Letters in Arabic sent from the Nasrid Court. A diplomatic analysis

Abstract

This article applies Diplomatic discipline techniques to the correspondence issued from the Nasrid Granada Court and directed to Christian monarchs and Lords. For reasons of coherence and space, it focuses only on the letters written in Arabic. The aim was to establish their extrinsic charac-teristics (paper size and colour, palaeographic type, size of the seals, presence of ʽalāma) and the in-trinsic ones (directio, intitulatio, greetings, toponymical and chronological dating styles), to character-ize them and check if the formulae reflect the social categories of the sender and the recipient. To carry the task, some 70 letters (all original) have been studied; they were submitted by the sultans or their dignitaries from Granada to the Aragon and Castile Courts, and most of them are preserved now in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon. They have been analysed to determinate the formulae which constitute the initial and final Protocols, their usual wordings and order of placement. The conclusions of the study show that these letters written in Granada in Arabic language have a characteristic structure and con-ventions of their own and that knowing them it's easy to identify them.