The paper deals with the practice of rulership of the duchesses or queens in Bohemia and Moravia in central Middle Ages, focusing on their influence on issuing (intervention, petition, or as witness) the charters and their roles at the court of dukes of the Přemyslides dynasty. As the wife of a duke, a reigning duchess enjoyed a personal and political closeness to the duke, i.e. she used to follow his ruling practice, but she had, thanks to her dowry or higher status (for instance Eufemia, consort of duke Oto I. of Moravia, or Elisabeth, wife of duke Friedrich I., both princesses of Hungary), financial resources as well as household or in the late twelfth century court-officials that gave her some possibilities to make individual political decisions.
Bohemian prince and first king Vratislav II († 1092) encouraged the building of an exemptchapter dome, dedicated to St. Peter and Paul opposite to Prague castle. It was situated near the second important dwelling of the dynasty, the Přemyslid castle of Vyšehrad on the left shore of Vltava river. In the first years of the chapter's existence, under the rule of Vratislav II and Soběslav I (1125–1140), there were four phases of associated privilege making. The study emphases on those charters that contain the chapter's justification and some references to alleged privileges of the founder Vratislav II and pope Alexander II. The same accounts for the charter's placement in the memoria of the chapter.
This study focuses on the memorial function of charters in the Late Middle Ages based on narrationes in Sigismund of Luxemburg's charters for Czech recipients from 1433 to 1437. This dramatic period saw the culmination of the Hussite Wars (the siege of Plzeň, the Battle of Lipany), while at the same time there were negotiations between the Hussites and the Council of Basel which resulted in the issuing of the Basle Compacts and the acceptance of Emperor Sigismund as King of Bohemia in July 1436. The author gradually describes narrationes in Sigismund's charters for Bohemian Catholics from 1433 to 1435 and 1436 to 1437, and finally also for the Utraquists from 1436 to 1437. He demonstrates that while from 1433 to 1435 the charters were a means of fixing the Catholic towns' and noble families' memory of their continued and gallant struggle against "Hussite heresy" in writing, from 1436 to 1437 Sigismund's chancery retrospectively modified the memory of the previous wars in an effort to harmonise the image created in these charters with the religious reconciliation of July 1436.
The transformation of legal culture from oral to written, which was taking place at a different pace and with varying intensity throughout Europe starting in the twelfth century, is the subject that has been regularly neglected by the Czech historiography. Similarly, little attention has been paid to the co-existence of legal ritual and its written records in diplomatic documents. Based on the analysis of the case from the late thirteenth century, the aim is to determine the way in which ritual circuicio was represented in charters. The question is: What strategies were chosen by the new written legal culture facing the tenaciously resisting old world of rituals? To be able to address the issue, the nature of the above mentioned sources will be defined along with the reconstruction of the intertextual network which they form.
This study introduces the reader to the on-going re-edition of the abstracts of Emperor Sigismund's charters within the Regesta Imperiiseries and their parallel publication at the RI-online portal. The project team prepares new volumes containing Sigismund's charters from the Czech Lands and Hungary, while simultaneously a partial emendation of the existing old abstracts by Wilhelm Altmann in the RI-online database is undertaken, due to the complications caused up to now by their brevity and their system of abbreviations.
The author analyzes the diplomatic sources related to the negotiations between the Teutonic Knights and the Polish-Lithuanian Union after the truce in October 1414. As the compromise was not agreed within the set two-year period, the truce had to be extended, which was eventually done several times until 1421. Negotiations for the extension of the truce were quite tough. The King of Poland used the threat of non-renewal of the truce to put pressure on the Grand Master who was afraid of resuming war against a powerful adversary. Uncertainty surrounding the extension of the truce forced the Grand Master to hire mercenaries every year in the Empire. He also objected to the July deadline (St. Margaret) for the truce set each year, because this month was the most convenient time to begin a war campaign. Nevertheless the Grand Master refused to hand his three villages of Kujawy, which had formed an enclave on Polish territory, over to the King of Poland. Negotiations sometimes took place in several places simultaneously which caused some communication difficulties. The content of the charters extending the truce was drawn a comparison.