Supplex Libellus Valachorum

"Supplex Libellus Valachorum Transsilvaniae" (Latin for "Petition of the Vlachs of Transylvania") is the name of two petitions sent by the leaders of the ethnic Romanians of Transylvania to the Holy Roman Emperor 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. 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 of Blaj, and by Gherasim Adamovici, Orthodox bishop of Transylvania.

The demands in the petition were largely based on the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" of Revolutionary France, and it also included an essay reviewing historical reasons (such as references to a Roman Dacia-Romanian continuity) as well as statistics about the Romanians (who made up more than 60% of the population of Transylvania).

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, Gheorghe Şincai, Ioan Piuariu-Molnar, Iosif Meheşi, Ioan 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 and, 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 and the "Ausgleich"), but its authors were sent to prison for treason.

References

* David Prodan, "Supplex Libellus Valachorum", Bucharest, 1948.