L'ambasciata di Antoine Marini presso Luigi XI e il progetto di unione europea (1464)

Antoine Marini's embassy to Louis XI and the European Union project (1464)

Abstract

The Tractatus pacis toti christianitate fiendae was elaborated at the court of the Hussite King George Podebrad of Bohemia by Antoine Marini. The document contains the project of perpetual peace among the sovereigns of Christian Europe, aimed at the common defense against the Turkish danger. The project, in which Casimiro iv of Poland, Mattia Corvino of Hungary and the Republic of Venice were involved in different degrees, was presented to Louis xi of France through an embassy from Prague and arrived in France between the spring and summer of 1464. Despite the failure of the Bohemian attempt in the political sphere, due to the strenuous opposition of the clerical members of the French court to a plan that envisaged a new Crusade subtracted from the hegemony of the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, the twenty-three articles of the Tractatus outline a project of perpetual, strictly international union that prefigures and anticipates the idea of the European Confederation and its main political-juridical instruments.