ORBIS

The Orbis Encyclopedia · Person · 1894–1918

Gavrilo Princip

The nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist whose two pistol shots in Sarajevo killed an archduke and helped trigger the First World War.

Black-and-white 1914 prison photograph of Gavrilo Princip, a thin young man in a jacket, facing the camera with a bruised face
Photograph, 1914, of Gavrilo Princip in his cell at the Terezin (Theresienstadt) fortress. Author unknown. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Two shots from a cheap Belgian pistol, fired by a tubercular teenager who was sure his plot had already failed, killed an archduke and his wife and set the machinery of the First World War in motion. Gavrilo Princip was nineteen, a Bosnian Serb from a poor peasant family, thin, consumptive, and convinced that the South Slavs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire belonged in a state of their own. On the morning of June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, luck handed him his opening, and the twentieth century turned on it.

The plot

Princip belonged to Young Bosnia, a loose movement of student radicals who dreamed of ending Habsburg rule over Bosnia and binding the South Slavs together. Idealism supplied the motive; the guns came from elsewhere. Three of the conspirators were armed and trained in Belgrade with help from the Black Hand, a secret society whose true name was Ujedinjenje ili Smrt, Union or Death. Its guiding figure was Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, code-named Apis, the head of Serbian military intelligence. That link, Serbian officers arming Bosnian teenagers to kill the heir to a neighboring throne, is what let Vienna cast the murder not as a lone crime but as an act of war by Serbia.

A morning of accidents

The assassination almost did not happen. Six young men waited along the Archduke's route with pistols and grenades. One, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, hurled a bomb that bounced off the car and wounded bystanders; he then swallowed cyanide that only made him vomit and jumped into a river too shallow to drown in. The others lost their nerve or their moment. Princip, believing the day was ruined, drifted toward a delicatessen on Franz Josef Street. Then fortune delivered the target to him. The Archduke's driver, Leopold Lojka, had not been told the route was changed, took a wrong turn, and stopped to reverse, stalling the open car barely two meters from where Princip stood. He stepped forward and fired twice.

Terrorist or hero

Princip was too young to hang under Austrian law, which reserved execution for those over twenty, so he drew twenty years. Habsburg justice killed him more slowly anyway. In the fortress prison at Terezin he wasted away from tuberculosis, lost an arm to the disease, and died on April 28, 1918, at twenty-three, months before the empire he had struck at fell apart. He never learned that his two shots had helped set off a war that killed some seventeen million people. His memory has never settled. To much of the West he is the archetypal terrorist, the boy who lit the fuse. To many Serbs he remains a freedom fighter who died resisting foreign rule, and monuments to him still stand. The uncomfortable truth is that both readings fit the same nineteen-year-old, standing outside a Sarajevo shop, astonished that the car had stopped in front of him.

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