This presentation focuses on the ‘condominia’ or land partition truces negotiated by Frankish and Muslim rulers during the Eastern crusades (488-690 AH/1095-1291 AD). Although the earliest Christian-Muslim partition truce was negotiated in 69/688, this type of diplomatic agreement was not used again until the crusaders established a foothold in the Levant in the sixth/twelfth century. The last known condominium truce was concluded by the Franks, represented by Eschiva of Beirut and Lady Margaret of Tyre, and the Mamluk sultan Qalawun in 684/1285. This presentation begins with an overview of the history and defining characteristics of the munasafa. It then focuses on the procedures that Frankish and Muslim rulers and envoys followed when negotiating such truces. Concluding an agreement invariably involved drafting a truce through a collaborative process to accurately render stipulations in the languages of both parties involved. In reconstructing the drafting process, I will draw on testimony from the chancery encyclopaedia of the Mamluk chief scribe, al-Qalqashandi (756-821/1355-1418) as well as traces of intercultural exchange preserved in extant truce documents. Finally, this presentation examines how aspects of shared territorial control, including shared judicial and administrative duties, were translated and expressed in the extant truce documents. Whereas the Islamic tradition emphasized the importance of sources of revenue as the basis for ownership, the Latin Christian tradition emphasized territorial rights to land within which sources of revenue were located. By analyzing the division of administrative duties and shared rights to revenue in the extant truces, I argue that a limited form of ownership was exercised in partition truces which resembled commercial partnerships (sharikat) as well as political claims of territorial sovereignty.

For a long time Waqf has been considered as a pious foundation whose development forced the development of the infrastructure of the city, more specifically, mosques, madrasas and Khanqahs. However, the claim of ownership of different properties which appear as important elements in Waqfiyyat as contracts, has not been given much attention in scholarship. This paper will discuss a so far unpublished sale document belonging to to Awlad al-Nasir Hasan, the sons of the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Hasan (r. 748-752 AH/1347-1351 CE and 755-762 AH/1354-1361 CE). The story of this document tells us about al-Nasir Hasan’s descendants who 30 years after the death of their father filed a case, asking the judge for permission to sell some of the Awqaf on their father’s complex in Cairo. This document helps us to understand how Waqf could work as a property rights claim. The legal system that formed these rights at times supported urban growth, while at others it worked the other way around and could not help such infrastructural facilities to develop the city. Presenting this documents as a case-study, this paper considers the role of a good legal system in protecting urban economic growth. A strong claim of ownership over certain properties could give absolute safety for those who were willing to invest in the city, for instance by investing in the building industry. The document presented in this paper thus sheds light on how the physical value (i.e. infrastructure) and the legal value of Waqf, could act as real protectors of the economy, or at least protectors of business in the long term.

The raison d’être of a property deed is to record changes in ownership status. These deeds are also, however, physical documents, recording transactions that reflect concrete realities. The processes of their production, use, and storage are of profound concern to the individuals and communities who hold stakes in the transactions they record. They are thus objects that are physically situated in society. In past scholarship, the material aspects of legal deeds surviving from the pre-modern Middle East have been neglected. Historians have mined their texts for details that contribute to the social and political histories of certain times and places, while disregarding the physical containers of these texts. Recent years have, however, seen a valuable shift towards a more comprehensive examination of such deeds, including their material features. This approach acknowledges that documents lived out their own social lives, which reflect the interests of the societies in which they were situated and are thus deeply historically contingent. Taking its cue from these trends, this paper explores the lives of documents recording the ownership trajectories of urban property in Cairo during the final decades of Mamluk rule in Egypt. This period has furnished us with a rich documentary record, which reveals dynamic practices of property exchange through repeated sale and re-sale, and immobilisation in waqf endowments. Avoiding a tight focus on a specific legal genre, this paper foregrounds instead the documentary practices that emerge from a micro-analysis of the surviving documents: their content and textual formulary, but also their layout and materiality. Examining these features, I detail the extended lives of these documents, which were punctuated by practices of archiving, copying, cross-referencing, and certification, and which mirror the ownership trajectories of the properties they dealt with. From the evidence of these documents, I argue that the exchange of property during the late-Mamluk period was accompanied by an extensive paper trail and an acquisitive attitude towards legal records. The lives of documents thus reflect not only the desire to record the legal status of properties, but also a drive to possess physical records. Through the case of late-Mamluk Cairo, this paper demonstrates the way in which a deed – as a legal instrument, but also as a roll of paper or parchment – could become an inherent element in the social and legal practices surrounding property ownership.