Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated by Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. They were shot at close range while being driven through the provincial capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, formally annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908. The incident was one of the key events that led to World War I.
Princip was part of a group of six Bosnian assassins together with Muhamed Mehmedbašić, Vaso Čubrilović, Nedeljko Čabrinović, Cvjetko Popović and Trifko Grabež coordinated by Danilo Ilić; all but one were Bosnian Serbs and members of a revolutionary movement later known as Young Bosnia. The political objective of the assassination was to free Bosnia and Herzegovina of Austro-Hungarian rule and establish a common South Slav ("Yugoslav") state. The assassination precipitated the July Crisis, which led to Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia and the start of World War I.
The assassination team was helped by the Black Hand, a Serbian secret nationalist group; support came from Dragutin Dimitrijević, chief of the military intelligence section of the Serbian general staff, as well as from Major Vojislav Tankosić and Rade Malobabić, a Serbian intelligence agent. Tankosić provided bombs and pistols to the assassins and trained them in their use. The assassins were given access to the same clandestine network of safe-houses and agents that Malobabić used for the infiltration of weapons and operatives into Austria-Hungary.
The assassins and key members of the clandestine network were tried in Sarajevo in October 1914. In total twenty-five people were indicted. Five of the six assassins were under 20 years old at the time of the assassination, the exception being Mehmedbašić who was 26 or 27. While the group was dominated by Bosnian Serbs, four were Bosnian Croats, one was a Bosnian Muslim and all of them were Austro-Hungarian citizens; none were from Serbia. Princip was found guilty of murder and high treason, but being too young to be executed, was sentenced to 20 years in jail. The four other attackers also received jail terms. Five of the older prisoners were sentenced to be hanged.
Black Hand members were arrested and tried before a Serbian court in Salonika in 1917 on charges of high treason, which were later widely regarded as fabricated. The Black Hand was disbanded, and three of its leaders were executed. Much of what is known about the assassinations comes from these two trials and related records. Princip's legacy was re-evaluated following the breakup of Yugoslavia, and public opinion of him in the successor states is largely divided along ethnic lines.
Background
Under the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, Austria-Hungary received the mandate to occupy and administer the Ottoman Vilayet of Bosnia, while the Ottoman Empire retained official sovereignty. Under this same treaty, the Great Powers (Austria-Hungary, the United Kingdom, France, the German Empire, Italy, and the Russian Empire) gave official recognition to the Principality of Serbia as a fully sovereign state, which four years later transformed into a kingdom under Prince Milan IV Obrenović who thus became King Milan I of Serbia. Serbia's monarchs, at the time from the royal House of Obrenović that maintained close relations with Austria-Hungary, were content to reign within the borders set by the treaty.
This changed in May 1903, when Royal Serbian Army officers led by Dragutin Dimitrijević stormed the Serbian Royal Palace. After a fierce battle in the dark, the attackers captured General Lazar Petrović, head of the Palace Guard, and forced him to reveal the hiding place of King Alexander I Obrenović and his wife Queen Draga. The King was subsequently shot thirty times and the Queen eighteen. MacKenzie writes that "the royal corpses were then stripped and brutally sabred." The attackers threw the corpses of King Alexander and Queen Draga out of a palace window, ending any threat that loyalists would mount a counterattack. General Petrović was then killed when Vojislav Tankosić organized the murders of Queen Draga's brothers. The conspirators installed Peter I of the House of Karađorđević as the new king.
The new dynasty was more nationalist, friendlier to Russia and less friendly to Austria-Hungary. Over the next decade, disputes between Serbia and its neighbors erupted, as Serbia moved to build its power and gradually reclaim its 14th-century empire. These conflicts included a customs dispute with Austria-Hungary beginning in 1906 (commonly referred to as the "Pig War"); the Bosnian crisis of 1908–1909, in which Serbia assumed an attitude of protest over Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ending in Serbian acquiescence without compensation in March 1909); and finally the two Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, in which Serbia acquired Macedonia and Kosovo from the Ottoman Empire and drove out Bulgaria.
Serbia's military successes and Serbian outrage over the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina emboldened Serbian nationalists in Serbia and Serbs in Bosnia who chafed under Austro-Hungarian rule and whose nationalist sentiments were stirred by Serb cultural organizations. One notable example was a Serbian nationalist society Narodna Odbrana, which was formed in Belgrade on 8 October 1908 under the initiative of Milovan Milovanović. Under the guise of cultural activities, it operated to undermine the loyalty of Bosnian Serbs to the Habsburg regime. In the five years leading up to 1914, lone assassins – mostly Serb citizens of Austria-Hungary – made a series of unsuccessful assassination attempts in Croatia-Slavonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina against Austro-Hungarian officials. In Bosnia and Herzegovina existed an aggregation of local revolutionary groups that became known as Young Bosnia, their goal was the end of Austria-Hungarian colonial rule in Bosnia and the unification of all South Slavs.
On 3 June 1910, Bogdan Žerajić, a young revolutionary loosely connected to Young Bosnia, attempted to kill the Austrian governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, General Marijan Varešanin. Žerajić was a 22-year-old Bosnian Serb from Nevesinje, Herzegovina, who was a student at the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb. (General Verešanin went on to crush the last Bosnian peasant uprising in the second half of 1910). The five bullets Žerajić fired at Varešanin and the fatal bullet he put in his own brain made Žerajić an inspiration to future assassins, including Princip and his accomplice Čabrinović. Princip said that Žerajić "was my first model. When I was seventeen I passed whole nights at his grave, reflecting on our wretched condition and thinking of him. It is there that I made up my mind sooner or later to perpetrate an outrage."
In May 1911, the Black Hand, a secret society dedicated to creating a Greater Serbia through "terrorist action", was established by key members of the Narodna Odbrana including Dimitrijević and Tankosić. Within Bosnia and Herzegovina, the networks of both the Black Hand and Narodna Odbrana penetrated to some extent local revolutionary movements such as Young Bosnia. The fundamental difference between those movements was that the Young Bosnians regarded social revolution as a necessary corollary of national liberation, and that, even though its membership was predominantly Serb, Young Bosnia also attracted an important minority of Croats and some Muslims. In the Spring of 1912, in a plot involving Young Bosnians, Luka Jukić a Bosnian Croat student, tried to assassinate the Governor of Croatia Count Slavko Cuvaj.
In 1913, Emperor Franz Joseph commanded Archduke Franz Ferdinand to observe the military maneuvers in Bosnia scheduled for June 1914. Following the maneuvers, Ferdinand and his wife planned to visit Sarajevo to open the state museum in its new premises there. Duchess Sophie, according to their eldest son, Duke Maximilian, accompanied her husband out of fear for his safety.
As Sophie, although of high aristocratic birth, was not from a dynastic family, her union with the Habsburg heir presumptive could only be a morganatic marriage. Emperor Franz Joseph had only consented to their marriage on the condition that their descendants would never ascend the throne. The 14th anniversary of their marriage fell on 28 June. As historian A. J. P. Taylor observes:
[Sophie] could never share [Franz Ferdinand's] rank ... could never share his splendours, could never even sit by his side on any public occasion. There was one loophole ... his wife could enjoy the recognition of his rank when he was acting in a military capacity. Hence, he decided, in 1914, to inspect the army in Bosnia. There, at its capital Sarajevo, the Archduke and his wife could ride in an open carriage side by side ... Thus, for love, did the Archduke go to his death.
Franz Ferdinand was an advocate of increased federalism and widely believed to favour trialism, under which Austria-Hungary would be reorganized by combining the Slavic lands within the Austro-Hungarian empire into a third crown. A Slavic kingdom could have been a bulwark against Serb irredentism, and Franz Ferdinand was therefore perceived as a threat by those same irredentists. Princip later stated to the court that preventing Franz Ferdinand's planned reforms was one of his motivations.
The day of the assassination, 28 June (15 June in the Julian calendar), is the feast of St. Vitus. In Serbia, it is called Vidovdan and commemorates the 1389 Battle of Kosovo against the Ottomans, at which Sultan Murad I was assassinated in his tent by a Serb. Princip, Čabrinović and other members of the Young Bosnia were inspired by the heroism of Miloš Obilić, reenacting the Kosovo Myth. Čabrinović was deeply
immersed in the myth, personally identifying himself with the Kosovo heroes, while it is known that Princip knew the entire Petar II Petrović-Njegoš's The Mountain Wreath, one of the most celebrated works in the South Slavic literature that glorifies the heroic ideals and spirit of the Kosovo Myth.
