In the dark of the early morning of the 28th of June, 1914, a Hungarian bishop woke from a dream so specific that he got out of bed, wrote it down, and drew a picture of it. Ten hours later, in Sarajevo, the picture came true, and the world went to war.

His name was Joseph Lanyi, Bishop of Grosswardein, and years earlier he had been the language tutor of a young Austrian archduke named Franz Ferdinand. In the dream, the bishop was at his desk, and on it lay a letter edged in black, sealed with the Archduke's coat of arms. He opened it. Inside, in his old pupil's own handwriting, were the words: I and my wife will fall victims to political assassination this day. And above the writing there was a small picture, like a postcard, showing a street, an open motor car with the Archduke and his wife sitting in it, an officer facing them, and two young men springing out from the crowd and firing.

Lanyi woke shaking. The hour is one of the few things the accounts disagree about, some say around a quarter past three, others nearer half past four, and it is fair to say so. What is not in dispute is what he did next. He got up in the dark, wrote out everything he had seen while it was fresh, and sketched the scene from the dream. Then, as morning came, he told his mother and a guest staying in the house what he had dreamed. And he went and said a mass for the souls of Franz Ferdinand and his wife, while both of them were still alive, hundreds of miles away, and had not yet got into the car.

At about eleven that morning, in Sarajevo, a nineteen year old named Gavrilo Princip stepped out of a crowd toward an open motor car carrying the Archduke and Duchess, and fired twice. Within six weeks Europe was at war, and the century that followed was the one we got. Lanyi sent his written account and his sketch to his brother, a professor, and afterward a Vienna newspaperman examined the drawing and questioned the two witnesses in the house, and they confirmed it. It is testimony, not proof, and the witnesses were his own household. But the drawing was made before breakfast.

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