As court historian to Ferdinand I, Wolfgang Lazius (151465) was going to produce his
monumental Latin compendium of the history of Austria from the Roman conquest to his own
time, entitled Rerum Austriacarum Decades. Some parts of this voluminous work were never
completed, other chapters relating to the early centuries are of little relevance to modern
scholarship. The situation is quite different, however, with the Fifth Decas, which was
completed in its entirety, and which can rightly be regarded as an invaluable source on events
in the Hungarian Kingdom 154056. Lazius wrote about the siege of Buda (154142) as an
eyewitness, and as a court historian he had access to many sources which have now been
partially lost. Although he was Austrian by birth, his work as the historian of King Ferdinand
can rightly be interpreted as a continuation of the most famous Hungarian court historians,
Jnos Thurczy and Antonio Bonfini, and his immediate predecessor Caspar Ursinus Velius. It
is almost incomprehensible thatwith the exception of a few pagesit was never printed, and
that neither Hungarian nor Austrian historiography made use of it.
The publication of the work in its original language is therefore an internationally significant
undertaking, since the years 154056 are not only a turning point in Hungarian history, but also
the years of the birth of the Habsburg monarchy (so called Donaumonarchie), and thus a rich
source of data not only for Hungarian historians of the early modern period, but also for
Austrian and other scholars. It is therefore essential that the edition be published in the original
language, with annotations in German/English, comprehensible to international scholarship.
The second undertaking of the project is a monograph on Lazius work as a historian in a
broader context. Lazius was a major figure of 16th-century Viennese humanism, whose diverse
activities have attracted the attention of many scholars. However, the study of his work as a
historian has been largely neglected, not least because his texts were only available in
manuscript form. The monograph being produced in the framework of this project aims to fill
this gap.