Juraj Dragisic (Georgius Benignus, 1445? – 1520) was a Croat born in Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia (known by the Greater Serbian slaughter of Muslim Slavs in 1995 that the international community watched with fingers crossed, though it had been “UN protected area”). As a young Franciscan, when Bosnia fell in the Turkish hands in 1463, he escaped across Zadar to Italy. Due to the generous support from several Italian noble families he obtained excellent university education in Rome, Bologna, Florence, Padova, Ferrara, Paris and Oxford. His career started on several Italian universities, where he was lecturing philosophy and theology (including Sapienza in Rome). At the same time he was an educator and tutor of the children of the Toscan Archduke Lorenzo Medici – one of his children became a Pope (Leon X). By the end of the 15th century, after 30 years spent in Italy, he continued his career in Dubrovnik. Juraj Dragisic was in touch with the most outstanding names of the European Humanism of that time, and is the author of several books in the Latin language: “De natura celestium spiritum”, Florence, 1499, “De natura angelica”, Dubrovnik, 1498. He also spent some time as an envoy of the Pope at the court of Emperer Maximillian in Innsbruck. In 1514 he proposed the reform of the Julian calendar, which later became known as the Gregorian calendar.

In 1515 a question was raised by a German theologist on the admissibility of Talmud within the Christian doctrine. As a representative of the theological commission in charge to express his opinion, Dragisic was resolutely for acceptance of Talmud. Being accused by a Great Inquisitor of Germany for heresy, he was defended by the famous Erasmus of Rotterdam. See [Gregory Peroche], p. 65.

The last book by Dragisic entitled “New and Old Rules of the Dialectical Art”  (Artis dialecticae praecepta vetera et nova, 1520), dedicated to the questions of Logic, has been prepared in Dubrovnik and published in Rome. Croatian Logic Association has founded the Juraj Dragišić / Georgius Benignus Prize in Logic.

This very interesting Bosnian Croat, and outstanding European intellectual of his time, is treated in a monograph written by Croatian scientist Mirjana Urban: Juraj Dragisic, published in Dubrovnik in 1998. We learn that Dragisic wrote 7 printed book (out of them 5 incunabula, including one very beautiful in Dubrovnik), 12 handwritten books, and at least 4 lost books.

We find it pertinent to add that the monograph of Mirjana Uraban is dedicated to her son Pave, a young Croatian photographer and cameraman, killed in 1991 during Serbain attacks on Dubrovnik. He had the same profession, and the same tragic destiny as Gordan Lederer.

The reader will not mind a short digression with a word or two about Srebrenica, where Juraj Dragisic was born. Before the Ottoman penetration to Bosnia, which started in the 15th century, its population was mostly Croatian. In 1600 it had about 200 Catholic houses. Srebrenica was a part of the Bosnia Argentum Archbishopric held by the Bosnian Franciscans. Its Catholic church from the 14th century had not been destroyed by the Turks, only its bell-tower was rebuilt to a minaret, so that the former church served as a mosque, even till these days (i.e. for more than 500 years). The author of these lines visited it in 1981, when the population of Srebrenica had a large Muslim majority. As a “UN protected” zone, this city, overpopulated by tens of thousands of exiles (mostly Muslim Slavs), was a victim of the Greater-Serbian ethnical cleansing and genocide in July 1995. The fate of about 8,000 people is not known. The Catholic church – mosque was destroyed.