A Middle Eastern archive is born

In February 1251, the members of the Crusader Court of the Burgesses were called to council in the Hotel of the Lords of Beirut in the city of Acre, the main Crusader stronghold in Palestine. By that time, headed by John of Ibelin, lord of Arsur, the Kingdom of Jerusalem was engaged in defending its southern frontier from the Ayyubid attacks. Louis IX of France had disembarked in Egypt in June 1249, in a failed enterprise known as the Seventh Crusade. The French Intervention triggered the rise to power of the Baḥriyya Mamluks of Egypt, originally an Ayyubid elite corps. The Barons had been summoned not to decide on any war matters, but on whether a secular court, the Cour des Bourgeois, should employ scribes to keep written records of the proceedings and preserve them in an archive.

The initial suggestion by John of Arsur was contested by Philip of Montfort, a Syrian, lord of Tyre and Toron, and, at least at a first instance, overthrown by the liegemen, over which the Court had jurisdiction. Under the pressure of both the Ibelin clan, in control of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the dominant force in Cyprus, the assembly eventually accepted the proposal with reservations. ¹ Entitled by A. Beugnot (1797-1865) as the Abrégé du Livre des Assises de la Cour des Bourgeois, it is generally referred to as Livre Contrefais. The text comprises a collection of laws as applied at the Court of the Burgesses in Nicosia, compiled in the early fourteenth century by an anonymous author, who served at the Court for over forty years, Livre Contrefais, pp. 227-352, 246-249. The narrative concludes with the council, or parlement, eventually agreeing to the adoption of scribes and archival procedures. Yet, it stresses the resistance presented by some Latins, who insisted that the Court should base its decisions primarily on memory and that registers should be consulted only as a lender of last resort.

The decision was enforced as it concerned the Burgesses’ Court and found further resistance at the High Court, with jurisdiction over the Nobles. At the High Court, records started to be kept sometime after 1285, only six years before the fall of Acre, the last Crusader stronghold. In Cyprus, where Crusaders flocked after the kingdom’s downfall, secular courts still took decisions based on collective memory as late as the fourteenth century. ² Several authors note the slow application of these provisions: Sombati, “Les Letres dou Sepulcre”, p. 71, Edbury, “Law and custom”, p. 75, Nader, Burgesses and Burgess law, pp. 47-48. The decision may have appeared as just logic and taken for granted, but our informer - an anonymous jurist with firsthand knowledge of the Court - places much stress on the burgesses’ reticence to rely on the written word.³ The problem is central to Michael T. Clanchy’s works, which pay particular attention to the Norman society. Clanchy, “Remembering the past”, pp. 165-176, Clanchy, From memory to written record, pp. 21-46.

The discussion of the parlement at Acre in 1251 equally revolved around the archival practices the newly established scribes should adopt to keep the Court’s records. The most profound distrust emerged about the way the proceedings were to be kept and by whom, and a procedure was established involving several key holders. ⁴ Three for the author of the Livre Contrefais, Livre Contrefais, 248. Novara mentions instead at least nine custodians, Edbury, Philip of Novara, p. 119. In Palestine, where a ‘feudal paradise’ is supposed to have been settled to the benefit of a strong nobility, the archive emerges as a contentious place, where, for some of the Syrian feudal lords at least, the revered privileges and laws ran the risk of being altered.⁵ For the expression feudal paradise, Setton, Zacour, & Hazard, A History of the Crusades, vol. V, p. 144, Sombati, Letres, 81. Indeed, the parlement vignette has been understood in a context where the Latin Syrian noblemen saw their supremacy challenged by the autocratic aspirations, first of the emperor Frederick II, then of the King of France and his 1250 Crusade. On the contrary, the aristocratic Ibelin house would have been interested in fixing the law before the knights arriving with the new crusading armies could introduce potential innovations. Of equal interest for our purposes, no one expected to place the locked chests containing the court’s proceedings in any royal palace. They were kept instead by the King’s delegates. For the High Court, when the procedure was applied, the chests were in the custody of the Court’s attorneys, accompanied by a complex sealing procedure. A “proper” archive for the chests in the form of a vaulted building, we are told, only arrived under the aegis of Hugh IV of Cyprus, in 1325.⁶ Livre Contrefais, pp. 250-251.

In the same vein, invented narratives appeared towards 1250 to justify the establishment of an original body of laws immediately after the Kingdom’s foundation, in 1099. At about the same time the parlement was being held, the myth of a lost Crusader archive emerged, since, as Peter Edbury has explained, the oldness of laws became the battlefield over which two factions struggled for supremacy. ⁷ Edbury, Law and custom, pp. 76-9, Sombati, Letres, pp. 88-90. According to the account transmitted by Philip of Novara, another jurist close to the Ibelin faction, the original codes of law of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the assises, had been promulgated shortly after the conquest (au conquist de la terre), then safeguarded in chests placed at the Holy Sepulcher (and hence were called letres dou supulcre).⁸ Edbury, Philip of Novara, Ch. 47, pp. 118-121, pp. 259-260. Allegedly, these early privileges sanctioned the constitutional bases of the Syrian lords’ feudal paradise, as against the centralizing claims of the kings. To be sure, the story is built upon some realistic materials: the use of chests entrusted to a variety of key holders is documented, and a vaulted hall might well have been built in Nicosia for archiving purposes. However, the story, as warned by Edbury, Jan Sombati, and others, conveys a good deal of anachronism in the details, and is believed to have been tailored by Novara, writing in the 1250s or early 1260s, to the benefit of his Ibelin patrons. As discussed below, and quite like some present-day historians, the Crusaders were looking in their own past for the legitimacy of a “proper” archive for their laws. Apart from a respectful locale, documents needed to be safeguarded by legitimate archival practices, no matter how impractical they might have seemed to us. For the letres dou sepulcre, it has to be noted, a refined security protocol was established involving no less than nine custodians, representing all social strata in the Kingdom, from the king’s representatives to commoners and the archbishop of Jerusalem. Finally, episodic destruction helps explain why the charts were not available at Novara’s time: his story closes, indeed, with Saladin’s takeover of the city in 1187, during which, allegedly and against all evidence, the documents were lost.⁹ Et tout ce fu perdu quant Salahadin prist Jerusalem, Edbury, Philip of Novara, ch. 47, pp. 119, 259. Destruction by Muslim conquerors figures as an important feature in many narratives about archives, even present-day ones. From then on, Crusaders, we are told, were compelled to rely on their good memory again.

Don’t shoot the archivist! Nicosia 1426

A second vignette brings us to 1426 and depicts dramatic events for the last surviving Crusader dynasty, the Lusignan of Cyprus. In that year the Mamluk sultan of Egypt, al-Ašraf Barsbāy launched a punitive attack on Cyprus, the third in barely twenty-four months, leading to the takeover of the Island. ¹⁰ Ouerfelli, “Les relations”, Moukarzel, “Les expéditions militaires”. As a result, King Janus was made a prisoner and sent to Cairo. The Island, an offshoot of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, hosted a Latin nobility transplanted from the Holy Land, and equally comprised burgesses, citizens of the Italian Republics as well as many Christian, Arabic-speaking refugees from Syria. In the turmoil following the fall of Nicosia, chroniclers mention an apparently unimportant episode related, again, to the Crusader archives, in which Arabic language and Arabic speakers take the brunt of the story. The two extant Cypriot narratives by Florio Boustron and by the contemporary Leontios Machairas notice the hesitation of the Mamluk contingent, probably limited in size, in entering what appeared to be a large city.¹¹ Those by Florio Boustron (ca 1500 - after 1568), written in Italian, and by Leontios Machairas (ca 1360/80 - after 1432), Machairas, Chronicle, 2 vols., pp. 670-671 and n. 693, Boustron, Chronique, pp. 367-368. At the instances of the Venetian ambassador, a group of Syrian-origin, Arabic-speaking notables, knights Joseph, Behna, Abbud, and Hamis Audeth, together with Badin (i.e. Baudoin) Goneme welcomed the Egyptians at the gates and escorted them to the city, holding torches.

