expedition against a minor insurgency in Spain. After that he planned to execute a major attack against Parthia to avenge the death of his friend Crassus. It is likely, knowing Caesar’s military genius, that he would have won at least a partial victory in the East, increasing Rome’s wealth and power yet again. And while away fighting, Caesar would have been in no position to cruelly tyrannize Rome, even if his character ever changed enough to make him want to do so.
So by killing him when they did, the conspirators achieved little or nothing and also lost much for Rome . . .
(April 26, 1478)
When Lorenzo de’ Medici, the wealthiest banker in Florence, went to Mass on Easter Sunday 1478, he had no suspicion that killers stalked him and his younger brother and co-ruler, Giuliano. A professional hit man named Montesecco had been hired to do the job by a rival banker, Francesco de’ Pazzi, and when Lorenzo was dead, Montesecco was supposed to invade the city with a hired army and wipe out the rest of the Medici family.
Giuliano de’ Medici
The Pazzi Conspiracy
Chaos erupts in the nave of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore as perpetrators of the Pazzi conspiracy attack the Medici brothers.
Giuliano was the first to die—but he should not have even been in the cathedral. Pazzi had persuaded him to rise from a sickbed to attend High Mass at the cavernous Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. At the closing of Mass, as Pazzi stood with Giuliano near the altar, he gave Giuliano a friendly squeeze—he was really checking for a concealed dagger. Then an accomplice, Bernardo Bandini Baroncelli, shouted, “Here, traitor!” and plunged his dagger into Giuliano’s side. Giuliano staggered back into Pazzi. Pazzi began slashing, stabbing Giuliano 18 more times. Giuliano fell dead.
Meanwhile the priest slated to kill Lorenzo placed a hand on Lorenzo’s shoulder. Lorenzo twisted around in a flash, and the priest lunged, slicing Lorenzo’s neck. Drawing his own sword, Lorenzo fought off his attackers before his friends hustled him to safety behind the massive bronze doors of the sacristy.
“Palle! Palle!”
The Medici coat of arms
Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch of Bernardo di Bandini Baroncelli, hanging from the Bargello
Unaware that the plot had misfired, the head of the Pazzi family, Jacopo, rode around the piazza waving his sword and shouting, “Liberty and the republic!” in an effort to raise the populace against the Medicis. The crowd, who loved the Medicis, replied with shouts of “Palle! Palle!” or “Balls! Balls!”—not a lewd riposte but a reference to the Medici coat of arms. Jacopo fled.
Within an hour the bodies of most of the plotters, including Francesco de’ Pazzi, were hanging out of the Bargello, also known as the Bargello Palace or Palazzo del Popolo (“Palace of the People”), and other government palace windows with ropes around their necks. Some were simply tossed from towers to die broken on the ground. Jacopo, after capture, begged for mercy. “Allow me to commit suicide,” he pleaded. His capturers denied him. They beat him until he could not walk before hanging him naked.
The Scene of the Crime
Golden mosaic in baptistery of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Italy
The Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore is the cathedral church (Duomo) of Florence. Construction began on the Duomo in 1296, with its major construction completed in 1436. With a variegated exterior in various shades of green and pink marble, it features a magnificent dome, which was designed by Filippo Brunelleschi. It was in its peaceful but imposing setting that Giuliano de’ Medici bled to death from the knife wounds inflicted by Francesco de’ Pazzi and Bernardo Bandini Baroncelli.
Until the murder in the cathedral, the Pazzi family had had an honorable history with the Duomo. Francesco’s ancestor, Pazzo (“the madman”) had returned from the First Crusade with a stone from the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. His descendants were given the distinction of striking a light from this stone on Holy Saturday, when all fires in the city were extinguished. From this spark, the altar light of the Duomo was rekindled annually. On Easter Sunday a dove-shaped rocket would slide on a wire from above the altar to a fireworks-laden oxcart waiting in the Duomo’s piazza. The fireworks not only entertained the populace, they also provided the sparks that relit the city’s hearths.
Twisting the Pope’s Tail
Among the statues of famous Florentines that grace the facade of the renowned Uffizi Gallery is one of Lorenzo de’ Medici.
Lorenzo de’ Medici was a brilliantly gifted “Renaissance man” who, before his early death (at the age of 43) had made his city, Florence, the most celebrated in Italy. Lorenzo was the patron of great artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Botticelli. His grandfather Cosimo the Great had accumulated the family wealth, and Lorenzo became head of the family in 1470, when he was only 21.
Eight years later he became the target of the murder plot, dreamed up by men he trusted: Pope Sixtus IV, who had once been his friend and client, and Francesco de’ Pazzi, the town’s second-richest banker. When the pope decided to buy a strategically placed town called Imola, Lorenzo had secretly asked Pazzi not to lend him the money. Pazzi immediately told the pope. The pope removed the papal account from Lorenzo and transferred it to Pazzi.
Lorenzo now made the mistake that cost his brother’s life. A wealthy man named Borromeo lay on his deathbed, and his only relative, his daughter, was married to a Pazzi. Lorenzo quickly passed a law that said that male heirs should be preferred over females. Borromeo’s money went to Lorenzo’s nephew instead. Pazzi swore revenge.
Papal Sinners
Sixtus IV, shown seated at far right, one of the ringleaders of the Pazzi plot
It seems astonishing to us that a pope could be part of a murder plot. But in Renaissance Italy, few people would have raised an eyebrow. More than one medieval pope had proved immoral.
Sixtus IV was born in 1414 into the modest Rovere family. He entered the Church and became a Franciscan friar. Intellectual brilliance brought him to the papal throne in 1471, but he was also power-mad and corrupt—and soon infamous for his greed and nepotism.
To do him justice, Sixtus was not willing to countenance murder. “No killing,” he warned Pazzi as they hatched their plot to overthrow the Medicis. But both Pazzi and the pope knew perfectly well that there was no way of getting rid of the Medicis without murder.
When the plot failed the pope was beside himself with rage, not simply because his enemy was still alive but also because one of his own favorites had been killed—Francesco Salviati, the archbishop of Pisa.
