A Structured Dataset of Payments, Places and Persons in the Cartulary of Santo Toribio de Liébana (790–1626)

María Teresa Ballestar; Jorge Sainz

doi:10.5334/johd.633

A Structured Dataset of Payments, Places and Persons in the Cartulary of Santo Toribio de Liébana (790–1626)

Journal of Open Humanities Data

Volume 12 (2026): Issue 1

By: María Teresa Ballestar and Jorge Sainz

Open Access

|Oct 2026

Abstract

This paper presents a structured, open dataset derived from the Cartulario de Santo Toribio de Liébana, a monastic cartulary from northern Spain edited by Sánchez Belda (1948). The dataset converts 566 charters (790–1626) into five linked relational files: (i) 328 payment events; (ii) 531 payment items, retaining goods, quantities, units and legal context; (iii) a gazetteer of 603 place names with medieval variants, municipal attribution and, for 94 places, geographic coordinates; (iv) an index of 1,348 persons with their attested roles; and (v) a concordance between cartulary and edition numbering. The extraction pipeline, implemented in Python 3.12, is released with the data, alongside an audit trail recording penal-clause contamination and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) defects. The dataset supports research on medieval monetisation, diplomatic formulae, historical toponymy and the economic history of northern Iberia.

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