1. Enraged over the abduction of his queen, he embarked on the most-written-about war of all time – launching a thousand ships for the sake of her lovely face.

2. Whether it was self-inflicted or the work of foreign saboteurs, the mysterious explosion that sank an American warship anchored off Havana served as the casus belli for a war that delivered the coups de grâce to a fading colonial power.

3. A staged attack on a radio station in Upper Silesia provided the pretext for invasion by a neighboring country with expansionist ambitions. Part of a larger “false flag” operation cooked up by and named after the invading regime’s No. 2 man, this manufactured “border incident” was one of 21 executed within the space of two days.

4. The assassination of this Habsburg prince, shot by a nationalist during a state visit to an imperial province, started a chain reaction that ultimately mobilized 60 million troops, and left 40 million people dead – half of them civilians.

5. By local accounts, genteel society sat on balconies overlooking the battery, the harbor and its besieged fort, drinking salutes as the first battle of this nation-defining war unfolded.

6. A religious war that pitted Catholics against Protestants, this decades-long conflict was famously triggered by the tossing of two Bohemian governors out of a window. (Miraculously, the governors survived; the peace did not.)

7. It should have been no surprise at all. Eight years earlier a mock attack, part of a preparedness exercise, had proved ominously successful. Yet the nation was surprised when early one infamous morning, an air raid – this time no drill – knocked out the better part of its fleet, leading inevitably to war.

8. After two years of civil war, a cease-fire was in effect and peace talks were well under way when a double presidential assassination reignited hostilities. No one knows who shot down the plane carrying the two heads of state, but the crisis sparked three months of massacres that left nearly a million civilians dead. Even after the ethnic killings ended, civil war resumed and did not subside for nine more years.

9. At the root of this civil war – the last in a series that tumbled a declining republic into dictatorship – lay a “sister scorned.” Two allies, brothers-in-law and longtime military compatriots, ruled the world. Their friendship soured somewhat when one of them abandoned his wife, the other’s sister. But it wasn’t until he married his lover without divorcing his wife, disinherited their children, ceded large territories to his new bride and legitimized her bastard son as royal heir that war boiled over.

10. Not a cause of war, but rather its consequence, church bells the world over by order of the Pope ring at noon in celebration of this long-ago, little-remembered military victory “that decided the fate of Christendom.”

›› CONTEST RULES
We are looking for the specific catalyst referenced in the clue, and the name and starting date of the ensuing war. Up to five $30 gift certificates from Borders Books and Music will be awarded to the swiftest, highest, strongest and best informed Last Worders who respond. If more than five perfect entries are received, five winners will be drawn by lot.

Send your answers no later than September 15 to The Last Word c/o USC Trojan Family Magazine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-7790.

Submissions by fax (213-821-1100) and e-mail <magazines@usc.edu> are welcome.