It had been Archbishop Salviati’s job to murder the chief justice, Petrucci, when he was eating lunch. But Salviati was unaware that Petrucci’s door had a spring lock that would snap closed. When he demanded to see Petrucci, he was without his thugs. When Petrucci grew suspicious and called for the guard, Salviati lost his nerve and tried to run away. Consequently he became one of the corpses dangling out of a window.
In Deep Trouble
The inner courtyard of the Bargello, once the site of executions. The Bargello now serves as a museum.
The pope now demanded that Lorenzo should be sent to Rome to be tried for Salviati’s murder. Florence refused, and the pope placed the whole city under interdict, forbidding Mass and communion, and called for a crusade to destroy it.
There were plenty of the pope’s friends who were delighted to answer the call. King Ferrante of Naples was particularly dangerous and had soon routed Lorenzo’s half-hearted mercenaries. Then people began dying of plague at a rate of eight a day. Lorenzo knew it would only be a matter of time before Florence handed him over.
Lorenzo now played his masterstroke. In December 1479 he embarked on a journey to Naples. With lavish gifts in hand, he exerted all his considerable charm on Ferrante. His grand gesture worked. The king liked him, and soon the two of them were spending all their time hunting together. Ferrante agreed to peace, and when Lorenzo returned to Florence, crowds cheered themselves hoarse, and every bell in the city rang all day.
The pope was furious—but helpless. And he soon felt obliged to swallow his rage. When the Turks invaded southern Italy, his contemporaries generally believed that Lorenzo was behind it, for he had often claimed that he had some influence over the sultan. When Otranto fell to the Turks, the pope thought they were preparing to march on Rome, and hastily granted Florence absolution. Once again the bells rang out for Lorenzo.
(1475–1507)
If Lorenzo de’ Medici is one of the greatest men of the Renaissance, Cesare Borgia has a good claim to be the most evil.
His father, Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander VI, may have been the worst pope who ever lived: he was corrupt, ungodly, and obsessed with seducing underage girls. When he was a cardinal, the previous pope had to reprimand him for holding an orgy in his garden with crowds of expensive courtesans.
Rodrigo’s mistress, Vannozza dei Cattanei, having produced three illegitimate children, Giovanni (Juan), Cesare, and Lucrezia, felt that her position ought to be legalized. The pope found her a husband—specifying that he was not to engage in sex with Vannozza. When she became pregnant again, the pope suspected that she had reneged but accepted the child, a son named Gioffre (Jofré), philosophically.
Cesare Borgia
A Change of Fate
The lifeless body of Giovanni is brought to his family, Alexander, Lucrezia, and Cesare.
Alexander VI hoped to become the master of Italy, so he decided that Giovanni was destined for the army. Cesare would enter the Church—and inherit the papacy. Cesare hated the idea. Then one evening Giovanni vanished mysteriously after he and Cesare ate supper with their mother. His body was pulled from the Tiber River with nine stab wounds. It was a long time before people realized that Cesare had chosen the simplest method of stepping into his brother’s shoes as the family warrior.
Lucrezia Borgia
Portrait of a Woman by Bartolomeo Veneto. Most historians agree that the sitter was Lucrezia Borgia.
Lucrezia has a reputation as a poisoner, but this is completely unjustified—she never poisoned anyone. There are many well-known rumors about Lucrezia’s complicity in her brother’s crimes and misdeeds, but these reports are unsubstantiated. Born in 1480, she was pretty, gentle, and had a temperament that begged to be dominated.
Her father decided to marry her off as soon as possible. She was betrothed twice by the time she was 13, but it was not until after Rodrigo became pope that he selected Giovanni Sforza, scion of a powerful Milanese family. But Giovanni soon realized that with a brother-in-law like Cesare, he was not likely to live long and returned home to Milan.
For safety, Lucrezia, now divorced, went into a convent. Giovanni had resisted divorce on grounds of alleged impotence but gave in when told he would have to demonstrate his virility with a prostitute in front of the College of Cardinals. Even in a convent, however, Lucrezia still managed to become pregnant. The pope solved the problem by marrying her off to Alfonso of Aragon, the son of the king of Naplesof Naples problem by marrying her off to Alfonso of Aragon, the son of the king of Naples.
Murder in the Family
Lucrezia seemed to enjoy marriage. This did not sit well with the possessive Cesare, who was used to a great deal of attention from his sister. Cesare, once known as a handsome man, had become very conscious of his appearance. A bout of syphilis had scarred his face, and he began wearing masks and dressing in all black. Jealous of his sister’s good-looking husband, he plotted to rid himself of his rival. One evening a group of Cesare’s men repeatedly stabbed Alfonso while he was crossing Saint Peter’s Square. Papal guards intervened and carried the bleeding man to his wife’s apartment in the Vatican. Lucrezia and Alfonzo’s sister Sanchia (who was married to Gioffre Borgia) fought to save his life. But just as he began to recover, he was found strangled in his bed. Cesare, accused of the murder, freely admitted it—he claimed Alfonso had fired a crossbow at him as he walked in the papal gardens. The grief-stricken Lucrezia retired to her castle at Nepi.
The Beginning
A Glass of Wine with Cesare Borgia by John Collier. In Collier’s illustration Pope Alexander VI bends over his plate, while Cesare, at left, pours a glass of wine—assumed to be poisoned—for a guest. Lucrezia stands between her brother and father.
In exchange for a divorce decree, the new French king, Louis XII, made a deal with the pope to appoint Cesare as the duke of Valence. In 1499 Cesare married Charlotte d’Albret, the 16-year-old daughter of the king of Navarre. In a scandalous letter to his father, he described, in detail, the pleasures of the wedding night. The French court hated him for his vain, tasteless behavior, and Cesare spent much of his time grinding his teeth at slights and insults. That same year, with Cesare in tow, Louis XII invaded Italy with the pope’s approval. Cesare immediately began a campaign against those who had upset him—“friends” of his died suddenly after banquets, or were found stabbed in the Tiber. Finally some Romans recalled the death of his brother Giovanni and saw the light.
The Conqueror
The Ducal Palace in Urbino. Cesare held Urbino from 1502 to 1503.
