by Ann Wroe
Abroad, thanks must go to Professor Leopold Auer, director of the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchivs in Vienna; to Dr Manfred Rupert, director of the Tiroler Landesarchiv in Innsbruck; to Frau Moses of the Sächsisches Haupstaatsarchiv in Dresden; to Jose Maria Burrieza Mateos of the Archivo General in Simancas; and to Dr Susy Marcon at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice. Particular thanks for kindness well beyond the call of duty to Paul Vancolen of the Stedelijke Openbare Bibliotheek in Courtrai, who sent the relevant documents from the Courtrai Codex on his own initiative and without charge, and to Danielle De Smet of the Tournai Public Library, who came magnificently to the rescue by providing all the material I needed when the archives decided to close à l’improviste (as archives do). A special thanks to Dr Inge Wiesflecker-Friedhuber at Karl-Franzens University in Graz for copying and sending without charge dozens of pages of the Regesta Imperii, from which a great number of good things emerged. And lastly, particular thanks to Adelino Soares de Mello in Lisbon for tirelessly seeking out rare books and documents and for translating many a knotty piece of poetry or prose. Next time, I will try to pick a subject who went no further than Swindon.
Several people, all considerably more expert on the period than I am, read the manuscript, of parts of it, before publication. Thanks to all of them – C. S. L. Davies, Peter Hammond, Wendy Moorhen, Colin Richmond, Livia Visser-Fuchs and Christine Weightman – for their time, their good advice and their eagle eyes. Any mistakes that remain are lucky to survive, and are of course my fault in the first place.
Lastly, thanks as ever to my agent, Toby Eady, for his constant solicitousness and encouragement, and to my two sterling editors on either side of the Atlantic, Dan Franklin and Joy de Menil, for dealing with an author who was more neurotic about this book than usual and needed dunking in cold water every so often. To take on a subject who has become unknown, and is deeply mysterious anyway, is a leap of faith indeed, especially in New York.