Mavro Orbini

Mavro Orbini
Cover of the first edition of "Regno de gli Slavi", written by Mavro Orbini
Born	1563 Ragusa, Republic of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik, Croatia)
Died	1614
Nationality	Ragusan
Other names	Mavro Orbini
Occupation	writer
Known for	influencing Pan-Slavism

Mavro Orbini (1563–1614) was a Ragusan chronicler, notable for his work The Realm of the Slavs (1601) which influenced Slavic ideology and historiography in the later centuries.

Orbini was born in Ragusa (now Dubrovnik), the capital of the Republic of Ragusa, a Slavic-populated merchant city-state on the eastern shore of the Adriatic sea. His Slavic family drew origin from Kotor (in modern Montenegro), and his name in Slavic was written by himself as Mavar Orbin. He was mentioned for the first time in sources dating to 1592.

At 15 years old, he joined the Benedictines, and after becoming a monk, he lived for a while in the monastery on the island of Mljet, later in Ston, and in Hungary, where he was the abbot of the Benedictine monastery in Bačka for a couple of years. Then he returned to Ragusa, where he spent the rest of his life.

Like most Dalmatian intellectuals of his time, he was familiar with the pan-Slavic ideology of Vinko Pribojević. He made a very important contribution to that ideology by writing The Realm of the Slavs in Italian, a historical/ideological book published in Pesaro in 1601. This uncritical history of the Slavs was translated into Russian by Sava Vladislavich in 1722, with a preface by Feofan Prokopovich. From then on, the book exerted a significant influence on the ideas of Slavic peoples about themselves and on the European ideas on Slavs.