Juraj Križanić (c. 1618 – 12 September 1683), also known as Jurij Križanič or Yuriy Krizhanich (), was a Croatian Catholic missionary who is often regarded as the earliest recorded pan-Slavist. His ideal, often misunderstood - even today - was to bring about a union of the churches, which Rome and Constantinople had tried to do without success for centuries. He believed that this might come about through closer relations between Slav Catholicism and the Russian Orthodox Church, and supported the idea that all Slavs had a common language and ethnic origin. However, he was not a pan-Slav if this meant seeking the political unity of all Slav people under Russian leadership. He considered that the only possible role for the Tsar to 'correct' or unify the orthography and script used in Slav-language books and awaken Slav consciousness was through works conducive to education and logic. In extremis the South Slavs might join with the Russian tsar as a sovereign of the same language and people if the Catholic rulers supported his leadership in a war against the Ottomans. After lengthy travels and fifteen years of exile in Siberia, Križanić died, misunderstood and disappointed, in battle during the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. Although he had no direct followers, Križanić's work influenced many later South Slav thinkers who championed both reliance on Russia and South Slav cultural and political unification. Biography Early life, education, and early missionary work Križanić was born in Obrh, near Ozalj (in present-day Croatia, then part of the Habsburg Kingdom of Croatia) in 1618, a period of political turmoil and of Turkish invasions into Croatia. He attended a Jesuit grammar school in Ljubljana and a Jesuit gymnasium in Zagreb from 1629 to 1635. His father died when he was 17 years old, at approximately the same time he graduated from the gymnasium. He studied in Graz, then began attending the University of Bologna in 1638 to study theology and graduated in 1640. Shortly after graduating Križanić began attending the Greek College of St. Athanasius, a center in Rome for the training of Catholic missionaries who would work with Orthodox Christians; he graduated from this College in 1642. By the end of his life he was proficient in ten languages. While Križanić had a strong desire to travel to Moscow with the ambitious goal of uniting the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches, he was assigned