Gavrilo Princip

July 25, 1894 - April 28, 1918

Gavrilo Princip was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, part of the annexed northern Balkan territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents were Serb peasant farmers, and the family had been at the service of Ottoman overlords for centuries. As a youth, he went to Sarajevo to live with his older brother, Jovan Princip, who intended to send him to an Austro-Hungarian military academy. However, a consultation with a friend convinced Jovan not to make his younger brother "an executioner of his own people," and Gavrilo was sent to merchant school instead. 

Later, he would become involved with the youth revolutionary movement Young Bosnia. Its members, a mixture of Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims, held a diverse set of beliefs - from pan-Slavic nationalism to anarchism and revolutionary socialism. Princip himself identified as a "Yugoslav nationalist" and advocated for a unification of the South Slavic people, free from foreign influence and imperialism - especially the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Together with other members of Young Bosnia, he would later plan and carry out the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He was tried and sentenced to 20 years in prison, the maximum sentence for a nineteen-year-old. He died at the age of twenty-three in Terezín Fortress, modern-day Czech Republic, after losing his right arm from tuberculosis.