Red Book (Basel)

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The Red Book is a manuscript on parchment from the city of Basel from the Middle Ages , which is kept in the Basel-Stadt State Archives . This book is the oldest in town. It covers the years 1357 to 1493 and, by the way, begins in the same year that Lucerne begins to create a city chronicle. According to Feller and Bonjour, the record goes back to 1548.

At that time, the term Red Book was also common in the rest of the German-speaking area “for city books, legal collections and lists of delinquents”. It is a collection of council resolutions, council criminal judgments, laws and ordinances, citizen records, chronical records and lists of guild members. It is considered the beginning of the city's history .

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According to Peter Ochs , the book was started one year after the Basel earthquake in 1356 , the Basel-Stadt State Archives dates the beginning to March 1357.

Two thirds of the entries concern laws, one third was intended for the recording of important events, that is, "eternal things or things that are long gone". Also included is the performance book , which recorded participants in military campaigns who were thereby able to acquire civil rights. 1417 begins the call book , in which it was noted “who has served our city”, and the Liber diversarum rerum . This designation is historically documented. In the 19th century it was called regulations and contracts .

“In addition to the red book, there was also the large white book and the small white book: both covered with white leather. ... the latter a little thinner than the former. These were the corpora diplomatica des Raths. The larger one contains the contracts and other important documents; and in the second part political laws and other regulations are entered. They are of a later origin than the red book. … The black book is covered with black leather. It started in 1517, after the revolution in the form of government and after the perpetual union with France. It had the same purpose as the little white book. The blue book is older than the black book and is nicely bound. ... It contains the laws on peace and iniquity, written by one hand. Probably this copy was intended for the fornicators, the Reichsvogt, or the council himself. "

Feller and Bonjour describe the records as “sloppy and unequal” and “getting thinner and thinner” towards the end, so that they would not be satisfactory as a chronicle, but they also delivered the unexpected. While Basel's admission into the Federal Confederation was not mentioned in 1501, it was favorably appreciated in 1507. Schmid also writes of "occasional notes" that also show literary features "beyond the analistic sequence".

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Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d e Richard Feller , Edgar Bonjour : Historiography of Switzerland . Volume 1. Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1979, ISBN 3-7190-0722-7 , pp. 33-34
  2. ↑ August Bernoulli : Basel Chronicles . Hirzel, Leipzig, 1890, pp. 110-121; Text archive - Internet Archive
  3. ↑ Christoph Manasse: New for you: Ratsbücher A 1 Red Book , blog of the State Archives Basel-Stadt, April 23, 2018
  4. ^ Peter Ochs : History of the city and landscape of Basel , Decker, Basel 1792
  5. ↑ Hansjörg Roth: Diversity as a unit. The council book 'Liber diversarum rerum' (1417–1463) of the city of Basel . In: Archives for Diplomatics , Volume 50, Issue JG, pp. 47–56, ISSN  0066-6297 .
  6. ↑ quoted from Peter Ochs 1792, 2nd volume, chap. XVI
  7. ^ Regula Schmid: Swiss Chronicles . In: Gerhard Wolf, Norbert H. Ott (Ed.): Handbook Chronicles of the Middle Ages . Walter de Gruyter, 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-034171-3 , p. 273