The Four Gospels was printed in Belgrade in 1552, in the printing press which Trojan Gundulić from Dubrovnik had bought from Prince Radiša. The compositor was hieromonk Mardarije from Mrkša's Church.
The activity of Gundulić's printing press and of some other printing workshops, the renewal of numerous churches and the restoration of the Patrarchate of Peć show that the Serbian people was having some kind of national and cultural revival around the middle of the 16th century.
A hundred years after the fall of Smederevo, the capital of the Despotate, two decades after the Turkish siege of Vienna, and about ten years after the establishment of the Buda Pashalik, the Serbs took advantage of a rare and advantageous period of Ottoman tolerance and mustered all their energy, determined to survive in the adverse circumstances, to renew the memories of their past and to hand them over to their descendants as their most precious legacy. This was the heritage which inspired all later movements and insurrections, and, ultimately, the restoration and resurrection of the Serbian state.