Cesare marched off to fight in the province of Romagna, south of Venice, which his father wished to add to the papal territories. He had the kind of dash and boldness that brought swift victories. The pope provided the monetary support by selling cardinal’s hats to 12 completely unsuitable but wealthy candidates.
Cesare captured Rimini, Fana, and Pesaro. He now had the bit between his teeth—and he seemed unstoppable. After Cesare had subdued Romagna, his father made him duke of the province. Cesare decided that the unruly region needed a firmer hand, so he gave the most ruthless man he knew—Remirro de Orco—full authority to restore law and order by whatever means necessary. De Orco carried out the task with ferocity and soon had the whole region cowering. Cesare—to avoid the blame for this cruelty—had de Orco captured, hacked into two pieces, and left out in the public square at Cesena. A brutal end to someone whose brutality he’d sanctioned.
In summer 1502 Cesare displayed his cold-blooded qualities on the field of battle. His latest objective was the town of Camerino. This was well to the south of his other conquests in Romagna, and the large town of Urbino lay between them. Urbino’s duke, Guidobaldo, was a friend and ally, so he saw no reason to worry about his exposed position. Cesare marched on Camerino from the south—and then unexpectedly seized Urbino. Guidobaldo had to flee to Mantua. If anyone had accused him of treachery, Cesare would have replied that if an ally is in a position to stab you in the back, it is common sense to strike first.
Lucrezia—Marriage 4
While Cesare was conquering Italy, Lucrezia had remarried. The pope was aware that his health was failing and wanted to see his beloved daughter settled. For an enormous dowry, the duke of Ferrara agreed to permit the marriage between Lucrezia and his son Alfonso d’Este. It was Cesare who suggested the alliance. He had morphed from a possessive malcontent into a methodical madman.
Disaster
A nineteenth-century print, showing the accidental poisoning of Alexander and Cesare.
With shattering suddenness, the whole edifice of power came tumbling down. On Friday, August 11, 1503, the pope and Cesare attended a party at a vineyard just outside Vatican City; their host was cardinal Adriano Castelli da Cornetto. The next day, the pope and Cesare lay ill in bed with all the signs of fever. For a few days, they were both at the point of death. The pope briefly rallied, only to have a relapse and die.
Cesare, still lying ill in bed, knew he was in trouble. His career would be at an end if one of his father’s enemies became pope. A harmless and aged cardinal was elected Pius II but died within a month. And the man who replaced him—as Julius II—was a member of the Rovere family, old enemies of Cesare and his father. On the day Julius was elected, Cesare told Niccolò Machiavelli that he never thought that at his father’s death he would be dying himself.
Plague in a Bottle
The Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome was built by the Roman emperor Hadrian (117–138) as a mausoleum. A corridor connects it to the Vatican, and beginning in the thirteenth century, Roman Catholic popes used it as a fortress, a prison, and a place for torture. It is now a museum.
Cesare took refuge in the Castel Sant’ Angelo to avoid the daggers of his enemies. Lucrezia, safe in Ferrara, wrote to the king of France begging him to allow Cesare to take up his dukedom there. But Cesare was now an embarrassment to the French. The new pope ordered Cesare arrested and brought back to the Vatican—he was locked in the room where he had Lucrezia’s second husband strangled. Cesare escaped from Rome and hurried to his allies in Naples, only to face arrest again.
Imprisoned on the island of Ischia, he was forced to give up his conquests in Romagna. Everything he had gained was now lost. He was allowed to go to Spain, but he’d forgotten that his brother Giovanni had left a widow—a bitter widow determined to avenge her husband’s murder. Cesare landed in a Cincilla jail.
The Spaniards had only one reason for keeping him alive: he was a valuable pawn to use against the pope. To have Cesare in prison was like having a plague germ in a bottle. In 1506 Cesare escaped and joined his brother-in-law, the king of Navarre, who was engaged in a territorial dispute in Spain. Cesare again took up a position as a commander—but of a mere 100 troops.
He rode ahead of the rest of the army and engaged the enemy first to prove that he was as bold as ever. This time his luck deserted him. Badly wounded, he was left to die of thirst. He was only 31.
Few Tears for Cesare
Cesare had only three mourners: his mother, Vannozza; his sister, Lucrezia; and his adviser, Niccolò Machiavelli.
Charlotte Corday and the Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat
(July 13, 1793)
On July 13, 1793, the French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, sat in his bathtub. A crate was propped next to it, serving as a makeshift writing desk so that Marat could lean on it to pen an article for his fiery leftist newspaper L’Ami du Peuple (The Friend of the People). One of the greatest intellectuals and scientists of his age, Marat suffered from a debilitating skin disease, which itched fiercely and left his skin covered in blisters. The condition made it more comfortable for him to write in a medicated bath.
Jean Marat
One Death to Save Many
Charlotte Corday, just after stabbing Marat in his bath
At just after seven in the evening Marat heard women’s voices outside his door. One was his future sister-in-law, Catherine Evrard, and the other a more cultivated voice, obviously that of a “lady.” In fact he was half expecting a feminine caller, for a woman named Charlotte Corday had written to him earlier in the day, begging for an interview. Marat now called out to Catherine to let her in.
Corday, who came from Caen in Normandy, was a pretty young woman in her mid-20s. Her purpose, she had explained in the letter, was to tell Marat about a group of conspirators who belonged to the moderate Girondist faction and were plotting against Marat’s own extreme leftist faction, the Jacobins (The Girondins had actually started the French Revolution in 1789, but the Jacobins now regarded them as reactionary fuddy-duddies.).
Marat asked her to name names, and as Corday, sitting by the bath, started to dictate, Marat began writing them down, remarking, “They shall all be guillotined.” He then asked his fiancée, Simonne, to fetch some more of the kaolin solution he used in the bath. Charlotte knew that this was her only chance. As she stood up, she took a knife out of the top of her dress and plunged it into Marat’s right breast near the clavicle. Marat slumped back. The blade had severed the carotid artery, and he died almost immediately. And Corday, believing she would be killed too, sat there quietly as Marat’s crimson blood flowed into the milky bathwater.
Revolution!
