The Lutheran leader Philip Melanchthon entrusted him with a letter addressed to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople to join forces against the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottomans, but all came to naught.
Božidar Ljubavić (1460-1527) was the head of a printing dynasty from the city and municipality of Goražde in the Serbian land of Bosnia-Hercegovina just at the time when the Turkish invasions had taken place.
The Ljubavić brothers procured a press and began printing a hieratikon (priest's service book), copies of which had been completed by 2 October 1519 either in Venice or at the Church of Saint George, built by Stjepan Vukčić Kosača, near Goražde.
He also received an extensive religious education while at the Academy of "Janus Lascaris" becoming initiated in the questions of Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic theology.
After completing his studies at the Lascaris academy, Dimitrije joined hieromonk Teodor Ljubavić, his uncle in Venice, where he learned the family's printing trade.
On his return to Transylvania in 1552, Dimitrije Ljubavić not only took up responsibility for running a school in Brasov but also worked as a writer, printer, publisher, and illustrator of books.
He continued to cultivate his humanist network of connections with the Lutherans and his own Orthodox faithful, preserving his good relations with leading figures at the residence of Metropolitan Anania (Branković)[7] of Ungaro-Wallachia, who reigned as hierarch from 1544 to 1558.
German noblemen, clerks and military officers also played an important role in spreading the ideas of the Reformation at the grassroots level.
In spite of a large number of renowned Protestant intellectuals who came from other lands, Protestantism did not have a profound impact on the people in Wallachia, only for that moment in time.
[9] Well-aware that the newly established South Slavic Bible Institute needed the collaboration of some Orthodox in the translation of Protestant literature, Primož Trubar and Stjepan Konzul Istranin engaged Matija Popović and Jovan Maleševac for some time in Urach.
At this time, Dimitrije Ljubavić was the first secretary to the voivode of Wallachia Alexandru Lăpuşneanu and then spent more than three years at the Patriarchate of Constantinople as a deacon supervising the printing of books.
After having probably become acquainted in Transylvania with Peter Petrovics, one of Temesvar's most influential magnates and a fervent supporter of the Reformation, he left for northern Hungary, where in Eperjes (Presov, Slovakia) he visits the governor of the city, Sigismund Tordai-Gelous (1518-1569).
There, armed with a letter of introduction from Tordai-Gelous, Ljubavić leaves Presov in May 1559 for Wittenberg, where he met David Chytraeus and his teacher Philip Melanchthon and become familiar with the Augsburg Confession in a Greek version.
Iacob Heraclid made Lutheranism the state Church, offending the native Eastern Orthodox who viewed him as an iconoclast due to his rhetoric against images, even though he did not, in fact, destroy any icons.