The Syrians, we are told, took advantage of the situation to request their own appointment at several offices from the Mamluks. One of the King’s chancellors, Jean Flatre, offered his cooperation to guide the Mamluks through the ‘revenues of the kingdom’. The sources present Cypriots and Mamluks as entangled in many ways. King Janus and other members of the Lusignan used Arabic to swear and for other low purposes (he is said to have shouted in Arabic Ana al-Malik!, or ‘I am the King!’ when captured). Likewise, one of Flatre’s relatives converted and later became an emir in Cairo. If nothing else, the chroniclers confirm the well-known domination of a handful of Syrian-origin families, such as the Bibi, Salah, Urri, Goul, and Goneme over the administration. ¹² Grivaud, “Les minorités orientales à Chypre”. The story goes on, with the Syrian clerks laboring to summon another Syrian, the former chancellor (secretain) Eustache Goul, to Nicosia. Goul came from his estate in the countryside and engaged in cooperation with the new masters, receiving the Mamluks’ favor in exchange for his services.¹³ Machairas, Chronicle, pp. 670-671, Boustron, Chronique, pp. 367-368. Goul’s exact cooperation is defined in rather obscure terms, and both Boustron and Machairas mention Goul’s personal knowledge of the country’s finances as the main reason behind the Mamluk request.¹⁴ Machairas uses the term práktōr, referring to the head of the bureau (sékreton) while praktika designed cadastral registers, Richard, “The institutions of the kingdom of Cyprus”, p. 162.

Then, one may ask, where were exactly these accounts? Why could the Syrian clerks not produce them? The registers kept by the Secrète du Roy, the department managing the King’s finances, appear to have required the skill of a particular, discharged chancellor such as Eustache Goul. Had they been available, Flatre and the Syrian officials could have handed them over to the Mamluks. They do not seem to have been recorded according to standard chancery protocols, accessible to all clerks. The matter seems to have been of the utmost importance for the invaders. Indeed, for their third campaign, the Mamluks seem to have engaged in a hasty expedition targeting Nicosia, and to have spent vital time going over the Lusignan records and searching the Venetian Consulate before they departed in a hurry, fearing further resistance. ¹⁵ Moukarzel, expéditions, pp. 190-191. The story raises doubts about the records’ location, as it does not mention any recognizable repository, close to the center of power. Nowhere is it mentioned the vaulted archive, supposedly built in 1325, or any other storage facility. The narrative makes clear that the Mamluks required the services of a specific chancery scribe, most notably the head, or bailie (gr. práktoras) of the Secrète, the office in charge of registering the Kingdom’s fiefs and their income.¹⁶ Claude Cahen, La Syrie du Nord, pp. 465-466. The main attribution of the Secrète was the drafting of cadastral surveys for tax purposes, Grivaud, “Ordine della Secreta di Cipro”, pp. 561-562, 567-568 and n. 199. As a result of the Mamluk expedition, Cyprus became a vassal kingdom of the Mamluk sultans, a relation later transferred to the Ottomans. In the aftermath of the Mamluk conquest, these clerks’ knowledge was crucial in determining the amount of annual tribute to be collected (the so-called ‘Cyprus’ tribute’), as well as ensuring Mamluk intervention in the administration as well as in dynastic and diplomatic affairs.¹⁷ Nicholas Coureas, “The tribute”. Goul was appointed bailli, or chancellor, of the Secrète by the Mamluks and was probably in charge in 1435, when we will hear more of him and the Audeth brothers.

The Mamluks knew the problem well since they governed a country whose administration was based on complex cadastral surveys-the rawks-governing the allotment of fiefs by the sultans and other forms of property. ¹⁸ Petry, The Mamluk Sultanate, pp. 158-165. Families of civil secretaries involved in the administration of the land records passed down the registers of the Mamluk cadaster over generations. The rawks were subject to amendments and updates that only these clerks could decipher. The problem revealed itself with the occasion of the Ottoman conquest of Egypt (1517), and the challenges they faced in setting up a new administration. Decades after the conquest, in 1553, the Ottomans bitterly realized that their own cadastral survey and upon which the Ottoman taxation depended, was unreliable. They were compelled to call upon the old Mamluk clerks from the Ibn al-Jīʿān and al-Malakī families, traditionally in charge of those registers. Not only were their skills required; they had been hiding the extant records among other unimportant registers in the treasury and in their own houses, whence they were moved to the Citadel by the Ottomans.¹⁹ Michel, “Les Circassiens avaient brûlé les registres”, Kumakura, “Who Handed over Mamluk Land Registers to the Ottomans?”. According to a similar logic, the Secrète relied on the oral, personal knowledge of secretarial dynasties such as the Gouls - who still held posts in 1468. When Cyprus passed under Venetian authority, the chancellor Florio Boustron was confronted with the lack of written instructions at the bureaus of the Secrète for the Lusignan period, and with the fact that available ones were in the hands of land tenants, written in Greek, and totally unreliable. Hence, in 1554 he engaged in a personal inquiry based not on the extant written records but on the reports of “old people and experienced in such matters.”²⁰ Grivaud, “Ordine della Secreta di Cipro”, pp. 547, 560.

Crusader archives between East and West

The vignette of the Mamluk entry to Nicosia comes in handy to illustrate the close relationship between Middle Eastern practices of writing and documentation and the scribal clerks, or rather, families, entrusted with the production of records. Narratives about lost archives in the Middle East, I argue in the following pages, are due to the fact that documents were regarded as the personal property of their producers, rather than as forms and manifestations of state power. Written records were expected to be in the custody of the chancery clerks and not permitted to be ‘loose’ in the world. Descriptions provided by the livre contrefais and by Philip of Novara of the Crusader archives, be they at the Holy Sepulcher or, later, in Cyprus, mention chests entrusted to several key holders, rather than proper archives attached to courts and chanceries. ²¹ According to Nader, before the parlement at Acre the escrivein, who accompanied the viscount when in court, was in possession of the chests (huches), containing the written registers, and drew up the charters of property transactions, Nader, Burgesses and Burgess law, p. 141. The association between the record and its producer, on the one hand, and the lack of a locale for these collections in the Lusignan kingdom look indeed very similar to chancery practice in fifteenth-century Egypt and Syria, and seem to have played a role in the non-survival of archives in both lands.

