The Causes of World War I If you were to look back at WWI, you would see that there were direct and indirect causes to the war. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was an immediate cause. Gavrilo Princip, working with a Serbian anti-Austrian secret society called “The Black Hand” shot Archduke Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 in order to make way for a Slavic revolution. The assassination didn’t do as Princip hoped, and it was used as an excuse for Austria to take hostile action against Serbia. That was not the only cause of the war. The Alliance System was one of the festering causes of the war. After Germa