Codex diplomaticus Saxoniae

The Codex diplomaticus Saxoniae [regiae] (CDS), founded in 1860 by the Saxon state government, is the most important collection of charters on the history of the Wettin territories in the High and Late Middle Ages. To date, around 12,000 documents have been published in a total of 32 volumes. This makes the CDS the most important collection of sources on the history of central Germany. In view of the outstanding position of the central German territories in German history and the great influence that the Landgraves of Thuringia, Margraves of Meissen and, from 1423, the Electors and Dukes of Saxony had in the medieval empire, the edition is also of supra-regional and, in some cases, international significance.

According to its goal of publishing all charters relating to the history of the Wettin territories, which mainly covered Saxony and Thuringia, the CDS was divided into three main sections: Part I (‘Charters of the Margraves of Meissen and the Landgraves of Thuringia’) contains the charters of the entire House of Wettin and the Thuringian Landgrave House of Ludowinger, which died out in 1247, from its beginnings in 948 to the Leipzig Partition in 1485. It consists of an older section I/A, covering the period up to 1380, and a more recent section I/B, which begins with the death of Frederick III ‘the Strict’ († 1381), Landgrave of Thuringia and Margrave of Meissen, and ends with the permanent division of the Wettin dominion in 1485. Part II is devoted to Saxon monasteries, collegiate churches and towns, while Part III contains the edition of papal charters preserved in Saxony.

In the first decades of its existence, 24 volumes of the CDS were published. After 1909, however, work was effectively suspended. Nevertheless, the project was never completely abandoned. In 1941 another volume of Part I (CDS I/B 4) was published. As a planned project of the ‘Historical Commission for Saxony’, which was re-established in 1950, the edition project finally became an academy project when it was incorporated into the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig in 1956. However, even within this framework, it could not be further promoted at first.

After the peaceful revolution and the founding of the Free State of Saxony in 1989/90, intensive efforts were made to resume work on the CDS. The Institute of Saxon History and Cultural Anthropology (ISGV) in Dresden took over the processing of parts II and III of the CDS, which focus on Saxony, while the Saxon Academy of Sciences continued the edition of the supra-regionally significant part I, which contains the charters of the ruling Margraves of Meissen and the Landgraves of Thuringia, in what was effectively a new beginning. After initial efforts begun in 1998 led to the resumption of work on the codex in 2002 as part of the Academy’s project ‘Quellen und Forschungen zur Sächsischen Geschichte’, a separate project, ‘Codex diplomaticus Saxoniae’, funded by the Academies’ Programme, was established at the Academy in 2008.

With the edition of the Meissen and Thuringian princely charters, the project covers large parts of the federal states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, Hesse and Bavaria, as well as peripheral areas of Poland and Czechia. It documents the practice of governance, territorial politics, the princely position of the Wettins in the empire and their dynastic alliances as one of the leading princely dynasties in high and late medieval Germany. It thus provides fundamental research on the history of one of the central regions of the medieval German Empire as well as on comparative regional and imperial history.

The work begun at the Leipzig Academy in 2002 initially focused on creating a register for the main section I/A 3, published in 1898, which contains the margrave and landgrave charters from 1196 to 1234. The register has been available since 2009 as a separate supplementary volume of the CDS. Since then, work has focused on the edition of the margrave and landgrave diplomas from 1235 to 1288, the year of Margrave Henry the Illustrious‘ death. In addition, the Academy project collects and documents the tradition of the charters of the ruling Wettin dynasty from 1289 to the end of the independent reign of Landgrave Frederick I ‘the Brave’ in 1320. A first volume containing the charters from 1235 to 1247 was published in 2014. Another volume was published in 2017, containing the charters from 1248 to 1264. The edition of the charters from 1265 to 1272 has been published in 2026.

Following the end of funding under the Academy Programme, which ran from 2008 to 2019, the edition of the Meissen and Thuringian princely charters has been able to continue since 2020 thanks to funding from the Free States of Saxony and Thuringia and the Friedrich Christian Lesser Foundation (Mühlhausen). The research centre and its head remain based at the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig. In 2023, the division of labour between the Academy and the ISGV in the continuation of the CDS was further intensified by the creation of a new half-time position at the ISGV for the edition of the margrave and landgrave documents. The scientific supervision of the codex work jointly continued at the Leipzig Academy and the ISGV is carried out by a project-related commission established at the Saxon Academy, which includes representatives of both institutions as well as employees of the Saxon, Thuringian and Berlin state archives and external experts.