Regesta of Emperor Frederick III. (1440-1493) vol. 34

The present volume provides an inventory of charters issued by Emperor Frederick III (1440-1493) during the years 1476-1479 that are recorded in the holdings of the former Habsburg House and State Archives (Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv) in Vienna. The charters are published not in full text but in the form of regesta, an extensive summary with further information e.g. on persons, on the outward appearance of the charter (parchment or paper, seal etc.) and its present depository (archive, shelf-mark) as well as secondary literature and necessary explanatory notes. As the archive represents the issuers archive, the documents were addressed to a great number of recipients and cover matters concerning the Empire as well as the hereditary territories of the Habsburg dynasty. A significant feature of this archive is the great number of imperial charters that no longer exist but can be reconstructed by means of documents drawn up by subjects, which were directed to the imperial chancery. During the years covered by this volume, the late 1470s, the course for the Emperors last decade of reign was set. This holds true especially for the year 1477: in the West, the death of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and the marriage of his daughter, Mary, to Fredericks son Maximilian, sparked the war of succession for the Duchy of Burgundy. In the East, persistent tensions caused by the invasion of the King of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus into Lower Austria resulted in open war. It was only in the 1490s that the armed conflicts that simultaneously raged in the west and in the east of the Empire could be settled. Charters regarding Hungarian matters shed light on those continuous military disputes, the interests of the parties involved, among them also Austrian nobles who were opposed to the Emperor, and into the struggle to reach a peace agreement with Matthias Corvinus in December 1477. Whereas the other large complex of charters relating to international politics was issued in connection with the investiture of Archduke Maximilian as Duke of Burgundy in April 1478. It shows the wide spectre of late medieval politics and strategies that become visible in the medium charter in that political demands are formulated and recorded as facts so that they could be realized in case Maximilian should prove victorious. Numerous charters deal with administrative and financial issues concerning the Habsburgs hereditary territories. They reveal the financial and personal ressources as well as the effective social networks of the Emperors politics and safeguard of power. They also make apparent the extent to which administrative papers and documents that were issued by the imperial chancery increased during the period under investigation. Previous estimates as to about 50 000 charters issued by Frederick III will have to be revised upwards as the still existing charters seem to be only the tip of an iceberg whose size can hardly be guessed.