Gavrilo Princip was a Bosnian Serb member of Young Bosnia, a Yugoslavist organization seeking an end to Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, setting off a chain of events that would lead to outbreak of the First World War.
Background
Gavrilo Princip was born in the remote hamlet of Obljaj, near Bosansko Grahovo, on 25 July 1894. He was the second of his parents' nine children, six of whom died in infancy. Princip's mother Marija wanted to name him after her late brother Špiro, but he was named Gavrilo at the insistence of a local Eastern Orthodox priest, who claimed that naming the sickly infant after the Archangel Gabriel would help him survive.
Princip's parents, Petar and Marija (née Mićić), were poor farmers who lived off the little land that they owned. They belonged to a class of Christian peasants known as kmets (serfs), who were often oppressed by their Muslim landlords. Petar, who insisted on "strict correctness", never drank or swore and was ridiculed by his neighbours as a result. In his youth, he fought in the Herzegovina Uprising against the Ottoman Empire. Following the revolt, he returned to being a farmer in the Grahovo valley, where he worked approximately 4 acres of land and was forced to give one-third of his income away to his landlord. As he could not grow enough grain to feed his family, he resorted to transporting mail and passengers across the mountains separating northwestern Bosnia from Dalmatia in order to supplement his income.
Education
Despite his father's opposition, Princip first began attending primary school in 1903, aged nine. He overcame a difficult first year and became very successful in his studies, for which he was awarded a collection of Serbian epic poetry by his headmaster. At the age of 13, Princip moved to Sarajevo, where his older brother Jovan intended to enroll him into an Austro-Hungarian military school. By the time Princip reached Sarajevo, Jovan had changed his mind after a friend advised him not to make Gavrilo "an executioner of his own people". Princip was enrolled into a merchant school instead. Jovan paid for his tuition with the money he had earned performing manual labour, carrying logs from the forests surrounding Sarajevo to mills within the city.
After three years of study, Gavrilo transferred to a local gymnasium. In 1910, he came to revere Bogdan Žerajić, a Bosnian Serb revolutionary who attempted to assassinate Marijan Varešanin, the Austro-Hungarian Governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, before taking his own life. In 1911, Princip joined Young Bosnia (Serbian: Mlada Bosna), a society that wanted to separate Bosnia from Austria-Hungary and unite it with the neighbouring Kingdom of Serbia. Because the local authorities had forbidden students from forming organizations and clubs, Princip and other members of Young Bosnia met in secret. During their meetings, they discussed literature, ethics and politics.
Career
Next Princip migrated to Belgrade, where he volunteered to fight for Serbia in the First Balkan War, only to be rejected as "too small and too weak." When the visit of Archduke Francis Ferdinand to Sarajevo was announced early in 1914, Princip, along with Nedeljko Cabrinovic and Trifun Grabez, decided to make an attempt upon the life of the heir presumptive; they were supplied with weapons by Major Vojislav Tankosic of the Serbian organization Union or Death, dubbed the "Black Hand" by its enemies. Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, who guided the secret organization, supplied the boys with four pistols, six bombs, and some poison.
Disguised as peasants, the armed lads crossed into Bosnia on June 1, reaching the capital three days later. After some initial doubts, they decided to attempt the assassination on June 28, hoping by this violent deed to bring about social, political, and economic reforms for Bosnia and Herzegovina. On June 28 some of the would-be assassins lost courage. Cabrinovic threw a bomb, but it failed to find its target. As a result of this attempt upon Francis Ferdinand's life, the route of his motorcade was changed to proceed straight down the Appel Quay, but no one bothered to inform the driver of the car of the change in plans. The reigning military governor, General Oskar Potiorek, refused to bring additional troops into the city because they were not in dress uniform. Hence a startled Princip saw the archduke's car suddenly halt before him as Potiorek shouted at the driver to back into the Appel Quay. Princip drew his pistol and fired; within half an hour both Francis Ferdinand and his wife, the Countess Sophie Chotek, were dead.
Princip was arrested and put on trial for his action on October 12, 1914. Sixteen days later the guilty verdicts were handed down, but since under Austro-Hungarian law no youth under the age of twenty could be executed and although Princip's official birthdate in the civil register had initially been noted as June rather than July 1894, the assassin was spared execution and instead sentenced to twenty years at hard labor at the prison in Theresienstadt. Princip died there of tuberculosis on April 28, 1918, at the age of twenty-three. He was buried in an unmarked grave, but exhumed and reburied at Sarajevo in 1920.
Religion
A Serb family, the Princips had lived in northwestern Bosnia for many centuries and adhered to the Serbian Orthodox Christian faith.
Politics
Princip attempted suicide with a cyanide pill, but it was out-of-date (as did Čabrinović, leading the police to believe the group had been deceived buying the poison), then tried to shoot himself, but the pistol was wrestled from his hand before he had a chance to fire another shot. Princip was nineteen years old at the time and too young to receive the death penalty, being twenty-seven days short of the twenty-year minimum age limit required by Habsburg law. Instead, he received the maximum sentence of twenty years in prison. He was held in harsh conditions which were worsened by the war, and contracted tuberculosis. He died on 28 April 1918 at Terezín 3 years and 10 months after the assassination. At the time of his death, weakened by malnutrition and disease, he weighed around 40 kilograms (88 lb; 6 st 4 lb). His body had become wracked by skeletal tuberculosis that ate away his bones so badly that his right arm had to be amputated.
Fearing his bones might become relics for Slavic nationalists, Princip's prison guards secretly took the body to an unmarked grave, but a Czech soldier assigned to the burial remembered the location, and in 1920 Princip and the other "Heroes of Vidovdan" were exhumed and brought to Sarajevo, where they were buried together beneath a chapel "built to commemorate for eternity our Serb Heroes" at St. Mark's Cemetery.