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Liber instrumentorum memorialium

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionNov 29, 2018
Entity authorityQ1244247 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Liber instrumentorum memorialium is the surviving cartulary of the Lords of Montpellier, the Guilhems (Guillems), and an important source for their history. It was compiled in the early thirteenth century, under the patronage of William VIII, whose lordship is extensively catalogued in it. Its earliest documents date to 1059; its latest to 1204. Its 570 instruments are organised by both type and geography. According to the cartulary's preface, the documents are of two main types: those dealing with the lord's possessions in the Diocese of Maguelonne (which includes papal privileges, privilegia) and those dealing with his possessions elsewhere. Of these 150 record oaths of various sorts, while only 30 are convenientia (conventions). The earliest documents record some agreements of William IV involving the castles of Pouget and Saint-Pons-de-Mauchiens in 1059. The last few documents record the brief independent rule of William VIII's daughter Mary before her marriage (15 June 1204) to Peter the Catholic brought the lordship into the Crown of Aragon.

On the exceptional completeness of the cartulary of the Guilhems, Archibald Ross Lewis wrote:

The Cartulary of the Guillems of Montpellier presents an unusually full record of the activities of a noble family of southern France between the last decades of the eleventh century and the earliest years of the thirteenth. Only the Cartulary of the Trencavels of Beziers, still unpublished, or the Liber feudorum of the Counts of Barcelona can be compared to it; and each of these is much less complete.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Liber instrumentorum memorialium” as open-knowledge reference entry. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1059, 1204—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Liber, instrumentorum and memorialium can be independently traced.
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Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as open-knowledge reference entry. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 29, 2018. The linked authority identifier is Q1244247. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1059 and 1204.

Critical limits

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Liber instrumentorum memorialium” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.