"Why did this particular political murder have such vast consequences? Part of the answer is that when the Archduke was shot he was driving along one of the world's great fault lines - the fateful historical border between the West and the East, the Occident and the Orient. From the fifteenth century until the late nineteenth, Bosnia and neighbouring Herzegovina had been parts of the Ottoman Empire. Many of their inhabitants had converted to Islam, the better to serve their Turkish rulers and to reap the full benefits of Ottoman rule. But Bosnia was never an entirely Muslim country; there were also substantial populations of Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats, to say nothing of Vlachs, Germans, Jews and Gypsies. To one Victorian visitor, the River Sava between Bosnia and Habsburg Croatia seemed to be the dividing line between Europe and Asia. Others saw the Miljacka, which runs through Sarajevo itself, as the border; or the Drina, which runs through Visegrad to the east. In truth, with the protracted decline of Ottoman power, the whole of Bosnia became a contested frontier. In 1908 Austria-Hungary had formally annexed Bosnia, over which it had enjoyed de facto control since the Congress of Berlin in 1878. When Francis Ferdinand visited Sarajevo just six years later, he was touring a new imperial acquisition, in which considerable sums had been invested on new roads, railways and schools, but where thousands of Austro-Hungarian troops still had to be stationed to maintain order."