36 Facts About Gavrilo Princip

Gavrilo Princip was a Bosnian Serb student who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie, Duchess von Hohenberg, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.

On Sunday 28 June 1914 during the royal couple's visit to Sarajevo, the then-teenager Gavrilo Princip mortally wounded both Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by firing a pistol into their convertible car that had unexpectedly stopped 5 feet from him.

Gavrilo Princip was arrested immediately and tried alongside twenty-four others, all Bosnians and thus Austro-Hungarian subjects.

Gavrilo Princip died on 28 April 1918 from tuberculosis exacerbated by poor prison conditions which had already caused one of his arms to be amputated.

Gavrilo Princip was the second of his parents' nine children, six of whom died in infancy.

Gavrilo Princip's ancestors came from Grahovo, Niksic in Montenegro, emigrating in the early 1700s, they were members of the Jovicevic clan and adhered to the Serbian Orthodox Christian faith.

Gavrilo Princip overcame a difficult first year and became very successful in his studies, for which he was awarded a collection of Serbian epic poetry by his headmaster.

At the age of 13, Gavrilo Princip moved to Sarajevo, where his elder brother Jovan intended to enroll him at Sarajevo's Austro-Hungarian Military Academy.

However, by the time Gavrilo Princip reached Sarajevo, Jovan had changed his mind after a shopkeeper advised him not to make his younger brother "an executioner of his own people".

Gavrilo Princip started to associate with like-minded young nationalist revolutionaries and came to admire Bogdan Zerajic, a Bosnian Serb who had attempted to assassinate the Austro-Hungarian Governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, before taking his own life.

Zerajic, who was from Herzegovina like Gavrilo Princip, came to epitomize, in the eyes of many, the ideal of self sacrifice.

In 1911, Gavrilo Princip graduated from the fourth grade and joined Young Bosnia, a society with members from all three major Bosnian ethnic groups, that sought the liberation of Bosnia from Austro-Hungarian rule and the unification of all Southern Slavs in a common nation.

On 18 February 1912, Gavrilo Princip took part in a demonstration against the Habsburg authority in Sarajevo, organised by Luka Jukic, a Croat student from Bosnia.

When war broke out between the Balkan states and Turkey in October 1912, Gavrilo Princip went to a recruitment office in Belgrade to volunteer his service with the, the irregular Serbian units.

Humiliated, Gavrilo Princip returned first briefly to Belgrade then back to the village of Hadzici.

In reaction on 2 May 1913, while Gavrilo Princip was in Sarajevo, the Austro-Hungarian Governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina General Potiorek declared a state of emergency, suspended the 1910 constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina, implemented martial law, seized control of all schools, and prohibited all Serb public, cultural and educational societies.

Gavrilo Princip decided to lead a group of assassins back to Bosnia and attack the Archduke during his official visit to Sarajevo.

Gavrilo Princip convinced Cabrinovic and his old schoolfriend Trifko Grabez to join the plot.

Gavrilo Princip stepped forward, drew a Browning semi-automatic pistol, and at point-blank range fired twice into the car, first hitting the Archduke in the neck, and then hitting the Duchess in the abdomen.

Gavrilo Princip managed to swallow a capsule of cyanide, which failed to kill him.

Gavrilo Princip stated that he regretted the killing of the Duchess and meant to kill Potiorek, but was nonetheless proud of what he had done.

The Austrian police investigators were eager to emphasise the exclusively Serbian nature of the assassination plot for political reasons, but during his trial Gavrilo Princip insisted that, even though he was an ethnic Serb, his commitment was to freeing all south Slavs All the chief conspirators mentioned the revolutionary destruction of Austria-Hungary and the liberation of the South Slavs as the motivation behind their act.

Gavrilo Princip was nineteen years old at the time and too young to be executed, as he was twenty-seven days shy of the twenty-year minimum age limit required by Habsburg law.

Gavrilo Princip was chained to a wall in solitary confinement at the Small Fortress in Terezin, where he lived in harsh conditions and suffered from tuberculosis.

In January 1916, Gavrilo Princip unsuccessfully attempted to hang himself with a towel.

From February to June 1916, Gavrilo Princip met with Martin Pappenheim, a psychiatrist in the Austro-Hungarian army, four times.

Pappenheim wrote that Gavrilo Princip asserted that the First World War would have occurred even if the assassination had not taken place, and that he "cannot feel himself responsible for the catastrophe".

Gavrilo Princip died on 28 April 1918, three years and ten months after the assassination.

Long after his death, Gavrilo Princip's legacy is still disputed and he remains a historically significant but polarising figure.

The house where Princip lived in Sarajevo was destroyed during World War I After the war, it was rebuilt as a museum in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

Gavrilo Princip's pistol was confiscated by the authorities and eventually given, along with the Archduke's blood-stained undershirt, to Anton Puntigam, a Jesuit priest who was a close friend of the Archduke and had given the Archduke and his wife their last rites.

In Sarajevo about a half-dozen memorials to Gavrilo Princip have been erected on the site and torn down with each change in power.

In 1941, the 1930 plaque commemorating Gavrilo Princip was removed by the local Germans when the German Army invaded.

At the unveiling Nikolic gave a speech, saying in part: "Gavrilo Princip was a hero, a symbol of liberation ideas, tyrant-killer, idea-holder of liberation from slavery, which spanned through Europe".

On 11 November 2018, the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, Princess Anita of Hohenberg, the eldest great-grandchild of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and Branislav Princip, grandnephew of Gavrilo Princip, shook hands in a symbolic act of reconciliation in Graz, Austria.

Gavrilo Princip was portrayed by Eugen Knecht in Sarajevo, a German-Austrian television film based on the assassination, and by Joel Basman in The King's Man, the third film in the Kingsman fiction film series.