on this day a mistaken entry in a civil register was corrected by a parish priest in the West Bosnian village of Obljaj. Quite inexplicably, the birth date for the son of the farmer Petar Princip had been forward dated to July 13th when of course it should have been June 13th.

That tiny correction would profoundly alter the consequences of a political assassination in a Balkan capital almost exactly two decades later because Austrian law expressly forebade execution for crimes committed by individuals less than twenty years old.

The crime itself was committed on June 28th 1914 when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the Archduchess Sophia unwisely chose the City of Sarajevo as the most appropriate location to celebrate their fourteenth wedding anniversary. In fact, the Habsburg heir was entertaining wild dreams of transforming Austrian-Hungary into a Triple Monarchy. The counter-intuitive logic of this delusional scheme was to add further diversity in order to suppress the ethnic tensions that were threatening to tear the Empire apart even before he could ascend to the throne. More impartial observers might have detected a greater risk of throwing further fuel onto an already burning fire.

The opportunity for a Triple Monarchy had arisen through the annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina from the Ottoman Empire in 1908. Determined to prevent the Habsburg domination of the Slav people, the Government of Serbia created a secret society tasked with training resistance fighters in a region that they considered of vital national interest. It was members of this "Black Hand Gang" who were planning to turn the wedding anniversary into a lead jubilee.

But they bungled it, missing their first chance to shoot the Royal Couple. Dejected, Gavril Princip and Marko Barac slunk off to have a sandwich. By incredible fortune, the royal procession took a wrong turn, passing directly by the cafe on Franz Josef Street where they were eating, and this time Princip seized his moment and shot the Archduke dead.

Across the whole of Southern Europe the subsequent trial was watched with great interest. Presenting his own defence, Princip argued convincingly that "I do not feel like a criminal, because I put away the one who was doing evil. Austria as it is represents evil for our people and therefore should not exist .... The political union of the Yugoslavs was always before my eyes, and that was my basic idea. Therefore it was necessary in the first place to free the Yugoslavs ... from Austria".

Enraged that they could not establish a connection with the Serbian Government, the Habsburgs decided to treat Princip as a common murderer and summarily executed him. Inadvertently, they had created a martyr, and within weeks the Balkans was ablaze with sectarian violence that would overthrow the Habsburg Empire.