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We have published a book entitled The World Chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis: A Manuscript's Journey from Saint-Denis to St. Pancras In reading this you will see why that codex so attracted us, and why it is worth a book. But our subject here is the Chronicle itself and the complete stemma of all of its copies.The Chronicle was compiled and composed between 1285 and 1300 by Guillaume de Nangis, archivist of the royal abbey of Saint-Denis-en-France, with collaborators who continued the chronicle text eventually to 1368. The author admits in his prologue that the work is based on that of Eusebius to AD 325, then on Jerome to 380, then on Sigebert de Gembloux to 1113. Only a fifth of the Chronicle, the post-1113 part, has been edited, because editors have assumed that Guillaume merely copied the work of those three authors. Not so: Guillaume selected from those and a score of other sources, for instance Comestor, Livy, and Josephus; and he reworked his material and rewrote it in his own charming Latin style. He did the same for the latest two centuries, where his resources included the historians of his own house, Suger, Rigord, and Primat. Guillaume simplified Jerome�s era-chronology: he counts from the Creation to Anno Mundi 4062, then Anni Domini.
This page shows Anno Mundi 2288.
His most useful adaptation from Jerome and Sigebert was their research tool of parallel timelines. Each page in the best manuscripts is headed by a line where the kingdoms are named
which existed in those days, and each year�s text is headed by a line
that gives the regnal year of the sovereign of each kingdom, directly below the name of the kingdom. In the first year, the new sovereign is named.
So that�s the Chronicle, there are 21 copies, and we have constructed their family tree.
In a benchmark article of 1873, Leopold Delisle collated the ten manuscripts of the Chronicle from the Biblioth�que Nationale in Paris, and later he added two from the Vatican. He recognized that Guillaume had worked up a text, his FIRST VERSION, sometime before the canonization of Louis IX in 1297: in that FIRST VERSION he is never called Saint Louis. Guillaume, with colleagues who understood and shared his methods, then continued working to perfect a SECOND VERSION, improving, clarifying, and expanding the original text and continuing it to later years. There is no historical record of Guillaume de Nangis after 1300 and some surviving manuscripts include at the end of the year 1300 the words �huc usque scripsit Guillelmus de Nangiaco�. Either Guillaume died that year or his colleagues later judged that he had only polished his work up to that date.
First, here is what Delisle discovered about the relationships among the manuscripts that he studied. Here is a list of Delisle and our sigla and the names of the manuscripts.
Key to the Stemma: Delisle�s collations in red; Karen�s collations in blue
FIRST VERSION
BAV Reg. lat. 544 early 14 c. Creation to 1303 BnF fr. 5703 14 c. 1113 to 1303 BAV Chigi G VIII 233 mid-14 c. Creation to 1303 Bruxelles, BR 14855-14857 14-15 c. (headless) to 1303 SECOND VERSION
PARIS A BnF lat. 4918 early 14 c. Creation to 1297 (tailless) B BnF lat. 1780 14-15 c. Creation to AD171 (unfinished) C BnF lat. 17554 15 c. Creation to 781 (lost 2d volume to 1308) D BnF lat. 4919 14 c. Creation to 1300 E BnF lat. 11729 14 c. Creation to 1368 F BnF lat. 13703 + 13704 early 17 c. Creation to AD810, + AD810 to 1368 G BnF lat. 4920 15 c. Creation to 1300 H BnF lat. 14358 15 c. Creation to 1300 I BnF lat. 4917 15 c. Creation to 1300 OTHER CITIES Dijon BM 570 late 14 c. Creation to 1302 + 1301 to 1368 Dijon BM 571 late 14 c. 1301 to 1368 London BL Royal 13 E.IV early 14 c. Creation to 1300 Lyon BU 227 + 228 15 c. Creation to 592 + 593-1368 Napoli BN vii.A.45 3/4 14 c. Creation to 1308 Torino BU 506 + 507 late 14 c. Creation to 575 + 575 to 1302, 1301 to 1368 Vaticana Vat. lat. 4598 14 c. Creation to 1307 Verona Bib. capitolare CCVII 14 c. Creation to 1302 Wien NB 376 before 1477 Creation to 1300 Delisle identified A as the all-important mark-up copy of the SECOND VERSION of his work. I�ll call the original text block of A before any mark-ups �pristine A�. Extensive marginal notes, interlinear additions, interpolations, erasures, cross-outs and tip-ins were given to A over time, changing it through stages A1 to A4.
