Pavao Ritter Vitezović

Pavao Ritter Vitezović (; 7 January 1652 – 20 January 1713) was a Habsburg-Croatian polymath, variously described as a historian, linguist, publisher, poet, political theorist, diplomat, printmaker, draughtsman, cartographer, writer and printer.

Life

Early life

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

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 Bogenšperk (german: Wagensberg) near the town of Litija in Carniola (now in Slovenia), 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.Profile
, moljac.hr; accessed 29 December 2015.

Early writings

In 1677 he wrote a treatise on the Gusić clan, 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 various parliaments in Sopron, Požun and Vienna. On 19 April 1683, due to the efforts of Ritter Vitezović, the Austrian Imperial chancellary 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.

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

Sometime in the early 1690s, he returned to Croatia, 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. 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. 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.

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.

Printmaking and cartography

Vitezović contributed between 54 and 60 prints to Valvasor's ''Topographia Ducatus Carnioliae Modernae'' (1679) and Glory of the Duchy of Carniola (1689), both as draftsman and engraver. These were typically cities and places of Croatia and Carniola, which according to Vjekoslav Klaić, he "''visited carrying a sketchbook, drew them, transcribing them later onto copper plates''". His abilities as a graphic artist were later used in his 1701 heraldic book Stemmatografia. He studied cartography under Austrian Georg Matthäus Vischer, whose maps of Austria influenced his later works, which he used in his 1700 work Croatia rediviva.

As a skilled cartographer, he became a member of the Austrian military commission for the demarcation of the Croatian lands and the Ottoman Empire (1699), under Ferdinand Luigi Marsigli. He, along with other contributors sketched the neighbouring areas, much of which is preserved in the National Archives of Austria. A total of five maps are preserved in the Croatian State Archives, which are attributed to him.

Poetry

He wrote his poems both in Latin and Croatian.Vernacular Instances in Paulus Ritter's Latin Verse epistles
Violeta Moretti His first poetical work '' Odiljenje sigetsko'' (The Separation of Siget) was first published in 1679, in Linz. The third edition of the work was later self-published in Zagreb in 1695.TREĆE VITEZOVIĆEVO IZDANJE "ODILJENJA SIGETSKOG" (1695.), Vanja Budišćak, Filozofski fakultet, Zagreb
/ref> It is variously described as an epic poem centered on the aforementioned siege (similar to Vazetje Sigeta Grada) or a lyrical commentary of Petar Zrinski's ''Adrianskoga mora Sirena'' (Siren of the Adriatic Sea), all written in doubly rhymed dodecasyllable, typical rhyming scheme in Croatia at the time. He wrote Latin epistles to a number of Croatian, Austrian and Hungarian dignitaries and friends, numbering roughly 9000 lines of verse. In 1703, he self-published (Zagreb) ''Plorantis Croatiae Saecula Duo'' (Two Centuries of Croatia in Mourning), a work which is described as a poeticized chronicleWhose Love of Which Country?
Sandor Bene, pp. 392-393 framed as a pseudo-autobiography, and an allegory to the baroque Stabat Mater topos.Plorantis Croatiae saecula duo. Diskurzivne adaptacije i performativne funkcije marijanskog toposa
Zrinka Blažević, 2005 It is centered on first-person narration by a personified Croatia (presented as mother-homeland), which tells its tale as a personal history of suffering with detailed psychosomatic

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases