Book Review Series: The Trigger
Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War
Gavrilo Princip is no stranger to deification or vilification, depending on what lens you view him through. The NCERT textbook that taught me about Princip (circa 1999) labeled him a Serbian nationalist. In the aftermath of the Bosnian War, the word “Serbian Nationalist” became an ethno-nationalist term that Princip wouldn’t have understood. Had he survived his imprisonment and lived to see the War, he might have felt differently, reacted differently.
Despite being the trigger of an outbreak that rocked Europe’s monarchy, sent shockwaves through the world, exposing the mortality of seemingly immortal empires and sowing seeds for future conflicts and bloodletting, Princip is now hardly recognised or remembered in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Journalist and author, Tim Butcher, undertook a journey across the Balkan country, retracing Princip’s footsteps that eventually led him to the Moritz Schiller corner cafe on the Appel Quay, where he shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife.
Background and context
The Slavic history of the Western Balkans, which includes Bosnia begins in the 07th century with the invasion of the Early Slavs. The ethnicities that would later come to be known as Serb and Croat (creating their own respective ethnic nation-states in the 20th century) came around later. The Slavs (south-Slavs to be precise) who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy through the efforts of Byzantine missionaries would become the Serbs. Those who converted to Western Christianity, recognising the papacy of Rome came to be known as Croats. Additionally, Bosnia had its own cult of Christianity that emphasised ritual over hierarchy, known as the Bosnian Church. Despised, denounced and persecuted both by the Catholics and the Orthodoxy, the church disappeared before the Ottoman Conquest in 1463.
With the Ottoman Conquest, Islam became a third pillar in the marketplace of religions in the Balkan region. Battling through the countryside, the Ottomans captured Serbia and eased only around the northern region of the Dinaric Alps. Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror promised to protect Orthodox Christianity and the Serbian Orthodox Church enjoyed great support from the Ottoman state. The Ottomans introduced a sizeable Orthodox Christian population into Bosnia proper over time from other Balkan provinces.
While the Balkans did not experience religious warfare like the Crusades that swept much of Western Europe, religious tensions weren’t unknown and Catholics were often viewed as suspects by the Ottoman Sultans, believed to have been conspiring against the Ottomans with their Catholic brethren in Hungary, Venice and Austria. The Orthodox hierarchy was anyway subject to the Sultans. That said, religious syncretism existed among all three groups, Catholics and Muslims celebrating the Orthodox slava.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire versus The Ottoman Empire
The centuries leading up to the 19th and later 20th century were not kind to the Ottoman Empire. Having missed the bus for modernisation, the once powerful Ottoman Empire was now dubbed the “Sick man of Europe”. Serbia had rebelled against the Ottoman Empire, beginning in 1806 following the Slaughter of the Knezes a few years earlier. Inspired by the French Revolution which had occurred only 15 years ago, stirred in addition by ideas flowing in from Serbs living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Napoleon’s conquest in the Balkans and reforms in the Russian Empire; the Serbs revolted consistently (and violently) and successfully against the Ottomans through the First and Second Serbian Uprising, beginning with virtual autonomy and finally complete freedom in 1835.
Bosnia and Herzegovina continued to remain under notional Ottoman authority until 1908 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed Bosnia, an event that left a memorable impression in young Princip’s mind. Following the Berlin Congress of 1878 following the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78), Bosnia and Herzegovina were passed to the Austro-Hungarians though the region continued to be administered by the Ottomans until 1908, the year of the flashpoint, a prelude to the Greater European War in 1914.
If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.
The quote is attributed to Otto von Bismarck by Herr Ballen and quoted by Winston S. Churchill in the House of Commons, 16 August 1945.
With the annexation of Bosnia by the Austro-Hungarian Empire came a raft of new laws granting emergency powers to colonial governors, new waves of non-Slav immigration from elsewhere across the Empire. The 1910 census of Bosnia showed a meteoric rise in the population of Catholics, growing from 700 to 17,000 with the Bonsnian Muslim and Orthodox populations remaining relatively static. The change created a resentment among the local population who grumbled that advancement was being cornered by the outsiders.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire had developed railroads and institutions in Bosnia-Herzegovina though not with the intent of social emancipation and enlightenment as much as its vested interests as a colonial resource. Centuries of foreign rule and domination were now being threatened by ideas of revolution and self-rule, ideas exchanged and developed by young students in Bosnia and other parts of Europe. Young Princip was one of them.
The Mlada Bosna movement reflected perfectly the spectrum of political debate occupying minds throughout Edwardian Europe: the gradualism of social democracy, the theoretical promise of revolutionary socialism, the turmoil of anarchism, and all points between. The same political tracts that stirred so much revolutionary thinking elsewhere in Europe were steadily becoming available, smuggled into Bosnia under the noses of the Austro-Hungarian censors – every publication that made it through being a gesture of defiance against the foreign occupier.
