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 the stashed archaic faces grinning as if it were all an August-backed holiday lark. And the shut shops, the bleachers 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 pass 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 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?
If you think about the two great conflicts of 2023-2024, 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 Tsarism in Russia, the fall of the Kaiser of Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which falls apart in the Ottoman Empire, and Chris Clarke starts his book, The Seatwalkers, which we will be talking about a lot in the next few episodes. 65 million men 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 categories, 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, the 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, Aswith, 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 metres from where we're actually sitting. It's 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 read it all that.
Of course, it's the one thing everyone knows about the First World War is that it begins with this assassination. 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 the deeper processes at play? What's going on? I think it's a great question, Tom, and actually putting it in context of those assassinations makes you think slightly differently about it. In other words, this is not a period of great civility 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 the conflagration? Or is there something about what happened here, a few hundred yards from where we're sitting, about that moment in Sarajevo, 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? 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 honour 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 tongues. We'll have to correct them.
Well, 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 hand. 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 front notes. Some historians treat them as front notes.
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 of all, it's not the Kaiser.
It's not Tsar Nicholas II. 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 new 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 Bair 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 yeah, 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 Princip's 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 short-hand notes of the stenographer survived. After the war, particularly after the Second World War, a Yugoslav author called Vladimir Dedier basically tried to collate all the stories about Princip.
But I think it's fair to say a lot of those stories are probably inventive. They're folk tales that are made up after people knew what his place in history was. So they said, oh yeah, of course I remember Gabriel Princip in high school. You know, I knew he would be an assassin.
And 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, 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 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. 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 he gets 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. And we're in a city that suffered a terrible siege at the hands of people who view Princip as a great hero.
And he remains a very, very kind of political, politically fraught figure. I mean, we're sitting underneath buildings, some bits of 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 with a word that I know is terrifying to you. So he was born in July 1894. Yeah.
In a place called, I think, Oboljaj. That's how it starts. Yeah. It's called Obliai.
And it was in Herzegovina. So Herzegovina was the western part of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Very mountainous. Very rural.
Mostar is the most famous. It's basically there with a famous bridge. So he was 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, there was something attached to the Ottoman Empire and the Austrians had marched in to establish their own 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 it's exciting for me, an Englishman who did visit it, is Arthur Evans, who would go on to discover Palace of Minos, 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 don't worry, that must speak to you. Yeah, absolutely. But he then goes on to say, you know, if you love antiquity, if you perceive the high historic interest, which is access 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, the 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 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 Bush has suggested in his book, by the Ottomans. And it was often the case with a lot of Bosnian Serbs, being settled by the Ottomans to form a kind of buffer against the Catholic Habsburg Empire, because the area where Obliai is is quite close to the area called the Kraina, the military frontier, which was the buffer zone between these different, you know, 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, you know, 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, aren't they? Because one of the details that 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 Bulgans 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 seems 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. Yeah, exactly, exactly. That revolt lasted three years. And at the end of it, as we already said, Bosnia and Herzegovina was 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 have 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's kind of a mark of sleeping dog's lie?
Or is it because they're reformers, they want to get rid of it, I think the latter probably, Tom. Oh, a bit of both. So the Austrians have come in in 1878. They had been very boastful.
They'd say, this would be a great laugh. And actually, they had to face uncertainty for about three or four months. They'd send in loads of troops. But once they're in situ, the Austrians basically want to use this as a laboratory for a modernising, what they would call a civilising project.
So the Austrians already have many Slav subjects. We'll come to this in a subsequent episode. In Croatia, in Slovenia, in 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. And do 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. And of course, those railways are largely for their own benefits, for their armies and so on. But they encourage timber industry. They encourage mining.
In Sarajevo, they introduce a tram system that then provides a model for Vienna. They do indeed. They do indeed. So when we went to the museum, we saw that little list of achievements that they have in the museum.
