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an unnamed young researcher (Master's work at the University of Toulouse) presenting an edition of the lords of Montpellier's charters; questions come from audience members, one identified as Gilda Cantier-Rousseau of the University of Montpellier

The Role of Occitan in the Seigneurial Chancellery of Montpellier (12th–13th Centuries)

Andrea Cirla · Jul 18, 2026 · partial coverage

• Occitan
• Montpellier
• Latin
• medieval charters
• chancery
• oath of fidelity
• Roman law
• notaries
• language and power
• Guilhem lords

Coverage note: full (about twenty-three minutes; automatic English YouTube captions, apparently machine-translated from French, with several garbled terms and names such as "Petit Alamus" and "Monspestelarius")

Core ideas

The corpus and the observation. The study asks what status Occitan has in the lords' secular chancellery acts of Montpellier from the twelfth to thirteenth centuries. It rests on 52 original documents (1103-1349) from the lords' archive, now in the National Archives, plus the lords' cartulary (over 600 documents). A proto-chancellery appears in the early twelfth century, replaced by notaries; it kept working after Montpellier passed to the Crown of Aragon by marriage. The finding is stark: practically no charter is written in Occitan, which appears only through personal and place names and a few oaths, whereas the consulate's archives (the Petit Thalamus) use it freely.

A language shift and the role of orality. Eleventh-century charters were "stuffed" Latin mixing Latin and Occitan; in the 1080s-1090s there was an abrupt change to separate, "good" Latin and Occitan, as in ecclesiastical chanceries in Gascony, with lesser lords following around 1130 (and the Latin name of Montpellier changing from Monspestellarius to Montispessulanus). Occitan then survives in three kinds of acts, all linked to orality: oaths of fidelity (95 of 367 acts of the lords' chancery, close to a third, recorded as spoken words in the ceremony of homage), agreements recording both parties' grievances (the arbitral sentence returns to Latin), and land recognitions. From the thirteenth century jurists reform the form of homage in Latin, evacuating Occitan from the oath; only fiscal recognitions remain in Occitan, evolving into land registers until the sixteenth century. A royal proclamation is even translated into Latin before being cried in the vernacular.

Interpretation and discussion. The researcher links the choice of Latin to power: the lineage of the Guilhems, first Guilhem V who took the title of lord, based the new power on prestigious Latin, associated with empire, and Roman-law jurists and notaries made Latin the sign of their identity and of legal value (auctoritas). In the questions, he explains the consulate's Occitan by the social background (merchants, bankers, money changers, without Latin training) and by a logic of utility (utilitas): the Petit Thalamus translates Latin charters, such as the Great Customs Charter of 1204, for consuls who must defend their rights; the Occitan chronicle in them, with an Aragonese horizon, is a public writing with identity value. He admits he is more historian of practices than linguist.

Excerpts