"Breviculi" - that is what Jan Długosz decided to record in "Annales" from the history of the 15th century Krakow

The author of the present article is interested in the eponymous breviculi i.e. notes, for this is how the naturę of the information conceming the history of 15th-century Kraków contained in Jan Długosz Annales may be referred to. Firstly, the author characterises the state of research about the medieval Polish urban historiography. Particular attention was devoted to a dozen or so minor historiographical texts scattered on the pages of the municipal books of Kraków. In this context the author mentions, for example, the 1369 memoriał of the council written in contemporarily to the manuscript of the book of “proscriptions” which contained a list of complaints, inter alia complaints about the policy of the magnate submitted by the burghers to Władysław Jagiełło after his son Władysław’s ceremony of baptism in early 1425. The text was in- corporated in the earliest municipal copiarius. When these data are juxtaposed they con- stitute together something of a municipal chronicie, albeit one which is selective in its content. They are aptly supplemented by the fragments of the Annales which shed light on some of the events in the history of Kraków which could have been witnessed and observed by Długosz and also those which happened not long before his birth in 1415. Ali of these accounts, ones which indicate inter alia information about all kinds of atmos- pheric phenomena (anomalies of the weather) and the natural disasters which ravaged the city were critically treated in the further part of the present article. In conclusion, the author stated that Długosz (in contradistinction to Bartosz Paprocki who wrote a hundred years after him) did not use the archival resources of the Kraków town hall at all. He did not have at his disposal any work, unfamiliar to us, of the sort of annals or a chronicie which was kept in this town hall. He also did not peruse judi- cial books or other manuscripts stored in the town hall to draw certain important pieces of information pertinent to the history of the city. When he wrote about Kraków, about the city and the events which happened in this city he consulted other sources, which in the case of written accounts indeed should be considered lost. It is likely that he also consulted the orał tradition, rather from the community of the castle hill than from the city as such. He saw many things with his own very eyes. It is this information, especially the information about things which happened in Długoszs time, which constitute the breviculi - notes or rather entries to the “chronicie” of the history of the city, unpreserved in his memory but familiar owing to their being mentioned in the Annales. These notes, as it tums out, are also a repository of knowledge about the history of medieval Kraków.