Dacia at Posada: Marino Sanudo Torsello’s Letter to Cardinal Bertrand du Pouget (April 10, 1330)
Dacia at Posada: Marino Sanudo Torsello’s Letter to Cardinal Bertrand du Pouget (April 10, 1330)

Summary/Abstract: In the lands of few surviving documents, yet ofseveral chronicles ,spring 1330 was hectic beyond East-Central and South-European standards. On April 17, Felician Záh came very close to assassinating the royal Angevine family of Hungary. He paid for it with his life and that of his kindred. Within a month, when news from Buda should have arrived on the Bosporus. Andronikos III Palaiologos, who had rejected Church Union in 1327 . decided to join his ally and relative by marriage , Tsar Michael Shishman of Bulgaria, on the latter’s anti-Serbian long awaited endeavour. This ended however with Shishman’s death at the battle of Velbužd (today Kyustendil)8 on July 28, 13309 . It was the short-lived triumph of Stephen Urosh III Dečanski10 , reconnected to John XXII (since 1329) 11 . Already in 1323, the Pope had urged the Serbian king to conquer Byzantium, with support from, as well asfor the benefit of Angevine Naples12 . Michael Sishman’s fall had manifold consequences13 . It first led to a SerbianBulgarian peace14 . This enabled the rise, as co-regent of Bulgaria, of the future tsar (since 1331) John-Alexander15 . In spite of the later propaganda of Stephen Urosh IV Dushan16 , Dečanski’s son and also executioner17 , he had not sent his troops into battle at Velbužd18 . John-Alexander, despot of Loveč, was the son of the devout Catholic Kerana19 , and the son-in-law of Basarab of Wallachia20 , one of the Latin rite princes under Hungarian Angevine power (according to John XXII in 1327)21 . Ultimately, Shishman’s defeat at Velbužd led – within less than two months – in fall 1330 to the Wallachian campaign of Charles-Robert of Hungary22 . He had survived Záh’s suicidal assassination attempt23 . Charles was the ally24 of late Shishman and of Andronikos. Simultaneously (yet likewise unsuccessfully), Andronikos attacked Serbian controlled Bulgaria25 . In mid-November 1330, Charles barely made it back to safety26 . His Hungarian host had been crushed in mountainous Wallachia27 , at Posada. This is the conventional modern name for the battle between Basarab and Charles-Robert, for the trap laid to the king by the Wallachian voivode28 . It is difficult for the historians to reach a consensus regarding the known events of 1330, preserved foremost through conflicting chronicles and later, occasionally much later, deeds29 . It is therefore quite unlikely that an – altogether mitigated – appraisal of the coeval data discussed below will be reached in the foreseeable future. The contemporary medieval authority of the author of the source, id est the known Venetian scholar and politician Marino Sanudo Torsello (c. 1270-c. 1343)30 , and the most intertwined contexts, in which the letter under scrutiny was written, gently allows fathoming a more expedient scholarly outcome.

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