When Sarajevo Triggered a War

At the most famous spot in Sarajevo, where the Appel Quay once met the Latin Bridge that crossed the gentle Miljacka River, there now stand two footprints embedded in the concrete sidewalk. The bridge today is called the Princip Bridge, for these two footprints mark the place where Gavrilo Princip, a gaunt, sallow student of 19, stood and fired the pistol shots that, as one historian put it, took seven million lives.

Princip's 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, put Europe on the way to World War I, but Sarajevo has been a crossroads of violence for centuries. The Romans conquered the site in the 1st century A.D., the Slavs invaded in the 6th and the Turks in the 15th.

The Turks, whose legacy is still strong today, built Sarajevo into a flourishing provincial capital. Its very name derives from saraj, the Turkish word for palace. The Turks built the cobblestoned medieval marketplace and the surrounding old town now known as the bascarsija, and the handsome mosque of Gazi Husref Beg, the finest in the Balkans.

Being an outpost of the Turkish empire meant being of interest to the Hapsburgs' Austro-Hungarian empire, which annexed the whole region known as Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878. The Hapsburgs' new subjects resented them, and many put their nationalist hopes on the neighboring kingdom of Serbia.

To them, Archduke Franz Ferdinand appeared a worthy target. Arrogant and hot-tempered, he was an unpopular prince. And on his state visit to the south, accompanied by his wife Sophie, he was highly vulnerable. The route of his procession to the town hall that June 28 was widely known; his open touring car made him an easy mark. Each of the seven assassins stationed along the route carried a pistol, a bomb and a vial of cyanide to swallow if captured.

At the first bridge, where the first two attackers were supposed to strike, nothing happened. They had been paralyzed by fear. When the third flung his bomb at the archduke, it hit the following car, wounding an aide.

Princip, standing at the next bridge, heard the roar and assumed that the attack had succeeded. He was caught unprepared when the procession drove right past him to the town hall, with the archduke alive and well. Princip wandered off to a coffeehouse to console himself, then drifted back to the riverbank.

At the town hall, the archduke complained angrily. "Mr. Mayor, I came here on a visit, and I get bombs thrown at me," he declared. "It is outrageous." But the police assured him that they had everything under control. The only added security precaution was to change the return route of the imperial procession. But the bungling police forgot to tell the chauffeur of the lead car about the change, so he made a wrong turn at the bridge into a narrow alley, then had to stop and back out. That maneuver forced the archduke's car to a halt, right where Princip happened to be standing. "I got hold of my handgun and aimed it at the car without really looking," Princip later testified. "I even looked away when I fired."

One fatal shot hit the archduke in the jugular vein, the other struck the archduchess in the abdomen. From the archduke's throat a thin stream of blood spurted onto the face of an aide. "For God's sake, what has happened to you?" the archduchess cried out to her stricken husband. "Then she sank down from her seat," the aide recalled. "His Royal Highness said, 'Soferl, Soferl! Don't die. Live for my children.' " The aide grasped the slumping archduke by the collar and asked if he were in great pain. The dying archduke said, "It is nothing," then repeated that six or seven times until the words turned into "a convulsive rattle."

Princip swallowed his cyanide pill, but it did him little harm. Neither did the authorities who convicted him of murder but could not execute him because he was a minor. Sentenced to 20 years, he died of tuberculosis in prison in 1918. By then, the war that started with a punitive Austrian attack on Serbia had bled all of Europe white. But Princip's deed did finally achieve its purpose. In the redrawing of maps that followed the war, the Austro-Hungarian empire dissolved into fragments; both Serbia and Bosnia were included in the new state of Yugoslavia.

That did not end the fighting, of course. When Hitler invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, Sarajevo and its mountains became a center of fierce resistance. Both German and Allied bombers raided the city. Nearly 15% of its inhabitants died in the war. The Slavs remember such things proudly. That is why Princip, who is regarded by most of the world as a fanatic, is commemorated here by the two footprints near the river.