Gavrilo Princip Biography
(Assassinator of Archduke Franz Ferdinand)
Birthday: July 25, 1894 (Leo)
Born In: Obljaj
Gavrilo Princip was a Yugoslav nationalist and a member of ‘Mlada Bosna’ (Young Bosnia) movement. He assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo in 1914 initiating a sequence of events that ultimately led to the outbreak of the First World War. The ‘Young Bosnia’ movement, which predominantly consisted of Serbs but also included Croats and Bosniaks, sought the unification of all Yugoslavs and an end to the Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to Princip, Archduke was selected as the target because it was very likely that as a future sovereign, he would have initiated reforms providing more autonomy to the Slavic regions, which would have prevented the planned unification. The dramatic events of the day of the assassination culminated in Princip and his accomplices being arrested subsequent to which the ‘Black Hand’, the secret Serbian nationalist society was implicated causing a démarche, known as the ‘July Ultimatum’, to be issued by Austria-Hungary to Serbia. At the age of 23, Princip succumbed to tuberculosis that he had contracted due to the poor conditions in prison.