There is a heated debate going on about whether or not Islamic societies relied on written records and archives to the same extent their ‘Western’ counterpart did. This discussion on the archival divide stems from the long-established idea that medieval Muslims, unlike their European contemporaries, have failed to transmit to us their archives, a phenomenon that took a significant turn with the Ottomans in the early modern era. Orality and lack of archives are two sides of the same medal because, in the Islamic legal system, most legal records were considered simple aide-mémoires and ceased to be valid once those who had a memory of the recorded facts died. Hence, there was no need to preserve them. Therefore, the preservation of judicial collections depended primarily on ideas of proof and evidence, and as a result, notarial and archival practices go hand-in-hand. This divide has been acknowledged by scholars since the nineteenth century, usually accompanied by explanations about the different institutional trajectories of both societies. ²² For a comparative approach to notarial and archival practices, Francisco Apellániz, Breaching the bronze wall, pp. 138-143. A recent reappraisal is provided in Burak, Ferguson, & Rothman, “Towards Early Modern Archivality”. Another recent contribution is that of Jürgen Paul, “Archival Practices”. Medieval Islamic practice stands therefore in stark contrast to the prevalent written culture of southern Europe and its notaries public, whose deeds were bound to be filed in protocols and preserved, since they remained valid without further oral support. As we will see in the closing section, to understand the behavior of chancellors and notaries in the Crusader kingdoms, it is necessary to consider the Islamic notions and ideas about literacy that were prevalent in Syria and Palestine about the time the Franks left the Holy Land at the end of the thirteen century. Syrian clerks took their literacy skills, notions and practices to Cyprus in 1291, followed by successive waves of migrants, up to the fifteenth century.

As against this background, in the last years, there has been growing number of works claiming that Islamic societies relied on writing and documentation in their daily lives as much as their ‘Western’ counterpart did and that Islamic archives cannot be found because they had been destroyed or recycled, or, as convincingly argued by Konrad Hirschler, because collections were produced, used and preserved according to different logics and priorities. ²³ Hirschler, “From Archive to Archival Practices”, Aljoumani & Hirschler, Owning Books and Preserving Documents, pp. 78-110. The issue with scholars who advocate for the existence of archival traditions equal in importance to those of ‘the West’- in this case the Romanized cities of southern, or rather, southwest Europe- is that they often blur the distinction between the use and production of records and that of long-term preservation.²⁴ I concur with the problematization advanced by A. Hespanha of the notion of a legal ‘West’, Hespanha, “Southern Europe”. An influential work by Guy Burak, E. Natalie Rothman, and Heather Ferguson reviews the recent trove of cross-cultural research devoted to the issue of archives. Warning historians against the Leviathan of comparing European vs. Islamic ‘archival cultures’, they advocate for exploring the mobility of documentary notions, formats, and practices across divides. From many angles, the idea that Muslims had a different, and-allegedly-inferior consideration of written proof and did not prioritize record preservation is now being challenged and labeled as myopic and Neo-Eurocentric.²⁵ Burak, Ferguson, & Rothman, Towards early Modern Archivality. Instead of dwelling on clear-cut divisions, the Crusader archive emerges as a crossroads where different scribal traditions intertwined and cross-pollinated.

In the introduction to her monumental The Lost Archive Marina RustowRustow, Marina, The Lost Archive. Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue, Princeton-Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2020.
points an accusing finger at historians of Medieval Egypt and Syria for disregarding documents in favor of a view of history that mirrors that of the learned elites they study. Historians, Rustow argues, with their bias on ‘literary’ sources, are bearers of a nineteenth-century tradition of Eurocentric narratives and concepts (mainly that of oriental despotism), underplay the importance of diplomatics and philology in writing history. They tend to neglect the materiality of the records left by lower-rank actors. Once again, Middle Eastern studies take center stage of debates on the inadequate categories adopted to face the East-West apparent divergence. ²⁶ Marina Rustow, The Lost Archive, pp. 424-450. But, were these societies allegedly without archives necessarily ruled by Muslims? Against the background of an increasingly bitter debate, the attitude of the Barons in Acre towards writing and archiving and the mysterious whereabouts of their own documents stand as an uncomfortable parallel to their Islamic rivals. If not providing a definitive answer, this article aims to contribute to the discussion by taking advantage of evidence that appears to be somewhat out of place in the discussion. In the following pages, I will present and discuss an Arabic notarial deed drawn up in Cyprus in 1435, drafted by an Arab Christian clerk and involving several actors from the post-Crusade kaleidoscopic society. Of equal importance for our purposes, the document required the intervention of Syrian members of the chancery, who added a subscription in old French.

The 1435 record is exceptional since it does not seem to fit in the abovementioned East/West dichotomy. However, to use the label coined by Edoardo Grendi (1932-1999), the record constitutes a normal, or an exceptionnel-normal witness, since, despite its uniqueness, it is revealing of how social and individual life was documented and preserved. ²⁷ Grendi, “Micro-analyse et histoire sociale”. The record seems to be out of place within the narrow limits in which the archival divide has been framed, since, while being an Arabic document, is not Islamic, although indebted, I will argue, to Islamic notions of record-keeping and proof. The record is a notarial deed, but far from representing the standard practice of the Latin elites, it was drawn up according to the scribal rules of a Syrian clerk. It saw the light in a Crusader kingdom, yet away from the Holy Land, in its offshoot society in Cyprus. To all appearances, it is the only extant Arabic document produced after the Crusaders departed from Palestine, hence the last documentary witness to these communities’ use of Arabic in the fifteenth century. Its peculiar nature and the circumstances of its retrieval allow us to rethink the archival divide from a different angle. By bringing to the attention of scholars an exceptional Arabic deed, I wish to focus on scribal traditions that depended on categories such as witnessing, memory, and ultimately, the authorship of documents by chancellors rather than on notarial artifacts and institutions such as the archive or the notarial guild.

Cyprus, a crossroads of scribal cultures

Looking for the historical context for our Arabic document in the literature is a demanding enterprise. Jean Richard has written with great sophistication on chancery practices in the Crusader kingdoms, but paid little interest to the Syrian, and eventually Islamic, influences. The few Latin notaries active in Cyprus whose records have been preserved in Genoa and Venice continue to gather all the attention. ²⁸ Balard, Balletto & Otten-Froux, Gênes et l'Outre-mer. In exchange, Crusader law and courts are particularly well-mapped. In the early sixteenth century, the new Venetian rulers of the Island set a commission to retrieve and translate the Crusader legal codes.²⁹ Edbury, John of Ibelin : Le livre des assises, pp. 3-4. The dearth of local archives contrasts with the abundance of treaties of jurisprudence, or assises, at our disposal. Yet, all too often, interest in the scriptural and academic legal cultures has silenced vernacular actors, and their recourse to customary, often oral legal traditions.³⁰ Hespanha, Southern Europe, pp. 348-351. This attitude has led to the invisibility of Syrian legal culture, although, as it has been noted, the use of the Arabic language and legal institutions in Cyprus became even more relevant than in the Holy Land.³¹ Richard, “Le plurilinguisme”, sect. 6: “L’emploi de l’arabe par la chancellerie”.

