A chronicler and herald in the Teutonic Order.
Wigand served under Grand Master Konrad von Wal-lenrod (1391-1393) and is mentioned in the accounts of the order as having received a payment in 1409. He is chiefly known as the author of a rhymed German chronicle that described the history of the order in Prussia from 1293 until 1394.
The original text of Wigand’s chronicle, whose length has been variously estimated at between 16,500 and 25,000 lines, survives only as short fragments; its content has been preserved in a Latin translation written at the instigation of the Polish historian Jan Diugosz in 1464. The most important sources for Wigand’s chronicle were the Chronicon Olivense and Hermann von Wartberge’s Chronicon Livoniae. It was written to be read aloud to lay crusaders from Germany and elsewhere in the West at the high table at the order’s castle of Marienburg (mod. Malbork, Poland) as the ceremonial high point of their participation in the Baltic Crusades. The subject of the chronicle is therefore warfare and the celebration of the achievements of warriors, both Christian and pagan, in contrast to the predominantly spiritual concerns of the earlier chronicles of the order.
-Mary Fischer
See also: Teutonic Order; Teutonic Order: Literature
Bibliography
Wigand von Marburg, “Reimchronik,” ed. Thomas Hirsch, in Scriptores Rerum Prussicarum: Die Geschichtsquellen der preufiischen Vorzeit bis zum Untergange der Ordensherrschaft, ed. Theodor Hirsch, Max Toeppen, and Ernst Strehlke, 5 vols. (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1861-1874), 2:429-662; 4:1-8.
World History
