The Rest Is History - 465. The Murder of Franz Ferdinand: The Killer (Part 1)

Episode Date: June 30, 2024

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to one of the world’s greatest empires, in June 1914, set in motion a series of events that would culminate in the First World War, where more than 15 million people would lose their lives. Franz Ferdinand’s assassin, Gavrilo Princip, did not share the same illustrious lineage. A Bosnian serb of humble origins who dreamed of a greater Yugoslavia, he was prepared to do anything to help advance his cause, and free his country from the clutches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire… Join Tom and Dominic in the first part of our series on history’s most consequential assassination, as they dive into rural Serbia, early 1900s Sarajevo, and the life of Gavrilo Princip, a boy who would join the Black Hand, a sinister, mysterious underground organisation, and sow the seeds of world war with two shots of his gun. _______ *The Rest Is History LIVE in the U.S.A.* If you live in the States, we've got some great news: Tom and Dominic will be performing throughout America in November, with shows in San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Boston and New York.  *The Rest Is History LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall* Tom and Dominic, accompanied by a live orchestra, take a deep dive into the lives and times of two of history’s greatest composers: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. Tickets on sale now at TheRestIsHistory.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful, as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert, as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so.

Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. Chiara. It means smart in Italian. Too bad your barista can't spell it right. So you just give a fake name. Your cafe name. Giulia. But the more you use it, the more it feels like you're in witness protection. Wait a minute.

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I'm going really fast. I just got my license. Can I borrow the car, please, Mom? Kids go from 0 to 18 in no time. You'll be relieved they have 24-7 roadside assistance with intact insurance. Mom, can we go to Nana's house tomorrow? zero to 18 in no time. You'll be relieved they have 24-7 roadside assistance with Intact Insurance. Mom, can we go to Nana's house tomorrow? I want to go to Jack's place today.

I'll just take the car. Don't wait up, okay? Kids go from zero to 18 in no time, don't they? At Intact Insurance, we insure your car so you can enjoy the ride. Visit intact.ca or talk to your broker. Conditions apply. Those long, uneven lines, standing as patiently as if they were stretched outside the Oval or Villa Park.

The crowns of hats, the sun on moustached archaic faces, grinning as if it were all an August bank holiday lark. And the shut shops, the bleached established names on the sunblinds, the farthings and sovereigns, and dark clothed children at play called after kings and queens. The tin advertisements for cocoa and twist, and the pubs wide open all day and the countryside not caring the place names all hazed over with flowering grasses and fields shadowing doomsday lines under wheat's restless silence the differently dressed servants with tiny rooms in huge houses the dust behind limousines. Never such innocence, never before or since, has changed itself to past without a word, the men leaving the gardens tidy, the thousands of marriages lasting a little while longer, never such innocence again.

That was Philip Larkin's great poem 1914 which he wrote in 1964 so the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the first world war in 1914 and dominic he wrote the title of that poem 1914 in latin numerals roman numerals to convey the sense i guess of a kind of archaic tomb. Exactly. Raised over the ashes of a vanished world. Yeah, absolutely. The doomsday lines, the pubs that were open all day, the moustached archaic bases, and that line, never such innocence again. The idea that 1914 was this world historical dividing point

between that world that he describes in their poem and the modern that it's the seismic shift in human civilization there's no mistaking the scale of the catastrophe that the first world war represents i mean it's 110 years since it broke out yeah but it is still a massive shadow totally over europe over the world over our sense of what modernity is isn't it but if you think about the two great conflicts of 2023 2024 when we're when we planned and are recording this series the russian war in ukraine and the conflicts in the middle east israel and gaza both of those can be traced back to their clash of empires and the destruction of empires in the First World War. So the destruction of czarism in Russia,

the fall of the Kaiser's Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which falls back, and of course the Ottoman Empire. And Chris Clark starts his book, The Sleepwalkers, which we will be talking about a lot in the next few episodes. 65 million men were mobilized in the First World War. 20 million people died, military and civilian. 21 million people wounded. I mean, these aren't flesh wounds. These are people disabled, traumatized for life. It is the great cataclysm, isn't it? As one historian, Fritz Stern says, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang and yet dominic um that sense which is very powerfully articulated in larkin's

poem the sense that before the the war breaks out everything is stable everything is peaceful i mean we know that's not true because we did an episode on the coming of the Easter Rising in Ireland. And we know that Britain was on the point of civil war before the outbreak of the First World War. And in fact, Asquith, the prime minister, kind of greets the news of the outbreak of war with relief because he thinks that it will save the United Kingdom from a kind of terrible internal conflict. So let's just say where we are, because we are actually in Sarajevo. And this is going out a few days after the 110th anniversary of the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand here.

I mean, a few meters from where we're actually sitting. Just down the end of this little street. And so that explains the hubbub of balkan noise in the background um there's a large man with a phone who's just the moment we started talking yeah began um shouting very volubly into his mobile behind us so i hope theo's managed to edit all that out i'm sure people are picking up tom is the uh sense of a crossroads between east and west you think yeah very much and gary and yes. Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman empires. Absolutely.

Of course, it's the one thing everyone knows about the First World War is that it begins with this assassination. Yeah. But I was looking up the list of people just in the 20th century who got assassinated before 1914. Leaders, heads of state, prime ministers, and so on. So in 1900, the King of Italy was shot. 1901,

president of the United States. 1903, and we'll be hearing about this, we'll be talking about this in due course, the king and queen of Serbia and its prime minister. 1907, the king of Bulgaria. 1908, the king of Portugal. 1911, the prime minister of Russia. 1912, the prime Minister of Spain, 1913, the King of Greece. So the question is, what was it about the shooting of the heir apparent of the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, that set this cataclysm in train? Was it merely contingent? Were there deeper processes at play? What's going on? I think it's a great question, Tom, and actually putting it in the context of those assassinations makes you think slightly differently about it. In other words, this is not a period of great stability and innocence

that is suddenly punctuated by this unforeseeable act of horrendous violence. This is one of many assassinations in the first decade and a half of the 20th century. So the question is, with the First World War, is it inevitable? Are there deep historical forces that are moving towards a conflagration? Or is there something about what happened here, a few hundred yards from where we're sitting, about that moment in Sarajevo and those two characters, Gavrilo Princip and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, is that what makes the First World War happen? And also, what is it about the specifics of the various interests that the Archduke and the assassin represent?

