Gavrilo Princip (Serbian Cyrillic: Гаврило Принцип, pronounced [ɡǎʋrilo prǐntsip]; 25 July 1894 – 28 April 1918) was a Bosnian Serb student who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Sophie, Duchess von Hohenberg, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.

The killing of the Archduke and his wife set off the July Crisis, a series of events that within one month led to the outbreak of World War I. Princip was born in western Bosnia to a poor Serb family.

During the First Balkan War, Princip traveled to Southern Serbia to volunteer with the Serbian army's irregular forces fighting against the Ottoman Empire but was rejected for being too small and weak.

On Sunday 28 June 1914 during the royal couple's visit to Sarajevo, the then-teenager Princip mortally wounded both Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by firing a pistol into their convertible car that had unexpectedly stopped 1.5 m (5 feet) from him.

[6] Their ancestors came from Grahovo, Nikšić in Montenegro, emigrating in the early 1700s, they belonged to the Jovićević clan,[7] and adhered to the Serbian Orthodox Christian faith.

[11] After the revolt, he resumed farming in the Grahovo valley, cultivating around 4 acres (1.6 ha; 0.0063 sq mi) of land and was forced to give a third of his income to his landlord.

Despite facing challenges in his first year, he excelled in his studies, eventually receiving a collection of Serbian epic poetry from his headmaster in recognition of his academic success.

[11] By the time Princip reached Sarajevo, Jovan had changed his mind following advice from a shopkeeper, who cautioned against sending his younger brother to become "an executioner of his own people."

Instead, Princip was admitted to the Merchants' School, with Jovan financing his education through earnings from manual labor, such as transporting logs from the surrounding forests to mills in the city.

As a result, various student groups emerged interested in movements such as romantic nationalism, nihilism, or anti imperialism, while at school and through his roommate Danilo Ilić, Princip was also exposed to socialist, anarchist, and communist writing.

[15] Princip started to associate with like-minded young nationalist revolutionaries and came to admire Bogdan Žerajić, a Bosnian Serb who had attempted to assassinate the Austro-Hungarian Governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, before taking his own life.

[13] Some believed that the newly independent Kingdom of Serbia, as the free part of the south Slavs, was obligated to help unify the southern Slavic peoples.

Because the local authorities had forbidden students to form organisations and clubs, Princip and other members of Young Bosnia met in secret.

[14] On 18 February 1912, Princip took part in a demonstration against the Habsburg authority in Sarajevo, organised by Luka Jukić, a Croat student from Bosnia.

"[22] As a result of his conduct and his involvement in the demonstrations against Austro-Hungarian authorities, Princip was expelled from school [11] and in the spring of 1912 decided to go to Belgrade, making the 280-kilometre (170 mi) journey on foot.

[23] When war broke out between the Balkan states and Turkey in October 1912, Princip went to a recruitment office in Belgrade to volunteer his service with the komite, the irregular Serbian units.

According to Vladimir Dedijer, his failure to be accepted in the army on the account that he looked weak, was one of the primary motives which pushed Princip to do something exceptionally brave.

[25] In the summer of 1913 Princip passed the fifth and sixth grades of high school,[26] then in early 1914 he left Sarajevo for Belgrade, stopping briefly in his village to see his parents.

[31] The three-man assassination team left Belgrade on 28 May 1914, taking a river boat that took them to Šabac, they then split up crossing separately the border into Bosnia.

[35] Before leaving Serbia, Princip wrote to his former roommate in Sarajevo Danilo Ilić, to notify him of his assassination plan and to ask him to recruit more people.

[36] Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Duchess Sophie Chotek, arrived in Sarajevo by train shortly before 10 a.m. on 28 June 1914.

At 10:15 a.m., as the motorcade passed the central police station, 19-year-old student Nedeljko Čabrinović hurled a hand grenade at the Archduke's car.

[38] Following this failed attempt, the motorcade sped away, and the remaining conspirators, including Princip, were unable to act due to the high speed of the vehicles.

[39] After delivering his scheduled speech at Town Hall, the Archduke decided to visit the victims of Čabrinović's grenade attack at the Sarajevo Hospital.

[40] To avoid the city centre, General Oskar Potiorek directed the royal car to travel straight along the Appel Quay to the hospital.

[41] On 13 July 1914, Austro-Hungarian official Friedrich Wiesner submitted a report concluding that there was no evidence to implicate the Serbian government in the conspiracy behind the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo.

[49][50] The Austrian police investigators were eager to emphasise the exclusively Serbian nature of the assassination plot for political reasons,[51] but during his trial Princip insisted that, even though he was an ethnic Serb, his commitment was to freeing all south Slavs.

This did not prove that the Serbian government knew about the assassination, let alone approved of it,[c] but was enough for Austria-Hungary to issue a démarche to Serbia known as the July Ultimatum, which led up to the outbreak of World War I.

[56] Princip was nineteen years old at the time and too young to be executed, as he was twenty-seven days shy of the twenty-year minimum age limit required by Habsburg law.

[57] Princip was chained to a wall in solitary confinement at the Small Fortress in Terezín, where he lived in harsh conditions and developed tuberculosis.