Sarajevo // When Gavrilo Met Franz
© John Bills
On June 28, 1914, the world changed forever. Okay, the world didn’t literally change, it was still made up of the same rock and minerals that it was on June 27, the same that it was made of on June 29, the same that it is made of today. Even in geopolitical terms, the world didn’t change. The sun remained stubbornly over the skies of the British Empire. The Ottoman Empire was lurching through its final acts. The Austro-Hungarian Empire still ruled over Bosnia and Herzegovina.
All true, but the world isn’t really made up of the big facts. The world exists in the details. It exists in events that exacerbate other events, and sometimes these events come together to create massive ones. Events are tissues, and tissues come together to make organs. Organs work together to make organ systems. Individual events create societal ones, and societal ones come together to create global ones. On June 28, 1914, a 19-year-old boy from Bosnia shot a 50-year-old boy from Austria. The rest, as the tiresome saying goes, is history.
The story begins on a cold December in 1863, in the city of Graz, Austria. Arnold Schwarzenegger was born in Graz, but it isn’t Arnie that we’re talking about. In a roundabout way, we’re talking about the opposite of Arnie. Franz was the son of Archduke Karl Ludwig of Austria and grandson of Archduke Franz Karl Joseph of Austria. Franz’s uncle was Franz Josef, the man who would soon become Emperor of Austria-Hungary. A very important family, indeed. That meant that Franz had a privileged childhood, albeit one void of love and care. Franz got no attention from his mother, a woman who died when Franz was just seven years old. His father preferred the flamboyance of Franz’s younger brother Otto. All in all, it was an unhappy childhood. A privileged one in financial terms, but a bereft one on the emotional side.
Gavrilo’s childhood home in Obljaj © Wikimedia Commons
Fast forward to July 25, 1894, in a small Bosnian village called Obljaj. Marija was heavily pregnant, so pregnant that she found herself giving birth in a field. She managed to stagger back to the house before the boy made it out, her mother-in-law taking it upon herself to bite the umbilical cord before pouring the rakija for celebration. It didn’t matter that the boy was struggling for life. That’s wrong; it did matter, of course, it mattered, but some things are out of the hands of mere mortals. In giving birth, Marija had done all she could do. An Orthodox priest arrived to save the day, advising the parents on a name that would help the struggling newborn save. The boy was to be named Gavrilo, named after the Archangel Gabriel.
By 1895, Franz was very ill. It was tuberculosis, unsurprisingly. It hadn’t been a good start for the boy from Graz. In 1867, his uncle Maximilian I of Mexico was overthrown and executed on a hill outside Queretaro City, Mexico. In 1878, his grandfather died. Franz’s early years were so bereft of familial care that his struggles with tuberculosis were practically ignored. It was assumed that he would die, so most of what he had inherited was written out of his name. Besides, there was the issue of his father’s 1896 death from typhoid, picked up after Karl Ludwig had consumed contaminated waters while travelling through Palestine and Egypt. The family had also stuttered through scandal in 1889 when the only son of Emperor Franz Josef I had died in a suicide pact with his mistress. The struggles of a sickly boy were small fry in comparison, presumed heir to the throne or not.
Somehow, someway, call it divine intervention if you are that way inclined, Franz survived. Maybe it was the love of Sophie, the woman he had met at a ball in Prague in 1894. Their relationship wasn’t without its own controversies, obviously. Sophie wasn’t of the right social standing to marry such the heir to the throne, but love conquers all. Franz had to renounce the rights of his descendants to the throne for the two to marry. He did, and Franz and Sophie married in 1900.
Bosansko Grahovo // © Wikimedia Commons
Not that any of this mattered to young Gavrilo. He was dirt-poor, growing up in Grahovo valley in western Bosnia. There was no shortage of love, but you can’t feed on love. Gavrilo wanted an education. His father wanted Gavrilo to stay and work the fields, but his mother wanted more for the boy she had plopped out in a field. There was something more for him out there, something waiting over the rolling hills of his homeland. At the age of nine, he was in school, a good student but a feisty one, top of the class but growing ever frustrated with the impoverished status of his people. One of the few quotes directly attributed to Gavrilo is “the peasant is impoverished, they destroy him completely”. The boy was getting an education, and that education was further opening his eyes to the inequalities of the world.
