Abstract

The 1580 foundation charter of Zamość, bearing the handwritten signature of its founder, Jan Zamoyski, was until recently considered lost. The authors of this article attempt to explain how it found its way to the National Archives in Kraków, where it was identified in a collection of parchment documents. There is no doubt that until 1860 the document was in Zamość, as this is the date on the obverse of the parchment, accompanied by the signature of Father Mikołaj Kulaszyński, Vicar of the Zamość Collegiate Church, attesting that he had read the document. This note prompted the authors to search for arguments for the hypothesis that it was Fr Kulaszyński who sent the foundation charter to Kraków (together with other documents), to the conservator-restorer in Eastern Galicia Ludwik Mieczysław Potocki, who was working on a monograph on Zamość and the Zamoyski family entail. The hypothesis is based on two assumptions: first, the Zamość foundation charter, which at the end of the nineteenth century was supposed to be in the Archive of Old Documents in Lublin, was only a copy; second, the original charter was deposited in the archives of the collegiate church rather than in the “magistrate’s chest” (the nucleus of the municipal archive), as suggested by the church’s importance. The authors describe the circumstances of the discovery of another priceless historical document from 1580 lost during the Second World War in Vilnius: King Stefan Batory’s privilege for Zamość, as well as the biography of Fr Kulaszyński and his collaboration with Potocki in the creation of the monograph “Zamość and Its Institutions in Relation to History, Religion and National Education,” which remains unpublished.