[ERUDICIJA - BEČIĆ (Marin)]
I intend to say a word or two, in a short address to the reader, interested in the character and history of Montenegrin diplomacy, about two people, Paštrović.
Divergent, diasporic destinies bind them, one to the European West, the other to the East. And their work is scattered, preserved in two languages (membra disiecta, scattered limbs); one Latin, the other Slovenian. The first is Marin Bečić (1468-1526), born Paštrović, humanist, rector of a public school (in Dubrovnik, 1492, when the whole world was cooking in the transformation, so even our coastal residents did not sit idly by). He is a friend of poet Ivan Gučetić, secretary of the Venetian fleet (in Naples), diplomat, orator, writer, Renaissance man and man of the world. He was a mediator in diplomatic negotiations in Padua and Brescia (where he is the head of the university department), during the foundation of the Venice Humanities School, which he managed, and finally a professor of classical sciences in Mantua. And a public worker, all his life - polemicist, who was attacked by authorities, such as Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), cardinal, literary theorist, poet, and Gregorio Amaseo (1464-1541), humanist, writer, polemicist. Bečić found himself as a boy, in Ulcinj, when the Turks conquered his native Skadar, and his parents liked slavery - father Marin, also a diplomat, Venetian representative at the Ottoman court, and mother, Italian by birth, Bianca Pagnano. From there he was evacuated to Italy, where he studied classical disciplines, in Latin and Greek.
He returned to Ulcinj with a bachelor's degree, to marry Katarina, daughter of Pasquale Dabra, and she is, according to sources, Italian, his first wife.
Bečić printed his works in Venice, Brescia and Padua. According to the old, good custom of educated writers, he would use his stay in a city to edit and prepare his works for publication - critical reviews of the classics (Plinius, Cicero, Vergilius, Quintilianus), public speeches, and panegyrics intended for politicians and scholars. He married Isabella Gonzaga the second time, in Mantova, but even there, where he asked for her hand, says Šime Ljubić, his literary passion did not give him peace - but the Mantova song about rulers and writers is lost, for now.
Seven books remain from Marin Bečić: 1) Contributions to Pliny; 2) The art of Cicero's "Speeches"; 3) Three chapters of "Miscellaneous Observations"; 4) Notes to Virgil; 5) Observations on Livius and Fabius; 6) Comments with Persi; 7) A collection of observations on the First Book of Pliny (the author refers to "Natural History", cf. GČ).
His works are stored in Venice and the Apostolic Library in the Vatican. No one from our old writers published anything about him, until something, in a scrapbook, but precious, by his compatriot from Paštrović, Dionisije Miković, editor of the Great Illustrated Boka Calendar, in his magazine (Kotor, 1913, 38-48).
[MILITARY DIPLOMACY - PIŠČEVIĆ (Simeon)]
There is no great philosophy about what diplomacy is - it is the people who create and implement this activity, and the states, on whose behalf they interpret the will of their government abroad. The second step is for the diplomat to represent his country before the partner government, and the third, technically no less interesting than the first, is to inform his government about the public and secret affairs of that government.
That would be all, if, of course, one adds the romantic notions of manly sideburns, closely tailored tailcoats, balls, lovers, and secret lodges, which the 19th century so deftly served up. And if military, mostly intelligence, diplomatic actions interfere with it.
However, I am interested here in the pretext of diplomatic romanticism - the 18th century of Maria Theresa, and a figure from our soil in it, our above list, Paštrović (some tie him deeper, native, to the Pivlja village of Pišče, among them the historian, literary Milorad Pavić ). A striking, rarely masculine portrait that fraternizes war, on the one hand, and diplomatic negotiations, on the other. Forerunner of modern military diplomacy. The history of Montenegrin statehood is unimaginable without the people who walked its path, in the embrace of military and diplomatic actions.
This man is attractive for his literary work outside of romantic plays. This is a man who strengthens the classic idea of modern European diplomacy, despite the fact that he is an officer in the first place: Simeon Piščević (1731-1798).
On the one hand, Piščević was not a diplomat in the classic (accreditation) sense, for the simple reason that he did not represent one country. The Russian empress did not authorize him, and he practically did not have a Serbian state (his era formats nations within the framework of empires) - so for the diplomatic action, which he engaged in as a second calling from time to time, there remains that vacuum between administrative disorder, on the one hand, and private, experience, service to the people on the other hand.
It is not out of place to consult Voltaire ("Politics and arms are the most natural occupations of a man, because he is always either negotiating or fighting"); nor modern American military diplomacy ("The soldier is the statesman's junior partner" - Matthew Ridgway); or, on the other hand, the American political thought which has long, until today, maintained a close connection between state and military affairs ("A man cannot qualify for the duty of a statesman before passing the study of military science in the broadest sense" - JM Schofield); be that as it may, military diplomacy stands behind the state with variable visibility, and in Piščević's era, it stepped out significantly, from the shadows, because creating a state without it is nothing.
Credential diplomacy did not have the weight it has today. After all, also for the interest of the Montenegrin theocratic government - and it was far more self-aware in terms of the state than any South Slavic nation - (for the early Bokeljes, I don't waste words, such as Marin Bečić was), emissaries, deputies, deputies, delegated and non-delegated individuals, and by God, and self-appointed.
I don't have to look long for the reason for connecting the uniform, tailcoat and feather - it lies right there, within reach, in the work of Miloš Crnjanski. Piščević inspired an inimitable novel of Serbian and Yugoslav literature, Migration, and it is worth taking a look at his destiny. As long as the man from Paštrović didn't write anything. And yes, he is the most prolific diplomatic writer who used the Predvuk language, and his work is indispensable, on multiple levels, not only in the local but also in the European context.
