Pavao Ritter Vitezović

Pavao Ritter Vitezović was born as Pavao Ritter in Senj, the son of a frontier soldier. His father, Antun Ritter, was a descendant of an ethnic German immigrant from Alsace, while his mother, Dorotea Lučkinić, was a native Senj woman. 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.

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.

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.

His first work, a tractate abouth the dukes of Krbava, Gusić, was written in 1677, and subsequently published in 1684, Ljubljana. Upon establishing his printing press in Zagreb, he published a didactic work in Croatian Kronika aliti spomen vsega svieta vikov (1696), which was essentially a compilation of works from Antun Vramec (1578). In it he argued that Dalmatia had always been part of Croatia. He continued to advocate for such stances in an unpublished critique of Johannes Lucius' De regno Croatia et Dalmatiae. In 1700, he published his most significant work, Croatia Rediviva, in which he worked out an idea of equating Croats with all South Slavs, a concept which he expanded in a large unfinished work De aris et focis Illyriorum (On Illyrian altars and hearths). By the end of his life, he published a history of Bosnia (1712, Bosna captiva) and a lineage of Ladislaus I of Hungary (1704), in which he attempted to prove that Ladislaus did not originate from the Arpads, but from the Trpimirović. He also wrote a number of shorter texts, remaining only in manuscript; biographies Saint Vladimir and Skanderbeg, a history of the Ban of Croatia (Banologia), a lost text about the Hungarian acquisition of Croatia during the Middle Ages, and histories of Serbia. His only linguistical work, a Latin-Croatian dictionary Lexicon Latino-Illyricum, was preserved in manuscript. When writing in Croatian, he initially used his native Chakavian regiolect, but subsequently also embraced Shtokavian and Kajkavian elements, similar to the Ozalj literary circle.

He wrote his poems both in Latin and Croatian. His first major 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. 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 chronicle framed as a pseudo-autobiography, and an allegory to the baroque Stabat Mater topos. 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 manifestations. This was followed by a vernacular poem Senjčica (1704), which demonstrates Vitezović was primarily motivated by patriotism, making him a precursor of such Croatian poets of the 19th century. He wrote another similar work, Novljančica, which was lost. Overall reception to Vitezović's poetry has been mixed. While the historian Violeta Moretti praised his epistolaries as "mainly rich, well formed and fluent", she criticized his other Latin poems as being elusive in their meaning. Zrinka Blažević of the University of Zagreb praised his work Two Centuries of Croatia in Mourning as among the best Croatian poetical works in Latin, containing great aesthetic qualities and an unusual narrative structure. Conversely, Mihovil Kombol regarded his work Odiljenje sigetsko as lacking great poetic invention, instead treating its value primarily in historiographical terms. This interpretation was criticized by literary historian and writer Pavao Pavličić, stating Vitezović had excellent knowledge of language and skill in versification, managing to create great and inventive poetry in certain places within the work. Pavličić claimed this negative view stemmed from misinterpretation of Vitezović's intentions, which is not to create an epic, but a lyrical collection intended to expand the existing aspects of the Siege of Siget.