The Haram al-Sharīf collection of Arabic legal documents in Jerusalem: a Mamlūk court archive?

Abstract

This article analyses the corpus of 900 documents in the Mamlūk Haram al-Šarīf collection from the angle of archival storage. The vast majority of these documents are linked to the Jerusalem judge Šaraf al-Dīn ,Īsā b. Ġānim and to his period in office between the years 793/1391 and 797/1395. The sample of surviving documents, primarily estate inventories but also a few documents from other areas of the law within the qādī’s competence, contradicts the assumption that the Haram corpus is a systematically compiled archive of qādī records. Court certifications of real-estate sales and further transactions that are preserved for other periods within the Haram corpus are totally absent for this particular period. There is, moreover, an abundant number of documents concerning financial transactions in institutions over which the judge had jurisdiction. The necrology of the contemporary chronicler Ibn Hiğğī (d. 816/1413) opens an interesting perspective to explain the selection of documents relating to Šaraf al-Dīn, who was involved in a massive corruption case.