In 1873, Delisle knew only one copy of the FIRST VERSION, a disappointing one: BnF fran�ais 5703. The copyist was working from a complete FIRST VERSION Chronicle, but the copy begins in AD 1113, the last year of Sigebert�s chronicle, and it is full of slipshod mistakes. The radical mistake was writing it in two columns when the Chronicle, with its line of kingdoms in the running headline, needed the full breadth of the page. Three years later, in 1876, Delisle had the satisfaction of finding a complete FIRST VERSION in the Vatican: Reginensis lat. 544. Delisle declared this the original from which BnF fran�ais 5703 was copied, and he used the mistakes of that quote �stupid or scatterbrained� copyist to prove it. The copyist was towards the end of his second column when he turned to the next page of Reginensis, saw the headline of kingdoms and kings, and wrote it down as if it were a part of the text narration.
Here is Delisle�s elegant demonstration.
Folio 307v of Reginensis (AD 1114) ends with the line:
...cenobium in monte Tabor situm funditus evertunt. Monachos
Then, on 308r, the running head named five kingdoms and four sovereigns and the text continued:
interficiunt et omnia sibi diripiunt. . . .
ROMANORUM CONSTANTINOPOL. FRANCORUM JEROSOLIMORUM ANGLORUM Henricus V Ludovicus Grossus Balduinus II Henricus The BnF fr. scribe came to that point in the second narrow column of his first page and wrote:
...cenobium in mon-
te Tabor situm funditus evertunt.
Monachos. Romanorum. Con-
stantinopol. Francorum.
Jerosolimorum. Anglorum. Henricus V.
Ludovicus Grossus. Balduinus II.
Henricus. interficiunt et omnia
sibi diripiunt. . . .The scribe did not make that mistake again but proved beyond a shadow of a doubt the exact identity of the manuscript that he was copying.
Delisle showed that two other 15th century manuscripts in Paris, B and C, only reported a few of the marginal additions to A. The scribe of B�s early 14th century ancestor ε directly copied A as far as AD 171 and left off in mid year at the exact end of A�s quire 23. Delisle demonstrated that ε, then B, copied some few of A�s additions but lacked most of them.
B is one part of the composite codex BnF lat. 1780, a sad little manuscript altogether.
It was written about 1400, but its direct source ε was most of a century older: it incorporated only the earliest markups of A. It seems that scribe B, a Paris professional, had a commission for the Chronicle and asked for an exemplar from Saint-Denis. They handed over ε, which ran only as far as AD 171, to start on, but somehow never supplied the rest in another exemplar. And so B just halted on his 90th folio, in mid-page and mid-sentence; and the nine-line square that scribe B left open for the initial C picture remains blank. Some religious house bound B up with the Homilies on Matthew of John Chrysostom and the Elucidarius of Honorius (formerly of Autun), and then an Augustinian canon, master Robert de la Porte, gave it to our favorite duke royal, Charles d�Orl�ans, (pictured in a melancholy mood on the right) possibly to comfort his hours of captivity, possibly to welcome him home to Blois. Anyhow, it was from Blois that the composite volume came to the Biblioth�que Royale.
C�s Parisian scribe was copying α, a slightly later copy of A than ε, one with more additions than B but not yet the final SECOND-VERSION text. C ends in AD 781 but a note in the manuscript indicates that the text originally carried on at least to 1308. The original C, was divided into two volumes, the second of which is now lost.
In the Vatican, Delisle also found Vat. lat. 4598, a complete southern French or Italian 14th-century manuscript that carries on through 1307. This manuscript shared C�s modifications of A but not quite all of the marginal additions to A. Like C, it is a descendent of α.
