ABSTRACT
A single entry in the volume of the Liber conciliorum for the years 1478-1488 describes the circumstances surrounding the creation of Caoursin’s Descriptio:
e Liber conciliorum, written in a compact secretarial hand, records the minutes of the master’s council. e script and the layout of this entry set it apart from the rest of the text on the leaf. It catches the eye because it is written in a large humanist script consuming two-thirds of the area intended for text. An inverted arrow drawn in the margin draws additional attention to the paragraph. ere is no doubt that the appearance of the notice was deliberate. Caoursin habitually wrote the records of the chancery in a typical eenth-century secretarial hand. But he used a humanist hand for two types of ocial acts: original magisterial bulls on parchment (not the copies he registered in the bullaria); and references in the register to himself and to the activities of the chancery.2 Caoursin’s decision to write this entry in a humanist hand suggests that the production and the dissemination of the Descriptio was an extraordinary work commemorating an extraordinary event. Placed within the context of chancery business, however, keeping and publishing records of
magisterial bulls and taking the minutes of the meetings of the council general, the Hospitaller chancery publicly disseminated the statutes formulated during the council general, chronicled the history of the Order, and produced written descriptions of the Order’s battles with the Muslims. e last was not a unique Hospitaller practice. e communication to Christendom of the progress of the ght against the Muslims was a diplomatic narrative genre, which took the form of letters, reports, or prologues to charters.3 D’Aubusson’s letters to Pope Sixtus IV and Emperor Frederick describing the outcome of the siege fall within this genre.4 e council’s decision to publish Caoursin’s Descriptio, an historical work, as the ocial account of the siege represented an innovation in the Order’s chancery practices.