The museum is very pro-Austrian. So there's a brilliant brickyard, a lovely road with asphalt on it. Tremendous times. And they also, they straighten out the river that runs through the middle of Sarajevo, which is a very imperial project.
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 had been indoctrinated in Catholic Habsburg?
I think there's that, absolutely that. And I think they feel like they need the kids working on the land. So as you see with Gabrielio Princip, his father was 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 modernising 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 Gabrielio Princip's area, near Oblii, 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 Gabrielio 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 Gabrielio is Gabriel. Tim Butcher in The Trigger says that he found in the ruins of the house a stone with written in Cyrillic GP. And the date, 1909.
So that's basically the only evidence we have. This one stone, Gabrielio 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 drinking their kind of sliver bits of their their plum and pear brandy yeah exactly kind of raki 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 the village in the timber industry basically dragging tree trunks for sawmill and gavrilo has 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 yes how does he learn to read the 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 worst empire you are the more likely the portuguese risk yeah none of that you can keep it going indefinitely whereas if you're 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'll sign your own death warrant yeah well yeah absolutely absolutely so anyway um 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 to the 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 lines after the civil war no there are mines absolutely not back then no they take the majors they eventually get the train how often have they been on the train probably never i thought um they get the train to sarajevo and effectively gavrilo is 13 years old he's dropped off and his father goes back to obli 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 that's rassolnikov in crime and punishment yeah the ambitious young man going to petersburg um who has yearnings to be something and then finds it not possible yeah and this is 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 odd tram and the odd river 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 poised between between old and newton yeah and east of the west because um to give people a sense sarajevo is strung along this valley narrow pretty narrow valley you've got hills on either side the river running through it the miljatska 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 hapsburg era buildings but there's also there's the mosques that the ottomans had built there's a kind of bizarre quarter that we were walking around earlier now with all kind 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 um a century ago that was even more apparent even more so arthur evans nonostos guy had said the bosnian countrymen gapes with as much wonderment at the domes of the two chief mosques in sarajevo as an english rustic at the first site of st paul's now of course for gavrilo prince 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 with fesses 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 oblii he would as you said have seen the trams government offices 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 mademir dedion who wrote 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 is supposed to have said i don't want to sleep here because these people are turks so you've 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 chris clark in the introduction to speak office actually makes this point he says that you know looking back to the pre-war world guys and 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 princep lonely idealistic quite bright poor alienated from the culture that surrounds him um disaffected all of these things he conforms completely to a stereotype with which we are now very very sort of tragically familiar uh first actually he seems to make a decent start his brother finds him a lodging with a bosnian widow who's called mrs illich 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 he can you know when he looks out his window he can see the wheeling of the moosen exactly all of that stuff he goes to a place with a 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 point out he's 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 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 he does that's probably the one nice thing we're going to say about gavrile prince in this entire story he's a generous generous lad so tim butcher in his book the trigger has an amazing detective work on his school reports in 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 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 in the records that is really important his address keeps changing that is a sign of instability and poverty i think that he's moving between places and clearly running out of money and that's something again that's very familiar from the life patterns of high deckers and terrorists in the 21st century yeah absolutely so as butcher says the report's first story of students going an extra bit 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 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 it 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 okay so he's not he's not as familiar with german's german's 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 were 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 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 hitler when hitler changed school and went to i think the lintz the big school a lonely idealistic boy his grades plummeted and that's what happens with gerville 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 dos houses frustrated intellectuals and fervent nationalism and the question is because in princeps'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 princeps's hey this is michael and hannah from gold hangers the rest is science this episode is brought to you by cancer research uk we often think of beating cancer as treatment but imagine stopping it before it begins after years of work cancer research uk scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung vax