Jakov Mikalja

[1][2] Micaglia was born in Peschici,[3] a small town on the Gargano peninsula that six centuries before (about 970)[4][5][6] was a settlement of Croat refugees[7][8] and that in those years entertained fruitful trade with Venice and the city-states on the Dalmatian coast (like the Republic of Ragusa).

There he wrote "Latin grammar for Illyrian students" after Emanuel Alvares (De institutione grammatica pro Illyricis accommodata, 1637).

A few years later, in 1636, Micaglia sent a letter to the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, proposing a reform of the Latin alphabet for the needs of Croatian.

He discussed the same issue in the chapter "On Slavic Orthography"[citation needed] of his work in Croatian "God-Loving Thoughts on the Lord's Prayer Taken from the Books of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor" (Bratislava, 1642).

He came back to Italy, where he was confessor in Slavic languages at the Basilica della Santa Casa in Loreto, from 1645 till his death in that town.

It influenced the Croatian circle of lexicographers (among them Franciscans Divković, Toma Babić and Lovro Šitović), both in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina.