Vatican records reveal Croatian was an international language in 16th-17th centuries

Vatican

ZAGREB, 25 Nov (Hina) – Historian Stjepan Krasić, a Dominican who has devoted his life to studying documents in the Roman and Vatican archives, has uncovered evidence suggesting that Croatian held the status of an international language in the 16th and 17th centuries and that the Church selected it as the most suitable language for communication with all Slavs.

Speaking on Sunday on Croatian Television’s (HTV) prime-time news bulletin, Krasić discussed the documents he found over many years in the Vatican archives, during his various posts in the Roman Curia, and the research findings he recently published.

His article, “Croatian as an international language in the 16th and 17th centuries: evidence from the Vatican archives”, authored in English, was published in recent days in ST-OPEN, a journal of the University of Split.

He presents six original documents held by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, which show that in the 16th century the Catholic Church selected Croatian as the most suitable language for communication among Slavic peoples, after which it was taught at prominent European universities.

Krasić’s research reveals that Croatian became the official language for all Slavs in the 16th and 17th centuries as a direct decision of the popes, especially Gregory XIII and Clement VIII.

He told HTV that these insights could reshape the accepted history of the Croatian literary language. Croatian, he said, was used even in royal courts, including in Constantinople, as a diplomatic language.

He noted that in 1599 the Jesuits, on papal orders, founded the Illyrian Language Academy at the Collegium Romanum in Rome. “This was the first time in history that Croatian was studied at university level. It is the birthday of the Croatian scholarly literary language,” Krasić said.

He added that in 1643 Pope Urban VIII issued a decree requiring Croatian — chosen as the general language of all Slavic languages — to be studied not only in Rome but also at other ecclesiastical and public universities.

According to Krasić, in the 17th century the world’s most prestigious universities were therefore obliged to include Croatian as a compulsory subject, which made it a global language of the time. These included universities in Rome, Cologne, Ingolstadt, Toulouse, Vienna, Paris, Oxford, Madrid and Salamanca. He described this as an “incredible but true discovery” of the significance of Croatian in the 17th century.

Krasić argues that these findings, based on Vatican archival documents, alter the existing understanding of the history of Croatian, showing that the language of a “small nation”, the Croats, once held an important international role. This research, he said, casts new light on the global status of Croatian, which was recognised in European academic circles, although political and cultural circumstances later slowed its use in Croatia’s education system.

Stjepan Krasić was born in 1938 in Čitluk, near Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. A long-standing official of the Roman Curia, he served as president of the Croatian Historical Institute in Rome, editor-in-chief of the journal Angelicum and adviser to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.