The Sources of Annales Magdeburgenses Brevissimi in the Context of 'Foreign' Entries in Polish and Czech Annals

• Authors: Matla-Kozlowska M.
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

A key problem in the study of the medieval Polish annals is the provenance of their earliest 'foreign' entries, the most complete version of which can be found in the Annals of the Cracow Chapter (RKK). Because of the interrelatedness of the Polish and Czech annals some historians assume that the so-called Corbie entries must have reached Cracow by way of Prague. This conjecture is, however, impossible to verify as only small fragments of the Older Prague Annals (APd) have been preserved in later MSS. A new light on the provenance of the Corbie entries in the RKK is thrown by the Shorter Magdeburg Annals (AMag), which is an 11th-century excerpt from the APd. The editors conclude that AMag was compiled from materials of the APd, the Corbie Annals (AC) and a catalogue of Magdeburg archbishops. The fact that the annals occupy two last sheets (150v-151) of a pocket-book codex and that they include a small number of entries (29) crammed into narrow space (without allowing a separate line for each date) suggests that it was highly unlikely for the compiler to have used more than one source. Our analysis of the Corbie entries in APd and AMag shows a greater stylistic and chronological affinity between AMag and APd than between AMag and AC. Moreover, the AMag errors and divergencies from the AC version are common to both to the Czech annals and other Czech codices. So we may conclude that the AMag compiler used the APd rather a different copy of the AC and that the APd must have contained more of the Corbie entries than its later Czech descendants. A comparison of the extended 'foreign' input in the APd and the Corbie entries in the RKK makes the idea of their journey from Prague to Cracow in the 11th century highly probable.

Keywords

EN

ANNALS OF THE CRACOW CHAPTER; CORBIE ENTRIES

Discipline

• HISTORY: HISTORY

• Publisher: Księgarnia Akademicka
• Journal: Studia Historyczne
• Year: 2005
• Volume: 48
• Issue: 2(190)
• Pages: 135-150
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Matla-Kozlowska M.

• M. Matla-Kozlowska, Wola Bykowska 11/10, 97-306 Grabica, Poland

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

05PLAAAA0037909