Although we know a lot about feudal law, we still lack knowledge about cross-confessional justice dispensed at the Cour de la Fonde (the Crusader ‘marketplace’), or the community courts of the Syrians. One of the major paradoxes is that while we have a great deal of information about courts and codes of law, Crusaders, just like their Muslim neighbors, have not left judicial archives and therefore we do not know much about how justice and particularly cross-confessional legal relations worked in practice. ³² Cross-confessional justice has been neglected by scholars of the Crusades, Richard, “The institutions of the kingdom of Cyprus”, More recently, Nader, “Urban Muslims”, has brought the issue to light. Problems related to the murky status of Muslims are discussed in Mayer, “Latins, Muslims and Greeks”. It has to be noted that this has been just as much the case for medieval Islamic law. Despite the abundance of works of jurisprudence (fiqh) the dearth of court records and proceedings made scholars think of actual justice as an eminent pragmatic system that had few things in common with the sophistication of Islamic legal theory.³³ Schacht, An introduction to Islamic law, pp. 199-211. Topics related to cross-confessional relations, the use of the Arabic language and Islamic influence are also poorly covered.

At least three different legal layers were present in medieval Cyprus. These systems overlapped and coexisted with each other. The first was influenced by the legal traditions imported from northern France-where validation of private documents derived from the royal or ecclesiastic gracious jurisdiction. The second system was based upon the customary law of the Syrians, which had their own courts and Arabic scribes. Lastly, there was the predominantly written legal culture of Southern European cities, inspired by the Ius commune and marked by the use of the public, notarial document. In this section, I will focus on these three overlapping legal systems and how the first two are equally responsible for the absence of archival collections. Then I will examine the whereabouts of the remaining Crusader documents-particularly those written in Arabic. These documents would allow us, in turn, to identify the major problem that concerned the Mamluk troopers in 1426: finding the Crusader archive and its custodians.

Defenders of Islamic archival practices have declared the inadequate character of history as a discipline to provide a non-Eurocentric approach to the societies under Muslim rule. Rather than those of narrative, or archival historians, the skills of palaeographers, papyrologists, and codicologists are needed to fully grasp the meaning conveyed by the document as an artifact. ³⁴ Rustow, The Lost Archive, pp. 3-4, 8-12. Late medieval Cyprus was indeed a challenging field for medievalists, who were faced with a similar request for technical skills. Crusader history requires a good deal of legal knowledge, several languages ranging from Greek to Armenian, and expertise in fields such as sigillography or numismatics. As in the Islamic case, attention paid to diplomatics has been particularly compelling; one of the few surviving Arab charts produced by the Crusaders, now hosted in the archives of Palermo, was first edited in the nineteenth century, then in 1949, later by the eminent historian Claude Cahen, then by Jean Richard, Dominique Sourdel and Janine Sourdel-Thomine, only to be the object of a thorough revision by Nadia Jamil & Jeremy Johns in 2003.³⁵ Jamil and Johns, “An Original Arabic Document”. In a way, historians of the Crusades have anticipated the hardships described by Rustow, Hirschler, and others for Islamic studies, since they first faced the task of studying a highly literate society but without access to its archives. To be sure, if compared with its Islamic counterpart, Cyprus offers the advantage of having been permeated by citizens and subjects of the Italian communes and by hosting enclaves such as Genoese Famagusta, whose archival collections have been preserved in Italy. Genoa annexed Famagusta in 1373, imposing her communal institutions and administrative practices responsible for the production of archived collections, such as the impressive Massaria of Famagusta series.³⁶ Otten-Froux, “Famagouste”, pp. 74-76. By the same token, it comes as no surprise if the 1435 Arabic deed has come down to us as part of the Venetian collections. If the problems concerning writing and archiving span religious boundaries, the method and key concepts employed in the analysis of the 1435 deed will be shared with Islamic history.

Overlapping legal systems and jurisdictions made Cyprus a crossroads for scribal cultures, where different kinds of notaries crossed paths at the marketplace. The King ruled over his vassals and servile peasants according to feudal law. Yet other jurisdictions overlapped with that of the King. Famagusta hosted several Italian-style courts applying the Ius Commune, some commercial tribunals, and other forums like the Cour des Syriens. ³⁷ Richard, “La cour des Syriens”, Otten-Froux, Famagouste, pp. 135-136. The Genoese governor (the Capitano) heard cases whose proceedings have survived in Genoa. In that context of a de facto legal pluralism, one could be the King’s vassal according to feudal law and at the same time enjoy Venetian citizenship.³⁸ David Jacoby, “Citoyens, sujets et protégés”. Descendants of Venetians and Genoese settled since 1099 in Crusader cities such as Tyre and maintained their original citizenship. Syrian families such as the Audeth stemmed from this milieu, better known as white Venetians and white Genoese.³⁹ Ibid., 168-170. However significant the use of French and Arabic might have been in legal proceedings, the output of the Latin scribes attached to Latin courts and consulates, whose records have survived in Italian archives, overshadowed their importance.⁴⁰ For a description of the extant material, Nicholas Coureas, “The Structure and Content”. Endowed with public faith, the deeds they drew up were filed in ledgers and preserved by the authorities of their Communes.

In Cyprus, entire communities of Syrian descent seem to have been Arabic speakers until the fifteenth century, and we have reason to suspect that many Cypriots were unable to express themselves in any other language. We have indirect proof of a vernacular, Cypriot variety of Arabic being widely used up to the Venetian domination. ⁴¹ Balletto, “Ethnic Groups”, Richard, “Culture franque”. Cypriots had a consul in Alexandria and merchants engaged in business with Egypt based on contracts written in Arabic. A Venetian notary deed from Alexandria reports a case of a Cypriot who required the services of a dragoman to deal with Latin merchants in Egypt.⁴² Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Cancelleria Inferiore, Notai, B. 222, Notary A. Vactaciis, f. 80r, 3 Dec. 1404. Guillaume de Tyr states that, in Cyprus, fiefs were granted to dragomans and to Arabic scribes in the rural areas where the Syrian population had settled.⁴³ Edbury, The kingdom of Cyprus, p. 16. Specialists believe that the Syrian population had recourse to their community notaries, who were likely ecclesiastics who drafted contracts and deeds in their own language, which is confirmed by the 1435 document. A rare Arabic dowry deed mentioned by the Venetian notary Nicola de Boateriis suggests that vernacular scribal traditions were required2 for issues of family law.⁴⁴ Nicola de Boateriis, pp. 73-74. Cyprus is often described as home for Christian confessions and rites, such as the Jacobites, Maronites, Nestorians, and particularly Melkites. Adherents to these dioceses were mostly Syrian, and therefore Arabic-speaking Christians.⁴⁵ In this respect, see the discussion by Jamil & Johns, An Original Arabic Document, p. 162.

In the Lusignan Kingdom, with a nobility hailing in large measure from Northern France, the supremacy of feudal law and the right of noblemen to be judged at the High Court was never challenged. The Florentine agent of the Bardi company Francesco Pegolotti warns us of a subtle, yet important peculiarity in the functioning of the notarial system in Cyprus. In a passage of his Pratica della mercatura, written during the 1330s, he states: In Cyprus… nowhere in the island notarial deeds have any probative value… unless validated by the king’s grace. ⁴⁶ Pegolotti, La pratica della mercatura, p. 88. Unlike in Southern Europe, where Italian-style notaries had been invested with public faith, to be valid notarial deeds needed to be certified by the royal or ecclesiastic gracious jurisdiction. According to Northern French legal traditions, it was an official seal and other forms of authentication, not the word of a notary public, to grant a document official validity.⁴⁷ Bautier, “L’authentication des actes”. To Pegolotti’s surprise, when two parties concluded a transaction of any kind, it needed to be certified by royal officials, who transcribed it into a livre des remembrances, the favorite record-keeping format in Cyprus. Most commercial contracts, Pegolotti admits, were registered by the customs clerks, following the registering standards in Central and Northern Europe. According to this passage, Cyprus “was unfamiliar with notarial activities” that were amply diffused in Southern Europe. There were scarce notarial deeds in circulation and at least up to the fourteenth century most contracts were drawn up and registered at Cyprus’ commercial courts.⁴⁸ The passage is discussed in Richard, “Aspects du Notariat public”. This tendency started to change with the consolidation of Royal power: In 1311 an Auditor was created in charge of certifying notarial deeds; from then on, notaries of many kinds opened up shop in Cyprus, where they drafted contracts and deeds that were later certified by the Auditor and other royal officials. This appears to have been the case for our Arabic document drafted in 1435, which was certified by a chancellor through a subscription written in old French.