The French Revolution was a bloodbath waiting to happen. Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, France had experienced a population explosion, which filled the towns with unemployed farm laborers and beggars. But while the poor died of starvation, the aristocracy did not even pay taxes.
You could say the Revolution began in December 1725, when the hired ruffians of the Chevalier de Rohan, with whom he had exchanged angry words, beat up Voltaire, the writer and philosopher. When Voltaire complained, Rohan had him thrown into prison and released only on condition that he left the country. This treatment filled him with rage and hatred. He went to England, where there was a tradition of free speech. And from then on he devoted his considerable wit and brilliance to trying to destroy people like Rohan.
By 1787 things were so bad that the Marquis de Lafayette, who had fought in the American Revolution, suggested to the king that he ought to call a parliament. Louis XVI refused, but the newspapers set up such a clamor that he finally had to give way and call a parliament (or Estates General). This started by suggesting that the aristocrats should pay taxes.
Jacques-Louis David. painted The Death of Marat just days after the journalist’s death. David deliberately depicted Marat as a healthy man, cut down as a martyr for the revolutionary cause.
Marat’s Bathtub
After Marat’s death, the infamous bathtub disappeared. Evidence suggests that Simonne Évrard sold it to her neighbor, a journalist. In the ensuing years it changed hands a few times, and in 1885 a Le Figaro journalist tracked it down to a parish church in Brittany. The parish curé realized that he had a hot commodity. After offers from both Madame Tussaud’s waxworks and Phineas Barnum, the curé sold the tub for 5,000 francs to the Musée Grévin, another waxworks in Paris. It is there still.
The Bastille Falls
The storming of the Bastille
On July 14, 1788, a starving mob surrounded the Bastille, Paris’s greatest prison. The governor agreed to surrender, but as he marched out at the head of his troops, someone grabbed him and hacked off his head with a butcher’s knife.
The king then behaved stupidly. He decided to escape from Paris and return at the head of an army. Revolutionaries caught him and forced him to return to the city—but at least they allowed him to live.
Then Marat began to demand the king’s death. So did his fellow revolutionary leaders Robespierre and Danton. In January 1793 a guillotine removed Louis’ head. His was followed by that of his infamous queen, Marie Antoinette. And the Girondins, also driven out of government, were forced to flee to places like Caen in Normandy. Many also lost their heads.
Enter Mademoiselle Charlotte Corday
Detail from David’s Death of Marat, showing the lifeless hand of Marat, still clutching Charlotte Corday’s letter of introduction
On July 7, 1793, rebel Girondins held a parade in Caen. And Charlotte Corday, daughter of an aristocratic family, watched it. She had been about to enter a religious order when the Revolution broke out and nunneries were abolished.
Corday was not a royalist. On the contrary, she was an admirer of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the writer who stated: “Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains.”
Her mother had died in childbirth. And the priest who had administered the last rites had been forced to flee into the woods; he was hunted down with dogs and executed. As far as Corday was concerned, the man who was basically responsible for this was the immensely influential editor of the Friend of the People, Jean-Paul Marat.
Charlotte in Paris
On July 9 Corday took a carriage called a diligence to Paris. On arrival she took a room at the Hôtel de Providence before heading to the Palais-Royal, where she bought a 6-inch kitchen knife with “a dark wooden handle and a silver ferrule.” She intended to stab Marat at the national assembly, but she was disappointed to learn that Marat was ill, so he could not be killed in front of his fellow deputies, as she had imagined. She went to his lodging in the morning and was told he was too ill to see anyone. She left him a letter, promising to reveal the names of traitors in Caen. And when he returned later in the day she was lucky—newspapers and fresh bread were just arriving, and she was able to slip upstairs. There she encountered Catherine, who told her she could not possibly see Marat. So as she pleaded, Corday deliberately raised her voice so that Marat could hear her. And his voice called: “Oh, let her in . . .”
Just Who Was the Monster?
A copperplate print, published in England just 10 days after the assassination of Marat, shows Charlotte Corday, with her wrists linked by a chain, pleading her case before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Marat’s body lies between Corday and the judges, who appear shocked and alarmed by her forthright declaration of murder.
Corday proved a remarkably composed murderess. In a preliminary interrogation, she plainly stated that she had come to Paris to kill Marat. A police commissioner noted, “Convinced that the flames of civil war were about to be ignited throughout France and certain that Marat was the principal author of these disasters, the prisoner testified that she wished to sacrifice her life for her country.” And although the authorities sought to establish that she had merely been the handmaiden of a larger conspiracy, Corday calmly insisted after repeated questioning that she had planned and committed the assassination alone—she simply had no coconspirators and no accomplices. At her trial she never deviated from her story, asserting, “I told my plans to no one. I was not killing a man, but a wild beast that was devouring the French people.”
It was a vain hope, though. Rather than uncovering the evil of Marat, she instead turned him into a martyr.
Off with Her Head
Corday stares out from behind prison bars.
Corday never shirked from her guilt, admitting, “I killed one man to save 100,000.” Four days after she stabbed Marat, on July 17, she faced the guillotine. Immediately after her head fell, one of the executioner’s assistants lifted her head from the basket and slapped it on the cheek. But even executions have a code of etiquette—and slapping a decapitated head was a breach of it. The assistant spent three months in prison as punishment.
Her body, after it had been autopsied to verify her virginity, was tossed into a trench next to Louis XVI.
The guillotine was intended to provide a fast, humane method of execution.
Unleashing the Terror
Charlotte got only one thing wrong. Her bold act did not save France from further bloodshed. On the contrary, after her execution, it unleashed the period historians call “The Terror,” in which thousands of people died on the guillotine.
The Death of Napoleon Bonaparte
(May 5, 1821)
Napoleon Bonaparte
In ate winter of 2002, workers bulldozing an abandoned army barracks outside Vilnius, Lithuania, stumbled upon a mass grave. The bodies had not been thrown in haphazardly; they were laid out in rows and layers with military neatness. And many of them were still covered by the shreds of dark-blue uniforms.
