The Triggeris simultaneously a travel memoir and a work of history. Not that it did Princip much good he died of tuberculosis four years later. Most modern courts would consider 20 years a very light sentence for a double pre-meditated murder, especially of two such prominent victims. Ironically, Princip’s treatment doesn’t support his view of the Austro-Hungarian empire as a heartless tyranny. His arrest probably saved him from being beaten to death by the crowd and as he was under 20 at the time of the shooting, he was spared hanging and sentenced to 20 years in prison. In the event, the killing was easier than the dying. His motivations were much the same as those described in Maajid Nawaz’s Radical, which chronicles his own path into radical Islamism in modern Britain.īy 1914, the 19-year-old Princip was willing to kill and to die to resist Austrian hegemony. He was a member of a marginalised minority who saw little place for himself in the world, so he turned to violent nationalism. Princip’s story is highly relevant today. Butcher hiked in Princip’s footprints to his college in Sarajevo, where his initial academic excellence faded with poverty and then by his radicalisation as a militant Slav nationalist. So Butcher returned to Bosnia to seek out a man who had lived and died a century earlier, and who had defined the lives of so many who weren’t even born at the time with his one action.īutcher started at Princip’s birthplace of Obljaj, where his family still inhabit the house he was raised in, and where a wall still bears the initials that young Princip scratched into it. He appears for a momentous few moments of history, only to vanish back into obscurity. The name of Princip is familiar to schoolchildren across Europe, but Butcher discovered that little is known about the man himself. During a lull in the shelling, Butcher discovered, in a building being used as a communal latrine, the tomb of a Bosnian Serb called Gavrilo Princip. Two world wars and a prolonged nuclear standoff later, journalist Tim Butcher was introduced to a Sarajevo that was still burning as it was besieged by a Bosnian Serb militia. The baroque structure of alliances, non-aggression pacts, ententes and armed truces that had kept the European peace for sixty years collapsed like a pack of cards, unleashing a conflagration that scorched the entire world.
He begged her not to die and assured his companion, Count Harrach, that ‘it is nothing’ moments before he and Sophie died in each other’s arms. A second bullet struck his wife, Duchess Sophie of Hoehnberg.
Sarajevo, 28 th June 1914: a bullet passed through the jugular vein of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the empire of Austria-Hungary.
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