Thus, by 1300, Cyprus had become a hub for Latin scribes. Alongside clerks drawing up deeds in Greek and Arabic, the kingdom hosted many notaries hailing mainly from Italy, in whose legal schools the required legal and scribal skills could be acquired. Hence, after an initial period of notarial autarchy, Cyprus became part of a vast notarial oecumene, that of the so-called imperial notaries. ⁴⁹ Ibid., pp. 210-213. These clerks reclaimed for themselves the investiture hailing from the Roman emperor, making their deeds allegedly valid throughout the whole Roman territory (including regions ruled in the late Middle Ages by Muslims). Venturing notaries found it interesting to offer notarial services in the commercial cities of Cyprus; in the same manner Venetian and Genoese notaries were dispatched to several commercial spots in the Black Sea, Syria, Egypt, or North Africa.

If Latin notaries acting under imperial jurisdiction were the most frequent, in Cyprus they were accompanied by others, hailing from German and French dioceses and whose continental script was appreciated by the Latin elites. Pontifical notaries can be found too, and it was common among the Greek and the Syrian communities to have members of the clergy as scribes, as is very likely the case for the author of our document, Abū-l-Naẓārī. Although not all documents did require royal registration, all these scribes handed, on occasion, their documents to the registering authorities for validation, upon the payment of a fee. Richard suggests that after 1300, Latin scribes from Italy were often employed as chancellors and therefore had access to their masters’ seals and registers. ⁵⁰ Richard, “La diplomatique royale”, pp. 78-79, Richard, Le Livre des remembrances, p. xiii, Richard, “Aspects du Notariat public”, p. 212.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century Cyprus combined, among others, a feudal legal tradition of registration by royal officials, Christian-Arabic notary-witnesses, and, lastly, imperial notaries who drafted deeds endowed with public faith. Of course, the choice of a given notary did not depend only on the parties’ ethnic origins. Jeremy Johns has pointed to the fact that Arabic documents were issued by the trilingual Sicilian chancery to recipients who were not Arabic-speakers. ⁵¹ Johns, “Arabic Administration”, p. 207. Deeds were drafted to secure rights, eventually before courts outside Cyprus, in the same manner deeds drawn up in other places such as Damascus were produced in hearings held in Famagusta.⁵² Archivio di Stato di Genova, San Giorgio 590/ 1289, f.106v Whatever the motivations, needs, and background of the notary’s clients, only the Latin documents produced by Italian notaries public found their way into protocols and communal archives. Syrian and Frankish scribal traditions and their respective notions about proof and validation, appear instead to be responsible for the dispersion of records. The exiguous number of documents produced by Cyprus’ chanceries, some of them in Arabic, are to be found elsewhere.

Behind the whereabouts of the Crusaders’ collections

Tracing the whereabouts of the Chancery’s remnants is telling of the Frankish attitude toward storing and preserving records. The Vatican archive hosts the only significant collection of documents, most of which were produced and archived as products of the regular functioning of the pontifical court. These records were either dispatched by pontifical legacies to Cyprus or regularly exchanged by the papal chancellery of Avignon. As for the records produced in Cyprus, a group of ten documents from the royal Chancery was brought to Rome after the 1460 civil war by their owners, which never returned due to the Venetian takeover of the island in 1473. ⁵³ Richard, Chypre sous les Lusignans, p. 3. Similarly, the Arabic document mentioned earlier, drawn up in Antioch in 1213 and today in Palermo, has survived thanks to the will of its recipients, the Benedictine monks. Once custodians of the shrine church of Josaphat in Palestine, the Abbot brought with him the deed when, after the fall of Acre, the monastery was established in Sicily. It may appear, therefore, that documents issued by the Crusaders have been almost invariably preserved by their recipients.

As mentioned in our second vignette, the Audeth clan, a white Venetian family, defected the French and opened the gates of Nicosia to the Mamluks, hoping to be spared by presenting themselves as Venetian citizens. Another brother, Antoine Audeth (d. 1453), started a charitable foundation and appointed the Venetian state as his heir. His estate was handled by a financial institution in Venice, which gathered a remarkable collection of notarial deeds and other documents pertaining to the family. Although the Audeths were generally considered an Arabic-speaking family, no Arabic records found their way into the collection. The Venetian executors had some Greek deeds and testaments translated into Italian. ⁵⁴ ASV, Procuratori San Marco, Citra, Misti 132. The commissaria Audeth has been studied by Jean Richard, “Une Famille de Vénitiens Blancs”.

This pattern is behind the survival of seven Arabic records related to the Hospitallers’ estates, and now extant at the Archives départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône. They traveled from Palestine to the order’s commanderie in Manosque, Provence, where they were cataloged by the archivist Jean Raybaud in the eighteenth century. Raybaud described the records as written en babilloine sive caldée, or even en lettre caldée sive turquise. ⁵⁵ Richard, Le plurilinguisme, p. 1. The remaining Arabic documents issued by the Crusader chancery have either been transmitted in summary by Ibn Buḥtur (active between 1425-37) in his family history Taʾrīkh Bayrūt-i.e., by the recipients’ descendant, or kept in the Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem. In this latter case, a sales deed dated 1169 was received by a Greek priest.⁵⁶ Pahlitzsch, “Ein arabischer Kaufvertrag”. This pattern, it has to be noted, dovetails with the apparent paradox of late medieval Islamic societies, whose chanceries and notarial stalls issued deeds and decrees that most often have survived in non-Islamic religious institutions, their recipients, such as Saint Catherine’s Monastery or the Synagogue of Ben Ezra in Cairo. The 1435 Arabic notarial deed at the center of the present study owes its survival to a similar logic.

Standing as the most important witness of the Lusignan chancery, the extant livre des remembrances de la Secrète consists of a volume collecting court rulings, decrees, and private deeds issued during the 1468-9 timespan. This almost complete court record was found in a rural area of Cyprus and bought by a French vice-consul in 1627, then handed to the orientalist Peiresc and ended up as an acquisition of the Vatican Library. ⁵⁷ Richard, Le Livre des remembrances, p. vii. As mentioned earlier, the livres de remembrances became the standard record-keeping format in Cyprus. The Royal Chancery, the Secrète and the different courts of justice kept their decisions in these scribal artifacts. Original documents containing the signatures and seals were delivered to the right holders, while the contents of the deed were drafted in the livre de remembrances, featuring, if validated, the formula confermé.⁵⁸ Richard, “La diplomatique royale”, p. 82. A further parallel can be drawn between the remembrances format and the main chancery artifact in use in the Mamluk administration, the daftar kept by Arab clerks. As it has been pointed out for Islamic decrees, due to their physical features such as their dimensions, and monumental script, the originals had a symbolic, performative value and circulated widely, being often the object of reuse.⁵⁹ Rustow, The Lost Archive, pp. 381-391.

