![]() Countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Austria did not exist. He had the same nationality as Adolf Hitler.ġ00 years ago, at the twilight of the grand imperial era, the notions of the nation state and of nationality belonged to the future. Princip was sentenced to 20 years in prison – the maximum penalty for someone his age at the time – but would be dead before the guns of WWI fell silent, dying of tuberculosis in the hospital at his jail on April 28, 1918.ģ. But after much legal debate it was accepted that this record was a mistake – the month of July in the Cyrillic script used by the parish can easily be mistaken for June. It all got a bit complicated when a council record was found by investigators that suggested he had actually been born on 13 June 1894, making him old enough to execute. The recorded birth date for Gavrilo Princip was 13 July, 1894, making him 19 years, 11 months and 15 days on the day of the assassination, in other words just two weeks inside the deadline that would have seen him hanged. Only those 20 years of age or older on the day of the offense could be executed. But the Austro-Hungarian legal code was clear on capital punishment. His exact age was a matter of intense legal scrutiny after the assassination because so many people in Austria-Hungary believed a death sentence appropriate for the assassin who had killed the heir to the Habsburg empire. Surely history’s greatest teenage troublemaker, Princip was a student in his last year of high school – the eighth grade – when he fired the shot that sparked World War I. ![]() He was only 19 when he triggered the first global conflict.Īuthor and historian Tim Butcher Courtesy: Tim Butcher Statue of assassin who unleashed WWI unveiled in SarajevoĢ. His mother had wanted to call him Spiro after her late brother, but the local priest intervened saying the boy should be name after the Archangel Gabriel. The name of the gunman was Gavrilo Princip, his first name meaning Gabriel in his mother tongue, Serbian. The shooting acted as a trigger, metastasizing from a Balkan street corner into a continental crisis by releasing pent-up tension between rival blocs of Great European Powers: the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany on one side and France, Russia and Great Britain on the other. Our history teachers taught us that World War I began after a gunman killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. What do we know about history’s greatest teenage troublemaker? A century ago this Saturday on a street corner in Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip fired the shot that started World War I when he killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
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