Delisle considered that the other 6 Parisian manuscripts, D, E, F, G, H and I were copies of the final SECOND VERSION text with the complete set of mark-ups to A. He then divided these 6 manuscripts into three families according to the way they handled two long marginal additions to pristine A at year AD 33. These were added to A at a stage after ε and α, and so they do not appear in B and C.
Here is a diagram of that bifolium in A:
The first section of the pristine A text tells of the death of Christ and the immediate effects of darkness, earthquake and the rending of the veil of the temple ( text number one). The second section on the same page recounts the events up through the Ascension and Pentecost including a long account of the associated material found in Josephus (text number two). Guillaume or his collaborators later wrote into the lower margin of folio 164 verso a very long note of about 300 words concerning the universality of the darkness and the earthquake of Good Friday (text three). The length of the note caused the last line of 26 words to be squeezed in and very hard to read (and we�ll call that last line text four). An annotator then added a reclaim symbol before text four, and on the facing folio 165 recto, in the lower margin just below the text block added an answering symbol and repeated the text number-four-line, slightly reworded and clarified: text five. Then another long note of about 120 words is found below that, continuing the Josephus contribution with what he had to say about John the Baptist (and that�s text six). An X at the end of text two matches the X at the beginning of this text six.
Delisle felt that the intention of the annotators to A was clear: that the whole finished passage should be in the order of texts 1, 3, 5, 2 and 6. No surviving manuscript actually does that and their different solutions are perfect for establishing relationships among the manuscripts.
Delisle showed that the 14th-century manuscript D is certainly a direct copy of A since D explicitly notes the final words of the 6th quire of the manuscript that it is copying and those are the exact final words of the 6th quire of A. At AD 33, D copied text 1, then 3, skipped BOTH 4 and 5, copied 2, and finished with 6.
Delisle showed that 14th century E (or E�s ancestor) got closer to Delisle�s reconstruction of the desired sense of the additions: the scribe copied 1, 3, and 4, ignored 5, then copied 2 and 6.
Delisle also demonstrated that the 17th century F was a direct copy of E, so when I say E I always mean �E and its exact extremely late copy F�.
Finally, Delisle found that G, H and I shared a third, less sucessful, solution: these manuscripts from the 15th century all copy 1, 3, 5, THEN 6, THEN 2, leaving the John the Baptist section unattributed or misattributed. So it is clear that these three manuscript share a single ancestor γ derived directly from A.
And it is clear that D represents one family, E another family, and G,H and I, a third; each family independently derived from A.
E contains additions to Guillaume�s text up to 1368 showing that historical interest at Saint Denis continued and various successors to Guillaume and his at�lier continued to add further sections with later years to the Chronicle. Although Delisle counted E as having the final stage SECOND VERSION text he reports one important interpolation in A enlarging on the visit of Charlemagne to the monastery of Saint Denis in AD 810 which is NOT included in E. Based on that we have assigned E an origin in a late but still intermediate stage in A�s markup history on our stemma.
Delisle was thus able to demonstrate the relations among the twelve manuscripts that he saw in Paris and Rome.
As well as these, we have seen the nine other known manuscripts of the Chronicle and have assigned them to their places in the family tree. The very fine London manuscript, copied in Paris about 1320, slips into its place in our stemma as an independent faithful copy of the final stage SECOND VERSION A with all A�s additions and markups. Its solution of the locus criticus of AD 33 is exactly as E has it: 1, 3, 4, 2, 6. London however cannot be either an ancestor or descendant of E: E does not include the interpolation at AD 810 that is included in London.
London was the first manuscript of the Chronicle which we saw and now is the time to tell why we cared to look at it and what we found. The original nucleus of the British Library was the Royal collection, the personal library of
Henry VIII at Westminster. Our London manuscript, BL Royal 13.E.iv, was in the hands of King Henry in 1533, when he was planning the Anglican secession, including a new code of church law that he planned to have compiled by a board of university specialists. Here, in schoolboy Gothic he noted that the code of Pope Boniface VIII had been compiled in just that way: �Note the authority of the Liber Sextus Decretalium.�
How did King Henry get our Chronicle?
From Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk; he had presided at the annual Garter feast at Windsor as lieutenant of the Sovereign in 1525, and taken the Chronicle as a gift on that occasion.
Here is Howard�s ex-libris. The ambitious duke made the book a New Years gift to the king in 1530, but first he prudently erased the Dei gratia (that we have put back), lest it raise the eyebrow of his grace the king. Luckily for Howard, the king didn�t have an ultraviolet light.
But how did this French book come to be at Windsor?
Well, in 1416 the emperor designate, Sigismund of Luxembourg, king of the Romans, was elected, vested, and installed a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter, and the Chronicle was one of his gifts to the Chapel of St. George on that occasion. He also gave the heart of St. George, but that is another story.
And how in the world did Sigismund acquire our Chronicle?
Well, from his cousin Jean, duc de Berry.
Jean de Berry (shown here at dinner) was Sigismund�s host in Paris in 1416, during the first sad Lent after Agincourt.
What has that to do with our Chronicle, you may ask.
We turn for an answer to this chap in his robe of Berry blue, counting the gold and gilt tableware. He�s Robinet d�Estampes, keeper of the duc de Berry�s jewels.
He wrote this item in his inventory.
There are a few things to note here. Berry took the book, not from the library or the archive of St-Denis but from the church, and there is a wrong title in the inventory because that was how the book was labeled: it does contain chronicles of France, and that is the reason why it was kept on a lectern in the royal necropolis of Saint-Denis: to tell the glorious histories of the kings entombed there, ending with Philip III and IV.** The secundo-folio proves that it was BL Royal 13 E.IV that Robinet was describing. Berry declared on his deathbed, shortly after Sigismund�s visit, when he was clearing his conscience of debts and his house of other people�s goods, that the book had been returned to St-Denis. Certainly, the emperor had told him that he would return it. But Sigismund, in the judgement of Aeneas Silvius, �made more promises than he kept.� As for making a copy, sorry, you will see when we go back to Karen�s stemma that there are no copies of London.
The rest of the Chronicle manuscripts are related as follows. Verona, a 14th century Parisian book, is clearly copied from D. It reproduces D�s reading of AD 33. At the end of Verona�s year 1300 we find the line �hucusque frater guillermus de Nangiaco cronicam suam studio diligenti produxit,� just as in D. Verona includes in a different hand a copy of the FIRST VERSION�s years AD 1301-1302.
The manuscripts of Torino, Lyon, Dijon, and E have an intertwined history. They share E�s reading at AD 33 and they all carry on to 1368. They all share the variants that Delisle identified to separate E from D and from G, H, and I.
This is how they are related.
Torino is in two volumes. In 1904 a fire destroyed much of the town library, but thanks to prompt and sensible conservation the Chronicle volumes can still be read and collated exactly, although they are water-shrunk and wrinkled and their outer folios badly scorched.
Torino was copied from A early in the 14th century, up to the year 1302. Alone among the copyists from A, Torino�s scribe copied a set of marginal notations from A which note the word actor next to references to the succession of British kings over the years 3028 to 3168 from the Creation, but omitted to copy a few later annotations of the same sort. The manuscripts in this group prove their descent from Torino by consistantly copying actor where Torino has it and not where Torino omits it. In Torino, where the scribe did not copy A�s actor from the margin at the story about King Lear and his three daughters in Anno Mundi 3178, a later annotator supplied a note that does not come from A: Nota de rege Anglie expulso. Lyon copied that exactly. Dijon has Nota de rege Anglie eiecto. So Dijon�s early section, from Creation to 1302, also is a copy of Torino. E has neither the word actor at Lear, nor a note, so we know that none of the other manuscripts in this family was copied from E. We assume that Torino copied A, close to A�s final stage, at a date soon after 1302. A reader and friend of the Cistercians, noting in the margins of Torino many passages of interest to the Order, prompted the copying of Dijon from Torino, explicitly for the library of Clairvaux, and that library passed after the Revolution to the town of Dijon.
