Protagonisti e collaboratori. Studiosi provenienti dall'Europa centro-orientale presso gli archivi della Santa Sede tra il 1881 e il 1918, a cura di Alessandro Boccolini–Matteo Sanfilippo–Péter Tusor–Katalin Nagy (Storia d'Ungheria 2), Viterbo: Sette Cittá 2025, viii+269 p.
This volume contains the proceedings of an international conference held on June 6, 2024, at the National Institute of Roman Studies on the Aventine Hill, not far from the headquarters of the Order of Malta. Its title is the same as that of this publication: "Protagonists and collaborators. Central and Eastern European researchers in the archives of the Holy See between 1881 and 1918".
The conference was held on the centenary of the death of Vilmos Fraknói (1843–1924), who was already a knowned historian in his lifetime and, during his career, was a canon, titular bishop (never ordained) and secretary general of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Fraknói arrived in Rome in the spring of 1881 and was given the opportunity at the papal court to discuss with the cardinal of the curia and Pope Leo XIII the possibilities of scientific use of the Vatican archives, which had recently become accessible.
In 1882, he founded the Monumenta Vaticana Hungariae series, which published a huge collection of documents from 1884 onwards. A small Hungarian "Roman historical school" formed around this work, which was one of the first systematic responses to the opening of the Holy See's archival collections. In 1894, Fraknói used his church income to build a residence in Rome for Hungarian scholars: this was the seat of the Hungarian Historical Institute, which operated until 1905.
The studies collected here follow two directions. On the one hand, they reconstruct the beginnings of Fraknói's Vatican research using new sources, and on the other hand, they pay special attention to his colleagues, who came to Rome at his invitation and worked under his supervision in the archives of the Holy See. However, the heroic era of Hungarian research in the Vatican is not presented in isolation: the volume is placed in a broader Central European context, including the connections of Polish, Czech-Moravian, and Austrian historiography with Rome.