Ducal Archives of Medinaceli

The Ducal Archive of Medinaceli is one of the most significant examples of historical continuity in the conservation of documentary heritage. It will soon be a thousand years since Count Ponç I of Ampurias instructed it to set up a documentary repository in his fortress at Quermançó in order to preserve and protect its documents. During this thousand-year history, or more than a thousand years, if we take into account that its holdings date back to Carolingian Catalonia, the archive has been formed by the successive aggregation of Houses and States, a process that can be followed in the section entitled Aggregation. The incorporation of new archives into a House did not mean a merger between them, but rather that each retained its original organisational structure. However, the administrative restructuring which took place in the 18th century generated, in addition to administrative collections organised by territorial units which transcended the manorial estates, four large archival units with a certain internal homogeneity: the Archive of the Dukes of Segorbe and Cardona; the Archive of the Dukes of Medinaceli; the Archive of the Dukes of Santisteban del Puerto and the Archive of the Marquises of Camarasa.