Mavro Orbini
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Mavro Orbini (mid-16th century - 1614) was a Croatian writer, ideologue and historian. His work The Realm of the Slavs influenced Slavic ideology and historiography in the later centuries.
Orbini was born in Dubrovnik. After becoming a Benedictine monk, he lived for a while in the monastery on the island of Mljet, later in Ston, and in Hungary, where he was the abbot of the monastery in Bačka for a couple of years. Then he returned to Dubrovnik, where he spent the rest of his life.
Like most Croatian intellectuals of his time, he was familiar with the pan-Slavic ideology of Vinko Pribojević. He made a very important contribution to that ideology by writing Il Regno degli Slavi (The Realm of the Slavs) in Italian, a historical/ideological book published in Pesaro in 1601. This uncritical history of the Slavs was translated into Russian by Teophan Prokopievich in 1723. From then on, the book exerted a significant influence on the ideas of Slavic peoples about themselves and on the European ideas on Slavs.
Like Pribojević, Orbini unifies the Illyric and Slav mythic identities and interprets history from a pan-Slavic mythological position. Since Orbini lived on the very edge of the Croatian and Slavic free lands, he glorified the multitude of Slavic peoples (primarily Russians and Poles) to counteract the aggressiveness of the Germanic, Italian (Venice) and Turk empires.
Orbini also published a book in Croatian, Zrcalo duhovno (Spiritual Mirror, 1595), which was essentially a translation of the Italian work by Angelo Nelli. This text, translated into the "Dubrovnik language", as Orbini calls it, has cultural and historical importance as an example of Croatian prose from the 16th century.
Aside from its ideological background, Orbini's main work was used for a long time as one of the few sources for segments of late medieval history of the South Slavs, from Carinthia in Slovenia to Kosovo, Macedonia and Bulgaria. Many historians learned their trade by verifying the information from Orbini's Realm. Even today's historiography is often uncertain about how much truth there is in some of his writings and claims. This fact is enough to describe Mavro Orbini as an influential historian.
Orbini's Il Regno degli Slavi was also the main source used by Paisius of Hilendar to write his Istoriya Slavyanobolgarskaya, the most influential work of early Bulgarian historiography, in 1762. He is referred to in the book as "a certain Mavrubir, a Latin", and is generally discredited despite being often cited.
[edit] Works
- Il Regno degli Slavi (The Realm of the Slavs), Pesaro, 1601, a contemporary annotated Croatian translation published 1999.
- Zrcalo duhovno (Spiritual Mirror), 1595
