The teenager who sparked World War I was once rejected as too weak
In 1912 a Serbian guerrilla commander took one look at Gavrilo Princip and turned him away as too small and frail. Two years later, aged 19, Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo. Within a month the July Crisis had tipped Europe into the First World War.
Princip was born in July 1894 in the remote Bosnian hamlet of Obljaj, the second of nine children, six of whom died as infants. A local Orthodox priest insisted the sickly baby be named after the Archangel Gabriel to help him survive. His parents were poor Christian tenant farmers who handed a third of their income to a landlord; his father also carried mail and passengers over the mountains to Dalmatia. At 13 he went to Sarajevo, where his elder brother paid for school by hauling logs to the mills.
Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia in 1908, and student circles buzzed with nationalism, anarchism and socialism. Princip joined Young Bosnia in 1911, a secret society drawing members from all three of the country's main communities and aiming to free Bosnia and unite the South Slavs. Expelled after a 1912 protest, he walked some 280 kilometres to Belgrade. Being turned away twice by recruiters during the First Balkan War left him, argues historian Vladimir Dedijer, determined to prove his courage.
In 1913 Governor Oskar Potiorek declared an emergency, suspended Bosnia's constitution and banned Serb cultural societies. In Belgrade the next year, a friend showed Princip a newspaper cutting about the archduke's planned June visit. Princip recruited Nedeljko Cabrinovic and Trifko Grabez, and through contacts reached the Black Hand, a secret Serbian nationalist group linked to military intelligence, which supplied weapons and training. On Sunday 28 June 1914 he fired into the royal couple's open car, mortally wounding both.
Tried with 24 others, he declared himself a Yugoslav nationalist seeking freedom from Austria. At 19 he was too young for execution and received twenty years in the Terezin fortress, where tuberculosis cost him his right arm and then his life in April 1918. The Serbian government had not inspired the killing, but Austrian leaders used it to justify a preventive war. Opinion remains split: many Serbs honour him as a fighter against oppression, while Bosniaks and Croats often regard him as a terrorist.
Source: Gavrilo Princip