The works of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Marx, Gorky, Dostoyevsky and others were handed around like forbidden scripture to be parsed, analysed, discussed, memorised, copied and distributed. As they did for the downtrodden all over Europe, these thinkers raised in the minds of radical young Bosnians the possibility of changing a stratified, feudal social order that had altered little in hundreds of years.
Excerpt from The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher
Shots fired
While Princip was the assassin who was successful in shooting the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he wasn’t alone in his mission. Danilo Ilić, Muhamed Mehmedbašić, a Bosnian Muslim carpenter, Cvetko Popović, and Vaso Čubrilović were also involved in the plot to assassinate the Archduke though only Čubrilović and Princip would attempt the killing. Čubrilović failed where Princip succeeded.
Prior to the assassination, Princip sought to join the Serbian Chetniks in the First Balkan War where Serbia along with Greece, Montenegro and Bulgaria fought against the Ottoman Empire, freeing up most of Europe save Eastern Thrace from Ottoman Rule. At the time (1912), Princip was rejected from joining the military for want of his physical appearance. He was found to be too small and too weak.
Humiliated, Princip sought to find an opportunity to fight against Empire. The arrival of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo for a speech and city tour on 28th June 1914 presented itself as one.
On the fateful day, Mehmedbašić was the first of the assassination team to be passed by the Archduke’s car on Appel Quay on its way to the town hall at Sarajevo. However, he failed to act, citing the presence of a gendarme preventing him from hurling his grenade at the passing car.
Čubrilović however felt no such qualms and hurled his grenade accurately at the car. The explosive however struck the canopy of the car, a few inches behind Franz Ferdinand and fell harmlessly to the ground, only to explode under the next vehicle in the cavalcade.
Despite the assassination attempt, the cavalcade was not called off though plans were made to reroute the journey, skipping a city tour that was originally envisioned. Tragically, this information was not communicated to the drivers. Princip waited for his opportunity at the intersection of Franz Joseph street and Appel Quay. The cavalcade duly arrived and the driver turned into the street as originally planned. Princip found the Archduke a few feet in front of him. Taking him, he fired first at the Archduke. The second shot was disturbed as people from the crowd tried to grapple with him for the weapon. Aimed at the colonial governor Oskar Potiorek, the shot went through the side of the car and hit Sophie, the Archduke’s wife. Princip would regret her murder and repeatedly apologise for it later.
Aftermath
What followed is of course now, a matter of history and folly as far as the two World Wars are concerned. Princip’s dream of a free and united Yugoslavia manifested briefly between 1945 until 1980 under the communist dictator Josip Broz Tito though the people Tim Butcher met on his journeys debated about the benefits of socialism and Tito’s iron-fisted rule.
Discontent simmered beneath the surface in Yugoslavia just as it had during the Ottoman and later Austro-Hungarian rule though this time, it was ethno-nationalism that dominated the conversation. The fault lines of conflict were now between decentralisation and centralisation. Croatia and Slovenia supported a decentralised federation with greater local autonomy, versus a conservative-centralist nationalist faction led by Serbia that supported a centralised federation to secure the interests of Serbia and Serbs across Yugoslavia, the largest ethnic group in the country as a whole.
Following Tito’s death in 1980, tensions escalated with reasons varying from nationalism, ethnic conflict, economic difficulty to frustration with government bureaucracy. With the collapse of communism in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Republic in 1991, Yugoslavia disintegrated into several independent states, creating Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia and Serbia & Montenegro.
By 1992, it was no longer possible to contain ethno-nationalist tensions anymore and full scale wars broke out between the Croats, Serbs and Bosniak Muslims in what would be called the Bosnian War (1992 - 1995).
Epilogue
Gavrilo Princip was buried in an unmarked grave upon death and in 1920, transferred to a mausoleum in Sarajevo. Over the years, he was either celebrated as a nationalist who fought against tyranny or vilified as an enemy of the state (under the Austro-Hungarian empire). Today, he is largely forgotten. The Bosnian Wars have done much to undo the syncretic harmony that once defined the region. The National Archive of Bosnia & Herzegovina, Tim Butcher writes, has been badly destroyed. With it have disappeared some of the last remaining documents concerning Princip.
Butcher’s book is a part travelogue, part historic and thoroughly enjoyable read. Akin to the Baedeker’s travel guides (which he does refer to on his journeys), the book takes you through a troubled landscape that’s trying to come to terms with its identity and recover from a violent, traumatic past. The ghosts that Princip uncorked that fateful day continue to haunt Bosnia to this day.
History does not rest easily in Bosnia.
Excerpt from The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher
Recommended Reading: