Přehled o publikaci

Parchment, a writing material made from precisely tanned animal skin, is characterized by great resistance and durability. Thanks to this, some texts recorded by medieval scribes, often more than eight centuries ago, have survived to the present day. Others were, usually in times of war, copied into copybooks so that the memory of decisions made hundreds of years ago would not be lost. In both cases, the words written in often difficult-to-read script and poorly understood language are the only written evidence for us of the beginnings of urban life in Silesia, Moravia and Bohemia. Moreover, the strictly structured content of the documents does not reveal many details that would interest us today. In the best case, we have a record in a chronicle or annals that is several centuries younger, in the worst case, we have to try to read between the lines, so to speak. Thanks to the painstaking work of enthusiastic 19th-century local history researchers and renowned historians of the following centuries, who have devoted themselves to the oldest documents, an image of the medieval landscape emerges from the parchment, in which the first medieval towns in our country were built during the High Middle Ages with the hope of a better life.