HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

MEDIEVAL URBAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 343Middle Ages end up expressing a civic consciousness in a unitarysense: they must, in fact, record the status of the cives in subordinationto the traditional hierarchical order, based on the high clergyand the great aristocracy, and the conditions of passivity, of danger,and of injury suffered by the civitates because of the increasing domesticconflicts of local potentates and the hostility of these to the actionsof centralization by sovereign powers into national states.A count made of the narrative sources in question from internationaland national catalogues and from principal collections of editionsof medieval annals and chronicles, 64 using rigorous criteria,suggests that we are dealing with a drastic selection of texts, reducedhere to a small list out of a number that initially appears quite high.Some of these could not be given an accurate and analytic description,for reasons already indicated above, and for other motives,which will be stated from time to time. Above all, the texts chosenare quite far from being adequately representative of the urban centersof the extensive and varied historical, ethnic, and national areasof transalpine Europe during the later Middle Ages. In fact, in contrastto the Franco-Germanic network along the Rhine, where therewas a notable density of urban centers with relatively appropriatehistoriographical traditions, 65 there are other areas less or not at allcovered by authentic expressions of urban chronicle-writing—forexample, the British Isles (making exception, but not in an entirelysatisfactory and convincing way, for London), the Scandinavian peninsula,in part the Polish and Slavic worlds, and also the Iberian peninsula,where other forms of historiographical activity prevail, or whereurban annals has been exhausted or had not yet reached a point ofmaturation. 66One work, among thirty or so selected texts, that presents manycharacteristics which can number it among true urban chronicles isthe Annales Cameracenses (Cambrai, 1099–1170), composed between1152 and 1170 by Lambertus Waterlos (1108–ca. 1170), regular64See on this notes 3, 8, 9, and 63 above.65We are dealing in particular with the large and extensive river network of theRhine, which includes ten cities or almost-cities of sufficiently pertinent, and sometimeseven significant, historiographical production.66Chronicle-production in question is scarce in middle-eastern Germany and inthe Slavic area, while four centers in the league looking out on the North andBaltic seas have left testimonies of some importance in the scope of historiographicalactivity in question.