Spanish · c. 1400–1550
Read the looped court hand of the Castilian chanceries
Cortesana curls every ascender and descender back on itself and carries the pen through whole phrases without lifting it, so de la dicha çibdad can arrive as one long shape and the rúbrica under a royal signature looks like another line of words. Evidano transcribes cédulas, ejecutorias, capitulations and notarial receipts in this hand, separates the signature and the marginal registration from the body, and leaves the contractions standing if that is what your edition needs.
Sample pages
Real pages from public collections, shown beside their transcriptions. Pages whose transcription is still being checked are marked.
Archivo Municipal de Ayora, 12 August 1490 · Source · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Photograph by Dorieo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Transcription being verified
No edition of this receipt has been published; it belongs to the series of documents on the sale of Ayora kept in the town’s municipal archive.
What the model is told to watch for: Expect Cortesana with rounded, looped, and heavily connected forms developed for royal and administrative writing. Distinguish e, c, t, r, and s in rapid combinations, and watch for loops that enclose or cross neighboring letters, especially in que, de, and common name forms. Note superscript contractions, nasal strokes, abbreviations for titles and offices, paragraph marks, Roman numerals, and elaborate signatures or rúbricas.
Archivo General de Simancas, Estado, leg. 1-2º, f. 164, 1493 · Source · Public domain
Transcription
The opening of the letter, which is what the upper part of this page carries, in Martín Fernández de Navarrete’s edition of 1825, printed — as the archivist Tomás González certifies at its foot — literally from this original in the archive of Simancas. Accents, capitals and punctuation are the editor’s; where the copy gives the number of days in confused Roman numerals he prints veinte and notes that it should be seventy-one. Scanning errors in the digitised volume have been repaired, and the page continues well past the last line given here.
Señor: Porque sé que habréis placer de la grande vitoria que nuestro Señor me ha dado en mi viage, vos escribo esta, por la cual sabréis como en veinte dias pasé á las Indias con la armada que los Ilustrísimos Rey y Reina nuestros Señores me dieron, donde yo fallé muy muchas islas pobladas con gente sin número; y dellas todas he tomado posesión por sus Altezas con pregón y bandera Real extendida, y no me fue contradicho. A la primera que yo fallé puse nombre San Salvador, á conmemoración de su Alta Magestad, el cual maravillosamente todo esto ha dado: los indios la llaman Guanahani. A la segunda puse nombre la isla de Santa María de Concepción; á la tercera Fernandina; á la cuarta la Isabela; á la quinta isla Juana, é así á cada una nombre nuevo. Cuando yo llegué á la Juana seguí la costa della á poniente, y la fallé tan grande que pensé que sería tierra firme, la provincia de Catayo.
Transcription from Martín Fernández de Navarrete, Colección de los viages y descubrimientos que hicieron por mar los españoles, I (Madrid, 1825), pp. 167–168, via Internet Archive (Public domain).
Biblioteca Nacional de España, 23 November 1504 · Source · Public domain
Transcription being verified
The text of the codicil was printed among the documentary illustrations to Diego Clemencín’s Elogio de la reina católica doña Isabel (Memorias de la Real Academia de la Historia VI, 1821); this sheet has not been matched line by line to that text.
What the model is told to watch for: Expect Cortesana with rounded, looped, and heavily connected forms developed for royal and administrative writing. Distinguish e, c, t, r, and s in rapid combinations, and watch for loops that enclose or cross neighboring letters, especially in que, de, and common name forms. Note superscript contractions, nasal strokes, abbreviations for titles and offices, paragraph marks, Roman numerals, and elaborate signatures or rúbricas.
Boston Public Library, 1514 · Source · Public domain · Boston Public Library, via the Digital Public Library of America and Wikimedia Commons
Transcription being verified
The suit was studied, with extracts, by Caroline Bourland, The Case of Sancho de Almazán and Juan de la Cámara versus the Crown of Castile and the Town Council of Arenas (Smith College Studies in History XXIX, 1947), which is still in copyright.
What the model is told to watch for: Expect Cortesana with rounded, looped, and heavily connected forms developed for royal and administrative writing. Distinguish e, c, t, r, and s in rapid combinations, and watch for loops that enclose or cross neighboring letters, especially in que, de, and common name forms. Note superscript contractions, nasal strokes, abbreviations for titles and offices, paragraph marks, Roman numerals, and elaborate signatures or rúbricas.
What cortesana looks like and where it was used
Cortesana is the writing Castilian officialdom settled into once the albalaes cursive had loosened. From the last quarter of the fourteenth century the letters grow rounder, ascenders and descenders curl into closed loops, and the pen leaves the page less and less; by the reign of the Catholic Monarchs almost every royal secretary, council scribe and notary in the peninsula wrote it. It served the whole apparatus of government — cédulas and provisiones on paper, privileges and cartas ejecutorias on parchment, capitulations, receipts, protocols of sale and dowry — and it went with the administration to Granada in 1492 and across the Atlantic soon afterwards. Around the middle of the sixteenth century the courts pushed it aside in favour of the faster, tighter procesal.
The script is small, wide and round. The b, l, h and d carry looped ascenders that lean forward over the letters that follow; g, y, q and long ſ drop loops that tangle with the line beneath; e is often a closed circle finished with a hairline, and the two forms of s alternate by position. Because the pen stays down, de, del, que, dicho and the endings of names fuse into single shapes that have to be divided by sense rather than by eye. The contraction system is inherited from the medieval hands but used harder: dho for dicho, mrs for maravedís, Vra Alteza and Sus Altezas, Rl for real, xpiano for cristiano, and superscript o and a closing ordinals and names.