So what is it about the Balkans more generally that make them such a powder keg, Dominic? I think that's the phrase, isn't it? And it's a great honor for me to come here with you as an old Balkan hand. I've never been to the Balkans before, but with you, I have someone who, you know, you're as at home tramping the high mountains of Bosnia as you are at a cafe in Sarajevo. You speak the languages. You can blend into a crowd. And I'm going to be up front. I cannot speak a word of any of the languages that we're going to be using here.

So I'm going to be reading off from our notes. I will be pronouncing them incorrectly. I can't wait. Looking forward to that. The master of tongues will have to correct me. But Tom, just to flesh out that story a little bit more, on the walk to this cafe, I was just telling you about when I was attacked by Bulgarian gypsies on the border between Turkey and Bulgaria. Happy days. Happy days.

And you got the police to arrest them, didn't you? That's the mark of a Balkan hat. Oh, my word. That's what we'll be cancelled for. Okay, so we are going to tell the stories of the assassin, the victim, and the murder. They are not incidental details. They're not footnotes. Some historians treat them as footnotes.

I think they're not. I think they really, really matter. And I think, therefore, we should start with the man who started the conflict. The man who fires the first shot at the First World War. It's not the Kaiser. It's not Tsar Nicholas II. It's not Sir Edward Grey. it is gavrilo princip he is the most consequential gunman in history so tom you and i went to just before we sat down we went to the end of this road and

there is the latin bridge where franz ferdinand was shot And there's a little tiny museum, isn't there? And outside they have sort of blown up, pixelated photographs of the moment. And one of them is this man being dragged away by the police. And you see that photo reproduced in tons of history books. Gavrilo Princip being arrested. It's not Gavrilo Princip. That's the thing. Even the museum has the photo,

but it isn't Gavrilo Princip. It's a man called Ferdinand Baerer who was caught up in the confusion and the chaos. And that sort of sense of Princip as he's just a cipher, he's a nobody, he's so obscure that people misidentify him. Actually, what that misses is he's an extremely modern figure and actually really interesting. And yet there is an awful lot that isn't known about him. I mean, because he comes from a very humble background. So not many written materials about him.

His involvement in the shadowy world of Serbian espionage. I mean, all the records have been destroyed if they were ever written in the first place. And he's a very, very shadowy figure. So both of us have read a brilliant book called The Trigger by Tim Butcher, who was a war correspondent here in Sarajevo during the civil wars, and then came back here and he kind of literally walked in Princeps' footsteps

from the remote village where he was born here, then to Belgrade, and then back again. And yet what's amazing about that is actually, I mean, it's incredible how much he's dug up, but also how little he's dug up. So lots of what we know comes from the trial, but actually the trial documents were all destroyed during the war, I think, and only the pencil shorthand notes of the stenographers survived. After the war, and particularly after the Second World War, a Yugoslav author called Vladimir Dedia basically tried to collate all the stories about Princip. But I think it's fair to say a lot of those stories are probably invented. They're folk tales that were made up after people knew

what his place in history was. So they said, oh, yeah, of course, I remember Gavrila Princip at high school. You know, I knew he would be an assassin, all that kind of stuff. And I think a lot of that is a bit dodgy. Well, we've already done a series, a massive series on a famous assassination, namely the JFK assassination. And it's evident, looking at the stories and the myths that have surrounded that, that this process of kind of almost obfuscation is inevitable when something seismic happens, and particularly when the assassin is a figure of some mystery. It's almost inevitable that people are going to try and fill in the gaps.

But I thought just, it's quite striking reading some of the accounts that very, very distinguished historians have written about it. I mean, there are multiple versions. People get the details in an incredible tangle. Yeah, multiple versions and tons of mistakes, by the way. I mean, we were discussing all the different books and comparing them. They will give you completely, wildly different accounts of, I mean, you'll see the assassination happened on Franz Ferdinand's wedding anniversary. It didn't. Sophie was pregnant. She wasn't. All of these kinds of things. And particularly when you get to the conspiracy, who's in charge of the conspiracy, who's recruiting whom, it becomes such a kind of... Well, it's still very sensitive, isn't it?

It is, of course. We are in a city that suffered a terrible siege at the hands of people who view Prince Sip as a great hero. And he remains a very, very kind of politically fraught figure. I mean, we're sitting underneath buildings, some of which have bullet holes in them. That's the extent of the shell damage. I mean, that's how live that's how, how live this history is. Shall I tell people where he was born though? Yeah. You were going in with a word that

I know is terrifying to you. So, so he was born in, uh, in July, 1894 in a place called, I think, Obljaj. That's how it, that's how it's called. It's called Obljaj and it was in Herzegovina. So Herzegovina is the Western part of bosnia herzegovina very mountainous very rural mostar is the most famous with its bridge city there with its famous bridge so he's born in 1894 we absolutely know that bosnia herzegovina had been they were legally part of the ottoman empire but they had been administered by the austro-hungarians so balkan since 1878 so basically as we will see they were semi-detached in the ottoman empire and the austrians had marched in to establish their

own kind of colonial regime obliai is a tiny place it wasn't on many maps until recently it's on google maps you can see it but excitingly for me an englishman who who did visit it is Arthur Evans, who would go on to discover Palace of Minos at Knossos, which we might be doing a series on later in the year. So he wrote about it. Those who may be inclined to try Bosnia will meet with many hardships. They must be prepared to sleep out in the open air in the forest or on the mountain side. So Dominic, that must speak to you because you've done that as well, haven't you? Yeah, absolutely. But he then goes on to say, you know, that must speak to you, because you've done that as well, haven't you? Yeah, absolutely. But he then goes on to say, you know,

if you love antiquity, if you perceive the high historic interest which attaches to the southern Slavs, if you take pleasure in picturesque costumes and stupendous forest scenery, then you'll love a trip to Bosnia. And that captured, obviously, how many outsiders viewed this. It was seen as the backwater, romantic,

a place of wolves in the forest, of peasants in exciting costumes, all of that kind of stuff. And that is, I mean, Obliai is a very, very poor, obscure, fly-blown kind of place in the 1890s when Princip is born. His family are Bosnian Serbs. They probably originally had come from Montenegro. So that means they are Orthodox. They're not Muslim or Catholic like many other people in Bosnia. They possibly had been settled, Tim Butcher suggests in his book, by the Ottomans, as is often the case with a lot of Bosnian Serbs,

been settled by the Ottomans to form a kind of buffer against the Catholic Habsburg Empire. Because the area where Obloy is is quite close to an area called the Krajina, the military frontier, which was the buffer zone between these different worlds, I suppose. It was seen as the buffer zone between Christian Europe and the world of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. The Princip family, they claim they took the name Princip, which means kind of princely,

because some old ancestor, people said, what an impressive man he was, tall and all this kind of thing. Actually, they're not a very princely family. They're very poor. They're basically serfs. Well, I mean, they kind of in a way literally are, aren't they? Because one of the details I thought was fascinating in Tim Butcher's book, he quotes the police report on Prince Sip in 1914 after the assassination and has a box that says, to whom does this surf belong? I was amazed by that.

