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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 sun blinds, 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...
raised over the ashes of a vanished world. Yeah, absolutely. The doomsday lines, the pubs that were open all day, the moustached, archaic faces, and that line, never such innocence again. The idea that 1914 was this world historical dividing point between
That world that he describes in the 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, but it is still a massive shadow 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
of 2023-2024 when we planned and are recording this series, the Russian war in Ukraine and the conflict 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, that sense which is very powerfully articulated in Larkin's poem, this sense that
before 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 Vulcan noise in the background. There's a large man with a phone who's just... The moment we started talking...
began 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 sense of a crossroads between East and West, do you think? Yeah, I very much think so. 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 that 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...
I'm going to be reading off from our notes. I will be pronouncing them incorrectly. I can't wait. Looking forward to that. And you, 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. You were. On the border between Turkey and Bulgaria. Happy days. Happy days. And you got the police to arrest them, didn't you? So that's...
That's how you, that's the mark of a Balkan. Oh my word. That's, that's what we'll be canceled for. Um, 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 of the first world war. It's not the Kaiser. It's not Tsar Nicholas the second. It's not Sir Edward Gray.
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 Baer who was caught up in the confusion and the chaos. And that sort of sense of Princip as Gavrilo
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...
A lot 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 Prince at my 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
The details in it. 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 political, 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 this history is. Shall I tell people where he was born, though? Yeah, you're going in with a word that I know is terrifying to you. So he was born in July 1894 in a place called, I think, Oboljadj. That's how it is.
That's how it's spelt. It's called Obliai 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. It's situated 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 from 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 did visit it is Arthur Evans, who would go on to discover the Palace of Minos at
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 mountainside." 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, 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 princet family they claim they took the name princet which means kind of prince princely um because some old ancestor people said how what an impressive man he was you know how 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 are they they kind of in a way literally aren't they because one of the details i thought was fascinating in tim butcher's book
He quotes the police report on Princip in 1914 after the assassination and has a box that says, to whom does this serf 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 peasant revolt, I guess, against their Muslim landowners, 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? That 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 it a civilizing project. So the Austrians already have many...
Slav subjects will come to this in a subsequent episode in Croatia in 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 and
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 benefit, 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 they also, they straighten out the river that runs through the middle of Sarajevo. They do. Which is a very imperial project. Yeah. Actually, Julius Caesar wanted to do that to the Tiber, but that's by
by the by, but 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 taking possession of the Philippines. He said, our model should be the Austrians in Bosnia. 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 and 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 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 are 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 Spirol,
But he was born on the Archangel Gabriel's day. So Gavrilo is Serbian for 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 was 13, Jovo sees an advert in the newspaper. So Jovo also can read, clearly. 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 worst 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 or... Yeah, absolutely. All that. Absolutely. So anyway, they have a family discussion. The father is not 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. So Tim Butcher in his book has wonderful chapters about this. They're walking through really remote mountains where there are wolves and bears and all of these. And lions after the Civil War as well. Now there are lions, absolutely. But not back then, obviously. No, they take some ages. They eventually get to the train. How often have they been on a train? Probably never. Never, I'd have thought. Yeah.
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 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. Yeah. The ambitious young man going to Petersburg who has yearnings to be something and then finds it 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. Yeah.
And I guess that a century ago, that was even more apparent. Even more so. Arthur Evans, the Gnostic 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 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 officers 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. So, I've been comparing him to figures from 19th century literature, but you could also, I guess, compare him to the deracinated...
who goes on to become a terrorist in the 21st century. Christopher Clarke, in the introduction to Sleepwalkers, actually makes this point. He says that, 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 widow who is called Mrs. Ilic. We will come back to this family later on. So it's on the edge of the bazaar quarter, very close to where we are now. So he can hear, you know, when he looks out of his window, he can see the wailing of the moors and 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 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 1314. But in the next few years, the story is one of steady decline. His grades get worse and worse.
Crucially, 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 inextricably off the rails, actually. Yeah.
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
an Austro-Hungarian foundation. It 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 German. 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 Quay. And that quay is the 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 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, Linz, the big school, 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. Yeah. And it's this kind of land, this dimension of Doss houses, frustrated intellectuals, and phony,
fervent nationalism. And the question is, of course, in Principc'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 Principc's Sarajevo.
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Hello, 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 2 million people. A third of them are Muslim. A quarter of them 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 because 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. You know, 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, and 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 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 people.
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 socialism.
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 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 your classic introvert. He's a loner. The other boys say, 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...
