Overview
Gavrilo Princip (Serbian Cyrillic: Гаврило Принцип, pronounced [ɡǎʋrilo prǐntsip]; 25 July 1894 – 28 April 1918) was a Bosnian Serb student who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Sophie, Duchess von Hohenberg, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The killing of the Archduke and his wife set off the July Crisis, a chain of events that within one month led to the outbreak of World War I.
Princip was born in western Bosnia to a poor Serb family. At the age of 13, he was sent to Sarajevo, the capital of Austrian-occupied Bosnia, to study at the Merchants’ School, before transferring to the gymnasium, where he became politically aware. In 1911, he joined Young Bosnia, a secret local society aiming to free Bosnia from Austrian rule and achieve the unification of the South Slavs. After attending anti-Austrian demonstrations in Sarajevo, he was expelled from school and walked to Belgrade, Serbia to continue his education. During the First Balkan War, Princip traveled to Southern Serbia to volunteer with the Serbian army’s irregular forces fighting against the Ottoman Empire but was rejected for being too small and weak.
In 1913, following the unexpected success of the Serbians in the war against the Ottomans, the Austrian military governor of Bosnia, Oskar Potiorek, declared a state of emergency, dissolved the parliament, imposed martial rule, and banned all Serbian public, cultural, and educational societies. Inspired by a spate of assassination attempts against Imperial officials by Slavic nationalists and anarchists, Princip convinced two other young Bosnians to join a plot to assassinate the heir to the Habsburg Empire during his announced visit to Sarajevo. The Black Hand, a Serbian secret society with ties to Serbian military intelligence, provided the conspirators with weapons and training before facilitating their re-entry into Bosnia.
On Sunday 28 June 1914 during the royal couple’s visit to Sarajevo, the then-teenager Princip mortally wounded both Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by firing a pistol into their convertible car that had unexpectedly stopped 5 feet (1.5 m) from him. Princip was arrested immediately and tried alongside twenty-four others, all Bosnians and thus Austro-Hungarian subjects. At his trial, Princip stated: “I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free from Austria.” Princip was spared the death penalty because of his age (19) and sentenced to twenty years in prison. He was imprisoned at the Terezín fortress. The Serbian government itself did not inspire the assassination but the Austrian Foreign Office and Army used the murders as a reason for a preventive war which led directly to World War I.
Princip died on 28 April 1918 from tuberculosis exacerbated by poor prison conditions which had already caused one of his arms to be amputated.