the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer it builds on tracer x the world's largest cancer evolution study which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs lung vax is designed to train immune system to spot these signs early on destroying 40 cells before cancer develops so it's not treatment but preventative with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts the first stage of the trial starts this year focusing on people at higher risk it shows what long-term research makes possible for more information about cancer research uk their research breakthroughs and how you can support them visit cancer research uk.org forward slash the rest is science hello welcome back to the rest of history and we are looking at the making of galfarillo 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 an well it was a powder keg yeah but actually it doesn't seem to be that much of a powder keg really no i would say not particularly so if people are thinking it's this kind of uh yeah seething with nationalist discontent ancient hatreds 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 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 national 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 swabbling among themselves and demanding patronage funding all 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 um another part of pre-war europe that we've done yeah ireland yeah pre-1914 would ireland be more unstable i would say you think that ireland would be a greater our artists will not enjoy being described as a problem so i do that kind of advisedly they but for the imperial power 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 every 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 socialism i mean all these 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 media in which these ideas are being exchanged so they are actually creating they are facilitating expression of this kind of discontent now most of the activism is pretty low level so you would see if we'd been where we are right now in this kind of 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 we'd have seen that we might just see scribbling over german language signs so like corsica yeah absolutely but most of that that's not an existential threat right it's not paramilitary being recruited in belfast no it's not no it's not and um the austrians tried to shut that down so in 1913 they shut down the high school in mostrar because of national saturation 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're going to have and gavrilo princip is absolutely typical of this generation so he is a reader as a personality he is he's a 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 he's like do you know what he reminds me of 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 ass thinks he knows more spending one of 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 alizante jumat and jellick 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 um 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 um who has fancied themselves as being good at writing english yeah we'll recognize quite adrian mole we left hajichi oh what is it hajichi 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 piece that beloved ideal night of the poet now i wrote a lot of essays like that yeah i didn't go on to become a murderer it's all time 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 it's 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 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 but it's also very teenage yeah 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 well but it's already clearly kind of fomenting here totally i absolutely understand 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 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 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 he doesn't drink in a place full of cafes full of activity you know people sitting outside smoking and drinking that would presumably make him stand out of it 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 doesn't have a girlfriend yeah he doesn't it is one girl that he supposedly liked but he never you know even kept the courage to talk to as he later tells his austrian psychiatrist when he's in prison he's not dr freud no but i think you know so often let me see you 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 remember 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 ends 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's basically you're a 13 year old and you're hanging out with a 17 year old he's talking in that kind of way yeah he has a kind of cool moustache yeah i mean you're going to hear a question 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 Maxine Gorky Oscar Wilde again Tom he loves Nietzsche he's just so he was clearly an incredibly annoying person sounds like me he's like a young Tom Holland but he um 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 Lenin's there Illich would go to these places to basically buy revolutionary pamphlets political tracks and then he'd come back to Sarajevo sit around with his other fellow incels and they would discuss these tracks and say oh it's amazing it's a very very um a kind of pre-war version of the radical internet isn't it it's people downloading dodgy stuff on the internet yeah they're going around to read it oh it's a political version of the the teenager in the 70s who has actually gone to American records and brought them back to England and sharing them with his friends it just happens to be revolutionary tracks and there was like all those you know all the jihadis and so on oh yeah they were kind of accessing um illegal websites to download screens from the style of bin Laden or whatever exactly you're absolutely right that's what Illich is doing and that undoubtedly rubs off on Gavrila Prinsett now Gavrila Prinsett remember arrived here in 1907 in 1908 the following year so when he was 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 Habsburg 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-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 Gavrila would have seen straight away there will be protests from people who oppose 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 Gavrila and his friends you can imagine how angry they are about that loads of new people hundreds and thousands of them swamped swamped by immigrants that's what they're thinking so we can