Gavrilo Princip

Gavrilo Princip (Cyrillic: Гаврило Принцип) (25 July 1894 – 28 April 1918) was a Yugoslav nationalist, famous for assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife in 1914. The assassinations set off a chain of events that led to World War I. He had Tuberculosis and had come from a poor family, which, combined with the fact that he was a Nationalist, made him kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife in 1914.

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There is no need to carry me to another prison. My life is already ebbing away. I suggest that you nail me to a cross and burn me alive. My flaming body will be a torch to light my people on their path to freedom.
- Said to the prison warden on being moved to another prison; as quoted by Borivoje Jevtic (1914)
Our shades shall tread Vienna's streets, roaming the courtyard, striking fear in noble hearts.
- Written on the wall of his prison cell shortly before death

The fact that Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia emerged as one of the victor states of the war seemed implicitly to vindicate the act of the man who pulled the trigger on 28 June – certainly that was the view of the Yugoslav authorities, who marked the spot where he did so with bronze footprints and a plaque celebrating the assassin’s ‘first steps into Yugoslav freedom’. In an era when the national idea was still full of promise, there was an intuitive sympathy with South Slav nationalism and little affection for the ponderous multinational commonwealth of the Hapsburg Empire. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s have reminded us of the lethality of Balkan nationalism. Since Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo, It has become harder to think of Serbia as the mere object or victim of great power politics and easier to conceive of Serbian nationalism as an historical force in its own right. From the perspective of today’s European Union we are inclined to look more sympathetically – or at least less contemptuously – than we used to on the vanished imperial patchwork of Austria-Hungary.
- Christopher Clark, Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012), p. xxvi

On June 28, 1914 a tubercular nineteen-year-old Bosnian youth named Gavrilo Princip carried out one of the most successful terrorist acts in all history. The shots he fired that day not only severed fatally the jugular vein of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the Habsburg heir to the thrones of Austria and Hungary. They also precipitated a war that destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Empire and transformed Bosnia-Herzegovina from one of its colonies into a part of a new South Slav state. These were in fact more or less precisely the things Princip had hoped to achieve, even if he cannot have anticipated such far-reaching success. Yet these were only the intended consequences of his action. The war he triggered was not confined to the Balkans; it also drew broad and hideous scars across northern Europe and the Near East. Like gargantuan abattoirs, its battlefields sucked in and slaughtered young men from all the extremities of the globe, claiming in all nearly ten million lives.
- Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 72-73

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