Blessed Augustine Kazotić of Lucera (c. 1260–1323)
Also known as: Augustin Kažotić • Augustino Gazotich • Augustine of Nocera
Priest • Dominican Friar • Bishop • Humanist • Apostle of Charity
Feast Day: August 3 (Dominican Calendar)
A Son of Dalmatia — And the First Croatian to Be Beatified
Augustine Kažotić, the first Croatian to be beatified, a Dominican and bishop, was born in Trogir around the year 1260 and died in Lucera on August 3, 1323. That single fact — the first Croatian to be beatified — is itself a statement about the man. He did not merely live the faith; he lived it to a degree the Church formally recognized as heroic. He blazed a trail for his entire nation.
His father, Nicolas de Caczioth, was one of the most honorable and influential men of the town, and much respected for his virtuous life. His mother, Droslawa, was a daughter of the ancient house of the Draseovics — she was no less pious than her husband. Augustine entered the world formed by holiness, and he never let go of it.
He was one of the first humanist figures to appear in southern Croatia — a great Apostle of Charity.
The Road to the Habit — Attacked and Left for Dead
The story of Augustine’s entrance into Dominican life is marked from the very beginning by blood.
Augustine was born into a wealthy family who provided him with an excellent education. At 18, he and an Italian friend headed to the Dominican novitiate in France. Near Pavia, Italy, they were attacked by enemies of his family, who left the bodies of the two boys in the snow by the side of the road. Augustine was badly injured; his friend died. When he recovered from his injuries, Augustine continued to the novitiate.
This is a detail that must not be passed over quickly. Before he ever wore the Dominican habit, Augustine was left for dead in a snowbank. His companion lay murdered beside him. And when he recovered, he did not turn back. He got up and finished the journey. The man who would one day govern two dioceses with extraordinary gentleness began his religious life by walking over the body of a dead friend to reach a cloister.
He cultivated a very special devotion to the Angelic Doctor, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and sought so to model his life upon his that some of his ancient biographers have called him a disciple of that holy doctor. The thread of the Dominican intellectual tradition runs straight from Thomas through Augustine — Paris, the Summa, the Friars Preachers, the mission.
A Dominican Pope Raises Up a Dominican Bishop
What connects Augustine to the papacy is one of the most distinctly Dominican features of his story.
His fine spiritual qualities brought him to the attention of the legate Cardinal Niccolo Boccasino, a fellow Dominican. Upon the latter’s elevation to the Papacy as Benedict XI in 1303, Augustine was made Bishop of Zagreb.
Here is something that deserves to be savored: the man who appointed Augustine was himself a Dominican, elevated to the Chair of Peter. Benedict XI recognized in his brother friar the qualities of a true shepherd — and he was right. What Augustine would do with the See of Zagreb confirmed every confidence the Pope had placed in him.
Bishop of Zagreb: Builder, Reformer, Father of the Poor
The episcopate of Blessed Augustine at Zagreb was not the comfortable administration of an established diocese. It was a work of reconstruction — pastoral, liturgical, social, and architectural — in a region that had been devastated and disordered by decades of violence and conflict.
He reformed the liturgy and introduced the original ‘Zagreb liturgy.’ He established the cathedral school, introduced the joint reading of the breviary in the cathedral, paid attention to the hygiene of the people and health service, and took care of the poor. He regularly gave most of his diocesan income to the poor.
He also provided for free schooling for underprivileged students in his cathedral school. In an era when education was available only to those who could afford it, Augustine opened the doors. This is not progressive politics — it is the ancient Catholic conviction that every soul, regardless of birth, is made in the image of God and deserves the tools to know truth.
The new Bishop reformed the clergy, completed building the cathedral, and diligently brought about the spiritual renewal of the diocese and its people — while fending off the attacks of the hostile King of Dalmatia.
That last phrase is not a footnote. The bishop governed not only against the entropy of a disordered diocese, but against the active hostility of a hostile king. He held the line on both fronts — pastorally and politically — because he understood that the bishop’s first loyalty is not to the throne but to Christ.
Signs and Wonders: The Miraculous Bishop
The chronicles associate Blessed Augustine with a cluster of remarkable events that the faithful preserved across the centuries.
The river water of Zagreb was unfit to drink, so the Dominican fathers asked Augustine to pray for a new supply. At his prayer, a fountain sprang up in the yard of the convent, abundantly supplying their needs. Another time he planted a tree in a little village and the leaves turned out to have healing properties.
Historian Balthazar Krčelić, a canon, wrote that in 1312, when the cathedral was being built, there was a severe drought, and that by the intercession of the holy bishop, a spring of water today known as Manduševac at the present-day Jelačić square gushed. The spring that still runs in the heart of Zagreb today is, by tradition, the answer to a bishop’s prayer. Augustine’s intercession has been woven into the topography of his city.
