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Krzysztof Syta - Archives of
marshals of the Polish Crown. Definition,
characteristics
and typology of the documents
Adam Sędziwój Archives of great marshals (hetmani wielcy)
and field marshals (hetmani polni) of the Polish Crown and
of the Great Duchy of Lithuania functioned within an
organisational framework very different to archives of
other
ministerial offices within the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth. Marshals' archives should be regarded as
belonging to
private archives and, to be more specific, as fragments of
archives belonging to clans and families from which
marshals
descended. The documents written by marshals while they
were in office were considered their private property and
they
were entered into archives as their personal, private
files. This is how a paradox occured because documents
written
by a person holding one of the most important offices in
the country, and who was often seen as dangerous for the
nobility's and the ruler's own interests and for the
country's security, could not be made known to the public
and
existed beyond any control. Various documents survived
amongst the archives of the marshals of the Polish Crown,
different in terms of form, sender and subject matter.
The first criterion that we can adopt while characterising
the documentation found in marshals' archives is its form.
Here, the first place definitely takes correspondence,
followed by documents set out in tabular form, case files,
books,
and finally documents. Other criterion which can be
applied is the sender and the addressee. According to this
criterion,
the documents can be divided into these incoming,
addressed to marshal or people close to him (e.g. people
working in
his office), and these outgoing, written by marshal or
people working with him. Another criterion used for
typology
of documentation found in marshals' archives is the
subject matter, usually dependent of the function of
marshal of
the Polish Crown. And so the documents can be divided into
the following categories: military, financial, judicial,
diplomatic and private (these include documents related to
the office held but referring directly to marshal, e.g.
papers appointing to the office of marshal, documentation
regarding remuneration, correspondence). Taking into
consideration the fisical form in which the documents can
be found at the moment, we can describe them as loose,
glued
or bound together. Certainly, all those forms could well
be found in the past but it is important to remeber that
the condition that the documents are in at present does
not always correspond to their original form. They were
usually
produced as loose documents and were later bound into
fascicles.
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