A late 14th-century hand continued the Torino manuscript with additions to the chronicle from AD1301 (again) to 1368. Once Torino acquired that addition, it was quickly copied peciatim onto a transfer manuscript which is now Dijon 571. We note the catchword of the penultimate quire of Torino nobilis, also ends the penultimate quire of Dijon 571, prominently, in mid-page; and the last quire of Dijon 571 takes up with a new hand. Dijon 571 was then copied directly into Dijon 570, creating for Clairvaux a manuscript that also went from creation to 1368. So both Torino and Dijon are composite manuscripts written at two distinct periods, earlier, then later, in the 14th century.
In the transfer manuscript Dijon 571 there is a blank left in the text at AD 1304, apud possiacum [blank] diocesis. Dijon�s scribe left blanks in his copy just as they stood in the tranfer manuscript and incidentally in 1304 also misread possiacum as possicicum. Dijon�s scribe also left another blank at 1313, ecclesia beate marie de [blank] where he could not decipher the place name escoiis in the transfer manuscript. E has possiacum CarnotensisEscoys at 1313, and therefore E was not copying Dijon. We conclude that E is an early copy of the finished Torino manuscript.
Lyon was copied in the 15th century also from the complete Torino text, creation through 1368. The scribe copies the British �Actor� notes exactly from Torino.
We have seen that there was a continuing tension in the Saint Denis archive between wishing to copy the Chronicle as �finished� by Guillaume de Nangis, and producing a book that covered more years of history.
The religious of the monastery of St. Denis treasured the entire skeleton of their patron saint, including his decapitated head in its own jeweled reliquary, which could be opened for the favored faithful to kiss the crown of the skull. But the canons of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris claimed to possess the crown of the skull of their missionary first bishop, St. Denis. The conflicting claims caused a stiffness in relations between Notre-Dame and Saint-Denis, and in 1406 the quarrel led to high words, some punches thrown, and a spreading polarization: Louis duc d�Orl�ans venerated the Saint-Denis relic at the start of his last campaign into Gascony, while Jean duc de Berry bargained for a fragment of the Notre-Dame cranium to add to his gallery of relics. The Notre-Dame canons sent envoys to John the Fearless of Burgundy, hoping to pit two dukes against one, and the king�s handlers, considering that his family needed no fresh causes of division, imposed a general silence and evoked the question to his own Council. On 23 November 1407 Louis of Orl�ans was assassinated on behalf of John of Burgundy, and the Royal Council had no time for the head of St. Denis; but in 1410 the canons of Notre-Dame put their case against the monks to the Parlement de Paris. Both sides brought historical documents into court. Notre-Dame mentioned a botched exhumation of the saint by Clovis II, an incident told in the Chronica, but they wisely did not produce their copy (it was possibly E). Saint-Denis brought in London, with markers at three significant places, lastly this one, 397r, from AD 1191. The canons objected that Guillaume was a monk of Saint-Denis himself, a prejudiced witness, and that he wrote in the reign of Philip the Long (1316-1322). But the monks showed up the canons� ignorance by showing the definitive colophon of London at 1300; and as for prejudice, they argued, if Guillaume�s fellowship in the monastery caused him to write lies, who could trust the Four Evangelists, or the Roman History of Livy?
There was another prestigious case, in the 1406 Council of Paris as it deliberated on the subtraction of obedience from Pope Benedict XIII of Avignon, where the Chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis was accepted as dispositive proof. So the professional Paris libraires, when they were called on for a flurry of new copies early in the 15th century, knew that, as an historical document, the work of Guillaume de Nangis ended at 1300, and they ended their copies where that authoritative voice fell silent.
Thick black f and s descenders make the 15th-century Chronicle manuscript in Vienna very ugly but you consult it in one of the most beautiful rooms in the world in the former Imperial Palace that houses also the Lippizaners of the Spanish Riding School. Wien has the same AD 33 readings as manuscripts G, H and I in Paris. This 15th century subfamily can be further divided between G, H, and Wien, which are all set up alike and, unlike I, share the use of curiously formed arabic year-numerals in the margins up until Anno Mundi 2623. I also stands apart from G, H, and Wien in that it includes at the end of the text the words Hucusque protenditur cronica Guillelmi de Nangiaco et non ultra. So we posit two lost manuscripts, one γ that is the parent of I and which is also the parent of δ the lost parent of G, H and Wien. It is possible that G or H may actually be δ and the parent of the other two but to prove or disprove that will require another trip to Paris.