The dead men were the remains of one of the most successful armies in European history: the French Grand Armée of Napoleon Bonaparte. They had defeated larger armies again and again, winning France an empire that, at one time or another, stretched from Egypt to Sweden and from Portugal to Russia. And there, in the frozen Lithuanian earth, lay two thousand of them—none showing evidence of death through violence. All had died of a combination of starvation, disease, exhaustion, and, especially, bitter cold. They had followed the tremendous vision of their commander, only to be killed by an enemy even his strategic genius could not outmaneuver: the Eastern European winter.
At the height of his power, Napoleon had earned the nickname “the Monster”—so frightening was his reputation. Yet he died suddenly on his exile island of Saint Helena at the age of just 52. Little surprise then, that some still believe that he was murdered to prevent his escape to terrorize the world again.
The Rise of the Monster
Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of the Bridge of Arcole. During this battle with Austrian troops in 1796, Napoleon proved to be a brilliant tactician.
Napoleon was born on Corsica in 1769, the son of a petty aristocrat. In his teens Napoleon attended the Parisian Military Academy. He rose rapidly through the ranks of the French army, joining the republicans during the revolution and becoming a national hero after he led the Revolutionary army to victory over the Austrian occupying forces in northern Italy.
He then invaded Egypt, seeking to strike from there at British territories in India, but he was defeated by Admiral Nelson at the Battle of the Nile and was forced to return to France. There he seized power over the flagging revolutionary government and made himself First Consul—dictator in all but name—in 1799. He had himself crowned emperor of France in 1804.
Conquest then followed conquest: by 1809 Napoleon ruled almost all of Western Europe.
The Fall of the Monster
Napoleon, after his abdication in Fontainebleau
Then came the defeats, culminating with the retreat from Moscow to France, during which 570,000 of the 600,000 soldiers of the Grand Armée died in the snow.
The French Empire was finished. Napoleon’s own generals persuaded him to surrender and hand himself over to the victorious allied nations. They sent him into exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba with a ceremonial guard of 2,000 men. But within a year he and his tiny army escaped and marched on Paris. The French collaborator armies sent to kill him instead joined him, and within weeks Napoleon was once again master of France.
Napoleon now asked his enemies for peace, but they would not trust him. So he attacked their forces in Belgium before they could invade France. He narrowly lost the Battle of Waterloo, defeated only by a combination of thick mud, the Duke of Wellington’s generalship, and the doggedness of British, Dutch, and Prussian troops.
His new place of exile was the dreary Longwood House on Saint Helena—an island off the African coast in the mid-Atlantic so remote that even he could not escape from it.
The Death of the Monster
Napoleon in exile on Saint Helena off the African coast. He moved to Longwood House on the island in December 1815. In letters to the governor, Napoleon complained that the house was ill maintained and damp. By May 1821 his health had deteriorated dramatically.
So was Napoleon Bonaparte murdered to prevent a second escape and a third attempt at creating a lasting French empire?
When he died in 1821 the autopsy listed the cause of death as “stomach cancer.” Certainly this sounded convincing at the time. Paintings of Napoleon famously showed him habitually holding his right hand under his waistcoat, cradling his stomach, because he suffered from stomach ulcers—a condition brought on by constant stress but later made worse by the terrible cold on the retreat from Moscow. Such severe ulcers are often a precursor to stomach cancer.
Hints of Murder
Death of Napoleon by Charles de Steuben. Francesco Antommarchi, Napoleon’s physician, performed the autopsy. Antommarchi did not sign the official statement that declared the cause of death to be stomach cancer. Some felt that evidence of the emperor’s well-known stomach ulcer gave the British a convenient explanation for his death, therefore dodging some of the criticism they received for the quality of the care they gave him during his exile on Saint Helena.
Napoleon had not spent his last days alone, and one man in particular remained close to the fallen dictator—his valet, Marchand, who recorded his master’s agonized ending. This memoir, however, did not see print until 1955.
It was then that the conspiracy theories truly arose. Just how did Napoleon die? Was it the purported cancer—or something far more sinister?
Around the time of the memoir’s publication, Swedish dentist Sten Forshufvud launched his own investigation. Studying Marchand’s account of Napoleon’s last days on Saint Helena and comparing its descriptions of his symptoms with various possible diagnoses, Forshufvud came to a striking conclusion. The symptoms were far more consistent with a slow, incremental poisoning by arsenic, than they were with stomach cancer. But how could he prove his hypothesis?
Arsenical Evidence
Forshufvud first tracked down hair samples, a feat made possible by the nineteenth-century practice of snipping the locks of famous people for keepsakes. He then persuaded Hamilton Smith of the University of Glasgow to use his new testing procedure for detecting arsenical poisoning on the hair samples. Initial tests did detect higher than normal levels of arsenic. Additional tests erased all doubt—at least for a small group of investigators. Napoleon had been the victim of murder by arsenic.
The debate raged for decades, with various characters named as possible suspects, until in 2007 new tests on samples of Napoleon’s hair found significant amounts of the poison arsenic. Death by slow arsenic poisoning and death by stomach cancer are very similar, right down to the damage done to the stomach lining by both afflictions.
A Theory in Doubt
Below, Napoleon’s remains are hoisted onto a ship leaving Saint Helena.
Despite the evidence, doubt still remained. Then, in 2008, further tests on hair samples of Napoleon’s family and other, unrelated contemporaries, found similar amounts of trace mineral arsenic. The poison was used in many products in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so natural environmental seepage seems a likely cause of the high levels of arsenic found in Napoleon’s hair.
There are many who still debate these prosaic findings and insist that there is a solid case to accuse his British jailors or disgruntled retainers of assassination. But, because of the high levels of the poison in his environment, we will probably never be able to prove it.
The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
(April 14, 1865)
The story of how a pro-Confederate actor, John Wilkes Booth, came to murder the 16th president of the United States is rather more complex than is generally thought. Most people know that Booth shot Lincoln while the president was watching a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.—and many thus assume that Booth was just an opportunistic killer, perhaps even an actor in the play itself.
In fact the plot to kill Lincoln was multifaceted. Booth and his fellow conspirators planned multiple murders, ultimately aiming at creating total chaos in the federal government of the United States and perhaps thus giving the Confederacy time to reorganize and fight back from defeat in the Civil War.