Gavrilo wanted more. At 13, he walked across Bosnia with his father, jumping a train here and there before making it to Sarajevo, the so-called Jerusalem of the Balkans. His brother Jovan was already there. Gavrilo was going to enrol at the Austro-Hungarian Military school, but the prospect of fighting for the very crown that was holding his people down didn’t really appeal. Instead, Gavrilo went to Merchant school.
While Gavrilo was getting educated and learning more about the wider world, Franz was learning to hunt. ‘Learning’ isn’t really the right word. He was perfecting his shot. Spurred on by the neglect of his childhood and obstinacy that was seemingly bred into him, Franz took his frustrations out on a seemingly endless conveyor belt of animals. By the time he died, it was thought that Franz had shot a total of 274,889 animals in his life, most of which were battued into the firing line. Slaughter lost all meaning. His constant spree did little but scratch the itch of aggression, but any addict will remind you that no itch is ever scratched, only exacerbated. The more Franz shot, the more he wanted to shoot.
© John Bills
The bigotry and narrowness of his family found fertile soil in Franz, and he soon made enemies at every turn. His influence in the politics of Austria-Hungary was growing, but his privileged life was breeding backstabbing and neurosis. As his importance grew, so did his anxiety. His poor treatment at the hands of Habsburg officials, especially during his illness, became a source of ill-feeling for Franz. He had angered the Hungarians, grew distant from the courts and developed a reputation for being insufferable.
In his own sort of way, Gavrilo was becoming insufferable. He had become fast friends with a boy called Danilo, and the revolutionary passion of his new friend found fertile soil in the young man from the Grahovo Valley. The two joined an idealistic group of would-be revolutionaries, training in firearms, and reading all the incendiary literature they could find. To them, the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina was dire and getting worse. Something needed to be done. They were going to have to do it.
On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo and Franz finally met. It wasn’t supposed to happen. Logically speaking, it should have been impossible. Franz came to Sarajevo to inspect the Austro-Hungarian military there, but the day was about more than that. It offered him the rare chance to step out on official business with Sophie by his side. It was also 14 years to the day that he had renounced the rights of his children to the throne. By stepping out in Sarajevo and putting on a show of influence, Franz would be telling the empire that he was someone worthy of his future. For Franz, June 28, 1914, was a big day.
© John Bills
But he didn’t realise that it was also a big day for the part of the world he was visiting. June 28 is Vidovdan, St Vitus Day, a major event on the Orthodox calendar. The anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. Visiting Sarajevo on this day, ostensibly to showcase Austro-Hungarian military might, was a slap in the face to the Orthodox people of the city. Franz could not have chosen a worse day for this brazen show of arrogance.
The city was teeming with revolutionaries. If Gavrilo hadn’t met Franz, someone else would have. In fact, many tried beforehand. Mehmed was first, but he lost his nerve. He abandoned his post and jumped a train to Montenegro. Vaso was next, but he too did nothing. Cvjetko did the same. Nedeljko was next in line and the first to act, throwing a bomb in the direction of Franz and Sophie’s car. His aim was poor, and the driver was able to swerve and miss the worst of the explosion. Nedeljko jumped into the Miljačka river and swallowed a cyanide pill, but he didn’t reckon on the river being shallow and the pill being faulty. He was soon arrested. Still, the bomb had exploded. Gavrilo and Trifko thought that all had worked out. That illusion was smashed when Gavrilo saw Nedeljko get arrested.
What happens next depends on who you ask. Some say that Gavrilo, in desperate need of composure, nipped into a cafe for a cup of coffee and a sandwich. What is certain is that Franz and Sophie returned to HQ to reassess, to decide whether to continue their route lest someone else be waiting to attack. They decided to continue, albeit along a slightly different route, failing to inform the rest of the cavalcade. The driver continued heading down Plan A only to be aggressively told to change tack. He stopped by the Latin Bridge to turn, stopping perfectly in time for Gavrilo to (supposedly) nip out of the cafe, pistol in hand. Mehmed, Vaso, Cvjetko and Nedeljko had failed through a mix of nerves, bad technology, insufficient training and bad luck. The worst luck fell to Gavrilo, a malnourished 19-year-old from an anonymous village in the Grahovo Valley. He pulled the trigger and shot Franz, pulled again and shot Sophie. Two of the most opposite lives you could ever consider bumped into each on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, and the world changed forever.
The rest is history.
