Matthias Flacius

Biography Early life and education Flacius was born in Labin (Albona) in Istria, son of Andrea Vlacich (Andrija Vlačić) alias Francovich and Jacobea (Jakovica) Luciani, daughter of a wealthy and powerful Albonian civic family. Further, he himself signed a payment slip at the University of Wittenberg as Mathias Francovich Illyricus. The origin of the double surname is not clear, but it might have been a double last name resulting from marriage, his or some of his ancestors'.

At the age of sixteen, Flacius went to study in Venice, where he was taught by the humanist Giambattista Cipelli (Baptista Aegnatius / Battista Egnazio). At the age of seventeen, he intended to join a monastic order, with a view to sacred learning. His intention, however, was diverted by his uncle-in-law, (As mentioned, his uncle Luciano Luciani, married Ivanka Lupetina, the sister of the friar Baldo.) Flacius himself calls Lupetino the "brother-in-law of his uncle (der Schwager meines Oheims)

Flacius continued his studies in Basel in 1539, then went to Tübingen and finally ended up in Wittenberg, where in (1541) he was welcomed by Philip Melanchthon. In Tübingen, Flacius was received into the house of Matthias Garbitius (Matija Grbac) a humanist and a professor of Greek at the University of Tübingen, who, like Flacius, was from Istria, and was called "fellow countryman" (conterraneous) by Flacius.

Affirming the natural inability of man, he adopted a position on sin as not being an accident of human nature, but involved in its substance, since The Fall of Man.

Family life In 1545, while at Wittenberg, Flacius married a pastor's daughter. He had twelve children with his first wife before she died in 1564. He remarried the same year in Regensburg and had six more children with his second wife. His son was professor of logic and medicine at Rostock.

Works

De vocabulo fidei (1549) De voce et re fidei (1555) Antilogia Papae: hoc est, de corrupto Ecclesiae statu et totius cleri papistici perversitate, Scripta aliquot veterum authorum, ante annos plus minus CCC, et interea: nunc primum in lucem eruta, et ab interitu vindicata (1555) Catalogus testium veritatis, qui ante nostram aetatem reclamarunt Papae (1556) Confessio Waldensium (1568) Konfutationsbuch (1559) Ecclesiastica historia, integram Ecclesiae Christi ideam ... secundum singulas Centurias, perspicuo ordine complectens ... ex vetustissimis historicis ...congesta: Per aliquot studiosos et pios viros in urbe Magdeburgica (1559–1574) Clavis Scripturae Sacrae seu de Sermone Sacrarum literarum (1567) Glossa compendiaria in Novum Testamentum (1570)