The Charters of the Landgraves of Hesse Online (German Acronym: HeLaUrOn)

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Among the multiple charter collections of the Hessian State Archives in Marburg, the archives of the Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel are particularly outstanding. They comprise all the surviving charters of the Imperial Landgraviate Hesse from its formation in the 13th century and the line of Hesse-Kassel emanating from its distribution amongst different heirs in the 16th century up to the 19th century. Because of the cohesiveness and concentration of its material and the historical significance of the Landgraves that exceeds the Hessian territory by far, it must be regarded as one of the most significant charter collections of a ruling dynasty of imperial princes in the German-speaking regions. It illustrates the development of the Hessian sovereignty from a peripheral and scattered dominion to an independent territorial lordship and also demonstrates the importance of the Landgraviate in a German, European and international context. Despite their great prestige, most of the charters of the Landgraves must be classified as virtually inaccessible for historical research. The corresponding finding aids are handwritten volumes partly from the late 18th century which are hardly serviceable to the users due to their outmoded and confusing entries which are textually disfigured. Therefore it is the objective of the project to completely and consistently index the two most extensive stocks Urk. 13 and Urk. 14 of the Archive of the Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel and make them accessible on the internet. The stock Urk. 13 comprises 5.565 charters which cover a wide range of subjects and thereby displays the manifold responsibilities and vast scope of competence of the Landgraves. The stock Urk. 14, for the indexing of which funds are requested, contains 14.900 charters showing the Hessian Landgraves as fief givers, thus illustrating the evolution of their property and status as well as their regional and supra-regional relevance and interrelations. Indexing such a huge amount of charters will provide a much wider basis of sources for the scholars. The charters will be published on the research database "Arcinsys" in order to provide them worldwide, free of charge and barrier-free, for scholars as well as the interested public. The indexing will be based on a repeatedly approved concept for extensive charter collections. It is also intended to deliver the produced metadata to the internet platforms Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library), Europeana and Monasterium. The project also wants to contribute to the interdisciplinary communication between archive, history and data processing and to all questions of the “Digital Humanities”.