The gunshot that started World War I is famous, but the assassin himself is often reduced to a single day in June 1914. This episode traces the life of Gavrilo Princip, from a remote, impoverished hamlet in Austro-Hungarian-administered Bosnia to the street corner in Sarajevo where he shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife.

We explore how grinding poverty, romantic nationalism, radical anarchist doctrine, and a deeply personal humiliation converged to forge an assassin, and how a stalled car and a miscommunicated route handed a failed plot a second, world-altering chance.

• A sickly childhood in which six of his siblings died in infancy
• His radicalization through the secret society Young Bosnia and the propaganda of the deed
• Being rejected as too small and weak by the Serbian paramilitary commander Tankosic
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