Volo pacem per tres annos. O nouă ediţie a tratatului dintre Mehmed al II-lea şi Iancu de Hunedoara (Adrianopol, 20 nov. 1451)
Volo pacem per tres annos. A new edition of the treaty between Mehmed II and John Hunyadi (Adrianople, november 20, 1451)

Summary/Abstract: After the Long Campaign (1443-1444), the Crusade of Varna (1444) and the Crusade at Kossovopolje, both Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were exhausted. Moreover, already by 1451 dynastic struggles ensued in both realms, as the ascensions of both Ladislaus the Posthumous and Mehmed II were contested. The latter was as an ambitious young sultan that planned for the conquest of Constantinople and, in order to achieve his goal, needed peace at the Hungarian-Ottoman border. The three-year truce concluded between Sultan Mehmed II and John Hunyadi, as lord governor of Hungary, was negotiated by Despot George Branković of Serbia. The peace treaty, issued by the sultan in Adrianople, on the 20th of November 1451, also comprised the maritime Republic of Ragusa, the Kingdom of Bosnia, the Serbian Despotate and the Voivodeship of Wallachia. Despite some military skirmishes in the Balkans, the Hungarian-Ottoman truce remained valid for almost the entire period settled by the treaty. Meanwhile, both John Hunyadi and Mehmed II gathered their forces for a final and decisive battle, which occurred at Belgrade, in the summer of 1456. Thus, the 1451 Treaty of Adrianople provides a genuine „radiography” of south-eastern Europe in the eve of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. In addition, it represents one of the main documentary sources on the career of John Hunyadi. The text was published for the first time 120 years ago, by Nicolae Iorga, whose edition was later included in Documenta Romaniae Historica, series D. Relations between the Romanian Principalities (1222-1456).This important source was edited along with hundreds of other medieval documents, without any comments or historical explanations. This study includes a new, critical edition of the 1451 Treaty of Adrianople, supplemented by an extensive historical commentary of the text, based on a high-resolution digital copy of the sole extant version, preserved in the miscellanea manuscript BSB Clm 19542, at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich.

• Details
• Contents