HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

LATER MEDIEVAL INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY 313manifold historical works of Juan Gil de Zamora, such as his fascinatingDe preconiis Hispanie, 142 as well as the abbreviations and continuationsof Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum by fourteenth- andfifteenth-century Danish friars. 143 The relationship between these mendicantforms of national/dynastic history and mendicant educationaland political ideals (as they appear in mendicant political treatises,mirrors of princes, and other educational works) still awaits its firstbook-length study.A final category is formed by mendicant urban chronicles. Bothindirectly and directly, the mendicants contributed in a significantmanner to the proliferation of urban history in the later MiddleAges. Indirectly through the use of mendicant ‘Martin’s chronicles’by urban historians, to provide their account of local affairs with amore universal-historical (and salvation-historical) embedding; directlythrough the actual production of urban chronicles by mendicantauthors, whether or not in direct relation to the history of their ownconvent or the history of the diocese in which they were active aspriests, teachers, confessors, counsellors or bishops. 144This twofold contribution has tempted historians to trace the originof urban history to mendicant historiographical activities. Theyeven have depicted the mendicants as the ‘Lehrmeister der städtischenGeschichtsschreibung’. 145 However, the mendicants were seldomthe inaugurators of local historiographical traditions. In Italy,urban communal history often goes back to earlier centuries. 146 Inthe German lands, the mendicant role might have had a greaterpioneer character. Yet even there, urban historiographical traditionsreach back to older forms of episcopal historiography, to which Ihave alluded to in a previous section.Nevertheless, the mendicant production of urban and strongly‘regionalised’ universal chronicles was significant. Many of theseworks, which sometimes only survive in a fragmentary fashion, 147142Cirot (1913); Roest (1996), 234–43.143Compendium Saxonis et Chronica Jutensis, ed. M.Cl. Gertz, Scriptores Minores HistoriaeDanicae Medii Aevi, 1 (Copenhagen, 1918); Petrus Olai, Danorum gesta post chronicaSaxonis facta, Uppsala University Library, manuscript de la Gardie 37 fol.; Rasmussen(1998), 17.144To give an example: Jacob of Voragine, our famous Dominican hagiographer,became archbishop of Genoa and wrote a history of that town, as well asrelated works; see Kaeppeli (1970–93), 2:349–69, 4:139–41.145Schmidt (1958), 14–15.146Fossier (1977b), 641–55.147Dr. Anton Rinzema provided me with fragments of the Franciscan chronicles