Gavrilo Princip

Gavrilo Princip was born on July 25, 1894, into an impoverished Serb peasant family in Obljaj near Bosansko Grahovo. A sickly student passionate about romantic national liberation, Princip joined Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), a radical revolutionary movement uniting young South Slavs opposed to Habsburg Austro-Hungarian imperial rule.

On June 28, 1914, near the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo, Princip fired two fatal pistol shots at Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. Spared the death penalty because he was nineteen (under the Habsburg age of majority of twenty), he was sentenced to twenty years' harsh imprisonment in the fortress of Theresienstadt, where he died of tuberculosis in April 1918 shortly before the collapse of Austria-Hungary.