Much of the page is not running text at all. A royal cédula opens with El Rey, or El Rey e la Reyna, on a line of its own, states its business in a paragraph or two and closes with Yo el Rey, a secretary’s Por mandado del rey and a flourished rúbrica. A provisión begins with the full string of royal titles; a chancery ejecutoria is a bound parchment book whose first leaf is illuminated and whose text then runs on for dozens of dense pages. Sums are Roman numerals with the U that marks thousands of maravedís, dates are given by the año del nascimiento, and the margins carry registration notes, chancellors’ marks, later archival numbers and, in famous documents, line numbers added by nineteenth-century editors.
Why ordinary OCR struggles here
Loops that belong to another line
Ascenders from the line below and descenders from the line above cross the writing, so any page carries three layers of strokes at once. Segmentation designed for print joins the wrong halves together and reports letters where only the tail of a neighbouring word passes through.
Words that never end
The pen runs unbroken through de la dicha, por quanto and que le sea, and the same phrases are contracted so hard that the boundaries have to be settled by grammar rather than by white space. Engines that trust spacing return strings that are neither Spanish nor obvious nonsense, and those are the slowest kind of error to repair.
Signatures, rúbricas and registration marks
Yo el Rey, the secretary’s clause, the chancellor’s mark and the notary’s rúbrica are drawn rather than written. Treated as text they generate invented words; ignored altogether, the transcription loses the very marks that make the document authentic.
Money and dates inside the prose
Maravedí sums run into the sentence as Roman numerals with the U of thousands and the sign for a cuento, and in a receipt or an account they are the part that matters. A rent, a price or a year can be wrong while the surrounding sentence still reads perfectly well.
Who works with this material
Archives holding chancery series
Simancas, the Real Chancillerías of Valladolid and Granada and the municipal archives keep kilometres of this writing. Reference staff need a text they can index by person, place and date so that a researcher’s request can be answered without opening every bundle.
Genealogists working on hidalguía suits
An ejecutoria names parents, grandparents, witnesses and neighbours, and repeats them over dozens of leaves. What matters is that every name and place is caught, spelled as the scribe spelled it, and tied to the folio where it appears.
Historians of the early Atlantic world
Capitulations, instructions, licences and the letters that went with them survive as chancery copies in this hand. Reading them beside the printed editions of the nineteenth century shows where an editor normalised, guessed or silently mended a passage.
Economic historians in notarial protocols
Sales, dowries, rents and apprenticeships are recorded in bound registers of receipts and contracts. A usable transcription has to keep the sums exactly, including the U of thousands, because the figures are the data and the formulae around them are not.
Getting the best transcription
Name the document type before the page
Say whether you are sending a cédula, a provisión, an ejecutoria or a notarial instrument. The opening and closing formulae differ, and a model told what to expect will label the intitulatio, the dispositive clause and the subscription instead of running them together.
Ask for signatures and margins as their own blocks
Request the body of the text, then the signature clause, the secretary’s line, the rúbricas and every marginal note separately, each with its position. That keeps the drawn marks out of the prose and preserves the registration notes that date the document’s passage through the chancery.
Fix the contraction and numeral policy
Decide whether dho, mrs and Vra Alteza are to be expanded, and ask for maravedí sums to be given exactly as written, with a converted figure alongside rather than instead. Numbers are where a silent normalisation does the most damage.
Test on a page with a sum and a signature
Pick the least tidy leaf you have, one that carries a total and a subscription, and check it fully before running a whole book. If the loops, the figure and the rúbrica come back correctly there, a long ejecutoria will hold up.
Further reading on this hand
The palaeography guides the in-app selector points to for this domain, if you want to check a transcription against the standard references.
- Spanish Handwriting History
This Brigham Young University guide identifies Cortesana as a major Spanish secretary hand used during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It situates the script alongside Procesal and explains their relationship to administrative and court writing. The site's alphabet resources support comparison of connected lowercase forms, capitals, abbreviations, and individual variation. It is directly useful for recognizing the rounded and looped forms of Castilian chancery documents.
Frequently asked questions
- How is cortesana different from procesal?
- Cortesana is rounder and still legible word by word, with looped ascenders and moderate joining. Procesal, which grows out of it after about 1500, compresses the letters, lengthens the joins and can run whole lines together; the extreme form, procesal encadenada, is treated on its own page here.
- Can the royal signature and its rúbrica be separated from the text?
- Yes. Yo el Rey, Yo la Reyna, the secretary’s Por mandado clause and the flourish itself are returned as a labelled block at the end, with the flourish described rather than transcribed, so the body of the document is not polluted by invented words.
- What happens to words that are joined together?
- They are divided as an editor would divide them, using the formulae of the document type, and the transcription notes where the division is a judgement rather than something the scribe marked. You can also ask for the text exactly as written, without spaces added.
- Are maravedí sums converted into modern figures?
- Only if you ask. The default keeps the Roman numerals and the U of thousands as they stand, since that is what a diplomatic edition needs; a converted figure can be supplied beside each sum for checking against an account book.
- Can a whole bound ejecutoria be transcribed consistently?
- Yes, and consistency is the point: the same expansion rules, the same treatment of names and the same folio references across every leaf. Run the first few leaves, settle the conventions on them, and apply the same instructions to the rest of the volume.
Related scripts and pages
Transcribe your cortesana chancery documents
Upload a cédula, an ejecutoria or a notarial register, choose Cortesana Court and Chancery Documents, and settle the conventions on one leaf before the volume follows.