All Scholars

Andrija Dudić de Hrahovicza, whose name in Croatian is Andrija Dudić Orehovički, was born to a Croatian father and Italian mother. He met a number of the most influential humanists of his time such as Paulus Manutius (1512-74) and Giovanni-Vincenzo Pinelli (1535-1601) during his youthful travels in Europe and thanks to his uncle, the bishop of Vác, a adviser to Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I (1503-64), he was able to gain the patronage of many important religious figures, particularly Cardinal Pole. Despite the church background of his family, Dudith began his career as an Erasmian humanist publishing Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s commentary on Thucydides. Appointed bishop in Croatia by Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I (1503-64) and won praise from reformers at the Council of Trent in 1562-63, by arguing that the full communion should be shared with the laity and not be exclusive to priests. He was also opposed to celibacy. He served various diplomatic missions for Ferdinand’s successors, Sigismund II (1520-72) and Maximilian II (1527-76).  While on duty in Hungary, he was sent to Breslau, Poland, where he married in 1567 and was condemned by the church. He resigned his bishopric, and became a Protestant, and left diplomacy forever, devoting himself to philosophic and theological concerns. In 1570 he became interested in mathematics, which led him to correspondence with Henry and Thomas Savile in England and Johannes Praetorius (1537-1616) in Germany. He also studied Galen and collected medical manuscripts. His library amounted to over 5000 books and numerous manuscripts. He is chiefly known for his work De cometarum significatione, written following the appearance of the Great Comet in 1577, which was visible across Europe and was the subject of works by Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and many others. Dudith, who had studied Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos but was influenced by the Calvinist theologian Thomas Erastus (1524-83) denied any scientific value to astrology. Instead he accepted Aristotle’s view that comets were the release of fire from the earth (a view he later rejected based on his own mathematical calculations). He maintained correspondence and relations with anti-Trinitarians like Giorgio Blandrata (1515-86), Jacob Palaeogus (1520-85) Fausto Sozzini (1539-1604), but was never a self-proclaimed Unitarian. When Stephen Báthory (1533-86) became king of Poland in 1576, Dudith removed to Breslau and then Moravia, where he joined the anti-Trinitarian Polish Brethen. His Latin paraphrase of the fifth oration of Themistius reflects Dudith’s opposition to religious intolerance.