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

© 2016 Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. All rights reserved. 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.