On October 16–17, several members of our project attended a conference bringing together Hungarian researchers of the history of diplomacy in the late medieval and early modern period. The conference titled “Békék és szerződések: Diplomáciatörténet I. Lajostól II. Rákóczi Ferencig” (“Peaces and Treaties: the history of Diplomacy from Louis I of Hungary to Ferenc Rákóczi II”) took place at Szeged and was mainly concerned with the history of diplomacy of Hungary and the neighboring regions in the 14–18th centuries.
The SMALLST project was represented by its Hungarian members, who each presented their latest results in the research of small state diplomacy. Gábor Kármán explored the case of Gábor Bethlen and the 1625 peace negotiations between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, to which the Ottomans invited the envoys of the Transylvanian Prince as well. This involvement signals an unusual importance, so the paper explored how Bethlen was able to gain such political weight when a mere decade earlier he still had to make notable sacrifices to even keep his position as Prince of Transylvania.
Zsuzsanna Cziráki examined the methods and actors of decision-making in the Habsburg Empire of the 1606–1666 period. Focusing on the fragile relationship between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs and the decisions regarding the Eastern region, Zsuzsanna tried to reconstruct the process of decision-making within the Habsburg court and to identify the courtiers and government members involved in the process.
France was a logical choice as an ally against the Habsburg Empire for the Principality of Transylvania, and negotiations between the two states have been ongoing for decades in the early modern period. Several treaties and negotiations were made between the two polities, and Zsuzsanna Hámori Nagy tried to trace the specific topics and details that returned in these documents, to further discover how the imbalanced relationship of the two states worked, and how the Principality of Transylvania performed in the international scene.
Imbalance in power was nowhere more obvious than in the case of Miklós Zólyomi, grandson of the once Prince István Bethlen. After the second crisis of government in the Principality (1657–1662), having lost his state and wealth, he escaped to the Porte and tried to muster support for his return. In the following years, the Porte had in its reach a candidate to contest Mihály Apafi’s rule if it wished to do so, and the Transylvanian government feared that Zólyomi would sacrifice sizeable portions of the Principality to the Ottomans if they offered him the help needed to claim the throne. Ágnes Szalai’s paper explored the negotiations and diplomatic routes taken in this delicate situation, both by the Principality of Transylvania and by Miklós Zólyomi, who tried to utilize his network of (diplomatic) relationships – as much as he had.
Besides the project members, 55 other researchers presented their most recent discoveries regarding the period’s diplomacy and interstate relations, exploring the topics from a wide range of focuses.
