Gavrilo Princip

Independent activity Nationalism 1894–1918 ○ Died of tuberculosis in prison

Young Bosnia member who shot dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo in 1914

Born to a poor Serb farming family in western Bosnia, he studied in Sarajevo and in 1911 joined Young Bosnia, a secret society seeking to free Bosnia from Austrian rule and unite the South Slavs. Expelled from school after anti-Austrian demonstrations, he went to Belgrade. Armed and trained through the Serbian secret society the Black Hand, on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo he shot dead the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie. The assassination set off the July Crisis and the First World War. At his trial he declared himself a Yugoslav nationalist; too young for the death penalty, he received twenty years. He died of tuberculosis in the prison of the Theresienstadt fortress in 1918.