Yeah. The Ottoman Empire in the Balkans was a very sleepy kind of place. You know, technological change, modernity didn't really come at all in the 19th century but then in 1875 there's a revolt across bosnia and herzegovina against the ottoman empire which the princip clan seemed to have joined so a kind of uh peasant revolt i guess against their muslim landowner their landlords and landowners who in Bosnia are the gentry, the upper classes. Exactly, exactly.

That revolt lasts for three years. And at the end of it, as we already said, Bosnia-Herzegovina is effectively given to the Austrians. So the Austrians have marched in. It's nominally still part of the Ottoman Empire, but it's the Austrians who are given the right to run it. So can I ask you, that thing about the serfdom, which is a legacy of Ottoman rule,

is that still in place because the Austrians want to essentially leave things as they were? It's a kind of mark of sleeping dogs lie? Or is it because they're reformers, they want to get rid of it, but they just haven't got round to it? Or what's going on? I think the latter probably, Tom.

Well, a bit of both. So the Austrians had come in in 1878 they had been very boastful they'd said this would be a great laugh and actually they had to face an insurgency for about three or four months they had to send in loads of troops but once they're in situ the Austrians basically want to use this as a laboratory for a modernizing or they would call a civilizing project so the austrians already have many slav subjects we'll come to this in a subsequent episode in croatia and slovenia and slovakia and so on and they're anxious about slav nationalism particularly on their southern border and by taking over bosnia they can sort of make it a model colony i think that's their plan

yeah and you know what obviously empires get a very bad press these days but if you have to have an imperial overlord the austrians really are not that bad they set up all kinds of farms they have vineyards they have an agricultural training college they spend a lot of money on roads and railways now of course those railways are largely for their own benefits for their armies and so on but they encourage the timber industry they encourage mining in Sarajevo don't they introduce a tram system that then provides a model for Vienna they do indeed they do indeed Tom so when we went to the museum you know we saw that little list of achievements that they have in the museum the museum is very pro-austrian yeah it sort of says oh brilliant brickyards a lovely road with asphalt on it

tremendous times and um they also uh they straighten out the river that runs through the middle of sarajevo it is a very imperial project yeah actually julius caesar wanted to do that to the tiber but that's by the by but they they straighten it out and then they put roads that are very straight on either side don't they and this will play a role in the story that is to come it will indeed theodore roosevelt in 1904 said you know america was now in taking possession of the philippines he said our model should be the austrians in bosnia they've been they've been brilliant now of course we can take this a little bit far. The illiteracy rate in Bosnia, for example, was woeful.

The Austrians had built new schools, 200 new primary schools, high schools and so on. But they were very unsuccessful in basically persuading Bosnian peasants to send their children to school, in persuading them that this was in their interest. Because the Bosnian peasants had a, they were opposed to education or because they thought that their children would be indoctrinated in Catholic Habsburg propaganda. I think there's that, absolutely that. And I think they feel like they need the kids working on the land. So as we'll see with Gavrilo Princip, his father is very resistant to him going away to school. Like, why would you not stay here and help on the,

you know, help me with the smallholding. So actually what you have is in the cities like Sarajevo, things are changing. They're modernizing very quickly. But in the rural hinterland, which is most of the country, life doesn't really change that much at all. Most, a lot of the peasants, certainly in Gavrilo Princip's area near Obliai, they are Orthodox. They see themselves as Bosnian Serbs. Life is still pretty tough for them. So if you take his parents, his parents called Petar and Maria. They were born in 1860. So they would have been teenagers when the Austrians marched in. Their life doesn't change very much at all.

They live in this cottage with livestock on the ground floor, and then they would live above it. It's here that Gavrilo was born in 1894. The story goes the family told Tim Butcher that he was originally going to be called Spiro but he was born on the Archangel Gabriel's day so Gavrilo is is Gavrilo is Gabriel Tim Butcher in the trigger says that he found in the ruins of the house a stone with written in Cyrillic GP it's got the photograph in the book. And the date, 1909. So that's basically the only evidence we have,

this one stone of Gavrilo Princip's childhood. He himself at his trial said how poor they were. We're treated like cattle. We have nothing. I know how tough it is in the villages. Probably it was when he was a little boy that he got the tuberculosis that would later kill him, that kills him before the end of the First World War. His father is quite religious. His father doesn't drink, which is very unusual

in that world. People are drinking their kind of slivovice, their plum and pear brandy. Meraki. Yeah, exactly. A kind of Meraki. But Petar doesn't drink. Petar is a big man in the village. He's the head of the local kind of association, earns a bit of extra money as the village postman. So he's ambitious to some degree within his limits. And both Gavrilo and his older brother, Jovo, have a degree of ambition. So Jovo goes away to work in a village near sarajevo in the timber industry basically dragging tree trunks to a sawmill and gavrilo who's grown up you know helping out with the chickens and the cow and the sheep and stuff he's obviously bright he's a good reader yeah so

how does he learn to read there's a local school okay they go to the local school he learns to read and jovo when gavrilo is 13 jovo sees an advert in the newspaper so jovo also can read clearly yeah and jovo sees an advert that says as part of the austrian modernizing civilizing project as they would call it they want more people to go to school and there's an advert and it says basically send your children to sarajevo there are places in the schools. And so this is a very, very familiar story that will run throughout the 20th century, isn't it? Of imperial authorities setting up schools that then educate the people who will agitate against the imperial project.

