![]() ![]() He died in prison of skeletal tuberculosis in April 1918, a few months before the end of the war his actions had precipitated. In the end, a birth date of July 13th, 1894 was accepted by the court and Princip was jailed for 20 years. The Habsburg prosecutors wanted to make sure the accused did not miss out on the death penalty, if he really was 20 on the day of the shooting. I found, in a tatty file held at the National Archive in Sarajevo, a scrap of paper with pencilled calculations converting the dates from the Julian calendar, which was routinely used by local Serbs and was then a little under two weeks out from the western, Gregorian calendar. With the best legal minds available of the time focused on the issue, every avenue was explored. If his birthday was in July, he would face nothing steeper than a jail term. ![]() Princip, arrested within seconds, could only face the death sentence under Austro-Hungarian law if he was 20 or more. The difference was of no great significance until the assassination. To the non-Cyrillic reader, July and June are easily confused. A second record, this time for municipal authorities more comfortable with the Latin script of the Habsburg occupiers, noted it as June 13th, 1894. They, like the Princip family, were Orthodox Christians, an identifier that, in the vernacular of modern ethnic labelling, made them Bosnian Serbs and they wrote in Cyrillic. The Church authorities in Obljaj, the dirt-poor hamlet where he was born, wrote it in the parish record as July 13th, 1894. I have spent the last three years researching him and found that even his date of birth was difficult to establish. It is fair to say that Princip, a peasant-farmer’s son from remotest Herzegovina, born at a time when Bosnia-Herzegovina was an outlying part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, is not the easiest historic subject to focus on. As Behr wrote in a 1935 statement, which today’s Wikipedia authorities would do well to read, he was always surprised by the muddle, as he stood over 6ft tall and was of solid build, difficult to confuse with the much slighter and shorter Princip. It shows another man, an innocent bystander called Ferdinand Behr, being taken in for questioning. The problem is that it does not show Princip. ![]() It has been used ad nauseam over the years and, sad to see, illustrates the cover of a new Cambridge history of the July Crisis. The most egregious mistake is the famous photograph that purports to show Princip being bundled away by the Austro-Hungarian gendarmerie moments after the attack. Perhaps Napoleon was right when he observed that history is nothing but the lies that are no longer disputed. We have been told by historians, some of whom have published in the run-up to the war’s centenary, that: Princip jumped on the running board of the archduke’s limousine to take his shot the archduke’s wife was pregnant when she died in the shooting it happened on the anniversary of their marriage the car did not have a reverse gear so was incapable of correcting the driver’s error that delivered it to the assassin the archduke bravely caught the grenade thrown earlier at the couple and tossed it nonchalantly away and Princip stopped to eat a last sandwich at a corner café before emerging to take his shot.Īll these details, and many more published over the last century, are untrue, fanciful, frothy nonsense. But I would also maintain that no other assassin has had their story so mangled in the retelling. ![]() No other assassin, it may be argued, had a greater impact on world history than Gavrilo Princip, the gunman who triggered the First World War by killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914. ![]()
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