6. The Balkans Backwater Terrorists Who Changed the World
Throughout history, few things could have been more unexpected than the world-changing impact of the Serbian Black Hand. They were a small group of fanatics in a Balkans backwater of a country that few at the time knew of, fired up by nationalist grievances that few outside their homeland had ever heard of, let alone cared about. Yet, that unheralded collection of obscure malcontents set in motion a chain of events that ended up changing the world beyond all recognition.
The Serbian Black Hand was an early twentieth-century irredentist secret society, that sought to bring all Serbs together into a single country. They employed terrorist methods in a bid to free Serbs outside Serbia’s borders from Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule and to unify them into a Greater Serbia. Austria-Hungary was the Black Hand’s main target, and the group’s assassins would go on to murder the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. The result was unprecedented mayhem, as the world was plunged into its greatest war until then. By the time the dust had settled, one era had ended, and another – in which we live to this day – had begun.