This article presents the results of research on fifteenth-century wills recorded in the Liber Testamentorum (rkps 772) kept in the State Archives of the City of Cracow. Of the 190 fifteenth-century wills included in the book, 108 containing legacies for 'pious works' connected with the ecclesiastical institutions of the fifteenth-century Cracow agglomeration were taken into consideration. For statistical purposes, they were divided into four groups according to the purpose of the bequests, namely 1. parish churches; 2. non-parish secular churches; 3. monasteries and monastic churches; 4. hospitals and leprosaria. Since the donors were the bourgeoisie of Krakow - a group that was quite homogeneous in social and mental terms - it was treated as a representation of the bourgeoisie collectivity. Thanks to this, the endowed ecclesiastical institutions appeared as a series of centres of worship, constituting an area that this community regarded as its own. Under these assumptions, the results illustrate the social character of the phenomenon in question and show the bourgeoisie's perception of the set of ecclesiastical institutions in the fifteenth-century Krakow agglomeration; the phenomenon of the sacrum inscribed in the urban topography, the perception of which found expression in the legates.
The results of the research will be discussed in two stages. In the first part, data on the testators were collected, while in the second, statistical analyses were carried out on the question of the bequests made by the testators to specific groups and individual objects. The third and final part attempted to show the motives of the Krakow bourgeoisie in making legacies to particular objects. The study showed that the location of the objects within a specific urban area and their role in religious life had the greatest impact. These two factors determined the perception of the sacred topography of Krakow's fifteenth-century urban agglomeration, this sphere of the sacrum, whose outward expression became testamentary legacies earmarked for 'pious works'. These donations were an entirely voluntary gesture, a conscious choice on the part of the testators, an expression of their private piety, but in a broader sense also indicative of the piety of the bourgeoisie in late medieval Krakow.