see i mean we see this in Gavrila's data statements there is an intense bitterness towards vienna towards austria he says they 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 idea of a nation that you cherish is being swamped by alien peoples and alien cultures yeah absolutely it is i think that explains why so in 1908 or so Gavrila was dragged not towards socialism which was of course on the table yeah he's reading kropotkin books he reads william morris so he could have become a wallpaper designer yes he could have done absolutely he could have been an advocate for arts and crafts exactly yeah but what it is is slav nationalism that seduces him and it's important 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 it's a yugoslavia that he wants not a not a serbia and the movement that expresses that he gets into is this militant group called malada bosna 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 written literally woke yeah 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 nice absolutely everybody else is sleeping you know all the peasants that he thinks should be fighting the austrians but actually just like yeah they're looking after their chickens and he's like they're asleep but we are awake i mean that's the classic thing that teenage idealists and revolutionists 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 this time but they talk 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 has a moral duty 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 milos obelich had assassinated the sultan the ottoman sultan i mean it's fascinating because again this obsession with with an ancient battle that kind of lingers in the hearts of an battle community of course i mean it reminds me of the role the battle of the boyne plays for us the 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 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 the date i've really seen obviously will have some resonance in the story exactly to come so gavrilo prince has all this stuff in his head he's read all this stuff about martyrdom about serbia about people fighting empires all 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 a kind of industrial society that is able to provide mass education yeah right um well i think actually those serbian epics they had persisted down the centuries they've kind of been passed on around the fire and all that kind of stuff but that's within peasant communities and villages so this 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 i actually hate an impoverished intellectual so uh so there's a man who is i think interview 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 be doing this story listen talking about impoverished intellectuals something happens in june 1910 that is massive in this story and actually very few people listen to this podcast probably ever heard of so gavrilo has been here three years he's 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 jerich fires five shots at the austro-hungarian governor of bosnia general marian barashanin and the governor tom as you can see just at the end of this alley the river the river and the key alongside it the governor is driving over one of those bridges that we've walked over yeah on that river jerich had originally wanted to kill the emperor franz joseph but the crowds were very thick when franz joseph arrived people were excited to see him so he couldn't do it so he is standing what's called the emperor's bridge the governor arrives past jerich shoots five shots it doesn't say much actually he misses with everyone but he doesn't miss with his sixth shot is what he does with his sixth shot he turns the gun on himself basically blows his own brains out so suicide is another dimension to the whole miserable intellectual in a turn of the century does house yeah think how much the young man who takes his own life how that figure has recurred throughout the 19th century it's so many novels and poems and whatnot what's so unfair exactly exactly yeah jerich 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 he spits on it so winning hearts in minds there and then a bloke who works for the police has jerich's head cut off and he uses his skull as an ink pot yeah so that's building bridges with the serp community there this is like your ultimate bullcan anecdote yeah so anyway gavrilo princip and his friends obviously think this guy bogdan jerich is the beast he's brilliant they think he is absolutely brilliant there is a rush of pamphlets and poems there's one called the death of the hero that is very very famous if you can have an underground poem that's a bestseller this is it all the people going to say this is an absolutely central text for these guys and this thing this death of the hero says jerich must be a model for all young men young serves will you produce such men and for gavrilo he said himself at his trial jerich 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 the grave was neglected and run down he said my friends and i used to go i tarted up with flowers and stuff and pray in front of it well the hapsburg police then said rather seemingly they'd nick them from other graves 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 when he drops out of school and he drifts for a year or so and then it's an 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 so what does now happen ladies and gentlemen is that the old walk in the hand is swapping swapping anecdotes right so serbia is 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 they're 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 said too many people orthodox serbia have been tied into the ottoman economic system and when it was cut off the ottoman economic system there's kind of nowhere to go the largely muslim land-earning elites have left by 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 um how the king of serbia had been murdered in 1983 and his queen queen draga queen draga who um 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 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'll get killed after hiding in a cupboard 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 of master and sacrifice that goes back to the battle of kosovo it also has a sense of frustration and sort of betrayal that his party actually because since independence it hasn't done very well economically except people actually poorer rather than better off in 1903 as you say the