Do you know what he reminds me of? Lee Harvey Oswald. Lee Harvey Oswald. I mean, amazingly like Lee Harvey Oswald. Or your kind of American high school shooter. Yeah. You know, the boy who sits alone, sneers at the others in the car, thinks he knows more, spending all his evenings on the internet. Yeah. Gavrilo Princip. Mark David Chapman. He is that boy.
I mean, we know that he read, he loved reading. He loved Oscar Wilde. He also loves Alexandre 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 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 will recognise. Yeah.
Quite Adrian Mole. We left Hadjiji. Hadjiji? Oh, Tom. What is it? Hadjiji. Hadjiji. 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.
To be fair, I didn't go on to become a murderer. There's still time, Tom. 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 bad. 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, he's not an idiot. It's overwritten. It's romantic. It's lush. And there's perhaps
the faint hint of self-pity. Totally. But that's very romantic too, right? But it's also very teenage. Yeah, it is. Isn't it? Everything about teenagers, a word that hasn't yet been invented. No. That will come to kind of shake the world in actually in the post-Second World War world. Yeah. But it's 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. 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. 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
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'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 Ilic. 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 always wears a black tie, doesn't he? Yes. As a constant reminder of death. I mean, that is... And 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 moustache. Yeah. I mean, you're going to hero worship him. You are, absolutely. Now, Danilo Ilic, 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 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...
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, isn't it? Absolutely. It's people downloading dodgy stuff on the internet and then gathering around to read it. Or it's a political version of the teenager in the 70s
who has actually gone to America and bought loads of records and brought them back to England, sharing them with his friends. It just happens to be revolutionary tracts. I was thinking all those, you know, all the jihadis and so on. Oh yeah, absolutely. Who are kind of accessing illegal websites to download screeds from Osama bin Laden or whatever. Exactly. You're absolutely right. That's what Illich is doing. And that undoubtedly rubs off on Gavrilo Princip. Now,
Kavrila 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 Habsburg 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, more
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. And 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 been a great advocate for arts and crafts. But sadly... How different history would have been. History, yeah.
But what it 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
a 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, groups of kids in cafes. I see in your notes that 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... Something Shelley could have written. Absolutely. Everybody else is sleeping.
All the peasants that he thinks should be fighting the Austrians are actually just like, they don't give a damn about this. 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
That's 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 of the Battle of the Boyne plays for Ulster Protestants, but it's incredibly telling. I mean, that's a great victory for Protestantism. 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 that 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... Says 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 Varushanin,
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. Zereich had originally wanted to kill the emperor Franz Joseph, 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. Zverevich shoots five shots. It doesn't say much, actually. He's very close. He misses with every one. But he doesn't miss with his sixth shot.
Because what he does with his six shots, he turns the gun on himself and basically blows his own brains out. And so suicide is another dimension to the whole miserable intellectual in a turn of the century Doss house, isn't it? Think how much the young man who takes his own life
how that figure has recurred throughout the 19th century. Young Werther all the way forward. In so many novels and poems and whatnot. Life's so unfair. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Zverevich takes his own life. He's lying there on the ground. Then I have to say the governor behaves quite poorly. He does. 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. Yeah. 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,
Zereich 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 Habsburg police then said rather sneeringly that they'd nicked them from other graves. Yes, they did. But you can absolutely... They haven't got any money, right? Of course. 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'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. Hi. It's okay.
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 is poorer than much of Bosnia is. And part of that is because Serbia, as you said, 2 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-owning 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.
Queen Draga, who... She's a character. Tremendous character. So 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, Si, you cannot marry her. She has been everybody's mistress, mine included. But the king didn't worry about that, married her, and they were terrible. Yeah, 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 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
Obrenovic dynasty, King Alexander and his wife, Kundraga. They hide in the cupboard. They are absolutely horrendously mutilated and murdered. Quite kind of Lakota. Very Lakota. Treatment of their bodies. Of their bodies, yeah. Horrifically mutilated. One of the regicides, a man called Vemic, who was an officer, army officer. He's an army officer, hasn't he? 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. 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.
And the reason for that is basically he looks like a bull. Yes. I mean, he's a huge, great bloke. And 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
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 fatigues. 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 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, and 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, 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 doss houses and cafes with other people
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 were around today, they would all be on dark web 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 immoderate 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 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. Oh, yes. 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 the rest...
is history.com where we have three more episodes don't we yes specifically on the story of princip and the the assassination and then after that we will be looking at um the broader road to the outbreak of the first world war it's an incredible story um 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