Exactly. So basically, the worse empire you are, the more likely... So the Portuguese, for example. Yeah, none of that. You can keep it going indefinitely. Whereas if you're building schools and educating people and also bringing them to the metropole,

like the British Empire does, to go to university, you're signing your own death warrant, Tom. Well, France Fanon. Yeah, absolutely. All that. Absolutely. So anyway,

they have a family discussion. The father is not keen keen but the mother insists gavrilo is a bright boy this is a great opportunity for him he should go to sarajevo so in the late summer of 1907 he's 13 years old he and his father basically walk across a third of the country to get to the local railway station to get to the railway station so tim butcher in his book is has wonderful chapters about this they're walking through really remote mountains where there are wolves and bears and all the mines after the civil war now there are mines absolutely not back then obviously no they takes the majors they eventually get to the train how often have they been on a train probably never had a thought um they get the train to sarajevo and effectively gavrilo just 13 years old

is dropped off and his father goes back to obliai and this cannot help but be an alienating experience so we've described how um gavrilo's experiences are kind of reminiscent of post-colonial thinkers and fighters and revolutionaries. But it's also very, very reminiscent of a whole strain in European literature in the 19th century. I guess Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, the ambitious young man going to Petersburg who has yearnings to be something and then finds not possible yeah and this is a kind of archetype that you see repeated again and again and again and gavrilo will kind of play this role won't he he's surrounded by what seems to him an overwhelming symbol of modernity

but actually isn't really is it i mean you've got the old tram and the odd straightened river yeah but in lots of ways it's a town of a kind that Byron might have recognized traveling in the Balkans a century earlier. It is. Sarajevo in 1907, when Gavrilo arrives, it's a fascinating place poised between, I mean, such a terrible cliche, but it's poised between old and new, Tom. Yeah. And east and west. Because to give people a sense, Sarajevo is strung along this valley, a pretty narrow valley. You've got hills on either side, the river running through it, the Milyatska, pretty small.

It's not a massive river. The sides of the river are kind of lined with big Austrian buildings. I mean, we're surrounded by them, very obviously Habsburg-era buildings. But there's also the mosques that the Ottomans had built. There's a kind of bizarre quarter that we were walking around earlier. Now with all kinds of souvenir shops and stuff, it feels, even today, it feels very Turkish. Yeah, it does. I mean, there are a lot of mosques and there are a lot of women in headscarves, some of them veiled. And I guess that a century ago, that was even more apparent.

Even more so. Arthur Evans, the Gnosis guy, had said, the Bosnian countryman gapes with as much wonderment at the domes of the two chief mosques in Sarajevo as an English rustic at the first sight of St. Paul's. Now, of course, for Gavrilo Princip, it's not just that these are bigger buildings than he's ever seen, but they're Islamic. He is an Orthodox Christian.

And Islam for a Serb peasant is representative of the ruling class. Yeah. I mean, difficult for the people in Western cities to think of. Yeah. It's the reverse of what prevails now. Exactly. So he would have come here and he would have seen people in fezzes and turbans and the kind of baggy trousers and stuff. He would have seen a lot fezes and turbans and the kind of baggy trousers

and stuff he would have seen a lot of women with veils which would not have been the case back in obliai he would as you said have seen the trams government offices a tram just went past us now the austrian buildings like the theater and so on as you said obviously the austrians have just rerouted the river so i think all of this is clearly a big culture shock. There's a story told by Vladimir Dedio in his book, The Road to Sarajevo, that when Princip arrives, he and his brother go to this guest house, which is run by a Muslim innkeeper who is wearing traditional Muslim dress. And Princip is supposed, Gavrilo was supposed to have said,

I don't want to sleep here because these people are Turks. turks so been comparing him to figures from 19th century literature but you could also i guess compare him to the deracinated guy who goes on to become a terrorist in the 21st century christopher clark in the introduction to sleepwalkers actually makes this point he says that you know looking back to the pre-war world guys in feathers and archdukes and things but actually this is a world that will be very familiar to people who've lived through 9-11 or the london tube bombings the kind of people who are committing those atrocities are people who feel dislocated from the expressions of modernity that surround them but are also culturally alienated from the mainstream dominant culture that they regard with contempt and hatred.

Absolutely, Tom. I totally agree. As we will see in the rest of today's podcast, Gavrilo Princip, lonely, idealistic, quite bright, poor, alienated from the culture that surrounds him, disaffected, all of these things he conforms completely to a stereotype with which we are now very very sort of tragically familiar

at first actually you know he seems to make a decent start his brother finds him a lodging with a bosnian sub widow who is called mrslic. We will come back to this family later on. So it's on the edge of the Bazaar Court. It's very close to where we are now. So when he looks out of his window, he can see... The wailing of the muazen. Exactly, all of that stuff. He goes to a place called the Merchant School,

which is a commercial school that is basically designed to educate you to be a tradesman or a shopkeeper or something like that. And just to point out, he is getting money from his parents. So they are sufficiently big figures in their small village that they can send money to him. But not much money. But it is greatly to his credit that he kind of will, over the course of his time in Sarajevo, share that with his friends. Yes, he does. He does.

That's probably the one nice thing we're going to say about Gavrilo Princip in this entire story. He's a generous, generous lad. So Tim Butcher, in his book, The Trigger, has done amazing detective work on his school reports and his school grades. He tracked down the school records. And it tells a really fascinating and frankly familiar story. He starts, he's very clever, he's dedicated, he does really well. He

gets straight A's, he gets a first class diploma with honors at the end of his first year. So this is 13-14. But in the next few years, the story is one of steady decline. His grades get worse and worse. Crucially, I think I think that Butcher finds from the records that it's really important, his address keeps changing. That is a sign of instability and poverty, I think, that he is moving between different places and clearly running out of money. And that's something, again, that is very familiar from the life patterns of hijackers and terrorists in the 21st century yeah absolutely so as butcher says the reports tell a story of a student going inexorably off the rails actually so by 1910

he's still ambitious he's been here three years he leaves the merchant school with his parents permission and he goes to actually a more elite school the gymnasium the gymnasium which is an austro-hungarian foundation was one of the first things the Austrians did was to build this high school, which was a school where you would go right through to the end and then possibly go to university. So it's the medium for that German? No, I don't think it is, Tom, because we know that later on he needs help translating a German newspaper from one of his friends. So he's not as familiar with germany german is the language of the occupier and there was a movement of bright kids like him who are going to schools and colleges in bosnia at this period are often kicking against the occupier refusing to learn or to speak german so that school was very close to where we are now it's just off what's called the apple key

and that key is the straight road straight road running along the river of arguably i mean this is a big statement you could argue that is the most consequential road in modern european history as we will as we will find out but he gets terrible grades at the gymnasium i'm reminded of actually of hitler when hitler changed school and went to i think lintz the big, a lonely idealistic boy, his grades plummeted. And that's what happens with Gavrilo. And it's a similar milieu, isn't it? Hitler is in Vienna. So they're both living in the same imperial framework. And it's this kind of land, this dimension of Doss houses,

frustrated intellectuals, and fervent nationalism. And the question is, of course, in Princip's case, where is this nationalism coming from? And I think we should take a break at this point. And when we come back, let's look at that and see what are the wellsprings of Serbian nationalism in Princip's Sarajevo. Kiara. It means smart in Italian. Too bad your barista can't spell it right. So you just give a fake name. Your cafe name. Julia. But the more you use it, the more it feels like you're in witness protection.

