The Collaborative EuropeaN Digital Archive Infrastructure (CENDARI) will provide and facilitate access to existing archives and resources in Europe for the study of medieval and modern European history through the development of an ‘enquiry environment’. This environment will increase access to records of historic importance across the European Research Area, creating a powerful new platform for accessing and investigating historical data in a transnational fashion overcoming the national and institutional data silos that now exist. It will leverage the power of the European infrastructure for Digital Humanities (DARIAH) bringing these technical experts together with leading historians and existing research infrastructures (archives, libraries and individual digital projects) within a programme of technical research informed by cutting edge reflection on the impact of the digital age on scholarly practice.The enquiry environment that is at the heart of this proposal will create new ways to discover meaning, a methodology not just of scale but of kind. It will create tools and workspaces that allow researchers to engage with large data sets via federated multilingual searches across heterogeneous resources while defining workflows enabling the creation of personalized research environments, shared research and teaching spaces, and annotation trails, amongst other features. This will be facilitated by multilingual authority lists of named entities (people, places, events) that will harness user involvement to add intelligence to the system. Moreover, it will develop new visual paradigms for the exploration of patterns generated by the system, from knowledge transfer and dissemination, to language usage and shifts, to the advancement and diffusion of ideas.