Forschungsprojekt Dr. Rocio Daga-Portillo
A Society in Transition: Property and Law in Arabic Documents from Toledo (11th-14th Centuries)
After the conquest of Toledo in 1085, the Christians, Muslims and Jews of Toledo for over 250 years continued writing their legal documents in Arabic. Arabic as the legal language and features of the Islamic legal system were adopted by the Christian government. The Toledo Documents also mirrow a socio-linguistic reality: in the city of Toledo, Arabic continued to be spoken - as shown by dialectal marks - until the 14th century.
At present, the Toledo collection of Arabic Documents is preserved in the Archivo Nacional de Madrid and contains 1175 documents (dated 1083-1391). With over one thousand documents, this is the biggest collection of Arabic legal documents existing in Spain.
This project aims to typologize, edit and publish a representative sample of documents and to study the linguistic and social reality of a society in transition, the applied laws and the relationship between religious conversion and the process of transfer of property.