In 1578. Vienna decided to build a fortress so the most famous engineers were gathered and a special building commission was founded. Matija Gambon was in charge of it, and his right hand was Batista Bianchini. The future Karlovac was to be built in the shape of a six-pointed star, surrounded with bulwarks and ditches with water. Matija Gambon made the project and led the construction, leaning on the studies of Italian architecture theories. Chain fortresses like this one were built as a defense system ("antemurale christianitatis") by all Christian countries united against the Turks .

It is assumed that she was born in Bosiljevo around 1625. She married Petar Zrinski in 1641. She was the mother of four children. She had a great literally talent and is known as the greatest Croatian female writer of 17th century. Katarina is the first women in northern Croatia who was engaged in creative work and translation. In 1660 in Ozalj she translated "Traveler's Accompanier", a German collection of prayers, and published it in Venice. She also wrote poems. Besides already mentioned qualities, Katarina was also well known as a great diplomat, and she knew several languages (she spoke German, Hungarian and Italian, and she wrote in Croatian and Latin). After the fall of Zrinski-Frankopan Conspiracy she fell in disgrace of the Court, and spent the rest of her life in a monastery. She died on November16th 1673 in Graz.

The most important female writer in Karlovac at the time of the Illyrian movement. She was a daughter of ironworks dealer, a self taught tailor, an educator and a teacher. She finished primary school in Karlovac. She worked as an educator in nobility houses in Graz, Trieste and Venice. She published her works in Danica, Kola, Pilgar, Neven, Glasonoša, Obzor, Smilje, Napredak... (Famous Croatian magazines from the 19th century). Besides poems, she published three stories entitled "Domorodne poviesti" (Homeland Histories). She is famous for her "Diary" written as an honest confession of a sensitive and a lonely woman in over 1000 pages.

Croatian poet and politician born on July 18th 1814 in Novi Vinodolski. He attended high school in Rijeka, Zagreb and Szombathely, and studied law in Zagreb. After the studies, he worked as a teacher in one high school in Zagreb, and later as a lawyer in Karlovac. He started writing poems while he was still in high school in Rijeka. From 1835 to 1841, he wrote as an associate of Gaj's Danica. In 1846 he published his biggest and most important work: epic poem Smrt Smail-age Čengića (Death of Smail-aga Čengić). Until the 1849, Mažuranić was a prominent leader of a so-called Karlovac group of the Illyrian movement, and during his stay in Karlovac, he achieved the peak of his creative work. The first public reading of Mažuranić's epic poem was in Karlovac in 1847. He was the Banus from 1871 to 1880, and after that he left every political activity and lived reclused, occupied in mathematics and astronomy.

Vjekoslav Karas is the first known educated Croatian painter from the second half of the 19th century. He was born in Karlovac in a humble craftsman family. He discovered painting when he was only ten. He acquired his first knowledge in a house-painting workshop, and also with painter Fridrich Hemerlitz. Colonel Franjo Kos and other prominent Karlovac people helped him raise money for his education in Italy. At first he studied on Florence Academy, with Corsi and Meli as his first teachers. Three years later, in Rome, Karas becomes influenced by the Nazarenes and their spiritual leader Friedrich Overback, and in that period he worked on cycles of religious paintings. Besides painting, Karas also studied singing, music theory, flute and guitar in Rome. He was the founder of a smaller quire in Karlovac, for which he composed over thirty compositions. The most important Karas' works are: Roman Women with Lute, Mother Gives Moses to the River, Ana Krešić, Miško Krešić, Portrait of Josefina Barac-Bernardić, Boy, Self-portrait. Because of his sensibility he couldn't stand the incomprehension and the lack of motivation for further work in his environment. His life ended tragically with suicide in the Korana River on July 5th 1858.
According to many, Vjekoslav Karas was the most important painter in Croatia in 19th century.

Mirko Seljan was born on April 5th 1871, and his younger brother Stjepan on August 19th 1875. After primary school, the brothers travel trough Europe, and gather experience for later expeditions. In 1898, Mirko won the title "Champion of Globetrotter" for the accomplishment of passing the distance from Petersburg to Paris on foot in 110 days. Their enthusiasm for books about the unexplored parts of the world, made them go to Africa in 1899. After many troubles they arrived in Abyssinia and there they were appointed commissioners in government by the Emperor Menelik II. Seljan brothers have explored parts of the Rudolf and Stefania Lakes, and published the first geomorphologic, climatologist and ethnographic researche on those parts. But soon they packed the equipment and went to South America in 1903. There they organized several expeditions to unexplored parts. They were the first to mark out the position of Salto de Guayara Waterfalls, and several South American rivers, and to gather important documentation about the life of the native tribes. They also explored finding sites of caoutchouc and gold, and the ways of exploiting them in inaccessible places. Their most important idea, connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific with a channel as an extension of Amazon River, hasn't been fulfilled. That bold project was shut down after the sudden and unexplained death of Mirko Seljan in 1913 in Peru. In his book published in 1919, Stjepan Seljan claimed that Mirko was murdered. Other sources tell us about starvation, fighting with Indians, floods, disappearance in the jungle, and even of bloody cannibal feast with soaking-in of the brain from the skull. The fact remains that the official cause of death was never established. After Mirko's disappearance the younger brother Stevo went to Brazil where he was engaged in exploitation of mangan mineral. He died in village of Ouro Preto in 1936.