Hello. In The Crown of Aragon, 639 years ago,
it was December 28th, 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 1 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.
Today's document is another letter about filling
a vacancy for an ecclesiastical position. And
I gotta tell you... I am not in my comfort zone
because this document is in Latin. There were
a ton of abbreviation symbols in this document
that I had to go back to some of my notes in
order to figure out what they were. And even
after spending about three hours with this document,
which is only like about 10 lines, I'm still
not sure what's going on. Folks, Latin is really,
really difficult. And if you've never studied
Latin at all, let me just tell you that, well,
you know, in a lot of languages, there's conjugations
for verbs. The verbs will have different endings
depending on who's doing the action. Well, to
put it in a very basic way, in Latin, there's
different endings for the nouns, too, based on
certain prepositional phrases. So, there's just
a lot that you have to keep in mind, and when
you're trying to get a sentence meaning down,
you're often getting confused about who is doing
what to who, and it's all just a lot. So basically,
I figured out a lot about this document, but
I still am like really far from from what it
means. So what's going on here is that Joan
is writing to the archdiocese of Huesca. Now
Huesca is another city in the Crown of Aragon.
It's within Aragon itself, not Catalonia and
other or other parts of the Crown of Aragon.
What are the parts of the Crown of Aragon? I'm
gonna have to get into that probably in a future
episode upcoming pretty soon, though. I'll explain
what made up the Crown of Aragon, what territories.
But this is the city of Huesca as the intended
recipient of this letter. I guess I shouldn't
have said city. What I mean is it's the archdiocese
of Huesca. And in the first line, there's the
word vacet. And that's indicating that there's
some kind of vacancy. And it's because somebody
died. The person who died, I think, is named
Pere Cerdani. Four words from the end of the first
line there's a big letter P with a downward
diagonal mark above the P. I think that's an
abbreviation for Pere, the Catalan version of
the name Peter. And then there's a period, so
I think that's indicating that that's Pere, and
then the last name I think is Cerdani, maybe
meaning that this Pere came from the region of
Cerdanya. And that's a neighboring territory
of Aragon, I'm pretty sure. They're close if
not neighboring. Okay, so... Later on in the
letter, in the third line, is where we get to
the name of the person who Joan was recommending
for this post, the vacant post, and that person's
name is Nicolao Çorica. As best as I can transcribe
what I'm seeing there, I think that that's that's
the person's name, Nicolao Çorica. The C has
a cedilla underneath, which turns it into a soft
C, sort of pronounced like the letter S. So,
Nicolao Çorica. And then later on in the letter
we find out that Nicolao is the son of somebody
who's mentioned here as R. Çorica. This is most
likely a Raimundo, like a Raymond. So Raimundo
Çorica is the father, and the father, I think,
is very established, some kind of official that
has done a good job. He's called a Fidelibus,
but maybe like as faithful, but that may actually
be referring to Nicolao as the faithful son of
Raymundo. I don't know. It's all it's all just
gonna take a long time to figure out. So here
we have Joan getting involved with another ecclesiastical
appointment. And in this situation, he's not
addressing it to a particular person. It could
be because this is a lower level appointment.
the archdiocese here would have a bishop but
it's not like the archbishop so and I'm not even
sure if it's if it's a bishopric to be honest
so basically this is my guess this is maybe being
prompted by the father that sent in a request
to Joan for this recommendation, but I don't
know. It's just my best guess at this point.
Okay, so how did I get to this document? Why
did I torture myself with incredibly difficult
Latin abbreviations? If I have my druthers...
I will go for the Catalan letter versus the Latin
letter, but it is good for me to practice the
Latin and to give it a try. When I talk about
the abundance of the Archive of the Crown of
Aragon, it's not like a uniformly spread out
high quantity of letters each day. The Archive
will sometimes have like 30 letters in a day.
maybe even more. And then other days are like
down days, so there aren't as many choices. And
then in some points in this year, there's going
to be a real lack of letters from Joan, because
he had, I think, two different bouts of very
serious illness., where it looks like he's gonna
die like twice in the first year of the reign
it looked like Joan was gonna die so that's
dramatic and we'll get to that but oh the first
one is in January and then the second one is
in April so one of them is like coming up and
that that'll be interesting but basically what
I'm trying to get at here is there will be days
where I've got like 30 documents to choose from,
and then there will be days where I've only got
a handful. And this is one of those days where
there weren't that many to choose from. There's
another letter above this one on the same folio,
and that one was longer and also in Latin, so
I said, no thanks, I'll go for the shorter one.
