“Saracenis nostris de balafia”. An Arabism in a Latin document dated 1235 in Eivissa

Abstract

Feudal conquests within the 12th and 13th centuries promoted radical changes in the population structures of that time. The defeated population of Al-Andalus remained “under less rights, susceptible of being forced to abandon their houses, affected by alterations in their reproductive cycles, dispersed” (Barceló, 2005b: 22). All that formidable management of people needed written papers and new words. Some, for example, like the one that here appears – balàfia – paradoxically, borrowed from the language of those conquered.