Charters are of crucial importance as a source when studying the history of the Middle Ages and the early modern era. There are a number of projects aiming at making charters available in digital format. All of these projects, as far as they use XML as the technological basis for their work, were represented at a conference in April 2004. It was found that, despite some structural differences in the individual approaches, there is considerable potential for integration as regards the individual

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... charter as a legally relevant text. This potential can be tapped by using common standards for the tagging/ encoding of charters. This article presents a proposal for such a standard. The proposed standard follows the existing TEI standard, but also contains a number of significant enhancements. The article also looks at the problems caused by overlapping structures and presents an architecture for a search engine that could help to bring together charters from all over Europe.