Sources referring to the history of the Counts of Cilli

The Barons of Sannegg, first documented about 1130, were made counts of Cilli in 1341 and, due to the close connection to the emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg, were bestowed the dignity of royal counts in 1436. This fast advancement into high-aristocracy resulting from a single-minded policy of power and marriage was followed by an abrupt end after a short flowering period because of the assassination of the last Count of Cilli, Ulrich II., by Ladislaus, the son of Jnos Hunyadi, in November 1456. The aim of this research work is the registration and analysis of nearly all dispersed sources of the period 1341- 1456. In this context all those documents should be taken into consideration that note the issuer and receiver of the members of the House of Cilli. Even the kinsmanlike widely ramified dynasty of the Cilliers gives information about the nobility-structure of southeastern Europe and their various cultural connections. By the analysis of the "remains" of the Counts of Cilli, who strongly influenced Carinthia, Krain, Croatia and Hungary and other countries, it is possible to achieve insights into a short- and long-term historical process and along with that a view into the "world of the late middle-ages", not only from the perspective of the high-aristocracy.

The aim of the project performed at the department of history at the University of Klagenfurt was to register the documents and letters of the Counts of Cilli and to collect all the narrative sources concerning their history. The scattered documents had to be collected, copied and transcribed in various archives in Central and Southeastern Europe in order to transfer the data into a self-created database. The project should be finalized with a thesis and a monograph about the Counts of Cilli. Until the end of the project 2124 documents and letters in 79 archives of Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia and Italy were collected. In addition 97 chronicles and collections of letters concerning the Counts of Cilli were collected and analysed. As the research in the archives was concentrated on documents and special archives it was not possible to analyse the medieval copy-books in depth. Therefore a lot of new Cilli-sources are expected in the following project. The communication with foreign archives was partly very difficult. So it was not possible to visit archives in Zadar and Dubrovnik although there might be some interesting documents. Until the end of the project in September 2001 600 documents were put into a computer database. They are also transcribed. The other documents and letters were just registered with date and archival information to get an survey. Now it is necessary to complete this registration and transcription of all sources. The planned publication of a monograph, an edition of the sources and the thesis seems not to be very useful before completing the mentioned project. Although the project has not been finished yet it turned out that a lot of the scientific literature concerning the Counts of Cilli is nationalistically and politically influenced and false.