"Livro de demarcaçoes entre estes reinos e os de Castela e de Contratos de pazes", a chartulary for diplomatic relationss between Castile and Portugal in th late Middle Ages

Abstract

The book of frontier demarcations and peace treatments between the kingdom of Portugal and the kingdom of Castile, kept in the “Lei-tura Nova” collection within the National Archives of Portugal (“Torre do Tombo”), is one of the rare known examples of cartulary destined to preserve documents concerning international relationships between two states. Through the analysis of its external elements (Codicological and paleographical study), the structure of its contents (organization of doc-uments in the codex and the analysis of document typologies), and the biography of its editor, Fernão de Pina; we could draw conclusions about the context of its elaboration. We can assert that it was produced before the rest of the codices of the “Leitura Nova” collection, dating from the sixteenth century, and we can place it in the last decades of the fifteenth century, coinciding with a moment of a great intensity in the Luso-Castilian relations and it may well be the immediate precursor to the preparation of “Leitura Nova” collection, in which it was incorpo-rated later. Despite the importance of this cartulary, it has scarcely been considered in the vast bibliography on the Luso-Castilian relations, therefore we intend to bring it closer to the medievalists across the edi-tion of the summaries of its documents.