Unlike the visually impressive scrolls produced by the Fatimid chancery or the decrees imagined by the Crusader jurists, both the Islamic daftar and the livre des remembrances exhibited modest material features and were deprived of any symbolic capital. The mid-fifteenth-century secretary Šams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Saḥmāwī (d. 868/1464), describes daily chancery practices revolving around the daftar, but these practices appear to have been more concerned with the drafting of documents than with their preservation. ⁶⁰ Apellániz, Breaching the Bronze Wall, pp. 52-53. The procedures described by al-Saḥmāwī sought to secure the traceability of drafts to a single clerk, and to prevent blank or in-the-works decrees from being forged or manipulated. It has to be noted that during the 1251 parlement the party defending the keeping of written records insisted that the court’s output ought to be filed in a single register.⁶¹ Livre Contrefais, p. 248. Both the daftar and the livre des remembrances were artifacts used by secretaries to keep track of the documents drafted by the chancery, reporting their contents but deprived of signatures and seals. Incidentally, in his description of how documents were deposited at the Sepulcher, Novara alludes to the solemn script, the gold and red ink employed by the scribes, the seals and other physical features providing the records with this performative function (a description reflecting later, thirteenth-century practice, hence betraying the anachronistic character of Novara’s narrative).⁶² Edbury, Philip of Novara, pp. 119, 259. Edbury, Law and custom, p. 75, Sombati, Letres, pp. 72-73.

At this point, the question emerges about why is it that no vernacular documentation appears to have survived that can be traced to its original repository. The only exception to the non-survival of records is the livre de remembrances found in 1627, which, as Peiresc seems to imply, was located in an unexpected place “in the mountains.” It contains a single reference to the archiving procedures adopted in the Secrète that is in itself revealing. In 1469, Sire Jacques Stranbailli felt the need to ascertain the details of a sales contract. Nine years earlier, he purchased a garden from Sire Georges Mistahel, a Syrian, but now realized that he had forgotten the exact date. Both seller and buyer looked for the contract’s registration at the Secrète, but the relevant livre de remembrances could not be found. To his horror, Stranbailli could not retrieve the original chart delivered to him by the notary either, and both parties amiably agreed to have the sale registered again. ⁶³ Richard, Le Livre des remembrances, pp. 131-132.

Needless to say, the secretains would have been able to retrieve the documents they themselves had produced. This was the case in 1395, when the King requested evidence of some payments from 1365-1368. However, even in ordinary instances the procedure was more concerned with safekeeping than accessibility, since it involved not only the Baillie of the Secrète but the whole body of secretains. The records were placed under the key and seal of the Baillie, Thomas Mahé, who together with the secretains, issued the receipts, then certified them through the written subscription of each one of the chancellors. In the long term, instead, the collections in the Baillie’s possession were no longer accessible. In 1556 the Venetian officials in Cyprus complained about the norms followed at the time of the Lusignan kings by the Secrète, which had resulted in the loss of originals, hence the need to resort to uncorroborated copies or to the originals in possession of the right holders. ⁶⁴ Ibid., p. xi, n. 14-15, I libri commemoriali, vol. 6, pp. 285-286. […] furent contrescris les dytes payes en prezensse doudit bailly de la secrete et des secretens, et pour afermance ont confermé ce prezent escrit chascun de sa letre, De Mas Latrie, Histoire de l'île de Chypre, Vol. II, pp. 423-424.

Gilles Grivaud has pointed out that, in the 1530s, when the authorities gathered the body of Cyprus’ customary law to retrieve copies of the assises, the commission was forced to have recourse to the manuscripts owned by private collectors. ⁶⁵ Grivaud, “Ordine della Secreta di Cipro”, p. 547, n. 122. In the sixteenth century Florio Boustron felt the need to have the regulations of the Secrète written down pursuant, he reported, to the many conflicts that arose concerning land property and taxation. According to Boustron, the bureau did not keep any manuscript containing its own regulations (et tamen nella Secreta Real non si attrova alcuno ordine).⁶⁶ Ibid., pp. 560, 565-566. These episodes raise a few eyebrows about whether the Crusaders had archives or not and parallel al-Saḥmawī’s description of the Mamluk daftars, which did not leave the workshop to join larger state collections, serving only as a reference for ongoing work at the chancery. In Lusignan Cyprus, the drafting of the pratichi, or cadastral surveys, the attribution of fiefs and the handling of tax income constituted the Secrète’s main attribution. However,one is left with the impression that the conduct of these affairs was left in the hands of the personal knowledge of chancellors, and that the document had but a murky existence without the authoritativeness provided by a living author.

For Cyprus, we have evidence of two notarial contracts drafted in Arabic regarding the Mistahel and the Audeth families. In both cases they concerned issues of family and probate and were drafted by community notary-priests. They were certainly the same Jacobite and Syrian presbyters that were present at these Syrians’ deathbeds. ⁶⁷ Richard, Une famille de Vénitiens Blancs, pp. 90, 117, 127. The behavior of the Syrian Georges Mistahel in 1469, who does not seem to have had, at least initially, much interest in having the sale of his garden properly registered, seems to suggest that there existed a milieu of social relations where the recourse to notarization, and particularly to records written in a dying language such as Arabic, instead of displacing orality, served the purposes of fixing the memory in the community.⁶⁸ Smail, “Notaries, Courts and the legal Culture”, p. 49.

In the case of Islamic studies, the explanation for the non-survival of archives has been, often unconvincingly, that archives existed, but they have not survived due to episodic destruction. As we have seen, Saladin is credited by Novara with the earliest destruction of the Crusader archives during the takeover of Jerusalem. Following Richard, Gilles Veinstein conjectured that Venetian archives-heirs of the Lusignan collections-were again destroyed during the Ottoman conquest of Nicosia. ⁶⁹ Arbel & Veinstein, “La fiscalité veneto-chypriote, pp. 7, 16. The same has been often assumed for the Fatimid book collections. A similar fate has been suggested for the Fatimid chancery archives, supposed to be located somewhere in the vicinity of the Caliphal palaces and lost during the Fatimid-Ayyubid transition.⁷⁰ For a discussion, Apellániz, Breaching the Bronze Wall, pp. 71-72. The Ottoman takeover of Egypt in 1517 is also believed to have resulted in the loss of the Mamluk collections. Available explanations for the fate of the Islamic collections appear, once again, surprisingly coincident with those assumed for the Crusader archives.

