Periods of quaternionic Shimura varieties. I

We study “quadratic periods” on quaternionic Shimura varieties and formulate an integral refinement of Shimura’s conjecture regarding Petersson inner products of automorphic forms that are related by the Jacquet-Langlands correspondence. The main result is that this integral refinement is implied by another conjecture (Conjecture D below) regarding integrality of theta lifts between certain quaternionic unitary groups.