Gavrilo Princip was not the best-trained of assassins, or the best-equipped, nor was he the most ruthless. But he was, perhaps, the luckiest, shooting dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand through a series of strokes of serendipity and fortune. It was the rest of the world’s bad luck that his actions triggered the first global conflict.
Princip was born in 1894, a serf’s son from the wild west of Bosnia. His father, Petar, earned extra income by delivering letters around the hamlet of Obljaj, where Princips had eked a hardscrabble existence for generations.
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