Camoenae Hungaricae 3(2006) - Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények

indicates he did make a start in this direction. At the end of the Prodromus, Marsili
makes it clear that the work to be published is none other than the properly ordered collection
of papers documenting the peace negotiations and the border surveys: “Thus, the
conditions of the peace treaty relevant to the borders, necessitating the delegation of
plenipotentiary envoys from both sides, the correspondence between Mohammedan and
Christian statesmen, the lists of controversial topics and the descriptions of negotiations
complete the work containing documents, which I have structured according to chronology
and according to the places of their recording and dispatch. To all this I attached the
sketches of the «improvised boundary markers» which had to be employed when we had
no access to rocks, marble and great millstones.” 103
The emerging contours of the Acta pacis will then not simply add another unpublished
item to the Marsili opus but will in a certain way, provide a perspective on the entirety of
the collection and the organising principles of its structure. I think it is rather inevitable
that it is the completeness of the Marsili papers and their organising principle which has
remained hidden from so many scholars who were cherry-picking from the material,
looking only for texts about their own national pasts and who in the process ultimately
failed to see the forest for the trees. Hungarian scholars, for instance, went through the
two volumes (19 and 117) inattentively, because, in my opinion, these sketchy texts (it
takes 120 pages to get from the Huns of Attila to Leopold) offered no new information
regarding our national history and not because they had not registered the manuscripts.
Endre Veress, for instance, commented the Italian version this way: “Brief history of
Hungary, written in Italian, introductory to his work about the peace treaty of Karlowitz.
Insignificant. Rough copy.” 104 I think it is time to re-evaluate this entire attitude, as well
as the criteria used to determine the order of priorities.
A plan for the publication of the Marsili papers
Let us suppose this will come about, since it has lately become very timely for the
grand vision of Marsili’s last period about the division and cohabitation of Europe and
the Muslim world to leave the silence of the archives. If it does come about, if the scholarly
and financial conditions are met for the publication of the Marsili papers, then we
can ask the question: should a modern source publication adhere to the original intentions
of the author? The answer, in my opinion, is no. From the perspective of the history of
science, a publication of much more than Marsili originally intended is justified. For
103 “Articuli igitur actorum pacis ad limitationem spectantes et delegationem commissariorum et utrosque
plenipotentiarios, mutuae epistolae inter tot Christianos ministros, atque Mahometanos, controversiarum
tabulae, rerumque series integrum opus actorum perficient, quae ita disponam, ut suo singula quoque ordini ac
tempori, quo lata sunt, locoque ubi confecta sunt et unde sunt missa, respondeant. His omnibus addo figuras
limitaneorum signorum, quae tumultuaria dicimus, et quae adhibenda fuere, cum saxa, marmora, et molares
lapides deessent…” Prodromus, without pagination.
104 VERESS 1906, op. cit., 37.
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Camoenae Hungaricae 3(2006)