''Supplex Libellus Valachorum Transsilvaniae'' (

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

for ''

Petition A petition is a request to do something, most commonly addressed to a government official or public entity. Petitions to a deity are a form of prayer called supplication. In the colloquial sense, a petition is a document addressed to some offic ...

of the Romanians of

Transylvania Transylvania ( ro, Ardeal or ; hu, Erdély; german: Siebenbürgen) is a historical and cultural region in Central Europe, encompassing central Romania. To the east and south its natural border is the Carpathian Mountains, and to the west the ...

'') is the name of two petitions sent by the leaders of the ethnic Romanians of

to the

Holy Roman Emperor The Holy Roman Emperor, originally and officially the Emperor of the Romans ( la, Imperator Romanorum, german: Kaiser der Römer) during the Middle Ages, and also known as the Roman-German Emperor since the early modern period ( la, Imperato ...

Leopold II, demanding equal political rights with the other ethnicities of Transylvania and a share of the Transylvanian Diet proportional to their population. The first Supplex was sent in March 1791 by Ignatie Darabant, the Greek Catholic bishop of Oradea, to the State Council of

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

. The second Supplex, a largely expanded and argumented version of the first, was brought before the Imperial Court of Vienna on March 30, 1792, by Ioan Bob, Greek Catholic

bishop A bishop is an ordained clergy member who is entrusted with a position of Episcopal polity, authority and oversight in a religious institution. In Christianity, bishops are normally responsible for the governance of dioceses. The role or offic ...

Blaj Blaj (; archaically spelled as ''Blaș''; hu, Balázsfalva; german: Blasendorf; Transylvanian Saxon: ''Blußendref'') is a city in Alba County, Transylvania, Romania. It has a population of 20,630 inhabitants. The landmark of the city is the f ...

, and by Gherasim Adamovici, Orthodox

. The demands in the petition, according to the researches of David Prodan, were largely based on the ''

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (french: Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen de 1789, links=no), set by France's National Constituent Assembly in 1789, is a human civil rights document from the French Revolu ...

'' of

Revolutionary France The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in November 1799. Many of its ideas are consider ...

, and it also included an essay reviewing historical reasons (such as references to a

Roman Dacia Roman Dacia ( ; also known as Dacia Traiana, ; or Dacia Felix, 'Fertile/Happy Dacia') was a province of the Roman Empire from 106 to 271–275 AD. Its territory consisted of what are now the regions of Oltenia, Transylvania and Banat (today ...

-Romanian continuity) as well as statistics about the Romanians (who made up approximately 55% of the population of Transylvania). According to some more recent researches, the argumentation of the Supplex Libellus Valachorum based on the ideas of

natural law Natural law ( la, ius naturale, ''lex naturalis'') is a system of law based on a close observation of human nature, and based on values intrinsic to human nature that can be deduced and applied independently of positive law (the express enacted ...

as well as on the Hungarian feudal judicial argumentation.http://www.hunghist.org/images/volumes/Volume_5_Issue_1/Kov%C3%A1cs.pdf The document was drafted by the most important representatives of the Romanian nation of Transylvania (which were, for the most part, clerics of the Romanian Greek Catholic Church): Samuil Micu,

Petru Maior Petru Maior (; 1761 in Marosvásárhely ''(now Târgu Mureș, Romania)'' – 14 February 1821 in Budapest) was a Romanian writer who is considered one of the most influential personalities of the Age of Enlightenment in Transylvania (the '' Tr ...

, Gheorghe Șincai, Ioan Piuariu-Molnar, Iosif Meheși, Ion Budai-Deleanu, Ioan Para etc. The petition was signed in the name of the Romanian nation by its free categories: Clerus, Nobilitas, Civicusque Status Universae Nationis in Transilvania Valachicae. The ''Supplex'' was rejected during the negotiations in the National Assembly where they discussed not so much the concept and reasoning of public law contained in the Supplex libellus Valachorum, but the issues contained in the royal transcript, and in response to them the following was established: * In counties and Székely chairs, the rights and duties of nobles, freemen and serfs are determined not by nationality, but by orderly affiliation, therefore it is not possible to grant additional rights to Romanians. As for the King's Land, the privileges of the Saxons granted in the Andreanum would be violated by the extra rights of the Romanians; the discussion of this was postponed at the request of the Saxons. * The free exercise of religion by Greek Catholics has been ensured since 1744, a separate bill will be drafted on the Orthodox. * Since each Transylvanian denomination maintains its own clergy, the same must be done for the two Romanian denominations. * The main reason for the ineptitude of the Romanian people is the backwardness of their own priests, to change this, the church commission is preparing a proposal for the next national assembly. As such, the status of the Romanians remained the same. Several such petitions were issued in the following decades, and they all met with the same reaction. Another major petition, the Transylvanian Memorandum, was drafted a century later (in 1892, following the new circumstances after the

1848 Revolution The Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Springtime of the Peoples or the Springtime of Nations, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe starting in 1848. It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in Europea ...

and the '' Ausgleich''), but its authors were sent to prison for

treason Treason is the crime of attacking a state authority to which one owes allegiance. This typically includes acts such as participating in a war against one's native country, attempting to overthrow its government, spying on its military, its diplo ...

References

Sources

* David Prodan, ''Supplex Libellus Valachorum'',

Bucharest Bucharest ( , ; ro, București ) is the capital and largest city of Romania, as well as its cultural, industrial, and financial centre. It is located in the southeast of the country, on the banks of the Dâmbovița River, less than north o ...

, 1948. * Aron Kovacs, Continuity and Discontinuity in Transylvanian Romanian Thought: An Analysis of Four Bishopric Pleas from the Period between 1791 and 1842. In.: Hungarian Historical Review 5, no. 1 (2016): 46–72.

External links

Supplex Libellus Valachorum Transsilvaniae (1791), March 21st 2016, ''Enciclopedia Dacica''
{{Commons category, Supplex Libellus Valachorum Transsilvaniae 1791 documents 1792 documents 1791 in the Holy Roman Empire 1792 in the Holy Roman Empire 18th century in the Habsburg Monarchy Age of Enlightenment Transylvanian School History of Transylvania (1683–1848) Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor