Die ›Kaiserchronik‹ und der deutsche Adel

Abstract

Abstract The paper explains the broad reception of the ›Kaiserchronik‹ in the German culture throughout the high and late middle ages by its ability to give a historical shape and foundation to a social identity of the medieval German nobility. This identity is based on the Chronicle’s general concept of history and worked out in its series of narratives on the one hand, and mirrored by its reception in the textual tradition on the other. The paper shows that the ›Kaiserchronik‹ ascribes to the German nobility the identity of being the teleologically destined bearer of the Roman empire and that the manuscripts preserving the text contain various reflections of the fact that this identity was actually adopted by the Chronicle’s textual community from the late 12th to the 15th century. This is illustrated by the means of the continuation of the ›Kaiserchronik‹ in its so-called C-Version (I), its contextualization within the famous Vorau codex (II), the excerpt of the Adelger episode in a Vienna codex (III), and the copy of the final parts of the Charlemagne episode in a Munich single sheet (IV). Overall, the examples demonstrate that the ›Kaiserchronikʼs‹ function of shaping and founding a social identity of the German nobility also explains in a new manner its flagrant idiosyncrasies in representing the history of the Roman emperors.