Хорватия тарихшысы және саясаткер Милан Шуффлай өмірі мен қызметі

Croatian historian and politician

Milan Šufflay (8 November 1879 – 19 February 1931) was a Croatian historian and politician. He was one of the founders of Albanology and the author of the first Croatian science fiction novel. As a Croatian nationalist, he was persecuted in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and his murder subsequently caused an internationally publicized affair.

Šufflay was born into a lower noble family (hence pl., plemeniti, "noble", equivalent of von) in Lepoglava, in the Kingdom of Croatia Slavonia to Augustin Šufflay (1847–190? ), a teacher, and Franciska Welle von Vorstern (1847–1910), a German Hungarian from Osijek. The family coat of arms was included in Der Adel von Kroatien und Slavonien (1899) as "Sufflay de Otrussevcz". Their original surname was Sufflei or Schufflei, and their estate was Otruševec. He attended a comprehensive high school in Zagreb and studied history at the University of Zagreb. He received a Ph. D. in 1901 from the same university with the thesis Croatia and the Last Endeavor of the Eastern Empire Under the Scepter of Three Komnenos (1075–1180). He was a brilliant student both in high school and at the university. Already during his studies, he spoke French, German, Italian, English, all the Slavic languages, as well as Latin, old Greek, and middle Greek. Later in life, he learned modern Greek, Albanian, Hebrew, and Sanskrit. Tadija Smičiklas considered Šufflay his most gifted student and took him as his assistant when editing Codex Diplomaticus of the Yugoslavian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Šufflay became a historian of the Balkans and was convinced that the history of the Croats can only be researched properly from that perspective. This conviction clashed with the prevailing opinion of Croatian historians that the Croats were representatives of the West, as opposed to the Balkans. Ignoring the proposal of the university senate, Ban Pavao Rauch appointed him a university professor in Zagreb in 1908. However, when Nikola Tomašić, his distant cousin and enemy, became a Ban in 1910, Šufflay had to leave the university. No longer exempt from military duty as a university professor, he was drafted in early 1915 but was soon released because of illness. He wrote his most important works during this period.