HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

226 LEAH SHOPKOWnot very common until the end of the Middle Ages, when they aremore widely found, particularly in the German lands. 40 The vernacularNinety-five Comital Reigns of Austria, composed in the fourteenthcentury, was one such work. 41 Andrew of Regensburg in the fifteenthcentury composed a Chronicle of the Princes of Bavaria, extant in botha German and a Latin version. This flowering of dynastic historiographywas not limited to Germany; there was, from the late fifteenthcentury, a vernacular genealogy of the Breton rulers composed byPierre le Baud, only one of a host of writers producing Breton history.42 Much of this late medieval production was in the vernacular.Most royal history did not take dynastic form, with two majorexceptions. Frutolf ’s imperial history, in which each ruler’s regnalyears are set out and the ruler’s actions described year by year (untilHenry V, Frutolf ’s contemporary), was composed at the beginningof the twelfth century. 43 However, Frutolf ’s successors did not choosea dynastic form for their histories; instead they wrote annals, albeitannals that were clearly dynastic in their intention to celebrate theimperial lineage. 44 In contrast, French royal history already tendedtoward the dynastic in the twelfth century. There were earlier genealogiesof the French rulers, but from the beginning of the twelfth century,each French king received a biography (Suger’s biography ofLouis VI and his unfinished biography of Louis VII suggest that hemay have intended to create a dynastic series). 45 These biographiesappeared at the same time as chronicles that are strongly focusedon the royal family, if not organized around them. These variousLatin chronicles and biographies provided the basis for the vernacularand unambiguously dynastic Grandes chroniques de France of 1274. 4640Johanek (1992), 208, referring to Sprandel’s work, mentions that there wereat least 226 historians at work in this region between the plague and 1517.41Österreichische Chronik von den 95 Herrschaften, ed. Seemüller.42On the Bavarian texts, see Moeglin (1985), 42–43, 45 ff., and (1988), 106 ff.;on Breton texts, see Kerhervé (1980) and (1992).43Schmale, Schmale, and Ott (1972).44This did not mean that biographic forms of history were not important;Frederick I moved within a welter of biography. Moreover, the Cologne chroniclerexplicitly designated his chronicle, based on Frutolf-Ekkehard, as a ‘chronica regia’(Wattenbach-Schmale [1976], 107–08); one exemplar contains a diagram of thedescent of the Saxon emperors (Klapisch-Zuber [1991], fig. 3).45Suger, Vie de Louis VI le Gros, ed. and trans. H. Waquet (Paris, 1964); Suger,Oeuvres, ed. and trans. F. Gasparri (Paris, 1996–).46Grandes chroniques de France, ed. Viard; Spiegel (1978).