John Wilkes Booth
Let’s Steal the President
One of the last photographs shot in what was the last official photo session for President Abraham Lincoln. The session was long thought to have taken place on April 10, 1865, just days before his death. Recent research, however, indicates that the session took place earlier that year, on February 5.
The original plan, hatched by John Wilkes Booth, was not actually to kill Lincoln but to kidnap him. Ransoming the president, the conspirators would demand the immediate release of thousands of Confederate prisoners of war. This, they hoped, might give the South enough men to fight back from the brink of defeat.
Booth planned to waylay and abduct Lincoln on a quiet stretch of road as the president returned from watching a play at the Campbell Military Hospital on the evening of March 17, 1865. But Lincoln changed his plans at the last minute and instead attended a political junket at the National Hotel. Booth was doubly furious because, ironically, the National was the hotel in which he himself was staying.
A Change of Plan
Three of the conspirators in the plot to incapacitate the government of the United States. Above left, George A. Atzerodt; above right, David E. Herold; and right, Lewis Powell. Powell also used the names Paine and Payne. Most of the conspirators were photographed in irons aboard the U.S. monitor Saugus, where they were taken after capture.
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee of the Confederate States of America surrendered to General Ulysses Grant, commander of the Union army at Appomattox Court House: the Civil War was officially over. Two days later Lincoln gave a speech on the White House lawn mentioning, among other things, his belief that African American males should be allowed to vote. An incensed Booth was in the audience and was heard snarling: “That’s the last speech he’ll ever give.”
But the planned assassination was not just an act of revenge; Booth still believed that the South could rise up again and win the war. He wrote in his diary after the announcement of the surrender: “Our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done.”
He and the conspirators from the botched kidnap attempt—Lewis Powell, George A. Atzerodt, David E. Herold, John Surratt, and a few others—planned now to kill not only Lincoln but also Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. They also aimed to kill General Grant. This, they hoped, would plunge the government and military of the Union into chaos, allowing the still fleeing and uncaptured government of the Confederacy to re-form and restart the war.
It is evident, from the harebrained optimism of the plot, that none of the conspirators had witnessed the utter desolation of the Confederate states in the latter part of the war: the South had no chance of rising again, even if the entire government of the Union were to suddenly drop dead.
The Best-Laid Plans
Powell attempts to kill Seward.
Aiming to kill all four targets on the same night, Booth gave Lewis Powell the job of murdering Secretary of State Seward; George Atzerodt was to assassinate Vice President Johnson. Booth himself would kill the hated President Lincoln and General Grant.
During the afternoon of April 15, Booth went to see Mary Surratt, mother of coconspirator John Surratt, and asked her to bring a package to her tavern in Surrattsville, Maryland, where Booth had stashed guns and ammunition. She was to tell the innkeeper to make ready the weapons. By seven that night he met with the rest of the conspirators.
But the plan went wrong from the start. Powell managed to break into Seward’s bedroom and stabbed wildly at him with a knife—but, in the dark, he only landed a few nonfatal cuts before making his escape. Atzerodt—who had already tried to back out of the plot after the failed kidnapping—simply got drunk and did not even try to kill the vice president.
Meanwhile General Grant and his wife, Julia, were supposed to attend the showing of the comedy play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater, sitting in the same box with the president and his wife. But the habitually unsociable Grant ducked out of the invitation at the last minute. Thus Lincoln was the only target present when John Wilkes Booth stepped into the box at 10:15 PM on April 14, 1865.
Sic Semper Tyrannis!
Booth enters the presidential box and fires point blank at Lincoln.
The Lincolns joined their companions for the evening, Major Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, a bit late but settled in comfortably, with the president and first lady in velvet-covered rocking chairs, to enjoy the evening’s entertainment.
Booth entered the theatre at about 9:00 PM and, knowing the layout well from his stints performing there, made his way to a narrow hallway between Lincoln’s box and the theatre’s balcony. He chose his moment carefully, waiting for a line from the on-stage actor that he knew would draw a laugh from the crowd. Wrestling past the military officer on guard, Booth fired a one-shot pistol into the back of Lincoln’s head. He then pulled a knife, stabbed the guard in the arm, and climbed up on the box’s balcony rail. Booth had meant to make a dramatic leap to the stage but caught his foot in a flag hanging from the box and landed awkwardly, breaking his ankle. Nevertheless the actor managed to shout, “Sic semper tyrannis!” (Latin for “Thus always to tyrants!” and the state motto of rebel Virginia) before hobbling off, waving the bloody knife over his head. Although several theatergoers gave chase, Booth escaped through the back door of the theater. He managed to throw himself onto his horse and rode out toward Navy Yard Bridge to meet up with Herold and Powell.
A Hopeless Effort
Shocked but resigned to the worst, officers and doctors surround President Lincoln as he lies on his deathbed.
The cries of alarm from the presidential box drew the attention of Charles Leale, a young army surgeon. He rushed to help out but found the door to the box jammed—Booth had cleverly notched a dent in the door earlier in the day and had managed to jab a wooden brace against it as he entered the box to kill Lincoln. Although blood was gushing from his upper left arm, Rathbone, inside the box, managed to free the brace, allowing Leale to enter. The president was slumped forward in his chair, held up by a sobbing Mary. By the time Leale had lowered Lincoln to the floor, another doctor had joined him. They worked feverishly, but each of them knew that their efforts were hopeless.
Yet another doctor had joined them, and the three of them, along with some soldiers in attendance, carefully carried the president out of the theater and across the street to William Petersen’s boarding house. There began the vigil that would last until 7:22 AM the next day.
Useless
A crowd gathers to witness the executions of Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt on July 7, 1865.
Abraham Lincoln was the first U.S. president to die by assassination, but his death led to no chaos in the government. Vice President Andrew Johnson was simply sworn in as the 17th president of the United States.
Lewis Powell and George Atzerodt were quickly caught, tried, and hanged. Would-be presidential kidnapper John Surratt escaped to Europe but was later extradited to the United States. He was acquitted of direct involvement in the assassination and lived a long life—unlike his unfortunate mother, Mary, who was hanged for preparing the weapons used by the plotters.
