Moltkara companiona. Most dear companion. Journey
with me. 639 years in the past. To the Crown
of Aragon, the region of what is today Spain,
centered in Barcelona, and stretching northward
into southern France and southward to Granada.
There a king and queen ascend to the throne.
Their predecessor had ruled for 50 years and
now finally Joan and Violante have the chance
to rule. I'm Jonathan Seyfried, a PhD candidate
in history at the University of New Mexico, and
I'm the host of The Historian's Notebook, a podcast
about how history is made. The first season of
the podcast is titled Molt Cara Companyona, Most
Dear Companion. The podcast will be short daily
episodes taking you into my research process.
The title comes from the way that King Joan
I of Aragon and Queen Violante de Bar started
their letters when writing to each other. Although
other medieval couples wrote to each other using
tender phrases like this, Joan and Violant,
they took it to another level. For them, the
phrase evolved over time to become a mantra.
For example, in one letter, dated November 8th,
1391, Joan thanks Violant for sending him
a bottle of lovely perfume and asks her advice
on some matters of governance. He begins every
sentence of the letter with Molt Cara Companyona.
With Joanne and Violante, we have the chance
to investigate an emotional history that might
have been quite unusual. And that's because the
two of them supported each other in bending the
gender rules for a manly king and a womanly queen.
But how could we support that argument? Well,
there's something that certainly helps, and that
is the vastness of the Archive of the Crown of
Aragon. One of my major goals for this season
of the Historian's Notebook is to demonstrate
how historians navigate through an abundant archive.
Something unusual for medievalists. The archive
of the Crown of Aragon, today located in a very
modern building in Barcelona, holds over 6 ,000
bound volumes of documents from between 1200
and 1800. For the reign of Joan and Violant,
over 250 bound volumes survive, with the overwhelming
majority of them containing around 300 pages.
So we're talking about at least 60 ,000 pages
of letters, treasury records, and official proclamations.
All handwritten in a script that takes a while
to get used to reading. That's kind of an understatement
there. Over the last 20 years, the Spanish government's
Ministry of Culture and Sport funded a massive
digitization effort. The result is that a gigantic
number of the bound volumes in the archive of
the Crown of Aragon are available online for
anyone to look at. No other archive in the world
has as much available online for the 14th century.
So, on Season 1 of the Historian's Notebook,
I'm going to take you with me as I attempt to
construct a narrative out of documents from the
first year of Joanne and Violin's reign. We'll
look at a document for each day of that year,
1387. In the end, I expect that I will have changed
the way that I see their marriage and their reign.
My favorite scholar of historical thinking and
history education Sam Wineburg has argued that
quote true historical inquiry must end where
it begins with a question mark unquote. Get ready
to experience that feeling and that understanding
and experience of history with me every day,
for every document. In that sense, you can think
of the motto of this podcast as dissatisfaction
guaranteed. Certainty will always elude us, not
just on this season, but on all the seasons of
the Historian's Notebook. But even though certainty
will always elude us, The challenge of piecing
together the puzzle of the past grips us with
excitement and mystery. Starting on December
25th, 2025, join me for Molt Cara Companyona.