The Nuremberg Chronicle V. The Last Times and the Last Judgement

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 in this book he writes about his own time: he saw the preacher John of Capistrano in Nuremberg, studied at Padua and praises the new art of printing.

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

• eight parts: the rise of the Ottomans, Charles IV and Prague (the popes at Avignon, the Jubilee of 1350, the Black Death, St Bridget, Boccaccio, the beginning of the Great Schism); Breslau, the Great Schism and the Council of Pisa (King Wenceslas and the wine of Nuremberg, Catherine of Siena, the Whites, Vincent Ferrer, Chrysoloras, Tamerlane, Venice and Padua); Hus, Sigismund and the Council of Constance (Wyclif and the Hussites, John XXIII, Martin V, Jerome of Prague, Poggio, Empress Barbara); the Councils of Basel and Florence (Eugene IV and Felix V, Albert II, the union with the Greeks, the tale of two lovers, the Dauphin in Alsace, Cosimo de' Medici); Frederick III and the fall of Constantinople (Nicholas V, the Jubilee of 1450, the coronation in Rome, Mehmed II, John of Capistrano, the battle of Belgrade, Halley's Comet); Pius II, Matthias and the art of printing (Paul II, the Teutonic Order and Poland, Matthias Corvinus, Nicholas of Cusa, Bessarion, Platina, Šabac); Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII and the fall of Granada (the great comet of 1472, Regiomontanus, the Drummer of Niklashausen, Charles of Burgundy, Rhodes and Otranto, Brother Nicholas, the Ensisheim meteorite, Alexander VI, Maximilian); the Seventh Age of the World (Antichrist, the Dance of Death, the fifteen signs, the Last Judgement, the colophon)
• the complete text, to be read straight through, with 477 footnotes — every strange name explained on the page where it first appears; Schedel's mistakes are kept and explained
• 33 original woodcuts from the 1493 edition, in the colours of a hand-painted copy: councils, comets, the falling stone of Ensisheim, city panoramas of Prague, Breslau, Constance and Basel, and the full-page Antichrist, Dance of Death and Last Judgement
• eight 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 medieval history, the fall of Constantinople and the Hussite wars; lovers of old books, woodcuts and early printing; anyone curious about how people in 1493 saw their own century — and the end of the world.

About the series

This is the fifth book of a series of six. It closes the Sixth Age of the world — from about 1300 to the spring of 1493 — and ends with the Seventh Age, the end of the world and the Chronicle's first colophon.

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 (the burning of Jews, Simon of Trent, Sternberg), which the notes and the commentary clearly identify as lies.