Union soldiers cornered John Wilkes Booth and his guide, David Herold, in a barn in Maryland, 12 days after the assassination. Herold surrendered—and was later hanged—but Booth held out, even after the barn was set on fire. A sniper shot him in the neck, and he died two hours later.
Paralyzed from the neck down and in great pain, Booth’s last words were accurate: “Useless . . . Useless . . .”
An Act of Kindness
Abraham Lincoln’s last official act as president was to commute the death sentence on George Vaughn, a convicted Confederate spy. The signing of all the necessary papers, for this act of humane generosity, made Lincoln a little late for the play at Ford’s Theater.
The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
(June 28, 1914)
It was described as “the shot that rang around the world”: a single act of terrorism that, it is generally believed, catapulted the planet into its first world war. The 1914 murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand certainly shocked the planet, much as the murder of President John F. Kennedy did in 1963. It also sparked a diplomatic battle that quickly collapsed into total war. But was the shot fired by the young Yugoslav nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, really the cause of millions of deaths? Most modern historians reject such a simplistic view—one equivalent to blaming the cow that kicked over a lamp in Patrick O’Leary’s barn for the destruction caused by the subsequent Great Chicago Fire.
Gavrilo Princip
The Balkan Tinderbox
Three emperors of Europe in 1914, from the left: Nicholas II of Russia, Wilhelm II of Prussia, and Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary. Europeans before the war were all related to one another. Most of them had grown up in unimaginable luxury, sure that their way of life was secure.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the small eastern European states of Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina had spent much of the previous 50 years as political footballs between the three hulking empires of Austria-Hungary, the Turkish Ottomans, and Tsarist Russia. Indeed the Balkan region as a whole was a buffer zone between these menacing states, with Austria holding most of the area in virtual serfdom, and the Ottomans and Tsarist Russia making expansionist territorial claims on those same regions.
To add to the dangerous mix, the ruling class of all three empires were reactionary and corrupt—heavily reliant on draconian laws and military force to maintain control over their territory. But Europe was no longer in the Middle Ages; the people that the aristocrats of all three empires derisively dismissed as “peasants” were becoming increasingly educated and, as a direct result, increasingly aware of just how subjugated and oppressed they were.
One such “peasant” was Gavrilo Princip. He was the son of a rural postman who, as a small child, had been sent to live in Zagreb with his older brother because his parents couldn’t earn enough to feed him. Six of Gavrilo’s nine siblings had not survived past infancy—a common death toll among poor families in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Too Small and Weak
Princip’s elder brother had enough money to put him through high school, but when Gavrilo was 17, in 1912, he was expelled over his involvement in a protest against Sarajevo authorities. Seeing how little the rotting Austrian Empire did for them, it was only natural that many young Serbs, Coats, and Muslim Bosnians hoped that self-determination might better their lot, but all such political activity was strongly suppressed by the imperial authorities.
He moved to Belgrade to try to enter another college but was rejected. He then tried to join a guerrilla combat unit that was fighting Ottoman expansion into Macedonia, but they too rejected Princip—this time because poor nutrition as a young child had meant that he grew up to be “small and weak.” It seems likely that his involvement in the violent arm of the Serb nationalist movement was a reaction to all this endless rejection. Gavrilo wanted to prove to the world, and especially to his fellow activists, that he wasn’t just a worthless weakling.
A Good Man Expecting to Die
By comparison to the impoverished and unwanted Princip, Archduke Franz Ferdinand—the heir presumptive to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—had been brought up in a life of unimaginable luxury. Born in 1863 he had undergone a strict education but thereafter was free to indulge in such eccentric hobbies as jousting—as if he were a medieval lordling.
Yet the sad irony is that the archduke was actually a forward-looking, humane, and liberal man. He saw that political self-determination must be the future for many of the regions of his empire, and argued vigorously with the backward-looking policy makers who believed that all Austria needed was more crushing laws, more soldiers, and more killing of troublemakers.
But if he hoped that when he inherited the Austrian throne he might be able to roll back centuries of misgovernment, the archduke was also realistic enough to see the dangers of the growing situation. He told a friend in early 1914: “The bullet that will kill me is already on its way.”
The Morganatic Wife
The agreement Franz Ferdinand made with his uncle Emperor Franz Joseph meant that his wife, Sophie, rarely appeared at his side for public events. The joint appearance in Sarajevo was a rare occurrence.
In 1895 the archduke had met Countess Sophie Chotek and fallen in love. Although she was an aristocrat, she was not a member of one of the reigning or formerly reigning dynasties of Europe and therefore was an unsuitable mate for the heir to the imperial throne. Franz Ferdinand would have no other wife, though. Eventually his uncle, Emperor Franz Joseph, agreed that the pair could enter into a morganatic marriage. Their children would have no succession rights to the throne. Sophie herself would not share her husband’s rank, title, precedence, or privileges. And ironically, she would not normally appear in public beside him.
Mistakes on Both Sides
After firing seven shots into the royals’ car, Princip tried to shoot himself. But police captured Princip, shown above second to right, before he managed to commit suicide.
The archduke and Sophie were invited to witness a military parade in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. But by going he was being uncharacteristically tactless—this was the date of a Serbian nationalist holiday. To die-hard nationalists like Gavrilo Princip, the Austrian parade and the archduke’s presence seemed like calculated insults.
There were six primary conspirators who plotted the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, all members of Young Bosnia, an offshoot of the Black Hand, a nationalist movement that favored a union between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. Serbs, Croats, and Muslim Bosnians made up the Young Bosnia group, which committed itself to the independence of the South Slavic peoples of Austria-Hungary. Earlier that morning one of the Young Bosnia members, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, threw a bomb at the open, horse-drawn carriage in which the archduke and his wife were riding. They both escaped unharmed, although several onlookers were injured in the blast. The archduke and wife visited all of the injured at the hospital before they began to make their way back to the palace.
The royal couple was transferred to a car—also open topped—but the driver took a wrong turn in the thronging, cheering crowds. As he stopped and tried to reverse, Princip stepped up to the car, raised a Browning pistol, and fired two shots from a distance of just a few feet. Sophie was hit in the stomach and then Franz in the neck. Princip then tried to shoot himself, but a passerby stopped him. The police then quickly stepped in and took him in alive.
