What results is an extraordinary journey through landscapes and communities harrowed by history. Like Ernest Renan, the 19th-century biographer of Jesus who roamed the valleys and villages of 19th-century Galilee in search of clues to the boyhood and family life of his subject, Butcher acquaints himself with Princip by walking in the young man's footsteps from his birthplace in the tiny hamlet of Obljaj in western Bosnia to Sarajevo and across the border to Belgrade, the capital city of neighbouring Serbia.

In this book, a masterpiece of historical empathy and evocation, Tim Butcher goes in search of the person behind the myths. The story of how Princip left his home, of his journey from model schoolboy to disaffected teenager, militant nationalist and political assassin, has remained in shadow partly because the paper trail is so meagre, and partly because Princip's biography, located at one of the inflection points of European and world history, has been warped from the beginning by the very forces his action helped to unleash. These are the backwoods of the western Balkans, the vukojebina, the land, to use a colourful local expression, 'where the wolves fuck'.

Princip hailed from western Bosnia, a land of harsh terrain and virtually nonexistent infrastructure, crossed by swift watercourses and closed in by mountains. The archduke remained conscious for long enough to address his wife with words that would soon be reported across the world: 'Sophie, Sophie don't die, stay alive for our children.' Within half an hour both of them were dead.Īmazingly, little is known of the young Bosnian Serb whose shots triggered the escalations that brought war to Europe in 1914. She was already falling into a coma as the driver reversed the car away from the scene and sped towards the governor's residence. The bullet flew through the door of the car and was deflected into the abdomen of the archduke's wife.

The second, aimed at Oskar Potiorek, the Austrian governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, went wide, probably because members of the crowd were already trying to restrain the assassin. The first bullet tore through the collar of Franz Ferdinand's uniform, boring into his neck and opening the jugular vein. A t around 10.45 on the morning of Sunday 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip fired twice at point-blank range into the car bearing the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek.

The Trigger by Tim Butcher