Polish · c. 1100–1400
Charters in Latin, names in Polish
A Piast charter is Latin written by a scribe with no settled way of spelling Polish. One village can be Crezouicz on the parchment, Cresouici in the cartulary copy and Krzeszowice in the index, and the letters that carry the difference — c, z, s, ch — are the ones a Gothic documentary hand crushes hardest. Evidano treats the formula and the vernacular names as two separate reading problems and shows the line on the parchment beside each one.
Sample pages
Real pages from public collections, shown beside their transcriptions. Pages whose transcription is still being checked are marked.
Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, Warsaw, Zbiór Dokumentów Pergaminowych 6418, 18 April 1155 · Source · Public domain · Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych / Wikimedia Polska partnership
Transcription being verified
Printed in full as no. 78 (pp. 74–78) of the Kodeks dyplomatyczny Księstwa Mazowieckiego edited by J. K. Kochanowski; the reading of this opening section is being checked against it.
What the model is told to watch for: Expect Caroline, Proto-Gothic, and Gothic documentary hands in Latin, with Polish personal and place names represented through unstable Latin spelling. Distinguish long s (ſ), r rotunda, u/v, i/j, and minim sequences, and examine unfamiliar consonant clusters without assuming later Polish diacritics. Note chrismons, Tironian et (⁊), suspensions, contractions, superscript letters, notarial signs, seals, Roman numerals, and formulaic dating clauses.
Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, Warsaw, Zbiór Dokumentów Pergaminowych 3371, 14 November 1268 · Source · Public domain · Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych / Wikimedia Polska partnership
Transcription being verified
Printed as no. 389 (p. 344) of the Kodeks dyplomatyczny Wielkopolski, vol. 1, where the archive notes it appears under the date 1260; the transcription is being matched to that entry.
What the model is told to watch for: Expect Caroline, Proto-Gothic, and Gothic documentary hands in Latin, with Polish personal and place names represented through unstable Latin spelling. Distinguish long s (ſ), r rotunda, u/v, i/j, and minim sequences, and examine unfamiliar consonant clusters without assuming later Polish diacritics. Note chrismons, Tironian et (⁊), suspensions, contractions, superscript letters, notarial signs, seals, Roman numerals, and formulaic dating clauses.
Archdiocesan Archive, Wrocław, c. 1268–1273 · Source · Public domain
Transcription being verified
The Latin text was edited by G. A. Stenzel, Liber fundationis claustri Sanctae Mariae Virginis in Heinrichow (Breslau, 1854); the opening of Book I is being collated with that edition.
What the model is told to watch for: Expect Caroline, Proto-Gothic, and Gothic documentary hands in Latin, with Polish personal and place names represented through unstable Latin spelling. Distinguish long s (ſ), r rotunda, u/v, i/j, and minim sequences, and examine unfamiliar consonant clusters without assuming later Polish diacritics. Note chrismons, Tironian et (⁊), suspensions, contractions, superscript letters, notarial signs, seals, Roman numerals, and formulaic dating clauses.
Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, Warsaw, Zbiór Dokumentów Pergaminowych 2880, 30 September 1364 · Source · Public domain · Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych / Wikimedia Polska partnership
Transcription being verified
Printed as no. 233 (pp. 299–300) in the Kodeks dyplomatyczny katedry krakowskiej św. Wacława, vol. 1; the witness list at the foot is being checked line by line against it.
What the model is told to watch for: Expect Caroline, Proto-Gothic, and Gothic documentary hands in Latin, with Polish personal and place names represented through unstable Latin spelling. Distinguish long s (ſ), r rotunda, u/v, i/j, and minim sequences, and examine unfamiliar consonant clusters without assuming later Polish diacritics. Note chrismons, Tironian et (⁊), suspensions, contractions, superscript letters, notarial signs, seals, Roman numerals, and formulaic dating clauses.
Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, Warsaw, Zbiór Dokumentów Pergaminowych 592, 24 June 1394 · Source · Public domain · Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych / Wikimedia Polska partnership
Transcription being verified
Calendared as no. 229 (p. 29) in Index actorum saeculi XV, ed. A. Lewicki (Kraków, 1888); no full text has been printed, so the reading is being established from the parchment.
What the model is told to watch for: Expect Caroline, Proto-Gothic, and Gothic documentary hands in Latin, with Polish personal and place names represented through unstable Latin spelling. Distinguish long s (ſ), r rotunda, u/v, i/j, and minim sequences, and examine unfamiliar consonant clusters without assuming later Polish diacritics. Note chrismons, Tironian et (⁊), suspensions, contractions, superscript letters, notarial signs, seals, Roman numerals, and formulaic dating clauses.
What a Piast charter looks like
The oldest originals surviving in Polish archives date from the twelfth century and are written in a late Caroline minuscule, round and widely spaced, often by a scribe trained in Rome, Bamberg or Prague rather than in Poland. Across the thirteenth century the ducal chanceries of Kraków, Poznań, Płock and Wrocław move through a proto-Gothic phase into a fully Gothic documentary hand: letters compressed laterally, feet broken at an angle, ascenders shortened. By the middle of the fourteenth century a royal or episcopal office writes a practised chancery cursive whose first line is drawn in exaggerated tall letters — littera elongata — announcing the invocation before the reader has parsed a word of it.
The document is formulaic, which helps. Most open with a cross or a decorated invocation such as In nomine domini amen, move to a notification (Notum facimus universis quibus expedit), state the grant, add a corroboration naming the seal, and close with a dating clause built from Roman numerals and the Roman calendar: Datum Kalis anno domini M CC LX VIII, XVIII kalendas decembris. Papal privileges add their own furniture — the wheel-shaped rota, the BENE VALETE monogram, and a column of cardinal subscriptions each beginning Ego. Witness lists, notarial signs, pendant seals on cords and later archival endorsements crowd the same skin.
Abbreviation is constant rather than occasional. A bar marks a lost m or n or a contracted word (dns for dominus); p with a crossed descender is per, with a looped one pro; the 9-shaped sign is con- at the start of a word and -us at the end; the Tironian sign for et looks like a 7. Into this system the scribe drops Polish names that Latin has no letters for: the sound now written cz appears as c, cz, ch or z; ł is simply l; the nasal vowels are a, e, an or en. Vernacular forms are sometimes flagged — vulgariter, wlgari nomine — and sometimes not.
Why ordinary OCR struggles here
One village, six spellings
Polish names are outside every Latin word list an ordinary OCR engine relies on, so the engine quietly rewrites them into something Latin-shaped: Sorcow becomes Sortou, Rzeplin becomes Reptin. Because the whole value of these documents for local and family history lies in the name forms, a transcription that tidies them is worse than none.
Marks that are not punctuation
Bars, superscript vowels, hooks and the Tironian sign are grammar, not decoration. Read as accents or stray strokes they turn a legible sentence into a string of fragments; expanded silently and inconsistently they hide what the scribe actually wrote. Both failures are common on the same page.
Minim thickets and r rotunda
In a compressed Gothic charter hand, i, m, n and u are the same stroke repeated, and the dot on the i is absent or displaced. The r rotunda used after o, b and p is easily taken for a 2 or a z — which matters, because z is precisely the letter that carries Polish sibilants.
Everything added later
A charter carries archival numbers in ink and pencil, a nineteenth-century date in the margin, folds, seal cords and sometimes a dorsal summary in a much later hand. All of it sits in the same image as the medieval text and has to be kept out of the transcription rather than merged into it.
Who works with this material
Editors of diplomatic codices
The Kodeks dyplomatyczny series and its regional successors are still being extended. An editor wants a semi-diplomatic first pass that keeps the line breaks of the parchment, marks every expansion, and flags the readings that need a second eye, so the apparatus can be built from the transcription rather than from scratch.
