House of Pejačević

Pejačević
counts
Coat of arms of the House of Pejačević, here spelled as Pejacsevich ("Wappen der Grafen Pejacsevich").

The Pejačević or Pejácsevich family (Croatian: Pejačevići, Hungarian: Pejácsevich or Pejácsevics, Bulgarian: Пеячевичи Peyachevichi) is an old Croatian noble family, remarkable during the period in history marked by the Ottoman war in the Kingdom of Croatia and Austro-Hungarian Empire respectively. Notable members of the family were politicians, clerics, artists, senior military officers, bans (viceroys) of Croatia and other high state officials. They were very potent and influential in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country, and especially distinguished in the region of Slavonia. In German, the family name was sometimes rendered Pejacsevich, i.e. a simplified variant of the Hungarian spelling.

The origin of the family dates back to the 14th-century territory of southeastern Croatia and the neighbouring medieval Bosnia and Herzegovina. There are sources that connect the ancestors of the family with the Bosnian king Stjepan Dabiša (English: Stephen Dabisha), who ruled from 1391 to 1395, and his son Parčija (English: Parchia). Parčija's descendants used to be called Parčević (Parchevich). One of several family branches that came out of them later (in the 16th century) was the Pejačević family.

The 59th volume of the „Archive for the Austrian History“ issued by the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna in 1880 includes a long chapter about Baron Petar Parčević (1612–1674), the archbishop of Marcianople, a town in eastern Bulgaria. The text of that chapter is based on the researches made by Count Julijan Pejačević (1833–1906), a chronicler of the family. Despite the doubts of some historians, later analyses mostly showed and confirmed that he had a history-based approach and his theses had been proven. This refers particularly to the research of Bulgarian historiography, including those conducted by Bojan Penev and Boris Jocov in the 1920s and 1930s. The research dealt with the connected families of Parčević and Pejačević (as well as some other related families) during their residence in the territory of today's Bulgaria (then occupied by the Ottoman Empire). Particular facts have been described in Encyclopedia Bulgaria (1981-1997) (Енциклопедия България), issued in Sofia, in detail.