The Nuremberg Chronicle III. From Constantine to the Year One Thousand

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: Constantinople, Buda, Strasbourg, Ravenna, Salzburg, Erfurt, Ferrara, Würzburg, Eichstätt, Bamberg and Magdeburg.

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

• ten parts: Constantine, Constantinople and the Council of Nicaea (St Helena, Arius, the desert fathers, Julian the Apostate); Theodosius, the Church Fathers and Attila (Ambrose, Martin, Jerome, Augustine, Alaric, the birth of Venice, St Ursula, Merlin, Buda, Strasbourg); the fall of Rome, Theodoric and Saint Benedict (Odoacer, Boethius, Clovis, King Arthur, Monte Cassino, Ravenna); Justinian, the Lombards and Gregory the Great (Belisarius, Totila, St Patrick, Simeon the Stylite, Queen Theodelinda); Heraclius and Muhammad (the Holy Cross, St Gall, Salzburg, Erfurt); Bede, Pepin and Saint Boniface (Justinian II, Kilian, the first doges of Venice, St Sebald, Ferrara, Würzburg, Eichstätt); Charles Martel and Charlemagne (Poitiers, Roland, the coronation of 800, Alcuin); the heirs of Charlemagne (the body of St Mark, Pope Joan, the Cadaver Synod, Normandy); the Hungarians, Henry I and the Berengars (Cluny, Bamberg); the Ottonians and the year one thousand (St Wenceslas, Otto the Great, Magdeburg, Sylvester II, St Adalbert, Hugh Capet, the prince-electors)
• the complete text, to be read straight through, with 826 footnotes — every strange name explained on the page where it first appears; Schedel's mistakes are kept and explained
• 51 original woodcuts from the 1493 edition, in the colours of a hand-painted copy: the great councils of the Church, the Church Fathers, Monte Cassino, Muhammad, Charlemagne, wonders in the sky and great city panoramas
• ten 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 late Roman, Byzantine and early medieval history; lovers of old books, woodcuts and early printing; anyone curious about how people in 1493 imagined the world of Attila, Justinian and Charlemagne.

About the series

This is the third book of a series of six. It continues the Sixth Age of the world for almost seven centuries — from Constantine to Otto III and the year 1000.

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.