Recent research by Fauzia Bora on the Fatimids or by Nicolas Michel on the Ottomans has questioned the pervasive assumption that episodic destruction accompanied the downfall of ruling dynasties. Michel’s reconsideration of the Ottoman takeover of Egypt’s records supports the idea that first, collections were not necessarily kept within a state archive, since they were rather considered as personal collections of secretaries. Secondly, the archives did not perish but were gradually assimilated into the new administration, usually, but not always, becoming useless at the end of this process. ⁷¹ Bora, “Did Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Destroy the Fatimids' Books?”; Michel, “Les Circassiens avaient brûlé les registres”. In their discussion of the Sepulcher letters, Edbury, and more recently, Sombati, have offered ample evidence from Islamic chroniclers that Saladin did not sack the town, and that the clergy was allowed to take from the Sepulcher whatever they considered worth saving. Similarly, the Discours de la prise de Nicosie by Calépien describes the skirmishes during the Ottoman takeover of the city in 1571, mentioning the role of the Chancery clerks in them. However,nothing is said about the collections’ destruction.⁷² Calepien, “Discours de la prinse de Nicosia”. Be that as it may, the image of Muslims burning archives is a widespread, resilient one. While it has served the purpose of justifying the waning of invented archives, a close examination often proves that such claims are unsubstantiated. While we can hardly pin the dearth of the kingdom’s records on alleged Islamic plunderers, in the concluding section I turn to the 1435 deed for answers about why judicial archives have not come down to us.

The 1435 Arabic deed

Our deed was drafted by a certain Abū-l-Naẓārī Ibn Yāk, in all probability a notary-priest. He was certainly a Syrian-origin Arabic speaker, and his Franco-Arabic name (son of Jacques) suggests that his family was integrated into the Crusader society. A Melkite affiliation-a Greek church with Arabic-speaking ministers-may be inferred from the use of Greek characters in his monogram. The document is dated Friday 8 Nisān (April) 1435, while the year seems to have also been recorded in a different set of numerals, probably according to the Byzantine Era. ⁷³ Bauden, “Handlist”, Pedani, “Historical survey”. The document was briefly addressed in two independent contributions, published in the same journal issue (Quaderni di Studi Arabi, 2002). Bauden published the deed’s contents, without translation or transcription, while Pedani shortly elaborated on Alvise Correr and his archives. The deed is part of the personal archives of Alvise Correr, a Venetian merchant active in Cyprus and banker of the ruling family. It is accompanied by other Cypriot documents, such as a Latin deed drawn up by the imperial notary and chancellor Marcus de Signorio and a French deed from a livre de remembrances, dated 1433. While the two other documents refer to Correr’s role as a banker of the Lusignan, the Arabic deed concerns three members of the Audeth. The family survived the Mamluk takeover and made significant loans to king Janus and the Cypriot nobles to ransom hostages.⁷⁴ The family’s background, composition, and finances are discussed in Richard, Une famille de Vénitiens Blancs, pp. 89-94.

As for its contents, the clerk reports that Āmārī Dulfīn (the Venetian Marin Dolfin), Anṭūn ʿWdāt (Antoine Audeth, d. 1453), and Yuhannā ʿWdāt (Jean Audeth) appeared before the notary as clients. The last two were serving as executors of their late brother’s estate, the deceased Ḥamīs ʿWdāt (Hamis Audeth). ⁷⁵ Together with Ḥamīs, the younger brothers, Antoine/Anṭūn and Yuhannā/Jean are also documented in the Audeth papers in ASV, Procuratori San Marco, Citra, Misti 132, Richard, Une famille de Vénitiens Blancs, pp. 89-91. They declared that “everything”, i.e. any debt contracted by Lwīs Kurāl (i.e. Alvise Correr) vis-à-vis Ḥamīs ʿWdāt would be extinguished from their pending affairs. Referring in all probability to the notary’s clients, the scribe further states that they ‘cannot write’ and that they have summoned Astās Ġūl “to write and to make know through the present record.” This rather obscure wording may refer to the fact that Abū-l-Naẓārī’s clients were able to speak Arabic but could not write it. The scribe’s Arabic grammar and writing are defective, he does not lift the pen when drafting some words and generally lacks diacritics.

Acting at the priest’s request, Astās Ġūl adds a subscription in old French to the document, to make the otherwise private deed legally binding according to Cypriot legislation. The reading of this subscription poses some difficulties, although the chancellor uses the expression confermé la dite écrite, a well-known validation formula in Cyprus’ chanceries. ⁷⁶ Richard, “La diplomatique royale”, p. 82. Unlike Abū-l-Naẓārī, Ġūl can be identified with certainty in the sources: he is no other than the Eustache Goul, the “archivist” the Mamluks were looking for in the aftermath of the battle of Khirokitia on 7 July 1426.⁷⁷ Documented as Estas Goul, together with his nephew Pierre Goul, inRichard, Le Livre des remembrances, pp. 124, 130, Jacoby, Citoyens, pp. 168-169, 179. Needless to say, Ḥamīs ʿWdāt is the same Hamis Audeth who led the group of Syrian notables that opened the gates of Nicosia to the Mamluks that very same day.

The deed has been preserved in the Venetian archives as it was part of the personal documents of its beneficiary. Correr lived for some time in Cyprus, and has left a long trail of references in the sources. Together with Antoine and Jean Audeth, Alvise Correr was also involved in the financing of King Janus’ ransom. ⁷⁸ Coureas, Tribute, p. 363. Venice, Archivio di Stato, Procuratori di San Marco, Misti, busta 205, Fasc. I. The loan made by the Audeth dates from 1435, Richard, Une famille de Vénitiens Blancs, p. 92.

Davide (Dāwūd), Salomon (Salmūn), and Nicola (Nikūlā) appear as witnesses to the deed. They use the formula šahada bi-dalika (he bore witness to that), typical of Islamic documents, although not in their own handwriting; their Arabic subscriptions are written by the scribe. The latter, acting in the same way as the Islamic notary, is himself a witness to the deed he has just drafted, hence using the first person (šahadtu ʿalayhim bi-dalika, or I bore witness of that on their behalf).

The 1435 notarial deed does not seem to fit into the pattern of the Italian-style public document. Unlike deeds drawn up by imperial notaries, where witnesses are just mentioned as being present, Abū-l-Naẓārī’s formulae refer to the oral testimony the witnesses may provide if summoned before the judge (lines 23-5: established equally by witnesses, before any judge either ecclesiastic or secular). The role of the witnesses strongly suggests that Abū-l-Naẓārī’s craft resembles that of the Islamic notaries, whereby the document works as an aide-mémoire supplied to the parties by the scribe, who does not keep an original, or authentic, deed, in a protocol, as an Imperial notary would have. In the same manner as the Islamic notary-witnesses, Abū-l- Naẓārī’s function seems to be that of giving oral testimony at court, flanking the witnesses to the deed. The witnesses do not sign with their own hands since their value lies in their capacity to testify orally at court and to attest to the deed’s contents. Abū-l-Naẓārī seems to be delivering an aide-mémoire, bearing his signum, to the party, who can summon both notary and witnesses to appear at court. Instead, the Latin deeds produced by imperial notaries were public documents delivered to the parties, valid in southern European courts applying Ius Comune, and their originals were preserved in notarial protocols.

Not all external characteristics derive from an Islamic-like scribal tradition. The indiction and the notaries’ signum provide the record with supplementary, official authority, and the registration by a royal official suggests the need to use the record as a probative artifact in Cyprus. Lastly, the deed’s contents may have been registered in a livre de remembrances. ⁷⁹ The surviving livre of 1468 contains a section for private deeds, Richard, Le Livre des remembrances, pp. 11-134. Except for the royal registration, the deed conforms to a notarial culture confining legal truth to the realm of orality and memory and, as stated by the lords of Acre at the beginning of this article, featuring a very limited trust in paper artifacts. As in the case of its Islamic counterparts, no Cristian-Arabic notarial protocol has survived, not necessarily due to catastrophic destruction or any bias against vernacular records, but simply because they never existed and, therefore, were not the object of any archival procedures.

