Underlying the inception of the Czartoryski archives and collection of manuscripts were the need to document their own political activity; legal considerations relating to documentation used in court cases and to prove identity before tribunals; and their collecting passion. The department possesses 13,000 numbered catalogue items containing thousands of historical documents, loose-leaf and bound, relating to Poland, other European countries and the United States of America. They have been divided arbitrarily into four basic groups stored at (i) Public Archives, storing state documents and treaties; parliamentary and local legislative acts; inventory books of the Crown Treasury; cabinet records of king Stanislas Augustus; copies of documents for history of Poland (so-called Naruszewicz’s Files and Acta Tomiciana); and the Archives of Hôtel Lambert, including documents of the November Uprising, the Great Emigration and the January Uprising, as well as autographs of some celebrities of Polish and French political, military and cultural life: Tadeusz Kosciusko, Józef Poniatowski, Adam Mickiewicz, Zygmunt Krasiński, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, Frederic Chopin, Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, Edgar Quinet, Jules Michelet, Eugene Delacroix and Adolphe de Custine; (ii) Private Archives of the Czartoryskis and related families; (iii) Business Archives documenting the economic activity at the Czartoryskis’ estates across Poland; (iv) a separate group of records documenting the history of the Museum and the Library between the 18th and 20th centuries, when these institutions were located in Warsaw, Puławy, Paris, Sieniawa, Kórnik and Krakow.

Among the highlights of these extraordinary collections and groups of manuscripts are over 2,000 parchment deeds (Polish and foreign), including the Privilege of Kosice of 1374, the acts of the Union of Horodlo of 1413, the Privilege of Jedlno of 1430 and the Deed of The Prussian Homage of 1525; as well as medieval manuscripts, including illuminated ones (Polish and foreign), for example The Visigoth Codex (10th century), The Golden Codex of Pultusk (11th century), Treatise On The Form And Devising Of A Tournament by prince René d’Anjou (mid-15th century), Erazm Ciołek’s Pontifical (early 16th century), The Puławy Psalter (15th/16th century), numerous medieval specimens of illuminated Books Of Hours (French, Netherlandish, Italian and German), works of Jan Długosz (the autographs of his Chronicles and The Life Of Blessed Kinga), medieval copies of Gall Anonim’s, Wincenty Kadłubek’s and Janko of Czarnkow’s chronicles, as well as oriental manuscripts – Persian, Arabic, Armenian, Japanese, Hebrew and Kipchak. Autographs ranging in date from Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century are numerous either as parts of the collections listed above or in the form of separate manuscripts, among them autographs of Giovanni Boccaccio, Martin Luter, Filip Melanchton, Nicolaus Copernicus, Jan Amos Komensky, Antonio Casanova, Antonio Canova, Ludwig van Beethoven, Josephs Haydn, Angelica Catalani, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon Bonaparte, George Byron and others. They were brought together by Princes Izabela Czartoryska 200 years ago in the first Polish Museum at Puławy’s Gothic House and Temple of Sybil.

The Princes Czartoryski Library has been publishing Catalogues of the manuscripts on a systematic basis. Publications that have appeared so far cover items numbered from 1682 to 2000 (edited by Marian Kukiel), from 5214 to 5219 (edited by Janusz Pezda), and parchment deeds (prepared by Janina Tomaszewicz and Wacław Szeliński). Some of the valuable Western European illuminated manuscripts are described in the catalogue edited by Barbara Miodońska and Katarzyna Bałus for the exhibition called The Puławy Collection of Izabela Czartoryska’s Illuminated Manuscripts (2001). More catalogues of manuscripts are forthcoming.