This Master's thesis puts Piccolomini's Historia Austrialis into a wider context of Humanist historiography and examines it as a historical work and historical source. With a study of its sources, its understanding of history and the display of its content, it attempts a new reading of this work. New findings also help with a more detailed study of passages important for the wider Slovene region (descriptions of the house of Cilli and the crossing of the Kanal Valley). The thesis shows that Piccolomini did follow the requirements of Humanistic history, while also adapting the narrative to his own view of the past and its intended message. In his description of characters, he followed a general model that was adapted to a specific case. In using Historia Austrialis as a historical source, we thus have to be mindful of its relationship to the Humanist historiographical tradition, intertextual relationships to Antiquity and later authors, the genre and design of the work, sources used, possible differences with other sources, and stylistic treatment of the described events.
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