ABSTRACT
Some valuable light is thrown on the spread of crusading ideas and the knowledge of the first crusade, and on early crusading in eastern Germany, by the so called Magdeburg charter of 1107/8, which clearly associates spiritual welfare and material gain with the defense of Christianity and warfare against pagans and infidels. The charter was first published by Edmond Martène and Ursin Durand in 1724 from a twelfth-century manuscript in the library of the abbey of Grafschaft in the present diocese of Paderborn.1 The manuscript is ‘very carefully, clearly, and correctly written’, according to Wilhelm Wattenbach, who said that the Magdeburg charter is in ‘a somewhat later hand and without rubrication but very correct and clearly written and punctuated’.2 The edition of Martène and Durand (including its omissions) was reprinted several times, beginning in 1733, when Johannes Gottlob Horn published an edition of the text, calling it ‘maxime memorabilem’, with a series of remarkable notes, which are still of scholarly value.3 In 1882 two new editions, based on the rediscovered manuscript, were produced at the same time by Wattenbach and by Alexander Brückner. Critical annotated editions subsequently appeared in the Urkundenbuch des Hochstifts Merseburg, the Urkundenbuch des Erzstifts Magdeburg, and in the collection of sources concerning the medieval German settlements in the east by Herbert Hilbig and Lorenz Weinrich.4 There are
1 Darmstadt, Landesbibliothek 749, ff. 86v-8v. Veterum scriptorum … amplissima collectio, ed. Edmond Martène, Ursin Durand, 9 vols (Paris 1724-33), I, 625-7. This edition is marked by three small lacunae (‘Christumque nostrum suggillantes’, ‘crateras tenent humano sanguine plenas’, and ‘nostre’ after Jerusalem), which were probably accidental but may have been deliberate, as suggested by Henri Pirenne, ‘Un appel à une croisade contre les Slaves adressé à l’évêque de Liége, au duc de Lotharingie et au comte de Flandre au commencement du XIIme siècle’, in Mélanges Camille de Borman. Recueil de mémoires relatifs à l’histoire, à l’archéologie et à la philologie offert au Baron de Borman et publié par ses amis et admirateurs (Liège 1919), 86 n.1. There is also a one-word lacuna in the manuscript (see n. 96 in the accompanying translation).
