Pavao Ritter Vitezović

Pavao Ritter Vitezović
Born Paulo Ritter[1]
(1652-01-07)7 January 1652
Senj, Habsburg Monarchy
Died 20 January 1713(1713-01-20) (aged 61)
Vienna, Habsburg Monarchy
Pen name Paul Vitezović
Occupation Writer, diplomat, advocate of expansionism

Pavao Ritter Vitezović (Croatian pronunciation: [pâʋao rîter ʋitěːzoʋitɕ]; 7 January 1652 – 20 January 1713)[2] was a noted Habsburg-Croatian writer, diplomat, and expansionist advocate.

Early life

Pavao Ritter Vitezović was born as Pavao Ritter in Senj, the son of a frontier soldier.[1][3] His father was a descendant of an ethnic German immigrant from Alsace, and his mother was Croat.[1]

He finished six grades of the Jesuit-run gymnasium in Zagreb before moving to Rome, where he stayed at the Illyrian College and met the renowned Dalmatian historian Ivan Lučić. He then moved to the castle of Bogensperk (German: Wagensberg) near the town of Litija in Carniola, where natural historian Johann Weikhard von Valvasor influenced him to study his national history and geography. There he also learned German and the skills of printing and etching.[4]

Early writings

Kronika aliti spomen vsega svijeta vikov (1744)

In 1677 he wrote a treatise on the clan Gusići, published in 1681, the same year he wrote a number of poems for Father Aleksandar Mikulić, a Zagreb canon. As he developed a reputation of a learned man, his native town of Senj elected him as their representative in the Hungarian diet in Sopron. On 19 April 1683, due to the efforts of Ritter Vitezović, the diet proclaimed a charter granting the town of Senj their ancient rights, protecting them from the local military commander captain Herberstein who had terrorised the citizens at the time.

Because of the Ottoman wars he was enlisted and stationed in the Međimurje tabor (garrison) under ban Nicholas Erdödy. In 1683, when the Great Turkish War started, he participated in the capture of the forts of Lendava and Szigetvar. After the war, ban Erdödy employed him as an officer of his court, where he also met Adam Zrinski, the son of Nikola Zrinski. He was initially named the podžupan of Lika a purely honourable title with no actual significance.[5]

Then Croatian Parliament named him as their representative in the Imperial commission for the delimitation with Venice and Turkey, but despite his contribution, the borderlines were drawn against Croatian interests, which greatly frustrated Ritter Vitezović. During his work at the royal and imperial diets in Vienna and Bratislava, Vitezović met many dignitaries from Croatia, and at one point wished to return home to live in Zagreb.

Later years

In 1690, he returned to Croatia,[4] where he found out that there was a printing house in the Bishop's Palace in the city of Zagreb, acquired in 1663, but long since abandoned.[6] He asked his long-time friend Aleksandar Mikulić, who had by that time been named Bishop, to let him put it to use. He was soon in business, printing calendars and leaflets, and he appealed to the Croatian Parliament to give that printing house an official capacity. On 11 November 1694, the Parliament did indeed appoint him as the manager of the facility.[7] He then proceeded to move it from the Vlaška street to his house on Grič, and then travelled to Vienna, where he bought a new printing press and everything else necessary for the printing of books. He named the new printing office the "Museum" (like Valvasor before him), and printed the first books in Latin and in Croatian.

The printing house was in operation between 1695 and 1706, and his best known work Croatia rediviva ("Croatia revived") was printed there in 1700. On 14 June 1706, the press was largely destroyed in a great fire, and Vitezović's wife died two years later, rendering him entirely distraught.[4]

In 1710 he moved to Vienna, where he continued to publish, and was awarded an honorary title of a baron at the Austrian court. This however did not help his material status before he died in 1713.[4]

Legacy

Ritter Vitezović proposed an idea for orthography solution for the Croatian language that every sound should have only one letter, and this idea later inspired the linguist Ljudevit Gaj to reform the Croatian variant of Latin script and create Gaj's Latin alphabet.[4]

