timeline

By Iván Ontiveros

  • Franco-Russian Alliance

    Both Russia and France, which had been humiliated in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, feared the rising power of Germany, which had already formed alliances with Austria-Hungary and Italy. So the two nations decided to join forces for mutual protection as well. It was the start of what would become the Allied side, the Triple Entente, in World War I.

  • First German Naval Law

    This legislation, advocated by Germany’s newly-appointed Secretary of the Imperial Navy, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, dramatically expanded the size of Germany’s battle fleet. It was the first of five laws dictating a buildup in which the Germans envisioned building a force that was superior to Britain’s Royal Navy.

  • The Russo-Japanese War

    Russia’s Czar Nicholas II wanted to obtain a port that gave his navy and commercial ships access to the Pacific, and he set his sites on Korea. The Japanese saw Russia’s rising aggressiveness as a menace, and launched a surprise attack on Nicholas’ fleet at Port Arthur in China. The resulting war, fought both at sea and on land in China, was won by the Japanese, and as Beiriger notes, it helped shift power the power balance in Europe.

  • Austria-Hungary’s Annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina

    Under an 1878 treaty, Austria-Hungary was governing Bosnia and Herzegovina, even though technically they were still part of the Ottoman Empire. But after Austro-Hungarian government annexed their territory, the move backfired. The two provinces’ mostly Slavic population wanted to have their own country, while Slavs in nearby Serbia had the ambition of appropriating the provinces themselves.

  • The Second Moroccan Crisis

    The German small cruiser SMS Berlin is shown arriving two days after gunboat Panther in order to strengthen the German position off shore Agadir, Morocco, July 1911. The French and Germans butted heads for several years over Morocco, where Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II meddled in an attempt to pressure the French-British alliance.

  • Italy Invades Libya

    The Italian government declared war on Turkey in 1911 because it had refused to permit the military occupation of Tripoli by Italy. Italian troops are seen here landing after the bombardment of Benghazi. The modern Italian state, which didn’t begin until 1861, had been “largely left out of the scramble that built Britain, France, and other powers into worldwide empires,” Fogarty explains. The Italian government set its sights on Libya,

  • The Balkan Wars

    Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Greece, which had broken away from the Ottoman Empire during the 1800s, formed an alliance called the Balkan League. The Russian-backed alliance aimed to take away even more of the Turks’ remaining territory in the Balkans.

  • Events that Led to World War I

    introduced the world to the horrors of trench warfare and lethal new technologies such as poison gas and tanks. The result was some of the most horrific carnage the world had ever seen, with more than 16 million military personnel and civilians losing their lives. The event that sparked the conflagration was the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in 1914.

  • Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

    The archduke, who was heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, went to Sarajevo to inspect the imperial troops stationed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He and his wife Sophie were shot to death in their car by a 19-year-old Serbian revolutionary, Gavrilo Princip.