10 Wars That Were Started For Stupid Reasons
2. No One Really Knows (Everbody Vs. Everybody Else, 1914-1918)
On Sunday 28 June 1914, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip shot dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria as the latter drove through Sarajevo. Then the First World War started.
The world accepts there is a link between those two events, but no one seems sure what it is. Scholars have spent just over a century trying to work out what the hell happened and there's still no consensus about just why the First World War started.
The best explanation is probably that a bunch of powerful empires with tons of soldiers and machine guns were all jammed into Europe together and a massive war was bound to happen sooner or later.
The powers of Europe were tangled up in a complex array of alliances and treaties that meant when one of them did something, everyone else had to react somehow, and soon they were all invading each other and demanding everyone else do the same.
The Archduke's assassination wasn't even really a trigger event, it was more like a starting gun to tell everyone the whole thing was finally on.