A single extant register from the Lusignan courts stands in stark contrast to the c. 2.100 surviving deeds produced by Genoese notaries. Peter Edbury has found traces of the same phenomenon in his discussion of the historical work of archbishop William of Tyre (1130-1186). Despite his role as chancellor and his use of documents from his archiepiscopal archive, he gives no indication that […] he had access to any collection of royal records. ⁸⁰ Edbury, Law and custom, p. 75. The marginal, out-of-place 1435 Arabic deed, of very limited historical significance in itself, serves the purpose of illustrating that the lack of archives often associated with medieval Islam does not necessarily result from the biases of present-day historians. The same troubled absence of collections attests to the shared attitudes toward writing and documentation exhibited by Muslims and people embedded with Christian zeal.

At this point, a few final considerations can be added on how such attitudes may have crossed the boundaries between the Islamic principalities and the Crusader lands. Islamic societies’ distrust of the written word is mainly due to the attitudes of the legally learned against their secular rulers. As it is well known, this suspicion manifested during the early caliphate, when even the bearers of encyclopedic knowledge, such as ḥadīth collectors, restricted their own use of notes to simple aide-mémoires, entrusting actual knowledge to the realm of memory. ⁸¹ Melchert, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, pp. 28-31.

On the contrary, royal powers were interested in promoting written documents to convey their own rulings and provisions. They were eager to sponsor new technologies, such as paper by the Abbasids. No wonder civil secretaries-the kātibs (ar. kuttāb)-populated the chanceries, and we have reason to believe that the Abbasid Caliphs and similar regimes, such as the Fatimids in Cairo, engaged in archival practices and procedures. ⁸² For a discussion, Apellániz, “Breaching the Bronze Wall”, pp. 71-71, 140-141. The Caliphs in Baghdad had ample recourse to ḏimmī secretaries for their dīwāns, often hailing from a Persian scribal milieu or from Nestorian monasteries. The Fatimid caliphs were assisted by Jewish and Cristian chancellors and officials. It has been shown that scripts, documentary formats and the organization of the Fatimid chancery were, on occasion, adopted in Christian courts.⁸³ Yarbrough, Friends of the Emir; Johns, Arabic Administration, pp. 274-277.

The Crusader period coincided with a very different phase in Islamic history. The Franks’ main contenders in Syria and Palestine were households of Turks and Turkicised nomads and their lieutenants, the so-called atabegs, such as the Ayyubid Kurds headed by Saladin. Unlike the Caliphs-often at odds with the ulama-these Turkic overlords needed the support of religious scholars. The ulama mediated between the military lords and the masses over which they ruled. Religious scholars provided the Turkish rulers with legal and political support through the schools of law and mystic confraternities. In exchange, from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, the ulama took over chancery positions. A new kind of secretary, enjoying religious training, was now entrusted with chancery offices. The piety-minded became prevalent in ample areas of the religious and civil administration, which had previously been entrusted to a different kind of clerk, the more secular scribe or kātib. ⁸⁴ Escovitz, “Vocational Patterns of the Scribes”, Rabbat, “My Life with Salah al-Din”, p. 267. Under the Turkish dynasties, in many administrative departments, the knowledge previously entrusted to archives was now deposited in the form of Islamic notarization, the ulama’s favorite textual technology. To be sure, notarization conveyed a certain amount of paperwork, but ultimately these records were simple aide-mémoires, and oral witnessing by the notaries was needed. the Mamluks, who, as it has been mentioned, were Cyprus’ overlords, epitomized this state of affairs, and notary witnesses proliferated in and out of the administrative bureaus in their realms.⁸⁵ Apellániz, Breaching the Bronze Wall, p. 62.

I have been referring to the fact that, under the Crusaders, records were regarded as backed by their producers’ memory and authorship, and that these attitudes closely resembled Islamic ones. For Muslims, legal truth was entrusted to the heart of upright believers, and not to the perishable matter of paper, which in practice meant that all transactions were vouched for by the ulama acting as notaries. If, on the one hand, Islamic notarization resided on orality, at the administrative level it made little sense to deprive records of the credibility provided by their author, the secretary. In Mamluk times, civil secretaries often acquired the external manifestations of the religious elites and were referred to as ‘qadis’. Quite like the judge’s papers, records needed to be securely kept in the secretary’s possession and not permitted to be ‘loose in the world’. ⁸⁶ Johansen, A Perfect Law in an Imperfect Society, p. 269. Messick, The Calligraphic State, pp. 209-212.

In Late Medieval Syria and Egypt, the notaries and clerks owned the records. Previously known archival procedures seem to have been abandoned in favor of this model in which provisions and administrative acts were indissolubly linked to the persons of these notary-witnesses. This was obviously the background not only for Muslims, but equally for the subjected Christians who had ample recourse to Islamic notaries.

We can only guess how notarial practices in Arabic reached Cyprus. Jeremy Johns has made a strong case for the Norman Royal Dīwān and its grafting of a Arabic chancery based on the Fatimid model. However, the evidence on the specific actors and circumstances of this transfer is only circumstantial. ⁸⁷ Johns, Arabic Administration, p. 280. We know that Syrians migrated in great numbers after 1291, settling in the countryside and coastal cities such as Limassol and Famagusta, where they might have outnumbered other populations. Privileges were extended by the Lusignan not just to Latin knights, but also “to shoemakers, masons and Arabic scribes”.⁸⁸ Edbury, The kingdom of Cyprus, p. 16. Syrians were allowed to maintain their own courts, and a status superior to that of the Greeks, who were subject to a capitation tax. Migration waves continued until the fifteenth century, including entire families from Tripoli and Beirut, which are mentioned in the Genoese records. These Syrians bore Arabic names and made use of Arabic contracts, had recourse to their own jurors and courts, and kept their ties with the Arab lands.⁸⁹ Apellániz, “An Unknown Diaspora”, Edbury, The kingdom of Cyprus, Richard, “Le peuplement latin et syrien”.

No wonder the Arabic scribes who joined the Crusader chanceries brought with them their traditional ways of drafting and preserving records, which mirrored the Islamic notarial procedures. More interesting for our purposes, the Syrian families in charge of Crusader chanceries replicated Middle-Eastern patterns of social reproduction. Over generations, they monopolized the appointments to the leading posts. This was certainly the case for the Goul clan, and we find Eustache’s descendants still in charge in Mamluk-dominated Cyprus in the late 1460s. It is in this context, where orality and authoritativeness acted as guardians of written records, that the apparently odd scene of the Mamluk invaders looking for a dismissed clerk starts to make sense.

Venice, Archivio di Stato, Procuratori di San Marco, Misti, busta 205, Fasc. I.

Venice, Archivio di Stato, Procuratori di San Marco, Misti, busta 205, Fasc. I.

(in old French)

(in Arabic)

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my gratitude to my colleagues at the L’Orientale University of Naples professors Gaga Shurgaia and Riccardo Contini for their assistance, together with the two anonymous readers of my draft.

Declaration of competing interest

The author of this article declare that he have no financial, professional or personal conflicts of interest that could have inappropriately influenced this work.

Authorship contribution statement (CRediT)

Francisco Apellániz: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing-original draft and Writing-review & editing.

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Bibliographical References