Fazienda de Ultramar facts for kids
The Fazienda de Ultramar is an old book from the early 1200s. It was written in Old Spanish, which is an early form of the Spanish language. The book is like a travel guide for people visiting the Holy Land. It tells about places and history, similar to other travel guides and Bible stories written in languages like Spanish or Portuguese.
What's Inside?
This book is mostly a travel guide, showing the way to important places like Jerusalem and Bethlehem. But it's not based on a real trip the author took. Instead, it uses information from earlier journeys.
The Fazienda de Ultramar also includes some of the very first translations of the Bible into an Iberian Romance language. These are languages that developed from Latin in the Iberian Peninsula, like Spanish and Portuguese. The book also has stories from the New Testament, tales about saints (called hagiography), old legends, and other writings from ancient times.
Who Wrote It and When?
The book starts with two letters. In one letter, a person named don Remont, who was the archbishop of Toledo (a high church leader), asks his friend Almeric for information about the Holy Land. People believe these letters are real. They think this exchange happened when Raymond de Sauvetât was the archbishop, between 1124 and 1152. However, Almeric was French, so the letters would have been written in Latin or maybe French, not Old Spanish.
The Only Copy Left
Today, there is only one copy of the Fazienda de Ultramar that still exists. It is kept safe in the library of the University of Salamanca in Spain. In 1965, a scholar named Moshé Lazar studied and published this manuscript. He believed that Almeric, who was an important church official in Antakya, wrote it. Lazar thought the book was written sometime between 1126 and 1142.
See also
In Spanish: Fazienda de Ultramar para niños