Place-name and onomastic projects
Historical-geographical dictionaries are assembled by collecting every attested form of a settlement or a personal name with its date. That work fails if the transcription silently regularises Zvichov to Zwichów. What it needs is the graph exactly as written, with the surrounding clause for context.
Cathedral, monastic and municipal archives
Chapter and abbey collections hold thousands of single-sheet parchments described only by a one-line summary. A full text attached to each scan turns a shelf list into something a researcher can search by field name, tithe, mill or witness.
Teachers of Latin palaeography
Courses work from charters precisely because they combine a fixed formula with unpredictable vernacular. Setting a machine reading beside a student reading shows at once whether a mistake came from the letterforms or from the abbreviation system.
Getting the best transcription
Tell it which formula to expect
Say whether the document is a papal privilege, a ducal grant or a private act. Knowing that a corroboration clause and a dating clause are coming lets a damaged abbreviation be resolved from context instead of guessed at letter by letter.
Separate expansion policy from name policy
Ask for Latin abbreviations to be expanded with the supplied letters in brackets, and in the same instruction ask for personal and place names to be left exactly as written, unexpanded and unmodernised. Without the second half of that rule the names are quietly repaired.
Pull the dating clause and witness list out separately
Request the dating clause verbatim, with its Roman numerals and its kalendae or feast day untranslated, and the witness subscriptions as a list. Both are where indexing value sits, and both are where a continuous prose transcription blurs the structure.
Calibrate on a charter that is already edited
Start with a document printed in one of the diplomatic codices. Comparing the output with a known edition shows how r rotunda, suspension bars and vernacular clusters are being handled before you turn to the unpublished sheets in the same box.
Further reading on this hand
The palaeography guides the in-app selector points to for this domain, if you want to check a transcription against the standard references.
- Pismo w pigułce
This educational resource from the National Archives in Kraków introduces the historical development of writing represented in Polish archives. It surveys medieval Latin scripts and explains the functions of common abbreviation systems in manuscripts and charters. The material covers suspension, contraction, superscript letters, Tironian signs, and recurring sigla associated with letters such as p and q. It is useful for Polish medieval charters because their vernacular names occur inside a Latin scribal and abbreviation system.
Frequently asked questions
- Will Polish names keep their medieval spelling?
- Yes, when you ask for it, and it is worth asking explicitly. The default for this material is to reproduce name forms as written — Kalis, Crezouicz, Sorcow — rather than resolving them to the modern place name. A modern identification can be added in a separate column or note so the attested form and the identification never get confused.
- How are suspension bars, superscripts and the Tironian sign handled?
- They are read as abbreviation marks rather than as accents or stray ink. You choose whether they are expanded silently, expanded with the added letters in brackets, or left as the sign itself. Whichever you choose is applied consistently across a whole box of charters, which is what makes the output comparable.
- Can it separate the charter from later archival notes?
- A charter usually carries a modern shelfmark, an added date, a dorsal summary and sometimes pencil numbering. These can be transcribed into a separate block, labelled by hand and position, so the medieval text stays clean while nothing on the sheet is thrown away.
- Does it convert the dating clause into a modern date?
- Only if you ask. The safer default is to transcribe the clause as it stands, Roman numerals and feast day included, and to give the modern equivalent as a note. Polish charters date by the Roman calendar and by saints’ days, and both conversions carry assumptions an editor may want to check.
- What about papal privileges with a rota and cardinal subscriptions?
- The body of the privilege, the rota motto, the BENE VALETE monogram and the column of Ego subscriptions can each be transcribed as its own element and labelled, so the layout of the bull is recoverable from the text file rather than flattened into one paragraph.
Related scripts and pages
Transcribe your medieval charters
Upload a parchment scan, choose Medieval Latin Charters with Polish Names, and test the expansion rules on a document you already have an edition for.