La chancellerie almohade

A diferencia de sus homólogos orientales, los califas mu›minides se encontraban esporádicamente obligados a encabezar expediciones. Era un momento crucial para el califa que, al mismo tiempo que exponía su entera credibilidad a los ojos de sus súbditos, arriesgaba su vida al dejar la protección segura que le ofrecían los muros de su palacio. Para mantener su rango y seguir produciendo efectos, se adopto un dispositivo original, al-Afrāg, cuyo objetivo era crear una coherencia entre el palacio del califa y su campamento, al adoptar una disposición similar desde un punto de vista arquitectónico. Además, la tienda de campamento del soberano era ligeramente diferente del resto del Afrāg y de las tiendas del campamento, por el hecho que usaba el color rojo, a la manera de los califas omeyyades Palabras claves: poder, Almohades, campamento califal, Afrāg, itinerancia.

Las Navas de Tolosa, 1212-2012. Miradas cruzadas, 2014

Procedural acts can provide rich information when analyzed well, completing the sometimes different information found in chronicles. Historians have heretofore studied mainly the latter and focused on the first decades of the Almohad Empire, when it was expanding. Manuscript 4752 from the Ḥasaniyya Library of Rabat contains 77 acts of appointment of governors, tax inspectors and judges. It leads us deep into the administrative practices of the Almohad Chancellery. The taqdīm-s thus contain valuable information about the modalities of nominations, about the counsels and instructions given to civil servants. Nevertheless, their interests go beyond their informative aspects about the imperial administration. The heavily codified chancery language they were redacted in is at the heart of the process of lexical and semantic genesis that determined the elaboration of the political and religious thinking of the Arab and Muslim world. Within sajʿ (prosed rime typical to Chancery style), neologisms, semantic revitalizations, systematic associations of terms, allow the scribes to participate actively to the constitution of linguistic tools that would be used by future authors and thinkers, when trying to conceptualize Power and Authority. Thus, paradoxically, though they were in theory under the highest authority, that of the Caliph, whom they served faithfully, the kuttāb were indeed masters of the order; they literally put in order the sovereign’s words. They were authority. This is all the more remarkable during the Almohad Era since jurists and men of Law had gone into the Chancery offices, after having been deprived of any jurisprudential function, by the interdiction of the Malekite school and practice and by the imposition of the Almohad dogma which reserved to the Caliph alone the right to interpret the Divine Law.

2014

Dossiers d'Archéologie. Le Maroc médiéval. Un empire de l'Afrique á l'Espagne. nº 365.

Byzantiaka 33, pp. 265-294, 2016

Institutions de la Pincipaute de Moree: la chancellerie et la tresorie au temps des Villehardouin. Histoire, prosopa, details des institutions, problemes.

2019

International audienceA la fin de la République et au début de l'Empire, les membres importants de l'aristocratie sénatoriale s'étaient constitué des chancelleries privées composées de scribes publics qui étaient sortis des décuries officielles et s'étaient mis à leur disposition. Le rapport que ces individus entretenaient avec leurs patrons ne se donnait pas à percevoir comme administratif mais bien davantage comme fondé sur l'amicitia et une relation de familiarité privée. Une exemple est particulièrement frappant celui d'un scribe Volusius Himerus issu des décuries et prêtre du génie de son patron, au sommet en quelque sorte de la domesticité

MEFRA, 1984