He created the Croatian exclusivist discourse within the early Illyrian movement and introduced the 'historical appropriation' concept to the Balkans which is actually an idea to claim national territory on the basis of the past conquests.[8][9]

He was the first ideologist of Croatian nation who proclaimed that all Slavs are Croats.[10] The foundations of the concept of Greater Croatia are laid in Vitezović's works.[11] His works were used to legitimize the expansionism of the Habsburg Empire in southeastern Europe by asserting its historical rights to claim Illyria.[10][12] "Illyria" as Slavic territory projected by Vitezović would eventually incorporate not only most of southeastern Europe but also Hungary.[13]

Vitezović defined Croatian territory, as including, besides Illyria and all Slavic-populated territory, the territory between the Adriatic, Black and Baltic seas.[12] He also wrote the first history of the Serbs, which remains in manuscript.[8] He skillfully fabricated numerous genealogies and forged most of the Trophaeum nobilissimae domus Estorasianae (a genealogical treatise ordered by Pál Esterházy).[14]

Works

In Latin:

  • Apographum ex Joanne Lucio (1681)
  • Novus Skenderbeg (1682)[15]
  • Nova Musa (1683)
  • Anagrammaton liber primus (1687)
  • Croatia rediviva (Revived Croatia, 1700)
  • Stemmatographia sive armorum Illyricorum delineatio, descriptio et restitutio (1701)
  • Stemmatographiae Illyricanae liber I. Editio nova auctior (Zagrabiae, 1702)
  • Plorantis Croatiae saecula duo (Two Centuries of Croatia in Mourning, 1703)
  • Bossna captiva (Bosnia in Captivity, 1712)
  • Lexicon Latino-illyricum

In Croatian:

  • Odiljenje sigetsko (1684)
  • Priričnik aliti razliko mudrosti cvitje (1703)
  • Kronika aliti spomen vsega svieta vikov (1696)

Unpublished (in manuscript):[16]

  • Banologia
  • Sive de banatu Croatiae
  • Serbia illustrata

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 Topić 2010, p. 123
  2. ↑ Fine 2006, p. 482
  3. ↑ Encyclopedia of Historical Writing: A-J by Daniel R. Woolf
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Profile, moljac.hr; accessed 29 December 2015.(Croatian)
  5. ↑ Topić 2010, p. 125
  6. ↑ Dobronić 1995, p. 172
  7. ↑ Bratulić 1995, p. 181
  8. 1 2 Trencsényi & Zászkaliczky 2010, p. 220
  9. ↑ David Bruce Macdonald (2002). Balkan Holocausts?: Serbian and Croatian Victim Centered Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia. Manchester University Press. p. 96. ISBN 978-0-7190-6467-8. Retrieved 4 September 2013. Ironically, the idea of claiming of national territory based on past occupation or conquest was originally a Croatian one. Pavao Ritter Vitezović [...] would introduce the concept of 'historical appropriation' to the Balkans, and then use it to expand the geographical size of Croatia.
  10. 1 2 Banac, Ivo (1988). The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics. Cornell University Press. p. 73. ISBN 0-8014-9493-1.
  11. ↑ John B. Allcock; Marko Milivojević; John Joseph Horton (1998). Conflict in the former Yugoslavia: an encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. p. 105. ISBN 978-0-87436-935-9. Retrieved 4 September 2013.
  12. 1 2 Fine 2006, p. 487
  13. ↑ Trencsényi & Zászkaliczky 2010, p. 364
  14. ↑ Trencsényi & Zászkaliczky 2010, p. 390
  15. ↑ Ritter, Paulus alias Vitezovich (1682). Novus Skenderbeg.
  16. ↑ Mirko Marković (2005). Stari Zagrepčani: život na području Zagreba od prapovijesti do 19. stoljeća. Nakl. Jesenski i Turk. p. 168. ISBN 978-953-222-218-0. Retrieved 6 September 2013.

References

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