Only two of the Chronicle manuscripts seem to have been copied outside the professional stationers of Paris. They are the 14th century Vat. lat. 4598 and Napoli. The two manuscripts also share characteristics with the 15th century Paris manuscript C. They report some but not all of the additions to A. They carry on, to 1307 in the case of Vat. lat., and to 1308 in the case of Napoli. C is missing its second volume, but the first volume has references forward at least to 1308. We posit an early 14th century β, a manuscript which traveled to Italy and was the parent of Vat. lat. in the middle of the 14th century and then of Napoli later on in the century. β's Parisian ancestor α was copied again in the 15th century to create C in Paris.
The layout of C, Napoli, and Vat. lat. is novel: their paragraphs are not headed by a line of regnal years. Those manuscripts also have unusual and misleading titles, which attribute the following Chronicle to Jerome and other ancients and do not mention Guillaume de Nangis or Saint-Denis. The titles in Napoli and Vat. lat. are quite long and very similar to each other.
Titles in C, Vat. lat. and Napoli
C: Liber hystoriarum sive cronicarum quem Ieronimus dicit paralympomenon
Napoli in bold then Vat. lat. in Italics
Chronici Eusebii, Ieronimi et aliorum sanctorum patrum plurium. Hoc est et sancte romane
Cronica. Eusebii, Ieronimi, et aliorum sanctorum patrum, et probatur xv. di. c. sancta [ ?]�ria
ecclesie in multis verbis et dicuntur cronice cronicarum secundum cathalogum temporum serie
ecclesia in multis v# et dicuntur cronica cronicans secundum katholicon temporum series
ordine vel ubi descripta tempora continent vel facta operationum diversorum et corripitur vescanius.
vel ordo vel ubi descripta tempora continentur vel facta temporum diversorum et corripitur iii.
And here is what we can suppose about β.The Napoli manuscript has the ex-libris of Giovanni Conversini of Ravenna, whose library has been the subject of much study. Lucia Gualdo Rosa is one of its cleverest students, and she argues that Napoli was a fruit of the library of King Robert of Naples (1309-1343). Robert was called �the Wise,� praised by Petrarch and Boccaccio for his learning, and his library is supposed to have been singularly rich, but only scraps and hints of it survive today. Here is a paraphrase of Gualdo Rosa�s key paragraph:
Giovanni�s father, Conversino Conversini, was a physician in the court of Louis of Anjou, king of Hungary. In 1348, when Giovanni was scarcely five years old, King Louis marched into Italy to avenge the death of his brother Andrew (the murdered husband of Queen Joanna, Robert�s grand-daughter). Louis did not win the kingdom of Naples, but he did take the precious library of King Robert. That treasure must not have seemed too precious to Louis, because on the road back to Hungary he gave it to his court physician, and Conversino divided it into three parts. One part he brought with him to Hungary. Another part he sent off by sea, and it was lost in a shipwreck. The third part he left at Ravenna in the care of his brother Tommaso, guardian of his son Giovanni, and in 1375 Tommaso gave Giovanni three chests of those books. One way or another, Giovanni Conversini owned the Napoli manuscript, and Giovanni �s son sold it, sending it on its way, eventually back to Naples and the Biblioteca Nazionale.
Gualdo Rosa is certain that the Napoli manuscript was written in the third quarter of the 14th century, that is, between the day that Robert the Wise died in 1348 and the day that Giovanni Conversini received those three chests in 1375. The first quire of Napoli is written in a French hand; was it in fact the first quire of �? Did Giovanni Conversini create Napoli in his uncle Tommaso�s study? Or was it Tommaso who ordered Napoli copied from β? Mysteries remain, but we are quite sure that β belonged to Robert the Wise (shown here kneeling beside his sainted brother Louis, who had renounced the crown of Naples and for the priesthood and became Bishop of Toulouse.