Wait a minute. What kind of espresso drinks does Julia like anyway? Is it too late to change your latte order? But with an espresso machine by KitchenAid, you wouldn't be thinking any of this. Because you could have just made your espresso at home. Shop now at KitchenAid.ca I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello and welcome back to The Rest Is History and Dominic, we are looking at the making of Gavrilo Princip, assassin of Franz Ferdinand here in Sarajevo, where we are currently sitting. I think the sense that I probably had before looking at this was that Bosnia was a powder keg. Yeah.

But actually, it doesn't seem to have been that much of a powder keg, really. No, I would say not particularly. So if people are thinking it's this kind of seething with nationalist discontent. Ancient hatred. Ancient hatred. I think that is not right. So in 1914, there were about two million people. A third of them are Muslim.

A quarter of them are Catholic. That means they would call themselves Bosnian Croats, and they'd identify with their Catholic neighbor, Croatia, which is part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And then the rest, so we're talking just under half, they would be Orthodox, and they would call themselves Bosnian Serbs. By the way, all these figures are much contested. Yeah, I'm sure. Of course. Nationalist historians on various sides argue bitterly about them. However, that I think is a reasonable estimate. Now, it is absolutely true. The Austrians have great trouble in making the politics of Bosnia work because often these people spend an enormous amount of

time squabbling among themselves and demanding patronage, funding, all of those kinds of things, and refusing to work together. So that is a big issue. However, this is not an especially violent place. After the 1870s, there are not huge uprisings. It is not as stable as the Austrians would like, by any means. But say to compare it with another part of pre-war Europe that we've done, Ireland, pre-1914. Would Ireland be more unstable, do you think?

I would say you would think that Ireland would be a greater... Our Irish listeners will not enjoy being described as a problem, so I do that kind of advisedly. But for the imperial power? For the imperial authorities, I think the British would have regarded ireland as more of a pressing problem than the austrians would have thought about bosnia i think the issue tom is that actually for most people most people as so often are just getting along with their normal

lives the people who are the problem as it were are actually people like gavrilo princip they are literate idealistic students so these are the people like Gavrilo Princip. They are literate, idealistic students. So these are the people who everywhere in Europe at this point are the most susceptible to the most exciting and fashionable creed of the day, which is nationalism. But also a kind of anarchism as well. Yeah. Socialism. So, I mean, all those presidents and prime ministers and monarchs that I described being shot. Yeah. There's the kind of strain of mingled anarchism and nationalism there. Yes. And it's very much present here in Sarajevo.

Totally. And actually, of course, the funny thing is that the Austrian modernization project, which is building libraries and which sees the establishment of coffee houses and youth clubs and all these things, those are the milieu in which these ideas are being exchanged. So they are actually creating, they are facilitating the expression of this kind of discontent. Now, most of that activism is pretty low level. So you would see, if we'd been where we are right now, in this kind of lovely little street

in Sarajevo in 1914, we'd have seen maybe graffiti denouncing Schwaben, Swabians, which was the kind of nickname given, you know, they're kind of Teutons. Brits out. Yeah, that kind of equivalent. We'd have seen that. We might have seen scribbling over German language signs. So like Corsica. Yeah, absolutely.

But most of that, that's not an existential threat. Right, it's not paramilitaries being recruited in Belfast. No, it's not. Kind of level threat. No, it's not.ilitaries being recruited in Belfast. No, it's not a level threat. No, it's not. And the Austrians tried to shut that down. So in 1913, they shut down the high school in Mostar because of nationalist agitation. They actually arrested almost 150 secondary school children and put them on trial for kind of anti-Austrian demonstrations and stuff. But obviously, they're never going to shut all this down because the more they educate people the more trouble they are going to have and gavrilo princip is

absolutely typical of this generation so he is a reader as a personality he is he's your classic introvert he's a loner the other boys so, when they're interviewed after he's become famous, when one of them said, he stood out, he pretended that he knew more than any of us about literature. He used to say, he used to boast that he was the cleverest of us. So he's like, do you know what he reminds me of? Lee Harvey Oswald. Lee Harvey Oswald. I mean, amazingly like Lee Harvey Oswald.

Yeah. Or your kind of American high school shooter. Yeah. You know, the boy who sits alone sneers at the others in the cast thinks he knows more spending all his evenings on the internet yeah gavrilo princip mark david chapman he is that boy yeah i mean we know that he read he loved reading he loved oscar wilde he also loves alexander dumas and sherlock holmes he loves sherlock holmes and walter scott these are the stories that are being reprinted

in Serbo-Croat language as it would then have been called Serbo-Croat language journals so there's there's a piece of writing isn't there

basically the only piece of writing that survived by him yeah by him that's written when he was 16 that anyone who has fancied themselves

as being good at writing english yeah we'll recognize quite adrian mole we left hajichi hadzichi oh tom what is it at sunset when the western sun was blazing in purple splendor when the numberless rays of the blood-red sun filled the whole sky and when the whole nature was preparing to sleep through the beautiful dreamy summer evening in the magic peace that beloved ideal night of the poet now i wrote a lot of essays like that yeah fair i didn't go on to become a murderer you're still time tom there is there is but it's a young man's game really though isn't it i mean that's the key it's actually i don't think it's that bad no it's not it was as if we were hearing the song of the four sirens and the sad

aeolian harp of divine orpheus yeah no it's not bad i mean it's not an idiot it's overwritten it's romantic yeah it's lush and there's perhaps the faint hint of self-pity totally but that's very romantic too right but it's very also very teenage, isn't it? Everything about teenagers, a word that hasn't yet been invented, that will come to kind of shake the world, actually in the post-Second World War world, but is already clearly kind of fermenting here. Totally. Absolutely it is, Tom. The two things we know about him as a teenager,

number one, he's very, very poor. So he spends all his money really on books. You're absolutely right that he is seen by his friends as quite generous. He will share money with his friends and so on. But after the first couple of years, I think our sense is he is surviving on loans. He's borrowing a lot of money and his brother is helping him out. Yeah. And that obviously, when you're a teenager, makes you frustrated and angry and he's lonely he doesn't drink his father didn't drink of course

yeah he doesn't drink in a place like Sarajevo full of cafes full of activity you know people sitting outside smoking and drinking that would presumably make him stand out a bit plus we were talking about this on the walk about whether this is a key factor or not i think it actually is an important thing he's an incel he doesn't have a girlfriend yeah he doesn't there's one girl that he supposedly liked but he never you know even picked up the courage to talk to her as he later tells his austrian psychiatrist when he's in prison who Who's not Dr. Freud. No.

