Zusammenfassung / Abstract
“Archival documents between legal significance and historical research. Some examples in Teutonic Order’s history up to the 19th century” – The history of the Teutonic Order’s archives has many aspects due to the international developments of this corporation. Political events such as the Reformation or the time of Napoleon led to turning points in the order’s administration and thus also in the transmission of written material in the order’s central, regional and local archives. The paper attempts to reflect on the importance of the archives as an institution as well as the juridical and also historiographical significance of the archival sources for the order and for others.