This week’s post is by Dr Earle Havens, the Nancy H. Hall Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts at the Johns Hopkins University. The Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins is one of our Preserving the World’s Rarest Books partners.
Featured image: Ferdinand I, King of the Romans, Bohemia, Hungary, and Croatia, Holy Roman Empire. [F]erdinannd von Gotts gnaden Römischer Künig … Wir geben der hohen notdurfft nach hiemit züerkennen … das Unns, unsern Lannden … von gedachtem Türken [Vienna, 1536].
The above circular letter was printed as a broadside on extremely durable paper and remains remarkably well-preserved in an uncut, nearly pristine state. It was initially issued from the imperial Viennese printer on 23 December 1536 to notify Ferdinand’s fellow Electors, their vassals, and the Estates of the imperial Diet about military preparations being made by the Turkish Sultan, Suleiman I “the Magnificent” (d. 1566), for yet another impending attack on Christendom. Such an attack would have transpired within a few years of the failed Ottoman Siege of Vienna (1529) and subsequent Siege of Güns (1533).
The imperial order was made after informants of King Ferdinand and his brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, reported once more of the distant beat of Ottoman war drums. Such invasion fears were exacerbated by allied concerns over internal dissension among the nobility of Ferdinand’s fissiparous hereditary Hungarian possessions.
This sturdily printed ephemeron called for a new muster of imperial cavalry and infantry to address the looming Ottoman threat well before the summer fighting season, for distribution across the vast territories that formed the eastern marches of the Holy Roman Empire. Perhaps to inspire a clearer sense of confidence in its authenticity and authority, and a more palpable sense of vassal obligations to imperial calls to arms, this broadside was printed on the heaviest paper then available. Such paper stock will have come at a great cost, for its weight was of the sort usually reserved for supporting and preserving large-scale and often extremely expensive maps and copper-plate engravings, rather than simple letterpress.
Should printed administrative documents such as this—richly produced, but for a utilitarian legal purpose—properly count among the “world’s rarest books”? Or are they more common than one might expect, even during this fairly early period in the history of printed ephemera for which survival rates are incredibly low? In an effort to “preserve the world’s rarest books” how capable are we of “preserving the world’s rarest ephemera” in the process? Although we have no record of the broadside’s disposition prior to its acquisition by Johns Hopkins several years ago, the folds in the object suggest that it may well have survived simply by being tipped in between the boards of a larger bound book.