Registrum na deset truhlic s privilegii Českého království – Bobková Lenka (2025)

This Czech-language scholarly volume makes an undervalued source from the beginning of the sixteenth century accessible to researchers. It presents an inventory of documents kept in the archive of the Crown of Bohemia at Karlštejn, compiled by the noble estates after the completion of the land code known as the Land Ordinance of Vladislav. In Czech history, the resulting inventory is known as the Register of Ten Chests with the Privileges of the Kingdom of Bohemia. Closer examination shows that the inventory was not understood merely as a finding aid, but expressed the Czech estates’ ideas about the constitutional form of the Crown of Bohemia. It provided them with an accessible overview of the rights and privileges of the Bohemian king, the extent of the Crown of Bohemia and the treaties of Bohemian and European rulers. After the restoration of the Crown of Bohemia in 1490, the estates embraced this constitutional legacy of the Luxembourg kings and regarded it as their duty to ensure that it was upheld. In the name of the “good of the land,” they called on the monarch to respect and observe its provisions. For them, the Register was a kind of thesaurus to which they could return, use as an argumentative authority and draw upon; access was available not only to the king but also to representatives of the estates. The purpose of creating the Register is explained in an extensive Czech-language preface dedicated to King Vladislaus II in 1501 and 1502. The recorded documents are arranged according to their storage in the “ten chests” and presented as brief Czech-language regesta with the year indicated. Their scope and quality vary. Practical considerations probably led the estates to commission a German translation of the Register in 1503 and 1505, without the preface. The inventory apparently became an important document concerning the constitutional circumstances of the Crown of Bohemia, as shown by the many surviving copies made up to the mid-eighteenth century, now scattered among libraries and archives in Bohemia, Moravia and abroad. Twenty-three Czech manuscripts and ten German manuscripts have been identified. Attempts to identify the recorded documents more precisely showed that approximately 80–85 percent of those listed in the Register of Ten Chests survive today in the National Archives, in the Archive of the Crown of Bohemia collection. The estates’ measures to preserve the medieval archive of the Crown of Bohemia therefore appear to have been effective. Since the Czech regesta were created from Latin or German originals and were later translated into German, the text also provides important information about the development of Czech and German in administrative circles.