Pjetër (Peter) Bogdani (1625-1689)
Born in Gur i Hasit near Prizren about 1630, Bogdani was educated in the traditions of the Catholic church to which he devoted all his energy. His uncle Andrea or Ndre Bogdani (ca. 1600-1683) was Archbishop of Skopje and author of a Latin-Albanian grammar, now lost. Bogdani is said to have received his initial schooling from the Franciscans at Ciprovac in northwestern Bulgaria and then studied at the Illyrian College of Loretto near Ancona, as had his predecessors Pjetër Budi and Frang Bardhi. From 1651 to 1654 he served as a parish priest in Pult and from 1654 to 1656 studied at the College of the Propaganda Fide in Rome where he graduated as a doctor of philosophy and theology. In 1656, he was named Bishop of Shkodra, a post he held for twenty-one years, and was also appointed Administrator of the Archdiocese of Antivari (Bar) until 1671. During the most troubled years of the Turkish-Austrian war, 1664-1669, he hid out in the villages of Barbullush and Rjoll near Shkodra.
After arranging for the publication of the Cuneus Prophetarum, Bogdani returned to the Balkans in March 1686 and spent the next years promoting resistance to the armies of the Ottoman Empire, in particular in Kosova. He contributed a force of 6,000 Albanian soldiers to the Austrian army which had arrived in Prishtina and accompanied it to capture Prizren. There, however, he and much of his army were met by another equally formidable adversary, the plague. Bogdani returned to Prishtina but succumbed to the disease there in December 1689. His nephew Gjergj reported in 1698 that his uncle's remains were later exhumed by Turkish and Tatar soldiers and fed to the dogs in the middle of the square in Prishtina. So ended one of the great figures of early Albanian culture, the writer often referred to as the father of Albanian prose.
The Cuneus Prophetarum was published in two parallel columns, one in Albanian and one in Italian, and is divided into two volumes, each with four sections (scala). The first volume, which is preceded by dedications and eulogies in Latin, Albanian, Serbian and Italian, and includes two eight-line poems in Albanian, one by his cousin Luca Bogdani and one by Luca Summa, deals primarily with themes from the Old Testament: i) How God created man, ii) The prophets and their metaphors concerning the coming of the Messiah, iii) The lives of the prophets and their prophecies, iv) The songs of the ten Sibyls. The second volume, entitled De vita Jesu Christi salvatoris mundi (On the life of Jesus Christ, saviour of the world), is devoted mostly to the New Testament: i) The life of Jesus Christ, ii) The miracles of Jesus Christ, iii) The suffering and death of Jesus Christ, iv) The resurrection and second coming of Christ. This section includes a translation from the Book of Daniel, 9. 24-26, in eight languages: Latin, Greek, Armenian, Syriac, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian and Albanian, and is followed by a chapter on the life of the Antichrist, by indices in Italian and Albanian and by a three-page appendix on the Antichità della Casa Bogdana (Antiquity of the House of the Bogdanis).
The Cuneus Prophetarum is considered to be the masterpiece of early Albanian literature and is the first work in Albanian of full artistic and literary quality. In scope, it covers philosophy, theology and science (with digressions on geography, astronomy, physics and history). With its poetry and literary prose, it touches on questions of aesthetic and literary theory. It is a humanist work of the Baroque Age steeped in the philosophical traditions of Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, and St Thomas Aquinas. Bogdani's fundamental philosophical aim is a knowledge of God, an unravelling of the problem of existence, for which he strives with reason and intellect.