W trosce o zbawienie – testamenty kupców Gdańska i Elbląga z drugiej połowy XV i początku XVI wieku

The author analyses the instructions included in the testaments of the burghers from Danzig and Elbing, written in the second half of the 15th and at the beginning of the 16th centuries. After going through the pious legacies made by merchants and members of the town’s elite it may be claimed that the instructions in the testaments are quite similar as far as the numbers and amounts of the legacies are concerned; the legacies are made to local parish churches, monastic orders, towns’ hospitals and the poor. It was also quite common to give legacies to church institutions situated outside the towns where the benefactors lived; for example, the monastic complex of the Carthusian Order called Mary’s Paradise (Polish: Raj Maryi) in Kartuzy (German: Karthaus) and mendicant orders in the State of the Teutonic Order in Prussia (merchants from Danzig and Elbing) and in Royal Prussia (merchants from Elbing alone), which – in exchange for that – offered the benefactors a prayer and Masses for their souls and the ones of their families. Such obligations were consciously published in many places simultaneously, in an attempt to additionally secure prayers needed to be redeemed. The richest also financed pilgrims who would visit pilgrimage centres for them. The sums for that purpose were in both towns equal, which probably resulted from actual costs and accepted norms. Generally speaking, pious legacies constituted an insignificant part of the merchants’ property, unless the benefactor had any inheritors. In part of the testaments there are no instructions for pious bequests; however, it does not mean that the burghers did not give part of their property ad pias causas. The pressure both of the existing norms and the religious conceptions of the way that might lead to redemption made it indispensable to make that last contract.