PHJ № 1 (49) 2026 — Table of contents

In the West European Section of the Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences, there are 64 original charters from Venetian doges dating from the 14th to the first half of the 16th century: 18 sentences (ducali maggiori) and 46 letters (ducali minori). They originate from the collection of Academician N. P. Likhachev and were purchased for his Museum of Palaeography, where the history of writing was represented from the turn of the 3rd–4th millennium BC, primarily through documentary monuments. The documents were acquired between 1892 and 1914 at European auctions and through correspondence with other collectors. Thanks to Likhachev’s annotations on the covers of the charters, it is possible to establish the time and place of acquisition for 20 documents: private collections of Gabriele Fantoni (4) and Alexander Posonyi (2, by the Friedrich Cohn auction), auctions of Pio Luzzetti (7), Tammaro De Marinis (3), Gabriel Charavay (1), Sotheby’s (1), “Gilhofer und Ranschburg” (2). Through the analysis of owners’ inscriptions on the covers and on the charters themselves, the provenance of the documents is traced back to the collections of Gian Carlo Rossi (10), Luigi Azzolini (2), presumably Luigi Arrigoni and Amilcare Ancona (1), and two unattributed collectors (4 and 2). The analysis of the provenance shows that before being accumulated in Likhachev’s collection, these ancient acts changed hands multiple times.