Finally, we find two other manuscripts of the Chronicle�s FIRST VERSION. Bruxelles is a two-volume quarto manuscript. The text is headless; it carries on to 1303. We assume it was copied from the Reginensis. It has kingdom headings at the top of every verso, so it could not be copied from BnF fr. 5703. The other FIRST-VERSION manuscript is the 14th century Vatican Chigi G VIII 233. Chigi is copied so exactly quire by quire from Reginensis that they actually report the same catchword at the end of each of the first five quires. The Chigi scribe managed that by employing a slightly smaller letter size than that of Reginensis on similar-sized parchment. To avoid having a quire end short of the bottom of the page, the Chigi scribe carefully enlarged the space between paragraphs so that it is a beautiful, clean, easy book to read. However, Chigi does introduce some few changes from the Reginensis, for example, the chapter headings to the paragraphs about the Egyptian pharaoh, Nectanebo, Olympias and the birth of Alexander the Great (Anno Mundi 3708) are word-for-word the same in Reginensis and Bruxelles while Chigi�s titles are slightly reworded. So Bruxelles was not copied from Chigi: they are both the offspring of Reginensis.
Chigi, the last manuscript that Karen saw, completed the stemma.
When she went to collate it in the Vatican in 2009 she was delighted to see this illuminated initial:
An emperor receiving the Chronicle from a monk of St-Denis! Was this the copy for Sigismund? The script and the picture felt older. Our friend the codicologist Maria Alessandra Bilotta agreed, and recommended asking Fran�ois Avril. This was his answer:What an interesting problem! The historiated initial of BAV Chigi G VIII 233 is clearly (for me) a work by the parisian illuminatrix Jehanne de Montbaston, wife and later widow of the bookseller and manuscript producer Richard de Montbaston, whose career and works have been thoroughly explored by Richard and Mary Rouse in their momentous Manuscripts and their Makers. � In the lengthy list of works that they compiled, your manuscript is lacking. If my identification is correct, this means that the Chigi manuscript has been executed in Paris during the years 1340-1355, Jeanne being associated with her husband since at least 1338 and having taken over the workshop of her defunct husband after 1353, when she swore an oath as libraire of the University of Paris.�
And so this emperor is not Sigismund but his father Charles IV. He was king of the Romans from 1346, crowned emperor in 1355. The Chronicle was very likely a gift to Charles from the king of France, John the Good (each man had married a sister of the other). The natural occasion for the gift was Charles�s imperial coronation at Rome in 1355, after which he went north again, stopping at Siena for another ceremonial welcome and to give the University its first charter. He likely also gave the Chronicle: notes were written in it to indicate that it belonged in the major library of Siena or in the cathedral, very likely the same place. The Chigi family, already rich bankers of Siena in that year, were ennobled in 1377 and in the sixteenth century controlled the city. The Chigi family library went to the Vatican in 1923.
References
Delisle, L�opold, �M�moire sur les ouvrages de Guillaume de Nangis,� M�moires de l�Acad�mie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 27,2 (1873) 287-372.
Delisle, L�opold, �Notes sur quelques manuscrits du Mus�e Britannique,� M�moires de la Soci�t� de l�histoire de Paris et de l��le de France 4 (1878) 183-238.
Delisle, L�opold, �Notice sur vingt manuscrits du Vatican,� Biblioth�que de l�Ecole des Chartes 37 (1876) 471-527.
Delisle, L�opold, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, roi de France, 1337-1380. 2 vols.; vol. 2: Inventaire des livres ayant appartenu aux rois Charles V et Charles VI et � Jean, duc de Berry (Paris, 1907; reprint Amsterdam, 1967).
Gualdo Rosa, Lucia , �Un prezioso testimone della Grande Cronaca di Guillaume de Nangis nella collezione del Parrasio� in Gasparino da Barzizza e la rinascita degli studi classici fra continuit� e rinnovamento; Atti del Seminario di studi Napoli - Palazzo Sforza, 11 aprile 1997, ed. Lucia Gualdo Rosa (Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1999) 247-274.
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