But I think, you know, so often we see with people who commit terrorist acts that they are lonely, frustrated. You know, you made the joke about being an incel. Well, it wasn't a joke. It was a serious point. Yeah. So he does have one friend who I think is very influential on him. You'll remember that when he first moved to Sarajevo, he moved in with the widow Illich, Mrs. Illich. She had a son who was 17 when he arrived. So you can absolutely see if you're 13 and there's a 17 year old in the house, he will influence you. And he's the perfect

kind of person to influence Gavrilo. He's called Danilo Illich. He trained as a teacher, but he didn't really settle down. He ended up actually becoming a proofreader for a newspaper he is tall he is emaciated and he he always wears a black tie doesn't he yes as a constant reminder of death i mean that's basically if you're a 13 year old and you're hanging out with a 17 year old who's talking in that kind of way yeah he has a kind of cool mustache yeah i mean you're getting a hero worship him you are absolutely now danilo illich i think i think it's fair to say that as a father myself he's not the influence i would choose all kinds of reasons he spends his free time translating uh bakunin maxim gorky oscar wilde

again tom he loves nietzsche. He's just so annoying. He was clearly an incredibly annoying person. Sounds like me. It's like a young Tom Holland. But he was also really into politics. So he would travel. What money Illich had, he would spend traveling. He was as far as Switzerland, for example.

Switzerland, the great destination for emigres, for Marxist emigres. Lenin was there. Illich would go to these places to basically buy revolutionary pamphlets, political tracts and stuff. Then he'd come back to Sarajevo, sit around with his other fellow incels, and they would discuss these tracts

and say, oh, isn't this amazing? I mean, it's a very, very kind of pre-war version of the radical internet oh isn't this amazing i mean it's it's a very very um a kind of pre-war version of the radical internet isn't it absolutely it's people downloading dodgy stuff on the internet yeah gathering around to read it or it's the or it's a political version of the the the teenager in the 70s who has actually gone to america and brought loads of records and brought them back to england sharing them with his friends it just happens to be revolutionary tracks and they're all thinking all those you know all the jihadis and so on oh yeah they were kind of accessing um illegal

websites to download yeah screeds from azam bin laden or whatever exactly you're absolutely right that's what illich is doing and that undoubtedly rubs off on gavrilo Princip. Now Gavrilo Princip remember arrived here in 1907. In 1908 the following year so when he is 14, 15 very impressionable there is a huge political crisis and what happens is that Austria has been administering Bosnia for 30 years but now the austrians say we will formally annex bosnia herzegovina you know the days of ottoman sovereignty are completely gone and their plan is basically we will fully incorporate bosnia into the hapsburg empire and they have a good reason for doing that what they want to do is they want to have a better balance within the hapsburg empire of german speakers magyar speakers, i.e. Hungarians,

and Slavs. So what the authorities want to do is actually they want a balance actually against the Hungarians. And having more Slavs means they can perhaps establish a separate, a third kingdom, a third element of that bifurcated empire, a Slav kingdom with the emperor as its monarch, and that will mean greater stability in the long run. It's very controversial for all kinds of diplomatic reasons, which we won't go into in this episode. But what Gavrilo would have seen straight away, there would have been protests from people who are opposed to the Austrians. But he would also have seen the apparatus of Austro-Hungarian rule becoming much more pronounced. So lots of new people arrive in Sarajevo. The Austrian authorities are given more powers.

And actually, the census tells the story. So we know that by 1910, the Catholic population of Sarajevo has gone up in three decades from 700 to 17,000 out of about 50,000. And those Catholics are Austrians. They are Hungarians. They are Croats. They are newcomers who are affiliated to the imperial regime. So for Scavrillo and his friends, you can imagine how angry they are about that. Loads of new people, hundreds and thousands of them.

Getting swamped. Swamped by immigrants. That's what they're thinking. So we can see, I mean, we see this in Gavrilo's later statements. There is an intense bitterness towards Vienna, towards Austria. He says they hate the South Slavs. They're evil to us. He says, if I could, I would wipe Austria from the map.

I hate Austria so much. And a lot of that, I think, is the classic exaggerated anger of a teenager, of a romantic teenager. But it's also, I mean, it is reminiscent of Hitler again, isn't it? The anxiety that a nation, the idea of a nation that you cherish is being swamped by alien peoples and alien cultures. Yeah, absolutely it is. And I think that explains why,

so in 1908 or so, Gavrilo is dragged not towards socialism, which was, of course, on the table. Yeah, he's reading Oscar Wilde. Yeah, he's reading Kropotkin and stuff, anarchist books. He reads William Morris. So he could have become a wallpaper designer had history been different. Yes, he could have done. Absolutely, he could have become a wallpaper designer had history been different

like yes he could have done absolutely he could have been a great advocate for arts and crafts but sadly different history would have history yeah but what it is is is Slav nationalism that seduces him and it's important actually to make this point because I think again lots of people in fact loads of historians get this wrong they describe him as a Serb nationalist, and that's not really right. He's literally a Yugoslav nationalist, South Slav nationalist. He thinks all of the South Slavic peoples should be united in one state, admittedly under the leadership of Serbia, but not purely as a... It's a Yugoslavia that he wants, not a Serbia.

And the movement that expresses that that he gets into is this militant group called malada bosnia young bosnia and this is a very loose alliance of talking shops so-called revolutionary cells well groups of kids in cafes i see in your notes that you've you've written literally woke their credo the whole of our society is snoring ungracefully only the poets and revolutionaries are awake that's exactly it very 19th century it's very shelly could have written absolutely everybody else is sleeping you know all the peasants that he thinks should be fighting the Austrians, they're actually just like, they don't give a damn about this. They're looking after their chickens.

