Letter from Pristina to the Holy Congregation of Propaganda Fides

[Speaking of Peter Bogdani] Having appeared with supreme command before the holy court, he won everything according to his desire. Soon after, after his justice was recognized, he was elected bishop of Shkodra as a reward and, appearing, as is customary, before the Pope of the time, Alexander VII, he kindly called us our Teacher; being then given the entire direction of the church of Shkodra and was charged by the Holy Congregation with the administration of the Archbishopric of Tivar very usefully, with zeal, with clearness and preaching the Word of God, which caused him endless worries and persecutions great from the Turks, as he devotes everything to your excellences and on the other hand, because of his own that he suffered, it seemed to him little that he was in divine pain to illuminate Albania with such light; but he wanted to illuminate Serbia with the rays of his doctrine, since your excellencies appointed him archbishop of Skopje and administrator of the whole of this kingdom, in which he happily labored for 12 years in its direction in the most greedy time that can exist and yet he never withdrew from the direction of his flock, and he did not withdraw in spite of a thousand dangers, comforting them with the food of the Word of God. At last, on the arrival from these parts of the victorious army of our Caesar, he went to the meeting in person to suppress the pride of the troops so that they would not be driven to injury and wrongdoing to the Catholics, and happily he completely succeeded.
Then, as he returned to Prizren, his own homeland, with the strong illustrious general Piccolomini to catch his breath, this brave knight fell into a bed of plague, beside which, standing in the last need of his soul, the aforesaid Venerable, he also took the pestilential fluids because of which, confined to his bed on the enemy's frontiers and to the distress of the whole country, as much because of the death in the aforesaid city of the very excellent general Piccolomini, as because of his illness, he was advised from the other war leaders, as sick as he was, he was sheltered in Pristina as a safer and more comfortable place for German doctors.

After he arrived in Pristina, he was received with great love by all the counts and prominent leaders of the war, where after no more than five days since he fell ill, on December 6, in the morning hours, he surrendered his soul to God, strengthened by all the holy sacraments and assisted by the Reverend Father Francis Xavier Coffleri, of the Society of Jesus, and by most of his clergy. His corpse was placed in the Imperial Mosque of this place, turned into a new church dedicated to Saint Francis Xavier, on the right side of the great altar with the greatest grandeur and horror. Great is the pain of the entire clergy and of this suffering Christianity for the loss of such a zealous shepherd, the gloomy feelings that his loss has caused in the souls of this entire Caesarian army.

Source: Original document from the Propaganda Fides archive in Rome, APF SOCG, vol. 506 ff° 251r-252r (Translation: Stefan Paloka).