Her father was a Bohemian aristocrat, by birth member of an old House of Chotek, who served as Austrian Ambassador to the royal courts of Stuttgart, Saint Petersburg and Brussels.

[1][2][3][4] As a young woman, Sophie became a lady-in-waiting to Archduchess Isabella,[3] the wife of Archduke Friedrich, Duke of Teschen, head of the Bohemian cadet branch of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine.

Franz Ferdinand had become heir presumptive to the throne, after the suicide of his cousin Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889 and the death of his father Karl Ludwig of typhoid in 1896.

However, to prevent Franz Ferdinand from attempting to proclaim his wife empress-queen or declaring their future children dynasts and thus eligible to inherit the crown (especially that of Hungary, where morganatic marriages were unknown to law) once he ascended the throne, he was compelled to appear at the Hofburg Imperial Palace before the gathered archdukes, ministers, and dignitaries of the court, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Vienna and the Primate of Hungary on 28 June 1900 to execute by signature an official instrument in which he publicly declared that Sophie would be his morganatic wife, never to bear the titles of empress, queen or archduchess, and acknowledging that their descendants would neither inherit nor be granted dynastic rights or privileges in any of the Habsburg realms.

[7] The couple had four children:[4] In 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was invited by General Oskar Potiorek, Governor of the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to watch troops on maneuvers for three days in Sarajevo, the provincial capital.

Sophie was not usually allowed to accompany her husband on ceremonial visits because of her lower status, but on this occasion, Franz Ferdinand was invited as a military commander rather than a royal personage.

[9]: 17  The archduke therefore arranged for Sophie to join him on 28 June, the third and final day, for a troop review followed by a visit to the city to dedicate a new museum before returning to Vienna.

[citation needed] At 10:10 am of Sunday, 28 June 1914, when the procession passed the Sarajevo central police station, Nedeljko Čabrinović hurled a hand grenade at the archduke's car.

A member of the archduke's staff, Andreas, Freiherr von Morsey, suggested this might be dangerous, but General Oskar Potiorek, who was responsible for the safety of the Imperial party, replied, "Do you think Sarajevo is full of assassins?

When Freiherr Morsey told Sophie about the revised plans, she refused to stay, arguing: "As long as the Archduke shows himself in public today I will not leave him.

"[citation needed] In order to avoid the city centre, Potiorek decided that the Imperial car should travel straight along the Appel Quay to the Sarajevo Hospital.

The bodies were transported to Trieste by the battleship SMS Viribus Unitis and then to Vienna by special train for a joint funeral mass in a short ceremony at the Hofburg Palace attended by the immediate imperial family.

The reverse of the coin shows the entrance to the Hohenberg family crypt, with left-set overlay profile portraits of Sophie and Archduke Franz Ferdinand.