The Nuremberg Chronicle IV. Emperors, Popes and Crusades

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 emperors, popes and saints he describes the cities of his day: Ulm, Passau, Damietta and Munich.

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

• eleven parts: the prince-electors, Henry II and Conrad II (St Cunegonde, the dancers of Kölbigk, St Stephen of Hungary); Henry III and Henry IV (Guido of Arezzo, Hermann the Lame, Vallombrosa, Ulm, Matilda of Canossa); Gregory VII and the First Crusade (the Carthusians, Nicaea, Antioch, the Holy Lance, Cîteaux, Godfrey of Bouillon); Henry V, the Templars and Bernard of Clairvaux (the Hospitallers, Prester John, Otto of Bamberg, Passau, Hugh of St Victor); Conrad III and Frederick Barbarossa (the Second Crusade, Hildegard of Bingen, Avicenna and Averroes, Thomas Becket, the Waldensians); the fall of Jerusalem and Innocent III (Saladin, the Humiliati, Henry VI, the Lateran Council); Francis, Dominic and Frederick II (St Clare, Anthony of Padua, the Tartars, the Teutonic Order, Damietta, St Elizabeth); Guelphs and Ghibellines, Louis IX and Thomas Aquinas (Manfred, a great comet, Albert the Great, Bonaventure, the flagellants); Rudolf of Habsburg and the loss of the East (the Council of Lyon, Conradin, the Sicilian Vespers, Celestine V, the fall of Acre); Boniface VIII and the end of the Templars (the first Jubilee, Duns Scotus, Dante, the Council of Vienne, the Knights of Rhodes); Louis the Bavarian, Dante and Petrarch (the popes at Avignon, Munich, St Roch, John Mandeville, the war of France and England)
• the complete text, to be read straight through, with 901 footnotes — every strange name explained on the page where it first appears; Schedel's mistakes are kept and explained
• 49 original woodcuts from the 1493 edition, in the colours of a hand-painted copy: the great picture of the prince-electors, imperial family trees, the monasteries of the new orders, councils, comets and city panoramas
• eleven 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 medieval history, the Crusades and the Holy Roman Empire; lovers of old books, woodcuts and early printing; anyone curious about how people in 1493 saw the age of Barbarossa, Saint Francis and the Templars.

About the series

This is the fourth book of a series of six. It continues the Sixth Age of the world for more than three centuries — from the year 1000 to the middle of the fourteenth century.

A historical source: Schedel writes as a man of the fifteenth century, with the beliefs and prejudices of his time — including false medieval accusations against the Jews, which the notes and the commentary clearly identify as lies.