Žiga Zois, Baron Edelstein (Trieste 1747 – Ljubljana 1819), Enlightenment patron and mentor of Slovenian poets, writers, and scholars, was born into an ennobled mercantile family originally from Bergamo, and was schooled in Reggio nell’Emilia (1761-65). From 1768 on he took over his father’s property and business: a trading company in Trieste and Venice, a chain of mines and ironworks in Upper Carniola and Styria, and several dominions in Carniola. A keen student of the natural sciences (mineralogy, geology, zoology, and botany), he introduced technical innovations and his own inventions into his industrial plans, and corresponded with leading European natural scientists. In 1779 and 1780 he travelled round Europe to investigate the progress of economy and industry, but also the state of culture and literature in the leading countries. Worsening gout confined him to a wheelchair from 1797 on in his mansion in Ljubljana, but he maintained a wide network of scholarly and political contacts.

Between 1780 and 1819, his mansion in Ljubljana was the meeting point for the most prominent intellectuals in Carniola (known as the “Zois circle”), including the poet and translator Jurij Japelj, the philologist and educator Blaž Kumerdej, Anton Tomaž Linhart, Valentin Vodnik, Jernej Kopitar, Matevž Ravnikar, and Franc Metelko. Under Zois’s guidance, these intellectuals developed an Enlightenment interest in the Slovenian language and culture, envisaging a scholarly Slovenian grammar and dictionary, a history of the Slovenians, orthographic reform, and the production of useful reading in correct Slovenian.

Although Zois himself published almost nothing in the field of Slovenian letters or Slavic languages, he stimulated and sponsored the productivity of those around him: the lexicographical and grammatical work of Japelj and Kumerdej, or Linhart’s shift from German to Slovenian drama and his Versuch einer Geschichte von Krain (1788-91). Zois guided Vodnik’s writing of poems in Slovenian by pointing him to classical poetics and coordinated the preparation of Vodnik’s Velika pratika (“Large almanac”, 1795-97). He was also involved in the preparation of Vodnik’s (ultimately unpublished) great Slovenian dictionary. Finally, Zois sponsored Kopitar, who became his secretary in 1803. In 1808 Zois sent Kopitar to Vienna to complete his Slovenian grammar and to study law and Slavic languages, and especially to conduct research into the language’s early history. He quickly secured Kopitar’s promotion in society and his employment in the court library, and supported the publication of the Grammatik der Slavischen Sprache in Krain, Kärnten und Steyermark. Zois himself also wrote Slovenian poems and dealt with Slavistics, but scarcely published anything.

Zois, who had at first considered himself a Carniolan, Austrian, and Slav, from 1810 on saw himself as Slovenian, with a particular notion as to the distinct character of the Slovenian language and nation within the Slavic family. After 1808, he and Kopitar planned and established the first transnational epistolary network of European Slavic scholars, which eventually would include Josef Valentin Zlobický, Josef Dobrovský, Józef Maksymilian Ossoliński, Francesco Maria Appendini, Maksimilijan Vrhovac, Pavle Solarić, and Vuk Karadžić. Zois lent support by providing contacts, funding, and books, enabling the first permanent intellectual conduit between the Slavic north and Slavic south (by way of Vienna, Kopitar’s base of operations). Zois also conceived proposals for the governance of the south Slavic lands and recommended these to French and Austrian statesmen: Marmont, French governor of the Illyrian Provinces; the court commissar of the Illyrian lands, Franz Joseph von Saurau; and Metternich himself. Zois (in collaboration with Vodnik) in 1810 prevented the introduction of Serbo-Croatian into Carniolan schools, thus securing the independent development of Slovenian. In 1814 and 1816, Zois, together with Kopitar, supported the establishment of an Illyrian kingdom as a South Slavic state under the Austrian Crown, with Ljubljana as its capital.