Janez Vajkard Valvasor
1641 – 1693 · Slovenia
Known for: Polymath of Carniola, author of The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola
“He gave his fortune to a book, and the book gave his homeland its memory.”
Biography
Janez Vajkard Valvasor was baptised in the cathedral of Ljubljana on 28 May 1641, the twelfth child of a noble family that had come to Carniola from Bergamo a century earlier. His father died when he was ten and his mother when he was sixteen. After the Jesuit school in Ljubljana, finished in 1659, he chose no university but a journey of some fourteen years across Europe and as far as North Africa, seeking out learned men, collections and instruments, and serving for a time with the imperial army against the Ottomans on the Croatian Military Frontier. He came home with a scholar's training that no faculty had given him. In 1672 he married, and soon afterwards bought Bogenšperk Castle near Litija, where he set up a workshop for writing, drawing, engraving and printing.
From Bogenšperk he undertook to describe his homeland as no one had described it before. He measured, sketched and questioned the people, sent draughtsmen into the field and kept engravers at work in his own house, publishing topographies of Carniola and Carinthia, a map of Carniola, the Karst, Istria and the Slovene March, and a book of engravings on death. He was the first to treat the karst country as a scientific problem, and his account of Lake Cerknica, which fills and empties itself, went before the Royal Society at the suggestion of Edmond Halley, and the society elected him a fellow in 1687. His great work, The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola, appeared in 1689 in fifteen books and four volumes, 3,532 pages with 528 illustrations, describing the land, its rivers and caves, its castles, towns, crafts, customs and history. It also holds the first written account of a vampire, the Istrian Jure Grando.
The books ruined him. He had paid for the engraving and the printing himself, and the cost outran his fortune: in 1690 the Bishop of Zagreb bought his library and some seven thousand three hundred prints, and by 1692 he had to give up Bogenšperk as well. That collection survives today in the Croatian State Archives. His first wife had died in childbirth in 1687, and several of his children did not outlive their first years. Valvasor died at Krško in the autumn of 1693, aged fifty two and close to poverty. He is thought to have been buried in the family crypt at Medija Castle, but the castle was blown up in 1944 and no trace of the grave remains. What remains is his description of Carniola, the principal source for older Slovenian history and the ground on which later historians built.