The Charters of Otto IV

edited by Andrea Rzihacek and Renate Spreitzer


The edition of the charters of Emperor Otto IV (1198–1218) is being prepared by the MGH section Diplomata situated in Vienna at the Institut für Mittelalterforschung at the Austrian Akademie der Wissenschaften, Abteilung Editionsunternehmen und Quellenforschung and will appear as volume 13 in the Diplomata series "Die Urkunden der deutschen Könige und Kaiser" (The Charters of the German Kings and Emperors). It will comprise all ca. 330 charters and deperdita issued during Otto's reign as Holy Roman Emperor. In order to shorten the wait for the printed publication, beginning in 2019 the first ca. 100 charter texts have made available as an online pre-print edition, with yearly updates as of 2020.

The pre-print version offers a critical edition of the charters - published in chronological order - based on all relevant manuscript transmissions with a critical apparatus, summary, date, notes on the manuscripts used to reconstruct the text and previous printed editions, images, and registers. For reference purposes, the charters are numbered according to Regesta Imperii 5/1 (BFW: Böhmer – Ficker – Winkelmann) and 5/4 (BZ: Böhmer – Zinsmaier). In the online edition, the commentary is limited to providing information that is relevant for understanding the text, e.g. identifing precursor documents drawn on in the present charter with the corresponding text passages underlined (in the printed edition, these passages will be denoted with small font). Since the comprehensive commentaries dealing with formal and contentual aspects of the charters are a "work in progress" that will be finalised by the end of the editory work, they are not included in the digital pre-print version.

Besides using underlining to mark textual references to previous charters, the pre-pring edition indicates passages in elongata between # symbols and subscript letters with %: in the printed version these will be typographically reproduced as in previous Diplomata editions. References to printed editions, images and registers employ abbreviations that will be resolved in the printed edition; they are, however, largely the same as in previously published Diplomata volumes.

Pre-print edition

The charters of Otto IV (PDF, last update: August 2019)