The Islamic heritage of Spanish inheritance law

Volume 350 of Studies in European Legal History now published

The legal term albacea, the executor of a will in Art. 892 ff. of the Spanish Código Civil, orig-inates linguistically from Arabic, around the time of Al-Andalus (711–1492). But was the le-gal content of the albacea also adopted from the Islamic law of that time? A historical and comparative legal analysis of documentary practice reveals a multi-stage legal reception: with-in the Christian-Arabic (Mozarabic) context of medieval Toledo, the Islamic term was first transformed into the Mozarabic executor-guardian (al )waṣī (الوصيّ). This developed into the executor aluace in the Castilian document practice of Toledo. The later spread of the executor, now written albacea, took place by way of an internal Castilian reception of law, as Tim Knoche demonstrates using the example of late medieval document practice in Christian-dominated Seville.