City book
In the city book (historically also Stattbuch ) important legally binding orders of a city administration were recorded. They arose with the growing independence of the medieval city (in the 12th century) from the sovereign .
KG Homeyer (1861) coined the term based on the contemporary designation as liber civitatis , Statpuech etc. It was taken up and canonized through the work of Konrad Beyerle (1910) and Paul Rehme (1913/27).
background
Since the city books have a very different content, their emergence can only be explained with a generally growing written form. As liber privilegiorum , they were copial books that served to protect the medieval cities from their city lords. They collected the law applicable in the city as statute books and the judgments as court minutes, thus laying the written basis for the cooperation of the citizens , for the city's own jurisdiction and administration. As protocols of voluntary jurisdiction , they created legal certainty in business life. At the same time, city books are also a representative expression of the urban bourgeois-communal self-image.
The oldest are the Cologne shrine books (land register) , which were created around 1130 . They spread particularly in northern Germany in the 13th century ( Kiel 1242, Rostock around 1254, Wismar 1272). Since they were kept by the town clerks and kept in safe custody on behalf of the council, they were given public credibility and were given procedural evidential value up to the 14th century.
Content and structure
Especially the older city books, such as B. the Libri memoriales from Stralsund (since 1320), the memorial books from Braunschweig (mid-14th century), Lüneburg (1409) or Bremen (mid-15th century) initially had only mixed contents. Since the 14th century in particular, various series of city books have been developed for individual types of business: for legal acts of the council, for legal transactions between citizens (real estate affairs, marriage contracts), for financial matters, for statutes, city law and ordinances, for court records and judgments, for appointments and Service ideas of city officials, as a journal of incoming and outgoing correspondence, as new citizen directories, expatriations and original feuds etc .:
- in statutes ( constitution , privileges and ordinances),
- in books on jurisprudence ,
- in books on administration,
- in books about the organization of important services such as messenger and courier services, escorts , tax collection , supply, disposal,
- in books on important agreements between townspeople. The city registers as a method to secure legal transactions between private persons (e.g. in the debt register of Stralsund from 1228, from Hamburg from 1228, in the Lübeck Ober- and Niederstadtbuch 1227/1277/1325, in the new citizen lists of Kulmbach 1250, of Nuremberg 1302, im Revaler Kammereibuch 1363 or in the Rigaer Erbebuch 1384), was in competition with the notarial instrument , which is why this type of city books could never prevail in Italy .
- and later historically relevant records ( chronicles ).
execution
One of the duties of the town clerk was the conscientious keeping of the town book. In the chancelleries of larger cities, the upper town clerk ( pronotarius ) delegated the pure protocol work to his first assistant , the lower town clerk ( notarius ).
The scribes first noted the entries on wax tablets or sheets of paper and then transferred them to the city books. The city books themselves are rarely written on parchment , mostly on paper . Entries about completed legal transactions could be deleted by deleting them. The entries in the town register are initially written in Latin , and increasingly in vernacular since the second half of the 14th century.
meaning
The city books allow a deep insight into the bourgeois life of the medieval cities; its source value ranges from legal history to urban politics to population statistics and the social structure of urban citizens.
See also
literature
- Konrad Beyerle : The German city books . In: German history sheets. Monthly for the promotion of regional historical research 11, March / April 1910, issue 6/7, ZDB -ID 216893-5 , pp. 145-200 ( full text ).
- Evamaria Engel : The German city of the Middle Ages (especially chapter 3). Beck, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-406-37187-6 .
- Richard Hergenhahn: Jakob Köbel zu Oppenheim (especially chapter The office of the town clerk ). In: Oppenheimer Heft 11, December 1995, ISBN 3-87854-115-5 , pp. 3-9 and 45-49.
- Hannes Obermair : The Bozen City Book. Manuscript 140 - the official and privileges book of the city of Bolzano . In: City of Bozen (ed.): Bolzano fra i Tirolo e gli Asburgo = Bozen from the Counts of Tyrol to the Habsburgs . Contributions to the international study conference, Bozen, Maretsch Castle , 16. – 18. October 1996. Athesia, Bozen 1999, ISBN 88-7014-986-2 ( Research on the history of the city of Bolzano / Studi di storia cittadina 1), pp. 399-432 ( full text ; PDF; 76 kB).
- Christian Speer: Georg Rörer (1492–1557) in Wittenberg and Jena - attempt at local and social positioning. At the same time a contribution on the possibilities and limits of city book research , in: Heiner Lück et al. (Ed.): The Ernestinian Wittenberg: City and residents (text volume) (Wittenberg research 2), Petersberg 2013, pp. 255–264.
- Martin Kintzinger : City books . In: Lexicon of the Middle Ages (LexMA). Volume 8, LexMA-Verlag, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-89659-908-9 , column 12 f.
- Anna Spiesberger: City Books , in: Südwestdeutsche Archivalienkunde, as of August 24, 2017.