Yeah, they're looking after, exactly, looking after their chickens. And he's like, they're asleep, but we are awake. I mean, it's that classic thing that teenage idealists and revolutionaries say, isn't it? Now, what he thinks is the neighboring kingdom of Serbia, which is independent, not Austrian, not Ottoman, but its own thing, that should take the lead. It should be the analogy that he uses, that Yugoslav and Serbian nationalists always use in this time, but they talked about the Italian wars of unification, where Piedmont had led the way. Piedmont, Sardinia had led the way in unifying the different bits of Italy. And he says Serbia

had a moral duty to be the Piedmont of Yugoslavia. And he has been primed for this, I think, because like so many people from his background, he would have grown up with people reciting, singing ballads and poems about medieval Serbia. So the classic example is this ballad or poem about the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, where the Serbs had been smashed by the Ottomans. But afterwards, a Serbian nobleman called Miloš Obilić had assassinated the sultan, the Ottoman sultan. I mean, it's fascinating because, again, this obsession with an ancient battle that kind of lingers in the hearts of an embattled community. Of course, I mean, it reminds me of the role the Battle of the Boyne plays

for Ulster Protestants. But it's incredibly telling. I mean, that's a great victory for Protestantism. Yeah. Whereas this is celebrating a defeat. It is, but that's not uncommon. No, I guess. But two things. I mean, one is that Kosovo at this point is not yet part of Serbia. So that's a problem. But also the date of the Battle of Kosovo is the 28th of June.

Yes. And that is a date. A really significant date. Obviously will have some resonance in the story that is to come. So Gavrilo Princip has all this stuff in his head. He's read all this stuff about martyrdom, about Serbia, about people fighting empires, all of these things that teenagers actually always read at any point in history. Well, I'm not sure it is actually, not at any point in history. I mean, this is something that's actually quite distinctive, isn't it? Of kind of industrial society that is able to provide mass education.

Yeah, you're right. Well, I think actually those Serbian epics, they had persisted down the centuries. They'd kind of been passed on around the fire and all that kind of stuff. But that's within peasant communities and villages. But within the cities, you're right. What's different now is that they're deracinated. And so this kind of conversation becomes the new glue

that is sticking together a cadre of impoverished intellectuals. Yeah, I think that's very true. You love an impoverished intellectual, don't you? I actually hate an impoverished intellectual. It's true. So there's the man who is, I think, going to reveal himself very much as Team Franz Ferdinand. Oh, come on. Don't give that away so soon, Tom.

I mean, it's actually painful for me to even be doing this story. Listen, talking of impoverished intellectuals, something happens in June 1910 that is massive in this story. And actually, very few people listening to this podcast will probably ever have heard of. So Gavrilo has been here three years. He is what? 16? Could not be at a more impressionable age. And that summer, a guy just like him from Herzegovina, a Bosnian Serb called Bogdan Zerich, fires five shots at the Austro-Hungarian governor of Bosnia, General Marian Varoshanin.

And the governor, Tom, as you can see just at the end of this alley, the river, the river Miliacka and the quay alongside it, the governor is driving over one of those bridges that we've walked over on that river. Zerich had originally wanted to kill the emperor Franz Josef, but the crowds were very thick when Franz Joseph arrived. People were very excited to see him, so he couldn't do it. So he is standing on what's called the emperor's bridge. The governor drives past.

Zereich shoots five shots. It doesn't say much, actually. He misses with every one, but he doesn't miss with his sixth shot because what he does with his sixth shot he turns the gun on himself and basically blows his own brains out and so suicide is another dimension to the whole i'm a miserable intellectual in a turn of the century dos house isn't it think how much the young man who who takes his own life how that figure has recurred throughout the 19th century young verta all the way so many novels and poems and whatnot life's so unfair exactly exactly yeah zherich takes his

own life he's lying there on the ground then i have to say the governor behaves quite poorly he does he can behave i mean he behaves like a bulgarian warlord in the 10th century he gets out of his carriage. He walks over to the body. And then there's some sources say he just kicks it. In other words, that he spits on it. So winning hearts and minds there. And then a bloke who works for the police has Zverevich's head cut off

and he uses his skull as an ink pot. Yeah. So that's building bridges with the Serb community there. This is like your ultimate Balkan anecdote, isn't it? So anyway, Gavrilo Princip and his friends, obviously, think this guy, Bogdan Zerich, is the bee's knees. He's brilliant. They think he is absolutely brilliant.

There is a rush of pamphlets and poems. There's one called The Death of a Hero that is very, very famous. If you can have an underground poem that's a bestseller, this is it. All the people who've gone into this say this is an absolutely central text for these guys. And this thing, this Death of a Hero says, Zerich must be a model for all young men.

Young Serbs, will you produce such men? And for Gavrilo, he said himself at his trial zeriich was my role model at nights i used to go to his grave and i would vow that i would do the same as him i would spend whole nights there and he complained that the grave was neglected and run down he said my friends and i used to go like tart it up with flowers and stuff and pray in front of it well the hapsburg police then said rather sneeringly that they'd nicked them from other graves yes they did but you can absolutely well they haven't got any money right of course yeah you can absolutely believe it it's at this point i think that he drops out of school this is when the grades collapse and where he drops out of

school and he drifts for a year or so and then it it's in early 1912, so what is he now? He's 17, that he decides, you know what, there's nothing for me here in Sarajevo. I'm actually going to go to Belgrade in Serbia. I know. It's okay. No, sorry. I'm not giving you the microphone. So what does now happen, ladies and gentlemen? It's that the old Balkan hand is swapping anecdotes. Right, so Serbia, it had been a part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries and centuries following the great defeat at Kosovo.

But it's been independent of the Ottomans since 1878. It's quite small, isn't it? There are only kind of two million. And it's quite economically backward. So, I mean, it's much poorer, say, than Bosnia. Yeah, so certainly in the rural hinterland of Serbia, it's poorer than much of Bosnia is. And part of that is because Serbia, as you said, two million people, Orthodox. Serbia had been tied into the Ottoman economic system.

And when it was cut off from the Ottoman economic system, there's kind of nowhere to go. The largely Muslim land-earning elites have left, by and large. Which is unlike Bosnia. Yeah. The cities have actually declined. So someone like Belgrade has actually declined in population under independence. And they've had a spectacular murder of their king, haven't they? Yeah.

