This paper focuses on a set of structured document applications that we have denoted databases of historical documents. The information into these documents is closely related to the time in which they are created while being still of great usefulness in the future. The main contribution of this paper is the formulation of a group of operators and predicates that express retrieval conditions over the temporal features of documents. Additionally, the resulting retrieval language supports the construction of time series of documents, here named chronicles, which are regarded as a preliminary step towards the implementation of more complex data mining operations over historical document repositories.