Assassination of the Austrian royal couple a century ago that triggered World War I

By Dr. Eugene DSouza
Bellevision Media Network

28 June 2014: The assassination of  the heirs to the Austrian throne on 28 June  1914, by Gavrilo Princip exactly a century ago on this day,  triggered World War I that broke out a month later on 28 July 1914.

 

Students who have had history, especially European or World History as one of their subjects in schools and colleges might remember that they had studied the causes and consequences of the World War I that was considered to be the first major war, unlike the earlier wars fought on a wider scale using ‘modern’ technology and scientific innovations at that time. It was a war in which not only of European but also those of Asian nations and later even USA got themselves embroiled in this conflagration and the consequences of the war were felt throughout the world, hence the World War.

 

A number of factors have been at work since the unification of Germany under the leadership of Bismarck in 1870s in preparing the background of the war. Secret military alliances among the European nations, growth of extreme national pride, an enormous increase in European armed forces and development of military cult, imperial rivalries among the European nations, suppressed nationalities in widespread empires such as Austro-Hungarian and Russian and lack of an effective machinery to settle mutual disputes among the European nations could be viewed as some of the remote causes of the World War I.

 

However, the spark that triggered the outbreak of the World War I was provided by an incident exactly a hundred years ago on 28 June 1914 when the heir to the Austrian throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie were assassinated in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia.

 

Archduke Franz Ferdinand   & Archduchess Sophie

It is said that the doomed royal couple had been warned of impending danger to their lives. The night before their official visit to Sarajevo in June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie drove unannounced into the exotic, half-oriental Bosnian town to browse in a carpet shop. For Sophie, everyone was so warm and friendly. A sceptical local official knew better. He had urged cancelling the visit because of the underlying violent tensions in this turbulent part of the Austrian empire. ‘I pray to God you feel the same way tomorrow,’ he told her.

 

That night the royal couple, Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the imperial throne of Austria and Hungary in Vienna and Sophie, the commoner he had taken as his wife, much to the disgust of his uncle, the Emperor, dined well. They drank sweet wine from Hungary and a Bosnian white called zilavka and sent a telegram to their son Max congratulating him on his exam results at school.

 

The Royal Couple

The next morning, 28 June 1914, on their 14th wedding anniversary, they were dead, shot by a weedy teenage terrorist named Gavrilo Princip as they toured Sarajevo in an open car.

Gavrilo Princip, the assassin who triggered the World War I was only nineteen years pint-sized shy peasant boy who was also a passionate Serb and Slav nationalist whose rejection because of his size left with him with a point to prove. "It was difficult to imagine that he, so small, quiet and modest, should have decided to go ahead with such an assassination," contemporary press reports quoted a judge at his trial as saying.

 

Gavrilo Princip

Born  in 1894 in the remote mountain village of Obljaj in what is now Bosnia, one of nine children of whom only three of whom survived, Gavrilo Princip left home at the age of  13 to join his brother in Sarajevo. His Biographer  Drago Ljubibratic described Gavrilo Princip as "reserved and quiet".

Once he got talking, though "he could be cynical and tough, persistent and even stubborn, very ambitious and a little boastful," he wrote. A passionate reader, devouring adventure stories by Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas, he also dabbled in writing poetry but was too shy to show it off.

 

In 1912, Gavrilo  Princip moved to Belgrade, where he was swept up in a rising wave of anger against the Austro-Hungarian empire of the Habsburgs ruling large parts of the Balkans at the time. He tried to join first the Serbian army, then the ‘Black Hand’, a Serb nationalist guerrilla movement, but both took one look at him and showed him the door. According to Serbian historian Vladimir Dedijer, this twin rejection was "one of the key motives that pushed him to make an exceptionally brave move that would prove the others that he was their equal."

 

Gavrilo Princip managed to join Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), a group of revolutionaries inspired by the anarchist and communist ideas coming out of Russia and Italy. In 1914, having received weapons training with other members, the group learned that Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, would be in Sarajevo and thus, they decided to take their chance.

 

Gavrilo Princip with his fellow extremists

Numbering half a dozen and having spent the evening in Sarajevo’s cafes, Gavrilo Princip even had a date, the group separated and lined the route of the archduke’s motorcade on 28 June  1914.

 

The first three would be assassins  lost their nerve. A fourth, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, lobbed a bomb at the imperial car, but it bounced off and exploded under the vehicle behind. Cabrinovic tried to poison himself and jump into a river and amid pandemonium was arrested. But Gavrilo Princip, instead of fleeing, wanted to finish the job.

 

Royal Couple approaching their car

 

Last moments in the life of the Royal Couple

When Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade later took a wrong turn and had to stop and turn round, Gavrilo Princip who was by chance in just the right place, stepped up to the archduke’s car and shot him and his wife at close range.

 

The consequences of their deaths were enormous. A month later Europe’s system of alliances among the great powers had dragged the continent into the horrors of World War I.

 

At his trial in late 1914, where a judge described Gavrilo  Princip as "weak and short with a long yellowish face, he was unrepentant about the assassination.He insisted that he was a "Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs."

 

Gavrilo Princip escaped the death sentence because he was under 20, by less than a month, and was given 20 years in prison and incarcerated in solitary confinement in jail. In the harsh conditions, weakened by malnutrition, his tuberculosis worsened. Wasting away to a skeletal wreck, he died in 1918, a few months before the end of the war.

 

In 1920, bones og Gavrilo Princip were dug up and brought to Sarajevo where they were given a decent burial and until the Balkan wars of the 1990s he was the city’s favourite son.But after years of bombardment and sniper fire by Serb forces, the people of Sarajevo, now the capital of an independent Bosnia, no longer want to honour him. Two plaques commemorating Gavrilo Princip were ripped up and a bridge named after him reverted to its pre-1914 name, Latin Bridge, and his memory still splits the Balkans.

 

(Compiled from Sources)