Hello. In The Crown of Aragon, 639 years ago,
it was December 26th, 1387. My name is Jonathan
Seyfried. I'm a PhD candidate in history at the
University of New Mexico. And this is The Historian's
Notebook, a podcast about how history gets made.
Season one is titled... Molt Cara Companyona.
We're looking at a document from each day of
the first year of the reign of King Joan I of
Aragon and Queen Violant de Bar. Let's begin
today's document. Here's the basic profile of
today's document. It's written by Joan, and the
place that it's sent from is Girona. Girona is
about 100 kilometers, like an hour's drive from
Barcelona up along the coast, but Girona is not
a coastal city, it's inland a bit. Girona is
about halfway between Barcelona and Perpignan.
So, Joan is the Duke of Girona. It's the seat
of his political station as the firstborn son
of the king. The Duke of Girona is typically
the one who's next in line for the throne. So
what we're looking at here is a letter of about
11 lines. And if you took a look at the letter
from episode one, you might have noticed that
it's not in a script that's very easy to read
without practice. So I'm going to take a little
bit of time before getting into the content of
this letter from Joan today, and discuss a
few ways to navigate, at least for beginners,
the letters that we're looking at in these registers.
So first of all, the archival reference number
for today's document is ACA CR R1675 f19v. Let's break that
down. ACA stands for Archive of the Crown of
Aragon. CR stands for Cancellaria Real, the Royal
Chancery. R is for Registro, which is basically
like the name for the bound volume. The number
1675 is that registers number in the overall
scheme of how these volumes are numbered, which
was actually not assigned at the time. That was
that numbering scheme was put together by later
archivists, like centuries later. The F stands
for folio. It's not page. It's sort of like page,
but each Each page is numbered on the front,
on the upper right hand corner, and then the
back is unnumbered. So if you're looking through
these scanned images on Pares, what you're going
to find is that in order to get to the back of
Folio 19, it's actually going to be something
like image number 38, because each image has
its own number, but the pagination, the way that
the pages are numbered is that only the front
is numbered. So the V, the letter at the very
end of this document's reference, is for verso.
The front of a page, the front of a folio more
accurately, is called the recto, and then the
back is called the verso. So we're almost always
going to be seeing reference numbers that end
in either R or V. So that's a little bit about
the reference number, but when we get to the
page itself, we're going to be looking today
actually at the lower third of the page. There
are a couple other letters on this page. Well,
there's the ending of one that began on the recto
side of folio 19. That's at the top. And then
in the middle, there's a full letter. That one
is to the pope. And there's some interesting
repair work that's been done to the page that
you can see on that letter. And then the one
that's the focus of our attention today is actually
concluded by the bottom of the page. And it has
a top, El Primo... Oh boy, what is that? El Primogenito
D'argo. So that translates to the first
born of Aragon. All right. This was a title.
Primogenit was a title. It doesn't seem to be
saying it in... The ending there is a little
bit confusing to me because I would sort of expect
something like primogenit, but there's clearly
an O at the end, which I'm not quite sure why.
The line that's above the word, and there's also
a similar kind of line above darago, That is
called, in paleography, a macron, and it indicates
that there's been a letter left out of the word,
and the macron indicates that there's an abbreviation
happening because the letter has been left out.
So for darago, it's really clear that the macron
is standing in for the letter N. So basically that
word is d 'Aragon, for of Aragon. Just to the
right of that title, or I guess it's more like
an attribution heading of what's going to be
our document at the bottom of the page. to the
right is information that corresponds to the
letter above so this is a pretty typical thing
and you'll see it again at the bottom of the
page and this symbol stands for probata and that
is a word that means essentially authorized so
what's happening here is that at the at the bottom
of the letter the scribe is putting his authorization
onto this document to assert its accuracy. He's
basically vouching for it. So we have at the
end of the middle letter, above the squiggly
P, you see another P, and that is abbreviated
there's like a P dot and then above it there's
like a circle I think that the abbreviation there
is something like Pedro but I'm not sure and
then at the bottom it's very clear what's going
on above the probata symbol there's the letter
IDM with a macron and here it is the Latin word
edem, that means likewise. So what is indicated
by that is the person who authorized, who copied
and authorized the accuracy of that copy for
the middle letter on the page has also done so
for the bottom letter. One other thing I want
to point out here, if you're able to look at
this along with me, hopefully you are, the last
word at the bottom left of the page is R -O -D
-I, Rodi. And that is Rhodes. And the first
word of the letter is Maestre. Master. Master
of Rhodes. So the recipient of this document
is the Master of Rhodes. It's not really clear
who that is. I've done some reading on this,
and I know that the Master of Rhodes at this
time was Juan Fernández de Heredia, who was actually
a pretty frequent correspondent of Joan and
Violant. And this was the person that was in
charge of the Hospitallers, the order of the
Hospitallers sort of like an equivalent of the
Knights Templar. And so Joanne is writing to
the head of this religious order, the Hospitallers.
and is recommending a fellow named Bernard Maloll
for a position at a monastery. Now the context
that's super important for understanding this
document is the Western Schism of 1378, in which
there started to be two popes, one in Rome and
one in Avignon. Joan's father, Père, attempted
to maintain neutrality as this all unfolded,
but eventually, pretty much by the mid -1380s,
Joan had firmly taken the side of Avignon.
And so the pope being written to in the letter
above is most likely the Avignon pope, and understanding
the intervention of the Duke in an ecclesiastical
appointment has got to be something that will
be made more clear if I am able to learn more
about how the Western Schism shifted the relations
between the political, the secular political
authorities and the ecclesiastical authorities
in the Crown of Aragon, and then how this extra
organization, the Knights Hospitallers, had a
role to play in all of that. And this is something
I really don't know about. But beyond that, a
bunch of other questions come up when I'm thinking
about what I know about this document thus far.
First of all, Who was Bernardo Maloll, and was
he a shoe-in for this appointment, or did there
need to be a lot of advocating for him? Was he
something of a long shot? Was there a competitor?
And this letter, is it just a routine thing,
or was it something unusual for Joan to be
intervening like this? Now, I'm also curious
about how this moment here represents that larger
context that I was talking about a moment ago.
Is the Master of Rhodes going to be playing a
really big role in this? And then, of course,
I'm trying to limit myself to just one document.
each day, but I can't help thinking about the
letter to the pope that's right above this one.
And I didn't do that one today because it's in
Latin, and it's much more difficult for me. But
I am really curious about it, because I'm wondering
whether the pope actually involved himself in
appointments. at this level because this is not
a bishop it's not an archbishop it it seems from
what i can tell like these are are kind of small
monasteries so I'm really wondering about whether
the papal bureaucracy would have just handled
this and if the pope would have even read that
letter or maybe got a summary from one of the
officials or bureaucrats i don't know I'd be,
I guess, surprised if the pope actually read
this letter in full from someone who's not a
monarch yet. But maybe the pope is like, yeah,
this dude's gonna be king really soon, so I'm
gonna read this. It's a question mark. And that
brings us to the end of this episode, where we're,
remember, just doing an initial sweep through
these documents. Thanks for listening to this
episode of the Historian's Notebook, Season 1,
Molt Cara Campanyona. If you are leaving with
more questions than you arrived with, I have
done my job. Because remember, the motto of the
Historian's Notebook is dissatisfaction guaranteed.
Please try to visit the website to see an image
of today's document and additional show notes,
and listen again tomorrow to hear about the next
day in the first year of the reign of King Joan
I of Aragon and Queen Violant de Bar. In the
meantime, take care.