And then there is the story that has been passed down through the centuries with particular charm: On one occasion, when Bishop Augustine was dining with Benedict XI, the pope — feeling that a missionary bishop must eat well to preach well — had a dish of partridge set before Augustine, who never ate meat. Because he did not want to offend the pope, he prayed for a resolution to the situation. The legend says that God turned the partridges into fish.
This is not trivial. The episode reveals an interior life of startling intimacy with God — a man whose prayer was not merely an act of piety but a living conversation, and whose mortification (no meat, ever) was so complete that even a papal table could not override it, except by miracle.
Exile, Politics, and the Bishop Who Would Not Bend
His adamant defence of the rights of all against the abuses by King Charles Robert of Anjou got him exiled from the Kingdom of Croatia and Hungary after he travelled to Avignon and asked Pope John XXII for help in 1318.
This is the pattern of the great episcopal martyrs and confessors of the Church: Ambrose against Theodosius. Thomas Becket against Henry II. John Fisher against Henry VIII. And now Augustine Kazotić against Charles Robert of Anjou. The bishop who defends the poor and the weak against the powerful will always find himself in conflict with those who use power for themselves. Augustine went all the way to Avignon — to the Pope himself — rather than compromise the rights of his flock. And for that, he was removed from his diocese.
Lucera: A Church to Be Rebuilt from Nothing
The transfer to Lucera was not merely political relocation. It was the assignment of an apostolic mission of extraordinary difficulty.
In 1317 he was transferred to the See of Lucera, where he labored to restore peace after the Moslem withdrawal and completely reformed the diocese.
Lucera’s history is remarkable. For much of the 13th century, it had been a Muslim colony — a city of Saracens transplanted to Italy by the Norman-Hohenstaufen kings. When the political situation changed and the Muslim population was expelled, Lucera was left without functioning Catholic institutions, without a coherent diocese, without the structures of parish life. Augustine was sent to rebuild all of it, from the ground up, among a population that needed to be evangelized as much as governed.
Here he continued his holy government, using his characteristic gentleness and his gift of healing. He promoted devotion to Saints Dominic, Thomas Aquinas, and Peter Martyr — all brother Dominicans.
The three names he promoted are a Dominican triptych: Dominic, the Founder; Thomas, the Doctor; Peter Martyr, the blood-witness. In promoting those three devotions, Augustine was handing his new flock the entire Dominican charism — prayer, truth, and the willingness to die for both.
His Death: The Apostle’s Final Witness
Feeling that he was near death, he returned to the Dominican convent in Nocera to die among his brethren.
There is something deeply right about this. He had governed two dioceses. He had been a humanist and an orator. He had battled kings and heretics and built springs and cathedral schools. And at the end, he wanted to die not in a bishop’s palace but in a Dominican convent, among his brothers in white and black. The friar outlasted the bishop. The habit was home.
He died there on August 3, 1323.
His body is kept in the cathedral in Lucera and his relics in the Zagreb cathedral. Two dioceses — one in Croatia, one in Italy — claimed him in death as they had claimed him in life. He was theirs. And he had given himself to them utterly.
His Beatification
His reputation for personal holiness remained noted long after his death; this resulted in Pope Innocent XII confirming the late bishop’s beatification in 1700. Pope Clement XI beatified him in 1702, and a process of canonization is in progress.
A Battle on Multiple Fronts — And the Same Weapon on All of Them
Augustine spent most of his life battling heresy: in his native Dalmatia, he fought the Manichaean heresy; in Sicily, Islam; in Hungary, both.
The weapon he used against all of it was never merely argument. It was the combination that marks every Dominican at his best: deep holiness expressed in confident preaching, radical poverty that authenticated everything he said, and a personal charity — especially to the poor — that made his words credible. He continued his holy government, using his characteristic gentleness and his gift of healing.
Gentleness and healing. Not coercion. Not political leverage. Not denunciation. The same tools Jordan of Pisa used in Florence. The same tools Aimo Tapparelli used in Piedmont. God builds His Church on the same foundation in every century: men who love, preach, suffer, and refuse to stop.
The Thread Running Through This Series
The Dominicans in this series span five centuries and several nations — France, Italy, Poland, Croatia, Alsace. From Reginald of Orléans receiving the scapular from Our Lady in 1218, to Jean-Georges Rehm dying on a prison hulk in 1794, to the blessed bishops like Augustine governing their flocks with gentleness and fighting for the poor against hostile kings — the charism holds.
Augustine Kazotić is the episcopal face of the Dominican spirit. He is what happens when a friar who survived a murder attempt in a snowbank, who walked to Paris to study, who gave away his episcopal income to the poor, who turned partridges into fish by his prayer — is given a bishop’s ring and a diocese in ruins and told: rebuild it.
He did. Twice.
Blessed Augustine Kazotić, pray for us.