So we mentioned how the king of Serbia had been murdered in 1903. And his queen. Queen Draga. Queen Draga, who... She's a character. Tremendous character. So the king, who I think was about 10 years younger than her, murdered in 1903 and his queen queen draga queen draga who um character tremendous character so the the king who i think was about 10 years younger than her had announced to his cabinet that he wanted to marry her and the interior minister said sir you cannot marry her she has been everybody's mistress mine included but the king didn't worry about that married her yeah they were terrible yeah and they both got killed they all get killed after hiding in a cupboard for two hours.

It's a terrible story. So Serbia has a very, very troubled political culture. So first of all, it has a sense of an obsession with martyrdom and sacrifice that goes back to the Battle of Kosovo. It also has a sense of frustration and sort of betrayal that is partly actually because since independence, it hasn't done very well economically. So people are actually poorer rather than better off in 1903 as you say the last monarch of the obrenovich

dynasty king alexander and his wife kundraga they hide in the cupboard they are absolutely horrendously mutilated and and murdered quite kind of uh lakota very treatment of their bodies of their bodies yeah horrifically mutilated one of of the regicides, a man called Vemic, who was an officer, army officer. He's an army officer, done it. He walked around for years, Tom, with a piece of the queen's breast in a suitcase. Wow.

Which is very peculiar behavior. Yeah, very. Now, all of this matters because it has a long afterlife in Serbian politics. So the regicides, the conspirators who'd murdered the king and queen, they become great heroes for the people because the king and queen were seen as too pro-austrian and they play an outsized part in serbian public life afterwards in kind of nationalist politics in paramilitary groups and

so on and the most famous of these a man i know that you're very interested in uh do you want to tell us his name tom of course in serbian it's dragotin dimitrijevic dimitrijevic yeah but it's much more sensibly called apis after the apis bull of egypt of egypt mentioned by herodotus um and the reason for that is basically he looks like a bull yes i mean he's a huge great bloke yeah i think it's fair to say that if he were alive today in serbia he'd be a great enthusiast for one of those kind of faded combat caps that serbian hard men love to wear i can picture him surrounded by his coterie at some enormous outdoor barbecue yeah but in combat fatigue in combat fatigues with balkan turbo folk playing very loudly on

the loudspeakers and people talking darkly of attacking kosovo yes that's his scene that's very much his vibe so Apis becomes a national hero because of his role in the conspiracy, killing the king and queen. He loves plotting. He loves code names. He loves rituals. And as we will see,

he has a massive part to play in this story that leads us to the outbreak of the First World War. So as all this suggests, by far the biggest political force in Serbia is ethnic nationalism. The Serbian mission, as they see it, is unfinished. It's barely started. What they want to do is they build a greater Serbia, taking what's now Albania, Kosovo, what is now North Macedonia, even down as far as Greece. Yeah, because if you are the ruler of a non-Serbian country with Serbs in it,

they have a rather menacing catchphrase, which is, where a Serb dwells, that is Serbia. Exactly. Now, to be fair to them, that is not uncommon among nationalists across Europe. But in Serbia, it is probably more than anywhere else mixed with this kind of paramilitary politics. So, of course, when the Austrians annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, that was a massive shock to the Serbian sort of paramilitary nationalist

movement. It really ratchets them up, makes them absolutely furious. They despise the Austrians because of this. So when Gavrilo Princip arrives in Belgrade in 1912, Belgrade is full of people like him. People who hate the Austrians, people who dream of a greater Slav state with Serbia in the vanguard as the Prussia or the Piedmont of this state. So he arrives and he thinks, brilliant, Belgrade is going to be the promised land. Actually, he goes back to school.

He goes to the high school, the gymnasium in Belgrade, but he fails his exams he's distracted tom by revolutionary politics revolutionary politics by mooning around at people's graves and stuff yeah so then another blow i think to his sense of self-esteem in october 1912 so he's been there what nine months six months the first balkan war begins so what happens here is Serbia teams up with Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, all of them Orthodox countries to take on the Ottomans. So basically bite off loads of Ottoman territory and they win crushing victories for Serbian men. This is an incredibly

exciting and glorious moment. Well, I mean, it leaves Serbia a much more menacing figure, doesn't it? A kind of regional big power. Yes, yes it does but gavrilo princip is not part of them because he applied did some of the basic training and then he was turned down for being too much of a weed yeah well i mean even lee harvey oswald got into the army yeah he's seen as too sickly wanted to go into the balkan war but was found too weak his austrian psychiatrist wrote in his notes after his trial so for gavrilo princip this is an absolutely devastating moment and for the next couple of years he's just hanging around in belgrade and kind of dos houses and cafes with other bosnian exiles so these cafes all have very sort of romantic sounding names.

They're called like the Acorn Garland, the Little Goldfish and so on. And it's full of these basically boys, young men, nursing a coffee for hours because they haven't got much money. You're boasting about the great atrocities they will one day carry out

against the Austrian bullies who've always been horrible to them. So if they're around today, they would all be on dark web. They would be. Chat rooms. They would absolutely be. Kind of plotting atrocities and things.

They totally would be. And Gavrilo is right there in the thick of it. They all know him. And he is by now a very bitter and disaffected young man. He says later, wherever I went, people took me for a weakling. Indeed, for a man who had been completely ruined by the moderate study of literature. And I pretended that I was a weak person, even though I was not.

So there's this kind of self-loathing there, clearly. So therefore, presumably, he wants to prove that he's not weak. He wants to take a step that will echo around the world. Yes, exactly. He wants to prove he's a man, I think. He wants to prove he's not weak. He wants to take a step that will echo around the world. Yes, exactly. He wants to prove he's a man, I think. He wants to prove he's a man. And so, Dominic, I mean, what a cliffhanger. What's going to happen? How is he going to prove himself? Will he be able to take an action that everyone will hear about and mean that people will be recording podcasts about him 110 years after he takes this incredible step. Only one way to find out, and that is to tune into our next episode, which will be coming very soon.

But if you want to hear it immediately, you can, of course, go to therestishistory.com, where we have three more episodes, don't we, specifically on the story of Princip and the assassination. And then after that, we will be looking at the broader road to the outbreak of the First World War. It's an incredible story. I hope you've enjoyed this and I hope you'll be joining us for the rest of the episodes. But for now, bye-bye. Dovahzhenia. I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host

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