Bosnia (Austria-Hungary)
Gavrilo Princip
1894–1918 Assassin of Franz Ferdinand
Born to a poor Serb peasant family in western Bosnia, Princip was a thin, bookish teenager who was expelled from school after a demonstration in 1912 and made his way to Belgrade, where he fell in with Young Bosnia, a circle of students who read Russian revolutionaries and dreamed of South Slav freedom. In 1914, with two friends, he took bombs and pistols from Serbian officers, crossed the Drina and shot the Archduke on 28 June. Tried in October, too young for the death penalty, he was sentenced to 20 years. He died of tuberculosis in the Terezín fortress on 28 April 1918, months before the empire he hated collapsed. Yugoslavs later honored him as a hero; many others saw only a murderer.