Juraj Križanić

Early life, education, and early missionary work

Križanić was born in Obrh, near Ozalj (in present-day Croatia) in 1618, a period of political turmoil and of Turkish invasions into Croatia. He attended a Jesuit grammar school in Ljubljana and a Jesuit gymnasium in Zagreb from 1629 to 1635. His father died when he was 17 years old, at approximately the same time he graduated from the gymnasium. He began attending the University of Bologna in 1638 to study theology and graduated in 1640. Shortly after graduating Križanić began attending the Greek College of St. Athanasius, a center in Rome for the training of Catholic missionaries who would work with Orthodox Christians, from which he graduated in 1642. By the end of his life he was proficient in ten languages. While Križanić had a strong desire to travel to Moscow with the ambitious goal of uniting the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches, he was assigned missionary duties in Zagreb, where he was a teacher at the Zagreb Theological Seminary as well as a priest in several neighboring towns.^[3]

Life in Russia

Križanić managed to secure permission from the papacy for a brief visit to Moscow from 25 October to 19 December 1647.^[3] as part of a Polish embassy. However, he was not able to secure permission for a prolonged stay until 1658 (it was retracted shortly after being issued, a fact that Križanić simply ignored) and he did not arrive in Moscow until 17 September 1659. Another author^[4] said that he pretended to be an Orthodox Serb. He was assigned the duty of translating Latin and Greek documents and preparing an improved Slavic grammar. However, he was exiled to Siberia on 20 January 1661. The reason for his exile is still unknown. Possible explanations put forward have included the fact that he was a Roman Catholic priest, his criticism of Russian society and of the Greeks, with whom Patriarch Nikon was attempting reconciliation, and other political and social motives. Križanić postulated that he was exiled because of "some foolish thing" he had said to someone, and that whatever he had said had been mentioned to the authorities.^[3]

After his stay of roughly a year and a half in the Russian capital, Križanić arrived in Tobolsk in Siberia, on 8 March 1661. He lived there for 15 years, surviving on a state stipend and working on the treatises On Divine Providence, On Politics, and On Interpretation of Historic Prognostications amongst others. In these books, written in his self-devised "Common Slavonic language" (a Pan-Slavonic grammar named Grammatitchno Iskaziniye that incorporated numerous Slavic languages), he set forth a comprehensive program of reforms required for the Russian state, including reforms to administration, Russian serfdom, economic policy, education, grammar, and Russia's primitive agricultural system. Many of the reforms he recommended were in fact carried out by Peter the Great, although there is no concrete evidence of Križanić's direct influence in his doing so. His Politika, which he wrote from 1663-1666, was published by Peter Bezsonov (Russia in the Seventeenth Century, 1859–60) and for the first time in English in 1985^[3] and is his most well known and influential work.

His appeal to the Czar to head the Slavs in the fight against the Germans shows a remarkable political foresight. Križanić was freed from exile on 5 March 1676. After that he remained in Moscow until 1678, when he travelled to Vilnius and later to Warsaw. He accompanied a Polish force on its way to liberate besieged Vienna from the Ottomans during the Battle of Vienna, where he died near Vienna while participating in its defence against the Turks in the Ukrainian troops that adjoined the troops of the Polish king Jan Sobiesky in 1683.^[3]