In the field of non-literary document s , which Cintra also explored, he produced his thesis for the position of extraordinary professor on A Linguagem dos Foros de Castelo Rodrigo [Language in the Charters of Castelo Rodrigo] (published in 1959) and analysed Portuguese document s from the 13 th century. The edition and study of the Castelo Rodrigo charters are of interest, as a publication of sources , to historians of language, law and culture. A territory belonging to the Kingdom of León until 1296, it was only following the Treaty of Alcanices in 1297 that it was definitively integrated into Portugal – an opportunity for Cintra to revisit the proposal made by Alexandre Herculano, who suggested that Castelo Rodrigo had been colonised by inhabitants from beneath the Côa ( apud Cintra 1984: XV ) . The text of the charters is of interest to anyone looking to study a document of living speech, but it also holds evidence of how the repopulation of the western part of the kingdom of León took place ( Cintra 1984: XIX ) . Another foray into non-literary documents by Cintra – the review, classification and orthographic analysis of early documents written in Portuguese – revealed another type of call to History. Cintra ’ s main forerunners in this field had been historians and palaeographers, such as João Pedro Ribeiro and Pedro de Azevedo, and, as a collaborator of Cintra himself, Rui de Azevedo. The importance of crossing the synchronic and diachronic axes can be appreciated in Cintra ’ s care in grouping the documents by region (one of the manifestations of the attention he paid to linguistic geography) and by typology.

Interestingly, in Cintra, who sees himself as an empiricist, Celso Cunha will find the unconscious practitioner of a model that incorporates a plurality of factors: the region where the document was drawn up, the person responsible for writing it, the available spelling currents that condition the practice of the notary or scribe ( org. Faria 1999: 27 ) . The analysis of the script, aided by the characterisation of the writing and the inks, led Cintra to a series of conclusions that, according to Ana Maria Martins, revolutionised “ the state of the art on the oldest texts written in Portuguese ” ( org. Faria: 491 ) . Thus, in a parallel path to that of Avelino de J. Costa, he considered the Auto de Partilhas [Deed of Partition] (1192) and the Testamento de Elvira Sanches [Will of Elvira Sanches] (1193) to be late copies, which gave new prominence to the so-called Notícia de Torto [Notice about an Offense] , a document from the monastery of Vairão that, alongside the Testamento de Afonso II [Will of Afonso II] , came to be considered the oldest document written in Portuguese ( org. Faria 1999: 491 ) .

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