In the last centuries of the Middle Ages in Western Europe, dialogue between princes and their subjects took place through different channels. The emergence of representative and parliamentary assemblies in almost all territories facilitated exchanges between countries that were gradually becoming true states and their respective princes. At a more local level, urban and village communities also began a dialogue fueled by their own concerns. This dialogue took place through petitions and requests, most often called supplications, to which princes provided responses that established or reformed legal norms, corrected the abuses of officers in the exercise of their functions or simply granted graces in a "merciful" form to forgive certain crimes, to monitor the morality of their subjects or to alleviate their distress in situations of war, epidemic or famine.
The present corpus of texts contains 518 documents from the county of Provence, in the south of present-day France, between 1382 and 1480, all of which, textually or indirectly, deliver the content of petitions presented by communities, from the largest cities such as Marseille, Arles or Aix-en-Provence, to small villages, to the counts of Provence, their sovereign princes. These counts belong to the dynasty of the princes of Anjou, descended in a direct line from Louis of Anjou (died in 1384), brother of the king of France Charles VI: Marie de Blois, widow of Louis and regent in the name of her son Louis II, Louis II himself (1389-1417) then his sons Louis III (1417-1434) and René (1434-1480).