The Process of Writing and Promulgation of Acts in the Early Chancellery Practice of the Frankish State and Old Rus

Abstract

The paper is dedicated to the early chancellery practices of the Frankish State and Old Rus as well as to the differences and the similarities of the early immunity chaters of those two countries. In medieval Latin sources, the word kancellaria is known from the 12th century. In what concerns Rus and the Russian State, it is used somewhat conventionally up to c. 1700. Institutions comprising some staff of scribes are known in the Russian State not earlier than in the 15th—16th centuries. The offices of dyaks (later transforming into prikazes and chets) emerged only in the first half and the middle of the 16th century. Contrary to the early medieval West, chancellery was not a special institution at the court, but rather a structure within a central state office. Due to this, acts often were composed in scriptoria, and the originals of the earliest of them are written in bookish hands. The practice of composing charters by beneficiaries, known in the early Frankish State, was characteristic to Rus until at least the second half of the 16th century. Although princely scribes are known to compose some kinds of acts from the late 13th and the 14th centuries, many other long continued to be written in monastic scriptoria.