Juraj Dragišić
He lived and worked in Rome, Urbino, Florence and Dubrovnik (Ragusa), in addition to a long diplomatic stay in Germany.
[13] In September 1464, Marco Fantuzzi da Bologna [de], vicar general of the Observant Franciscans, stopped in Zadar and was invited to participate in a provincial council being held by Bernardino d'Aquila on the island of Pašman.
[16] He studied at various times in the Franciscan studia of Ferrara, Padua and Pavia, and in the universities of Bologna, Paris and Oxford, where John Foxal was one of his teachers.
[24] In 1482, according to Serafino Razzi's Storia di Raugia, Dragišić (whom he calls Jure Bošnjak) stopped in Dubrovnik while returning from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
[25] There, according to his own account, he fell ill and gave a relic he had acquired of the left hand (or arm) of John the Baptist to two citizens for safekeeping.
Back in Italy, he sold it to the Florentine merchants' guild, the Arte dei Mercatanti, who were anxious to acquire a relic to rival the Baptist's supposed right arm, given to the Republic of Siena by Pope Pius II in 1464.
[26] Aelius Lampridius Cervinus wrote an epigram, Ad Florentiam postulantem laevam S. Ioannis, in defence of Dubrovnik's position.
[30] On 25 May 1488, the chapter general of the Franciscan order appointed him rector of Santa Croce for a term of three years and inquisitor of Florence for two.
[32] He also asked him to judge the orthodoxy of the Apologia of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, which was dedicated to Lorenzo and defended thirteen theses condemned by a papal commission.
The plan failed and Sansone deprived him of all his offices in the order, appointing Pietro da Figino as minister provincial.
In a sign of his return to favour and prestige in Italy, he preached a sermon in the Apostolic Palace in Rome on 1 January 1501 in the presence of the pope.
From the summer of 1507 until January 1509, Dragišić was part of a diplomatic mission headed by Cardinal Bernardino López de Carvajal to the court of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, on behalf of the papacy.
[42] In 1517–1518, through his contact with the brothers Guillaume and Denis Briçonnet, he was connected to the reform-minded circles centred on the Milanese Oratorio dell'Eterna Sapienza and the Cenacle of Meaux [fr].
[30] The authors he cites most frequently in his writing are John Duns Scotus, Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, Francis of Meyronnes, Godfrey of Fontaines and Landolfo Caracciolo.
[48] He lamented the fact that more capable men, like Giovanni Gatto and Fernando de Córdoba, had not risen to the cardinal's defence.
[18] The interlocutors are Bessarion; Cardinal Francesco della Rovere, the future Pope Sixtus IV; John Foxal, Dragišić's old professor at Oxford; Giovanni Gatto and Fernando de Córdoba.
His first printed work was a manual of logic entitled Dialectica nova secundum mentem Doctoris Subtilis et beati Thomae Aquinatis aliorumque realistarum.
His arguments found favour with Pico, Ficino and Lorenzo de' Medici, but Nicolaus was defended by the logician Mengo Bianchelli.
[27] Also at Florence, Dragišić wrote Opus septem quaestionum, a commentary on Lorenzo de' Medici's sonnet Lo spirito talora a sè redutto.
[44] Oratio funebris pro Iunio Georgio is a funeral oration for the senator Junije Đurđević, whose nephew Sigismund was a student of Dragišić.
[71] In 1500, Dragišić and Cardinal Carvajal broke the seals on a document purporting to be the revelations received by Amadeus of Portugal in states of ecstasy.
[19] Of Dragišić and the Apocalypsis, Cesare Vasoli [it] writes, "He is in particular the man of the Church who played the most decisive role in the elaboration of one of the most famous prophecies of the sixteenth century.
"[72] During his legation of 1507–1509 to Germany, Dragišić edited for publication the Homelia doctissima of Cardinal Carvajal, adding a dedicatory letter to Maximilian I.
[18] During this period he also wrote Vexillum christianae victoriae, a treatise divided into 63 "contemplations" on divine simplicity and related Trinitarian topics, still trying to demonstrate concord between Scotism and Platonism.
[18] In 1513, he submitted to Leo X and the Fifth Lateran Council an astronomical treatise on calendar reform, Correctio erroris qui ex equinoctio vernali in kalendario procedere solet, to which he later added a prefatory epistle addressed to Agostino Chigi (both now preserved in manuscript Vat.
It offers the daring defence that the duke was moved by a divine impulse and that the cardinal's death was the fulfillment of the prophecies Cyril, Bridget and Amadeus of Portugal.
[18] In January 1515, Dragišić wrote a dialogue entitled An Iudaeorum libri quod Thalmud appellant sint potius supprimendi quam tenendi et conservandi ("Whether the Jewish Books, Which They Call the Talmud, Should be Suppressed or Kept and Preserved").
[76] It was published at Cologne in September 1517 as the main piece in the pamphlet Defensio praestantissimi viri Ioannis Reuchlin, edited by Count Hermann von Neuenahr [de] and with a dedication to the Emperor Maximilian.
[18] That year Dragišić also defended Reuchlin in a preface to Pietro Galatino's kabbalistic Opus de archanis Catholicae veritatis, printed at Ortona.
[69] Besides his aforementioned Defensorium Bessarionis and In logicam introductorium, three other lost works by Dragišić are known: Commentaria in IV libros Sententiarum, a commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which was ready for printing in 1512, according to his student, Antonio Sassolino [no];[79] Tractatus de rebus moralibus atque ad civilem regimen, which Dragišić refers to in De natura angelica and which was likewise dedicated to the senate of Dubrovnik;[18] and Liber de raptis, a work mentioned by Giovanni Giacinto Sbaraglia and which claimed that the devil who tempted Jesus was the same one who had tempted Adam.
