Čaplovičeva povijest Marčanske biskupije
The history of the Bishopric of Marča by Ján Čaplovič (Iohann von Csaplovisc)

Summary/Abstract: The history of the Greek Catholic Bishopric of Marča written by the Slovak scholar Ján Čaplovič (Johann von Csaplovisc) in 1819 is by and large based on the Serbian Orthodox Church legend of the Bishopric of Marča as the first Serbian Orthodox episcopate in the Habsburg Monarchy, and of the freedom to profess Christian Orthodox religion on the territory of the Military Border until 1670, when the Court in Vienna, the Roman Catholic Church and military commanders began a forceful attempt to unite the two churches. Their activities arguably provoked rebellions and a violent treatment of the opponents of the union in the first half of the eighteenth century. The monastery and the church in Marča were then taken away from the Orthodox population of the Military Border. Čaplovič’s conclusions, as well as numerous erroneous chronological and biographical data about the bishops of Marča that lacked confirmation of the archival sources, were then adopted by the later historians of the Military Border in the nineteenth century (A. Stojačkovič, J. Schwicker, F. Vaniček). These authors furthermore accepted the wrong and tendentious view of the French historian E. Picot, who argued that Jesuits were the main proponents of the united church in the Military Border, that they encouraged military commanders to implement an intolerant religious politics and that they persuaded some of the bishops of Marča to support the union. Through the work of Vaniček and Schwicker, the conclusions of Čaplovič and Picot became part of the twentieth century historiography and were used by overseas historians such as E. G. Rothenberg, K. Kaser, M. Tanner and J. Fine. They depicted the Habsburg Monarchy as an intolerant state in which Jesuits crucially informed the politics towards the Orthodox population of the Military Border. Yet according to the relevant archival sources, the chief advocates of the union were the Zagreb bishops. The military commanders opposed the bishops’ proposals to unite the two churches because they feared rebellions in the Military Border. The Court in Vienna agreed with the military commanders and rejected many of the bishops’ proposals aimed at establishing a church union. Jesuits were not at all freely active in the Military Border; on the contrary, they visited the area rarely and, when there, never encouraged discussions about the church union precisely because they feared negative responses of the local population. Unfortunately, as international historians are entirely unfamiliar with these more Zlatko Kudelić, Čaplovičeva povijest M 182 arčanske biskupije recent findings of Croatian historians, the erroneous nineteenth-century arguments about the religious politics in the Habsburg Monarchy that originated in the work of Ján Čaplovič are still in currency. The state of the historiography will only be changed if further, comprehensive research of the church and religious history of the Croatian-Slavonian Milita

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