Documents of the Doges of Venice in the Collection of Academician Nikolay P. Likhachev, 14 — mid-16 Centuries: Structure of the Collection, History and Prospects of Study

The collection of the Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences, contains more than 1.7 thousand acts on the history of the Venetian Republic from the 12th — 18th centuries, once part of the Museum of Palaeography of the USSR Academy of Sciences, created on the basis of the manuscript collection of Academician Nikolay P. Likhachev (1862—1936). The documents were acquired by the scholar between 1892 and 1914 through purchases at European auctions and from private collectors. Of these, just circa a hundred acts of the 12th to 15th centuries relating to Venetian possessions were published. These are the publications of L. Lanfranchi and B. Strina, E. Č. Skržinska, A. M. Kononenko and V. I. Mazhuga in the 1960s—1980s, S. P. Karpov, L. G. Klimanov and S. V. Bliznyuk in the 1990s. Some other pieces were attributed and briefly described in the 1990s — 2000s by L. G. Klimanov in catalogues and thematic reviews. A scientific description of illumination on 15th — 17th century documents was undertaken in the 2010s — 2020s by E. Y. Zolotova. The present article represents an intermediate stage in the preparation of a full-text edition of documents from the 14th to the first half of the 16th century issued by the Doges of Venice (18 ducali maggiori, 60 littere ducali, and one commissione ducale), which were of particular interest to N. P. Likhachev himself: a quarter of the documents were noted in his 1923 paper on the Venetian sphragistics and diplomatics; some pieces were presented at the exhibition in the Museum of Palaeography in 1927—1930.