The Nuremberg Chronicle II. From the Babylonian Captivity to Constantine

About this book

The Nuremberg Chronicle (Liber Chronicarum) was printed by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg on 12 July 1493 and became one of the most splendid books of the early age of printing. Its 1,809 woodcuts came from the workshop of Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, where the young Albrecht Dürer was then an apprentice. Schedel tells the history of the world in seven ages — and beside kings, emperors and saints he describes the great cities of his day: Verona, Milan, Florence, Cologne, Augsburg, Regensburg, Vienna, Nuremberg itself, Metz, Tivoli and Geneva.

About the translation: translated into modern English from the Latin edition of 1493 by BlusaBooks with the help of AI tools, working from images of the pages of a hand-coloured copy. A complete, sentence-by-sentence translation — not a summary; where a word had faded in the print, the sense was restored from the context and from Schedel's own sources.

What is inside

• nine parts: the Fifth Age — Babylon and the Persian kings (Ezekiel's Temple, the Roman Republic, the first Greek philosophers); the Greek sages and Alexander the Great (Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, Aristotle, the Septuagint, Alexandria); the Ptolemies, the Maccabees and the Punic Wars (Hannibal, Scipio, the Colossus of Rhodes, Siena, Mantua); the Roman civil wars, Caesar and Herod (Cicero, Cleopatra, Florence, Lyon, Cologne, Augsburg); Augustus, the birth of Christ and the beginning of the Sixth Age (Regensburg, Vienna, Nuremberg); the apostles and the first emperors (Caligula, Nero, Seneca); the first popes and the Antonine emperors (Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Metz, Tivoli); from Commodus to Decius (Origen, the Seven Sleepers); the great persecutions and Constantine (St George, St Christopher, St Catherine, Geneva)
• the complete text, to be read straight through, with 810 footnotes — every strange name explained on the page where it first appears; Schedel's mistakes are kept and explained
• 69 original woodcuts from the 1493 edition, in the colours of a hand-painted copy: the fall of Babylon, plans of Ezekiel's Temple, the family tree of Herod, the life of Christ, the martyrdoms of the apostles and great city panoramas
• nine colour illustrations in the manner of late 15th-century manuscript miniatures, one opening each part (created with AI tools)
• a Commentary section at the end: each part in plain words and what history tells us
• foreword

Who it is for

Readers of ancient, Roman and early Christian history; lovers of old books, woodcuts and early printing; anyone curious about how people in 1493 imagined the world of Alexander, Caesar and the apostles.

About the series

This is the second book of a series of six. It covers the whole Fifth Age of the world (from the Captivity to the birth of Christ) and the Sixth Age up to Constantine the Great.

A historical source: Schedel writes as a man of the fifteenth century, with the beliefs and prejudices of his time; our explanations are in the notes and the commentary.