But what I can tell you is that when I'm trying
to corroborate, which is one of the historical
thinking skills when you're comparing what's
in one document to another, I look up above and
then on the next page or the other side of the
folio and I try to see if there's something else
about the same topic so I can maybe start to
figure out a little bit more or some of the really
difficult words in the script. And I can tell
you that the document above is seemingly not
going to be helpful to understanding this one,
because it's to the governor of Mallorca. It's
something about Mallorca. And this one doesn't
seem to have anything to do with Mallorca. Okay.
Well, that's a bit about today's document. Of
course, there's a ton of questions, right? I
really want to know about how Joan came to
weigh in on this appointment. It seems pretty
minor. I'd really like to know a little bit more
about the recipient. There's not a person's name
here. At the bottom left below the text block
of the letter, we've got a little phrase about
who this letter is supposed to go to. And the
last word is oscen with a macron on top. So that's
Huesca. There was a Latin name for the town of
Huesca, which is Oscensis. And then the word
before that is something like capitulum. So maybe
a word to mean like the chapter, the people in
charge, the head. I'm just not sure. Someone
else who's worked with these a lot more and knows
this Latin would identify this immediately and
not have a problem. But for me, it's still tough.
Alright, we're gonna pause there on this particular
letter, and I want to come back to something
I was talking about before, which is... finding
the documents. I want to bring you in on one
of my methods for finding a document, if it's
one of those slow days, because I do know that
there is at least one document for each day of
this year and other years too. How do I know
that? Well, there was a scholar who was working
at around the turn of the 20th century, and in
1923 published a basically you could call it
a calendar well he called it an itinerary so
the the word for it in Catalan is itinerary and
it's a day -by -day list of where Joan was for
his entire time as the heir to the crown. And
then there's another itinerary for every day
of his reign. And the scholar who did this, he
was, I mean, dedicated, because it takes a lot
of work to be able to put this together, because
not only was he figuring out where Joan was,
but he listed a letter in the archive that lists
where Joan was according to the last couple
lines of the letter where there's not only the
date, but it's also the convention to put down
the place where the letter was composed. And
so This scholar, his name is Daniel Girona i LIagostera.
It's kind of funny that his last name is also
the the title of of Joan and Violant, Duke
and Duchess of Girona. So in 1923, this scholar,
Daniel Girona i LIagostera, published this long,
long document that lists where Joan was each
day, and also a register and folio for a letter
that confirms that location on that day. He also
added some transcriptions of letters, not every
single one, but a selection. This is a tremendous
resource, and it's one that I really wouldn't
be doing the podcast in this way if it didn't
exist. So I am just full of gratitude for the
work of Daniel Girona i Llagostera. But I just
want to mention that this project that Girona
i Llagostera did was situated in a really interesting
context called the Catalan Renaixença, the Renaissance
of the Catalan language and culture. In the 19th
century, kind of early in the 19th century, scholars
in the area around Barcelona, they basically
produced a rebirth of the Catalan language and
promoted Catalan culture, and the legacy of this
is still visible to this day, despite a total
crackdown on it, like a near extermination of
Catalan during the Franco era in Spain in the
20th century. So basically the work that Girona
i Llagostera produced is part of actually a gigantic
project of Catalan scholarship with a lot of
focus on medieval Catalan and the archive of
the Crown of Aragon. So there's a lot of scholars
that got into this. It's a really interesting
story and I don't have time to get into any more
details on it right now, but I do have some links
in the page on the website associated with today's
document, as well as an image of this page of
Girona i Llagostera's itinerary of Joan's movements.
And you can see where where I was able to locate
this particular document on this day. Okay, well,
that brings us to the close of today's episode.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Historian's
Notebook, Season 1, Molt Cara Companyona. If you
are leaving with more questions than you arrived
with, I've done my job. Because the motto of
the Historian's Notebook is dissatisfaction guaranteed.
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.