Gavrilo Princip
Gavrilo Princip fired the two shots that began the First World War, and was too young to be hanged for it. Born in 1894 in a remote village in western Bosnia to Serb peasants, he was one of nine children of whom six died in infancy. Bosnia had been occupied by Austria-Hungary since 1878 and annexed outright in 1908, and he grew up among Serbs who regarded that as foreign rule. He went to school in Sarajevo and then Belgrade, was expelled for taking part in a demonstration, and was rejected by a Serbian irregular unit in the Balkan Wars as too small and weak. He fell in with Young Bosnia, a loose movement of students committed to ending Habsburg rule, and was supplied with pistols, bombs and cyanide by the Black Hand, a secret society within Serbian military intelligence. On 28 June 1914 — St Vitus's Day, the anniversary of Kosovo — seven conspirators lined the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's route. A bomb thrown by one bounced off the car and wounded officers behind. The visit continued. Princip had given up and was near a food shop when the Archduke's driver took a wrong turn and stopped to reverse a few feet away. He fired twice, killing Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. The cyanide was old and he only vomited. He was nineteen days short of twenty, the age of capital punishment, and was given twenty years. He died of tuberculosis in prison in April 1918. Yugoslavia treated him as a national hero and Austria as a terrorist, and the argument has never been settled anywhere in the region.
- Lived: 1894 CE – 1918 CE
- Nationality: Bosnian Serb
- Roles: assassin, nationalist_activist
