Gavrilo Princip

July 25, 1894 – April 28, 1918

Bosnian Serb student who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, the act that set off the July Crisis and the First World War.

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Biography

Gavrilo Princip was born in 1894 in the hamlet of Obljaj in western Bosnia, then administered by Austria-Hungary, to a poor Serb farming family. At thirteen he went to Sarajevo to study, first at the merchants' school and then at the gymnasium, where he read nationalist and radical literature.

In 1911 he joined Young Bosnia, a secret society seeking to free Bosnia from Austro-Hungarian rule and unite the South Slavs. After taking part in anti-Habsburg demonstrations in 1912 he was expelled from school and walked to Belgrade. When the First Balkan War broke out he tried to volunteer for Serbian irregular units but was turned down as too small.

With two other young Bosnians he plotted to kill the Habsburg heir during his visit to Sarajevo, and the Serbian secret society known as the Black Hand supplied them with weapons and training. On 28 June 1914 Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in their open car. Austria-Hungary used the killing as grounds for war on Serbia, and within weeks the July Crisis had become the First World War.

Because he was nineteen, Princip escaped the death penalty and was sentenced to twenty years in prison. He was held at the Terezín fortress, where he died of tuberculosis in April 1918. He remains a divisive figure, seen by many Serbs as a hero and by others as a terrorist.