A perspective on the multilingualism of the Patriarchate of Aquileia between the 13th and 14th centuries through a new project

Over the past fifteen years, the “Pio Paschini” Institute for the History of the Church in Friuli has published a significant number of volumes dedicated to documents, instrumenta and imbreviatures drawn up by notaries and patriarchal chancellors in the XIII and XIV century. The place names taken from the indexes of these volumes were used to form the first nucleus of the Historical Topography of the Patriarchate of Aquileia, i.e. a basic tool useful to identify the toponyms encountered in the most diverse medieval sources. The amount of data made available by these publications is now gradually reworked and inserted into a database that can be consulted in an Internet portal. One of the most interesting aspects of this project centers on the fact that the documentation relating to the patriarchate, although written in Latin, testifies to a toponymic polymorphism due to the presence of populations of several languages; for this reason, the Latin denomination of a place can be the original one, or it can result from a translation or an adaptation of Germanic, Slavic or Romance forms. The contribution presents the main characteristics of the project and some particularly significant data.