Preliminaries
Previous conspiracy
Danilo Ilić was a Bosnian Serb. He had worked as a schoolteacher and as a bank worker but in 1913 and 1914 he lived with, and outwardly off, his mother, who operated a small boarding house in Sarajevo. Ilić was a member of a secret revolutionary society or Kružok organized on the model of the Black Hand. According to Serbian Colonel C. A. Popović, a captain at the time and a member of the Black Hand, in late 1913, Danilo Ilić came to the Serbian listening post at Užice to speak to him. Popović claimed that Ilić recommended an end to the period of revolutionary organization building and a move to direct action against Austria-Hungary. Popović alleged that he sent Danilo Ilić to Belgrade to discuss this matter with Chief of Serbian Military Intelligence Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, known more commonly as Apis. By 1913, Apis and his fellow military conspirators (drawn heavily from the ranks of the May 1903 coup) had come to dominate what was left of the Black Hand.
There are no reports as to what took place between Ilić and Apis during the alleged meeting, but soon Apis's righthand man and fellow Black Hander, Serbian Major Vojislav Tankosić, who by this time was in charge of guerrilla training, called a Serbian irredentist planning meeting in Toulouse, France. Amongst those summoned to the Toulouse meeting was Muhamed Mehmedbašić, a Muslim carpenter from Herzegovina. According to Luigi Albertini writing in 1942, Mehmedbašić was a member of the Black Hand, having been sworn into the organization by Black Hand Provincial Director for Bosnia and Herzegovina Vladimir Gacinović and Danilo Ilić. Mehmedbašić was (here quoting Albertini paraphrasing Mehmedbašić) "eager to carry out an act of terrorism to revive the revolutionary spirit of Bosnia." During this January 1914 meeting, various possible Austro-Hungarian targets for assassination were discussed, including Franz Ferdinand. However, the participants decided only to dispatch Mehmed Mehmedbašić to Sarajevo, to kill the Governor of Bosnia, Oskar Potiorek.
According to Mehmedbašić while he was traveling to Bosnia and Herzegovina from France, police searched his train for a thief. Thinking the police might be after him, he threw his weapons (a dagger and a bottle of poison) in the lavatory. Once he arrived in Bosnia and Herzegovina he wrote to Gacinović and did nothing more until Ilić wrote to him to summon him to Mostar. On 26 March 1914, Ilić informed Mehmedbašić that Belgrade (meaning the Black Hand) thought that an attack of Franz Ferdinand instead of the Potiorek would be far more important and that they would support it. (Apis later boasted to the Serbian Court that he ordered the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in his position as head of the Intelligence Department, however Apis made the unproven claims in 1917 attempting to save his own life since he was about to be executed for high treason.)
The assassination team
Unknown to the Black Hand, a second plot against the archduke had arisen that spring of 1914 when student Gavrilo Princip was shown a newspaper cutting announcing Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria's visit to Bosnia in June, by his friend and fellow Young Bosnia member Nedeljko Čabrinović. At the time the two young Bosnian Serbs were in Belgrade eager to return to Austrian-occupied Bosnia to commit an attack on an imperial official, what they saw as performing the ultimate act of heroism. Princip asked another friend Trifko Grabež to join the plot, and then wrote to Ilić, his former roommate and confidante, telling him about the plan and asking him to recruit people in Sarajevo.
For the assassination Ilić recruited seventeen-year-old Sarajevo high-school student Vaso Čubrilović, eighteen-year-old student Cvjetko Popović, as well as Mehmed Mehmedbašić, shortly after Orthodox Easter (as given by Dedijer: 19 April 1914), as testified by Ilić, Čubrilović, and Popović at the Sarajevo trial. Princip, Grabež, and Čabrinović testified at the Sarajevo trial that at about the same time (a little after Easter), they approached a fellow Bosnian Serb and former guerrilla fighter known to be well connected and with access to arms, Milan Ciganović, and through him Major Tankosić and reached an agreement to receive arms and get smuggled across the Serbian border back into Bosnia with the weapons.