Le carte dell’archivio degli Ospitalieri come fonte per la ricostruzione del francese d’Oltremare

This paper underscores the importance of archival charters in studying the spread of French within the Latin East, particularly across the Crusader States, as part of the broader medieval expansion of Francophone influence throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. Special attention is given to the archives of the Hospitallers, a military order whose initial settlement in the Holy Land dates to the latter half of the eleventh century. The vernacular documents associated with this order include translations of texts originally written in Latin as well as more recent documents in French, the language of the local French–speaking community also reflecting the predominance of French and Occitan members within the order’s ranks. Like other medieval archival charters, the Hospitallers’ documents are invaluable records of the development of a local scripta in French, though they do not represent the spoken French of the 13th–century Latin East. However, this corpus provides an indirect clue to certain features of the French language that circulated orally and in written form within the linguistically complex fabric of the Frankish territories overseas. In the appendix, the paper includes editions of two documents from the order’s archives, noteworthy for their grapho–phonetic and lexical characteristics.