Pjetër Budi

Pjetër Budi
Sketch of Pjetër Budi from his book "Paschyra e të rrëfyemit"
Born	1566 Gur i Bardhë, Mat, Ottoman Empire
Died	December 1622
Nationality	Albanian

Pjetër Budi (1566 – December 1622), writer of early Albanian literature, known in Italian as Pietro Budi, was an Albanian bishop of Sapë and the author of four religious works in Albanian.

Budi was born in Gur i Bardhë in the Mat region, and is a noted and respected figure in Albanian cultural history. In addition to his political and religious activities, he published four books in Albanian, a rarity at the time, and was the first Albanian writer to publish a substantial amount of poetry in Albanian, some 3,300 lines of it.

He trained for the priesthood at the so-called Illyrian College of Loretto, south of Ancona in Italy, where many Albanians and Dalmatians of renown were to study. at the age of 21, he was ordained as a Catholic priest and was sent immediately to Macedonia and Kosovo, then part of the eccesiastical province of Serbia under the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Antivar, where he served various parishes for an initial 12 years. in 1610, he was referred to as chaplan of Christianity in Skopje and. in 1647, as chaplan of Prokupolje. In Kosovo, Budi came into contact with Franciscan Catholics from Bosnia. These connections proved fruitful in later years for his political endeavors to mount support for Albanian resistance to the Ottoman Empire. In 1599, Budi was appointed vicar-general (vicario generale) of Serbia, a post held for 17 years. As a representative of the Catholic Church in the Turkish-occupied Balkans, he lived and worked in what was no doubt a tense of political atmosphere. His ecclesiastical position was in many way only a cover for his political aspirations. In 1616, he traveled to Rome, where he resided until 1618 to oversee the poblications of his works. On 20 July 1621, he was made bishop of Sapa and Sarda (i.e of the Zadrima region of northern Albania), and returned to Albania the following year.