ABSTRACT
Medieval national historiography originated in Eastern Europe beginning with Jordanes's sixth-century History of the Goths. The Chronicle of the Czechs became one of the richest sources for Slavic legendary foundation stories, comparable only with Kadlubek's Chronicles of the Kings and Princes of Poland. A theory about the Littoral Dalmatian South Slavic origin of the chronicler had gained popularity in Poland. A South Slavic origin for the Polish chronicler would nicely explain his familiarity with the Slavic language, but this theory has been rejected by the chronicle's English translators. In 1763, the Czech scholar Felix Dobner published two fragments of The Chronicle of Great Poland, which he discovered in the library of the sixteenth-century Czech humanist Jan Hodiejovski. Jan Dlugosz's chronicle served in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries as the standard textbook for Polish medieval history until the beginning of modern historical research in the nineteenth century.
