Early-Modern Annals of Carniolan Cities

Abstract

Slovenian territory cannot boast a plethora of annals and chronicles dating to the Middle Ages, and the number of such sources is not large for the early modern period either. This is especially true for proper town annals or chronicles. Given the reasons that dictated the recording of events by city officials, it is not surprising that very few of them produced systematic records of memorable events. There were certainly more documents to begin with than those which survived to the point of becoming the object of interest for preservationists and researchers, but the ratio between the material produced and the material preserved remains unclear.

The existence of some (proto)annals can be inferred from their instrumentalization. When towns reported their troubles to higher authorities and addressed requests to them, they listed disasters and other events supported by years and, in some cases, dates. Two Car­niolan towns, Novo mesto and Kamnik, might have had some kind of annals or records of local historical events; they were the ones to respond to polymath J. V. Valvasor’s printed circular letter of 1680. But there cannot have been many Carniolan towns in Valvasor’s time that were in the habit of writing chronicles or annals. No such record has survived in the form of a separate document, nor is its existence unambiguously indicated in other sources. Even for Ljubljana, there are only two extant manuscript chronicles, and they were made by private individuals from the 17th and early 18th centuries.

Thus, of city annals produced in city offices, one can only identify the Krško Annals (1601–1646), scattered in several places in the so-called city book, and extracts of the Kostanjevica Annals (1617–1686). Each was the result of the personal initiative and work of the city clerk, in both cases a long-standing scribe. The Krško City Book is a clear example of the gradual creation of annals in a book that was not in­tended solely for this genre of record, while the Kostanjevica extracts are an example of the instrumentalization of this type of written tes­timony. The Kostanjevica extracts have survived in two versions, their purpose being to show the authorities the reasons why the town was in such a poor state. The Krško and Kostanjevica town annals attracted attention as early as the mid-19th century. In the present paper, they are published in Slovenian translation in their integral form.