Poland

The lands of the Polish crown lay outside the Roman frontier, so Poland’s transactional record begins with the medieval town rather than with inscriptions. From the fourteenth century the unit of reckoning was the grzywna or mark, a weight of silver counted in 48 groszy, while actual payment ran in small silver coin — the Kraków grosz and half-grosz — and, for large sums, in imported gold: the Hungarian florin above all, later called the czerwony złoty or red złoty, alongside Venetian ducats. The złoty polski was never a coin but a money of account, fixed at 30 groszy in 1528, so any Polish sum obliges a reader to ask whether the florin named is metal or reckoning. What survives is unusually rich for a country so often fought over: Kraków’s council and court books run from the 1300s, the royal household accounts from the reign of Jagiełło, and the Hanseatic municipal archives of Gdańsk and Toruń are among the best in the Baltic. Kraków in particular kept its parish and guild papers, which is why the financing of a single altarpiece can still be read five centuries later.

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Alms and Bequests of the Kraków Burghers for Veit Stoss’s High Altarpiece at St Mary’s 1477–1489

Between the feast of St Urban 1477 and the feast of St James 1489 the parish of St Mary’s in Kraków paid for a new high altarpiece carved by Master Veit Stoss of Nuremberg, known in Poland as Wit Stwosz. A memorandum written by the city notary Joannes Heydeke and kept in the parish archive records that the work ran to expenses of 2,808 florins, that 200 florins came from the will of the burgher Franciscus Gleywicz, and that the rest was collected in alms from the townspeople — and states flatly that nothing whatever came from the town hall or the public treasury, which corrects the widely repeated claim that the city funded it. The sum covers the whole undertaking over twelve years, Stoss’s carving together with the joinery, painting and gilding, and not the sculptor’s fee alone. The notary writes only florins; it is read here as the Hungarian gold florin then current in Kraków, and the alternative reading as money of account moves the figure by about fifteen per cent rather than by a factor.

~9,773.5g

Kraków, Archiwum Parafii Mariackiej, vol. VII, no. 1, memorandum of Joannes Heydeke de Damnis on the building of the high altar, 1489; Lossnitzer, Max. Veit Stoss: Die Herkunft seiner Kunst, seine Werke und sein Leben. (Leipzig, 1912), documentary appendix III, no. 9, pp. XII–XIII.