I can immediately see that the reader is raising his eyebrows: where did Piščević get our paper from, wasn't he born in Šid, wasn't his father the commander of the Danube Land Militia? Finally, wasn't he educated in a language that he doesn't call, like us, but like predecessors and contemporaries from the old region, e.g. Andrija Zmajević, Ivan Antun Nenadić - Slovenian; or, like the baroque poet Dživo Bolica Kokoljić, "the Slovenian language of the mili"?
My answer is yes. - Because I read Josif Flavi very well, especially Jewish war, and learned something from the Jews, and what you learn from them, you learn forever. First of all, that a man's mother is the woman and the land that gave birth to him, and that a man speaks to his mother and the land in one way, with a special tone, and to the whole world in another.
Speech about the mother, and speech about the homeland, is profoundly different from all other types of speech. Even the man who succeeds in telling and writing his life to others stands out.
Therefore, his word about the mother should be respected. We need to let the man speak for himself - and Piščević is undoubtedly there:
"I am writing about the country of Paštrojevic in such detail because it is my first and oldest homeland..."
History of modernity
Of all possible histories, of all historiography, the most important is the history of modernity. The comfort of modernity is the greatest comfort in life. That's why the passion of thinking about modernity, realized in the genre of biography, leads me to Piščević, and I feel him warmly, despite the abyss of pathos. Not because he is historically reliable (there are hundreds of official historians more accurate than him), but because he spreads the radiation of warmth, spiritual optimism, when it is most difficult, despite the rigid attitude of an officer and, secondarily, the attitude of a military diplomat.
The obscure picture of the 18th century black-and-white technique soon becomes boring, and it is the picture of the fight with the Turks, predictable already after the first notes in the five-hundred-year-old soap opera about David and Goliath. Anything for the Western critical framework should be inserted, some landscape where, apart from the hunter and the beast, you can see something else, the forest, the sky, intellectual history.
And those who provide that otherness are few. One is Piščević. Boško Petrović sees him well: "Piščević is also the first - and already so unusually developed - appearance of a contemporary European rationalist spirit in us" (see Simeon Piščević: Memoari, N. Sad, 1972, 29).
He turned the page, out of the schematic, his eyes fixed on the speech of Europe. Accesses the European discourse, through service, first Austro-Hungarian, later Russian. And his manuscripts are like that, the two main works, in the previous editions with the titles History and Memoirs - like when the light on the stage changes, the record and the music.
This is how the historical picture of wars and diplomacy was created, from Piščević's pen, and this one, a whole century after its creation, was brought to the public stage by the Slavist Nil Popov (1833-1892) by editing the author's original manuscript.
Piščević was practically in the bunker for one hundred years, until the Russian edition and two hundred, until the Serbo-Croatian edition (it was published, and the foreword was written by Petrović in Matica srbiska, 1972).
Then Crnjanski, in a condensed, stronger light, the spirit of the age and genius locci he transferred, from the memoir, to the poetics of the novel Migration. That's how all of that was reincarnated, step by step, to a picture that introduces diplomacy into its primary framework: wars, security, information, and stabilizes it as a technique that rules the will of cultures and peoples. As a state consolation of modernity.
Crnjanski can, admittedly, be faintly restored in the reception through his own words: "swamp"; "regiment"; "Wolf (Volkan) Isakovic"; "migration"; “death”; "Slavic-Danube"; "Piscevic"; "a man should have one country and one wife in his life, Major Berenklau!"; "fulfill destiny"; "heart"; "Ms. Žofina", and so many others... However, no one has yet reached the spontaneous poetics, which springs from a single person, from the earth, from a woman.
Piščević started recording his memories - in 1775, after he finished his career as an officer, until before his death. In the 18th century, military and diplomatic memories are inseparable, and when you take a closer look, it is the same in all times: diplomacy is inseparable from security problems.
He is interested in reading, reading, the base of the compilation without which this encyclopedic era is unthinkable. He is alive, military and somewhat diplomatic, a participant in a game that will be played there for a long time, with variable success, until today.
Piščević begins his life's work with the story of Illyria. He relies on the French diplomat, Prince Dikanž (Charles du Fresne du Cange, 1610-1688), the first Western Byzantologist, from whom, in his formative years, he learned Balkan history from a compiled edition.
We know that he read Mavro Orbin (1563-1611), and used Sava Vladislavić's translation of this work into Russian, which means that he gained a familiar insight into the The Chronicle of the Dukljanin Pope (Piščević calls him Diocleas), and in the ancestral genos.
He read and compiled the history of Slavonia, written according to diplomatic instructions from Vienna, by his contemporary, the Austrian diplomat in London, Count Taube (Friedrich Wilhelm von Taube, 1728-1778), and by a Latin historian named Christoph Martin Keller (1638-1707).
At hand was the Italian diplomatic writer Giovanni Botero (1544-1617), with his title Universal Relations, the opponent of Machiavelli and the forerunner of the early liberal thinkers John Locke (1632-1704) and Adam Smith (1723-1790).
Piščević maintained contact with Vasilij Petrović, statesman and diplomat, who inspired Russian officials for diplomatic business with Montenegro; they worked together on the evacuation of Montenegrins to Russia (he was a member of the "Montenegrin commission", appointed to receive emigrants, on the border with Turkey); was formed under the protection of Prince Potemkin (1739-1791), perhaps the most offensive diplomat of his time, to whom he entrusted his son, a future high-ranking officer and also a diplomat, by second call, after the transition from military to civil service (Aleksandar Piščević, himself a writer : My Life 1764-1805).
Bonus video:
