A century ago this Saturday on a street corner in Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip fired the shot that started World War I when he killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. What do we know about history's greatest teenage troublemaker? 1. His name was Gavrilo, or Gabriel. Our history teachers taught us that World War I began after a gunman killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The shooting acted as a trigger, metastasizing from a Balkan street corner into a continental crisis by releasing pent-up tension between rival blocs of Great European Powers: the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany on one side and France, Russia and Great Britain on the other.
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Gavrilo Princip fired the shot that started World War I when he killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand
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Princip, a Slav nationalist, wanted to drive the Austro-Hungarians out of Bosnia
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He was a high school student when he carried out the assassination, in Sarajevo
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He got close to his victim purely by chance, and only fired one shot
By a fluke the bullet cut @placeholder's jugular vein.