Official Letters of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III (1415–1493) in the Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract

The paper considers five authentic official letters of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III (1415–1493) kept in the Western European Section of the Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. They come from the collection of N. P. Likhachev and were acquired by him in the period before 1914 in various West European antique firms.
The letters are scattered and cover the period from 1438 to 1482. They contain the instructions and orders of Frederick III to the representatives of the regional authorities of Austria, and he there acts as the territorial sovereign of his hereditary lands. The letters are worth consideration, as they give an authentic idea of the daily management activities of the authorities: control over the sale and transfer of real estate from hand to hand, financing of transport infrastructure, regulation of lawsuits, etc. The official letters are distinguished by brevity: their text, written in Gothic chancery cursive in Early New High German, occupies from a third to a half of the page of a one-sheet document, which was sealed with a small seal of red wax. The article also analyzes the features of style and composition of letters, office marks. Particular importance is attached to the analysis of the original signatures of Frederick III, which are found in three of these five letters and that allows us to consider them rare pieces. The article comprises the publication of the original texts of the letters and their translation into Russian.