Before the numbering of 1527-1532, the minutes of the General Inquiries of the 13th and 14th centuries are the most complete and exhaustive sources for the inventory of communities, goods and powers in Portugal north of the Mondego, as various regional and thematic studies based on the most important of these inquiries, those of 1220, 1258 and 1288, have shown.

The aim of this project is to carry out a critical edition of the first, those of 1220, since all of them have been published or are in the process of being published, but they are incomplete and therefore in need of urgent textual revision. In fact, the edition available today of the minutes of the General Inquiries of 1220, published, under the direction of Alexandre Herculano, in the Portugaliae Monumenta Historica – Inquisitiones, did not take into account all the available manuscripts, nor does it meet the current needs of editing a text whose consultation and use has proved fundamental for a complete knowledge of medieval Portugal in the 13th century.

In fact, the edition to be produced will not only seek to provide all researchers and cultural and educational agents with a critical and complete text of the minutes of the Inquiries of 1220, both in printed and computerized form, but it also proposes to present indexes that provide a complete and comprehensive set of information and materials that can be compiled and used in the further study of the minutes of all the Inquiries of the 13th and 14th centuries, since their editions do not include a similar treatment and presentation of the text.

In this sense, the proposed publication will ultimately provide the basis for a more rigorous, mappable and quantifiable clarification of the issues raised by the General Inquiries of the 200s and 300s, while at the same time shedding light on a wide range of issues that are decisive for our knowledge of Portuguese history, such as settlement patterns, demographic behavior, property regimes, the elements that ordered the occupation of the territory (castles, temples, the exercise of justice (communal, manorial, royal), taxation models, social differentiation, the marks of rural and urban daily life, toponymy and anthroponymy systems and the value of writing, records and archives in the defence of political and social rights and duties, as well as a better understanding of the functioning of the strategies of local and regional affirmation of royal power, as well as the tensions between centralization, manorialism and feudality.

Objectives: To establish the critical Latin text of the minutes of the General Inquiries of 1220. Prepare the respective edition. Design and complete a database based on the information available in the edition of the minutes of the Inquiries. Draw up a glossary of the text. Organize and establish the respective toponymic and institutional indexes. Promote the availability of all these materials on CD ROM and on the Internet. Hold a national meeting to reflect on the testimonies of the Inquiries of 1220. To organize, at the end of the project, an international conference dedicated to the comparative historical analysis of the royal production of the first regional documentary memoirs produced in the various medieval Christian kingdoms of the 13th century.