last monarch of the obrenovich dynasty king alexander and his wife king draga they're hiding in the cupboard they are absolutely horrendously mutilated and and quite kind of a lakota very lakota of their bodies yeah one of the registries man called demich was an officer army officer he walked around for years with a piece of the queen's breast in a suitcase which is very peculiar behavior now all this matters because it has a long afterlife in serbian politics so the registries the conspirators who murdered the king and queen they become great heroes for the people because the king queen was 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 dimitrijevic it's more sensibly called apis after the apis ball of egypt mentioned by herodotus um and the reason that is basically he looks like a ball 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 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 fatigue 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'll have rituals and as we will see he has a massive part to play in this story that leads us to um the outbreak of the first world war so as all this suggests by far the biggest physical 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 to the 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 of the prussia or the piedmont of this state so he arrives and he thinks belgrade is going to be the promised land actually he goes back to school he goes to the high school gymnasium in belgrade but he fails his exams he's distracted tom by revolutionary revolutionary politics by mooning around at people's graves and stuff 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 the orthodox countries to take on the ottomans to 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 every difference is not past 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 he also got into the army yeah he's seen as too sickly wanted to go into the balkan war 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 bosnian exiles so these cafes all have very sort of romantic sounding names they call the acorn darling 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 yeah against the austrian bullies who have always been horrible to them if they ran today they would all be on dark web they would be chat rooms kind of plotting yeah 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 week indeed for a man who would be 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 a 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 let's prove he's a man let's prove he's a man and so dominic i mean what cliffhanger what's gonna 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 um any 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 the rest is history.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 enjoyed this and i hope you'll be joining us for the rest of the episodes but for now bye-bye hi everybody we are back with another absolutely colossal update about the rest is history festival wise massive so on the 4th and 5th of july we will be at hampton court palace we have a weekend of brilliant talks live music exclusive access to historic world palaces collections and yes dominic most exciting this is the thing i have been pushing for and i'm so looking forward to it we have medieval combat a terrifying brutal yet completely thrilling sport it is going to be an unforgettable two days it is indeed and um at the core of the festival of these talks we've got some more talks to add to the lineup so i will be talking to the brilliant tutor historian tracy boorman about the secrets of the six wives of henry the eighth i'll be talking to a friend of the show and irish national treasurer paul rouse about whether there is an alternative universe in which islands could have remained part of the united kingdom we'll be talking to katia hoyer about weimar germany and in particular the town of weimar through history and professor adam smith will be telling the story of america through three presidents and on top of all that i'll be doing a special event with ian hislop about the history of satire and i will be on stage with mary beard and we will be talking about just how strange just how alien just how different to us rome was or maybe it wasn't i will be talking to helen castor about elizabeth the first and we'll be discussing whether she truly was england's greatest ruler or maybe whether that title should still be claimed by afelstan i will be talking to ali ansari about all things persian with dan jackson about the pit of death and i will be talking to friend of the show willie dalrymple about the links between ancient india and greece and rome absolutely incredible scenes and of course on both days tom and i will be on stage doing the show together as well so on the first day we'll be answering all our club members questions and then to close the festival we will do a definitive ranking of the all-time top friends of the show so lots of authority and beyond that there is so much else that will be happening across the weekend so think of it as the ultimate summer history hangout and your tickets will give you full access to explore the great to the palace of hampton court and indeed the royal tennis court so that'll be very exciting there'll be food and drink for a king which sounds very enticing i picture the very glamorous people that are our club members in a summer garb they're on the lawn at hampton court palace they're chatting about history in delightful surroundings sipping on a refreshing gin and tonic and it's probably the most civilized festival there's ever been i mean that's what i imagine anyway just a reminder the tickets are exclusive to club members and if you are not a member now is the perfect time to join so head over to the rest is history.com to sign up and grab your tickets and of course have access to a whole range of supplementary benefits once you have signed up to the rest is history.com all you do then is log into the members area and you select festival and it's all very obvious but you know what there is a twist if you do this you'll be entered into a genuinely unbelievable prize draw and that prize draw if you win you and three other people is at the golden tickets in child in the chocolate factory because you will be given the chance to be upgraded to the premium experience and the premium experience will give you among other things unlimited food and drink for free all day do not miss it can't wait to see that