The casus belli of the first world war, namely that Austria-Hungary was justified in attacking Serbia in “retaliation” for the Sarajevo assassination, is not supported by evidence.Īnd the land that gave us the boy who triggered the first world war is still giving. It taught me that although some of the slip-ups in the received history are inconsequential, others are paramount. The spot where he fired has had numerous plaques over the years, a shrill one condemning him as a murderer, the next praising him for liberating all local Slavs, another lauding him as killer of Germans, the next claiming him as a communist hero. It brought home the shape-shifting nature of history. I walked the hills and valleys in 2012, glimpsing at one point that most powerful of wilderness symbols, a wolf, and later witnessing the burial of 500 victims of ethnic violence from the 1990s. The land he passed through remains wild and charged. To follow the life of the 1914 assassin, Princip, from his remote rural birthplace in Hercegovina to radicalisation while at school in Habsburg-occupied Bosnia and “liberated” Serbia, and ultimately the street corner in Sarajevo where he fired his 9mm Browning pistol, was a powerful journey. Photograph: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Gavrilo Princip, Archduke Ferdinand’s assassin. It is a deliberate attempt to shape a fresh literary genre: books that are not travel books alone, nor adventure stories, nor authoritative histories, nor polemics, but somehow a blend that takes in all of the above and, I hope, more.

My previous books have used the device of journeys to unravel history: a traverse of the Congo in Blood River to sense Africa’s failed potential, a trek through the ebola epicentre Sierra Leone and Liberia for Chasing the Devil, to gauge the margin between survival and growth. And to do that, I needed to spend time on the ground. What I wanted to better understand was how such an important historical moment could be so misrepresented. If I did that alone, I would become, in the words of my wife, “nothing but a pub bore on a Balkan killing”. Off to the archives I went, panning for nuggets of verifiable fact, sluicing away inconsistency and occasionally uncovering gleaming new material.īut my aim was not simply to present the most definitive account.

So a drive to put this right was one of the forces behind my latest book The Trigger –The Hunt for Gavrilo Princip: The Assassin Who Brought the World to War.

A recent account of the assassination by Max Hastings (and God strike me down for pointing out mistakes by a man who once gave me a job in journalism) is holey with errors. For a century, people have been getting it wrong, from the first hawkish Habsburg investigators prone to political prejudice, to sloppy BBC documentary research.

The Trigger by Tim Butcher