Franz Ferdinand

Heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and by most accounts the man most likely to have held the empire together.

He was born at Graz on the eighteenth of December 1863 and was not born to inherit. He became heir by two deaths: the Crown Prince Rudolf shot himself at Mayerling in 1889, and Franz Ferdinand's own father died of typhoid in 1896 after drinking from the Jordan.

His uncle the Emperor disliked him. He was blunt, impatient and difficult, and he had married badly. Sophie Chotek was a countess from a Bohemian family - noble, but not of a house that could marry a Habsburg heir - and the Emperor allowed it in 1900 only as a morganatic marriage. She would never be empress, their children could never inherit, and she was not permitted to sit beside him at court, ride in his carriage or share his box at the opera. Their marriage was, by every account of it, happy.

Politically he was the reformer the empire needed and did not want. He thought the Hungarians had too much and the Slavs too little, and wanted a third crown for them - which is precisely why Serbian nationalists thought him more dangerous than a hard-liner would have been. A federal empire that satisfied the South Slavs would have ended the argument for a greater Serbia.

He went to Sarajevo in June 1914 to watch the army manoeuvres. It was the twenty-eighth of June - Vidovdan, the Serbian national day, the anniversary of Kosovo. Sophie went with him because on a military inspection, outside Vienna, protocol allowed her to ride at his side.

They were killed within a minute of each other. He was fifty, she was forty-six, and they left three children.

Their children Sophie, Maximilian and Ernst, aged thirteen, twelve and ten.