Library › Latin: Law › Pax cum Venetis
This short document records the peace concluded by the emperor Otto II with the Venetians after a conflict between them. Otto states that, moved by divine mercy, at the intercession of his mother the empress Adelaide and his wife and co-ruler Theophanu, and won over by the prayers of the poor of that people, he has made peace and alliance with them, so that neither he nor his heirs will molest any Venetian on account of the dispute, and that any future dispute will be settled by the judgement laid down in the pact. A second part gives the security guaranteed to the Venetians by the emperor.
Otto II had imposed a blockade on Venice during a struggle between Venetian factions, and the peace was made shortly before his death in 983. The document is a witness to relations between the western empire and Venice, which was nominally under Byzantine authority, and to the roles of the empresses Adelaide and Theophanu in imperial government. It is a brief but useful source for the political history of northern Italy at the end of Otto II’s reign.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 138, Parisiis 1853), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.