Regesta Supplicationum, 1522–1523. The Supplications Relating to the Kingdom of Hungary Approved under Pope Hadrian VI

CLASSIS I
vol. 16
Bálint Lakatos

Regesta Supplicationum, 1522–1523. The Supplications Relating to the Kingdom of Hungary Approved under Pope Hadrian VI, edited by BÁLINT LAKATOS (CVH I/16), Budapest–Rome 2018. (288 p. + 3 picture/facsimilia + 1 map)

From the Hungarian-related 15th and 16th century sources kept in the Vatican Secret Archives, the exploitation and publishing of the supplications, namely, the requests addressed to the pope in writing and accepted by the pontiff or his representative is an old debt of the Hungarian research. As the approved and signed supplications were not kept in the papal Chancellery, since they were thrown out after being copied, there are really few original of them survived. The texts of these requests survived in large numbers from 1342 only in the series of the Registra supplicationum, or in Italian Registri delle suppliche, which has thousands of volumes, and were recorded in the Dataria Apostolica and have been preserved from 1892 in the Vatican Secret Archives.

This volume as part of a future subseries contains 66 Hungarian-related supplications of 39 thick registers written under Adrian VI's short pontificate (1522-1523). Although the demonstrated period is quite short, it opens a narrow window to the horizon of the papal-Hungarian relations. A great part of the revealed sources refer to the persons related to the ecclesiastical provinces of Esztergom and Kalocsa. As regards their subject, two thirds of the found material are supplications asking for the rehearing of the church tribunal's cases examinef by local judges and for ordination. This occurrence is not due to the short period, but to the strategy of the Hungarian petitioners and to the work of the Hungarian church tribunals. Those who asked their ordination to priests submitted their requests to the pope in a large number in March 1523, that can be regarded as an example for the incident of the so-called "ordination tourism"-named by secondary literature.

The text edition is accompanied by an introduction, which summarizes the literature of the topic and presents the subject and the collected material, and an overall index of the person and place-names. Besides, it is supplemented by an archival reference-concordance.