The Quick-Burning Fuse
Grim artifacts from the assassination: the 1911 Gräf & Stift touring car in which the archduke and his wife were riding at the time of their assassination, below, and right, Franz Ferdinand’s bloodstained uniform can be seen at the Military History Museum in Vienna, Austria.
Although their aides tried to save them, both Franz Ferdinand and Sophie died within minutes. Princip and his fellow student conspirators were thrown in jail. But how did the assassination lead to war?
The Austrian government demanded the extradition to Vienna of certain Serbian officials who they suspected of helping Young Bosnia plan the attack. The Serbs, despite their underdog status, refused. So Austria declared war on its own province. Russia mobilized its armies to help Serbia, and Austria reacted by declaring war on Russia. Germany and Turkey supported their ally Austria, and Britain and France weighed in for Russia. By the end of the war more than 20 million people had died—including Gavrilo Princip, who died of a combination of tuberculosis and malnutrition in a Bosnian jail in 1918.
But it wasn’t Gavrilo Princip’s nationalism or the archduke’s death that started the war: it was the decades of unrestrained military expansion within the empires of Europe, coupled with the shortsighted and reactionary policies of the imperial governments.
No Regrets
Gavrilo Princip never meant his actions to start a war. In his own words: “I am the son of peasants and I know what is happening in the villages. That is why I wanted to take revenge, and I regret nothing.”
Shoko Asahara and the Aum Shinrikyo
(March 20, 1995)
On March 20, 1995, soon after seven in the morning, commuters on the Tokyo subway began to experience a tickling in the throat and soreness in the eyes and nose; soon they smelled a stench like a mixture of mustard and burning rubber. Within minutes dozens of people were choking or falling to the ground.
It was happening all over the Tokyo underground system. No one had any idea what was causing it. Fleets of ambulances ferried gasping or unconscious passengers to hospitals—the number of injuries reached 5,500. Many seemed to be temporarily paralyzed, and a dozen would die. Yet it was not until mid-morning that a military doctor made a cautious and incredible diagnosis: the victims were suffering from poisoning by a nerve gas called sarin, once used by the Nazis in their death camps.
Shoko Asahara
Suspicious Activities
Kasumigaseki Station was one of the many stations affected during the sarin nerve gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system. The attacks took place just at rush hour, killing 12 commuters and sickening 5,000 more.
A national police investigation soon turned up a likely suspect: an immensely wealthy religious cult known as Aum Shinrikyo, or “Aum Supreme Truth,” led by a 40-year-old guru who called himself Shoko Asahara.
During the previous six months, police had received dozens of phone calls accusing the cult of fraud, abduction, brutality, and murder. Now Aum Shinrikyo was the chief suspect in the nerve gas attack. In spite of his protest—“We carry out our religious activities on the basis of Buddhist doctrines, such as no killing”—police raided Asahara’s headquarters on the slopes of Mount Fuji. Most of the cultists had left, taking crates of documents, but the police found a huge stockpile of chemicals like sodium cyanide and peptone for cultivating bacteria. One of the chief suspects was a young cultist called Yoshihiro Inoue, the guru’s intelligence chief, who was caught driving a car that contained chemicals for manufacturing high explosives.
On May 16 there was another police raid on the Mount Fuji headquarters; this time they found a secret room, inside which a large, bearded figure sat cross-legged on the floor in the meditation posture. He told the police imperiously, “I am the guru. Don’t touch me. I don’t even allow my disciples to touch me.”
The Guru’s Progress
Asahara, whose real name was Chizuo Matsumoto, had been born blind in one eye and partially blind in the other. He was raised in a poor home, but had been a brilliant pupil at school. He thought of becoming a radical politician, like Mao Zedong, then began to meditate and claimed that one day he felt the kundalini (the sacred energy that electrifies and enlightens the soul) mounting his spine.
Asahara founded a yoga school, which became so profitable that he opened several more. Then he went to the Himalayas to meditate and even had himself photographed with the Dalai Lama. There in the Himalayas Asahara claims he experienced enlightenment and achieved psychic powers.
He changed the name of his yoga school to Aum Supreme Truth (Aum is a Sanskrit syllable pronounced during meditation). Teaching a mixture of Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism, Asahara was soon surrounded by hundreds of followers. Because he assured them that large cash donations would hasten their spiritual enlightenment, he was soon a very wealthy man.
Make War, Not Love
Hayakawa, shown right, was sentenced to death for his role in two murders and for building a sarin nerve gas factory.
In 1993 Asahara instructed his chief engineer, Kiyohide Hayakawa, to try to buy an atomic bomb. In fact, during 1994, Hayakawa made eight trips to Russia to try and buy a nuclear warhead.
When Hayakawa failed, Asahara decided to buy land in Australia. There cult members began testing nerve gas on sheep whose skeletons were later found by police.
No One Accepts Responsibility
A wanted poster in Japan listing three of the perpetrators of the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. From left, Makoto Hirata, Katsuya Takahashi, and Naoko Kikuchi.
But what possible point could there be to gassing hundreds of people in the Tokyo subway system?
Ashara’s trial failed to enlighten the public. Placed on the stand in 1996, he refused to enter a plea of either guilty or not guilty. For almost nine years, as the trial ground along, the ex-guru flatly refused to answer questions with anything but incomprehensible mutterings. In February 2004 he was sentenced to death on multiple counts of murder and attempted murder. Twelve of his followers were also sentenced to execution.
All appealed their death sentences, knowing that given the slowness of the Japanese justice system, they might avoid execution for many years, even if their appeals were ultimately unsuccessful.
So, why did they do it? The followers, predictably, say that they were acting on the guru’s orders and were not privy to his divine plan. Asahara, through his lawyer, claims the followers cooked up the whole scheme themselves, without his knowledge. He says that he has no idea why they tried to murder so many people.
Quake Inducing Terror
Rumors abound about other “doomsday weapons” that Aum Shinrikyo was supposed to be experimenting with: one was even said to be an “earthquake inducer”—a terrifying thought in quake-prone Japan.
