Sarajevo’s Elusive Assassin
Numerous untruths have persisted about Gavrilo Princip, the man who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. One of them was used by Austria-Hungary as grounds for its declaration of war against Serbia in 1914.
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. But I would also maintain that no other assassin has had their story so mangled in the retelling.
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.
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