The assassin who sparked World War I
Gavrilo Princip was a Bosnian Serb nationalist and student whose action precipitated World War I. Belonging to the Young Bosnia movement and supported by the Serbian secret society Black Hand, Princip sought to liberate South Slavs from Austro-Hungarian rule. On June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, he fatally shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. The assassination triggered the July Crisis, leading directly to Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia and activating global alliance systems. Arrested at the scene, Princip avoided execution because he was under twenty at the time of the crime; instead, he received a twenty-year sentence and died of tuberculosis at Theresienstadt in 1918.
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