Hello. In the Crown of Aragon, 639 years ago,
it was January 8th, 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.
Today we're looking at another in a series of
short rapid -fire missives that Violant is sending
out from Barcelona right at the outset, the initial
days of being Queen. This letter is at the bottom
of the folio and so you have to go I think it's
like four letters down and on the very last line
you'll see dirigit gubernatori majorcorum and
that means directed to the governor of Majorca
and this letter is basically summoning the agent
of the Crown of Aragon, someone who I think can
help to situate the concerns of Majorca to Joan
and Violant once he arrives to Barcelona, basically
just summoning him to show up and make connection
and to understand what the new monarchs might
want with Majorca. I don't know that the new
monarchs would want anything in particular from
Majorca except to just, you know, keep things
calm and don't, you know, have any trouble. There
hasn't been much trouble in Majorca for a few
years. And so Majorca is not exactly a hotspot
like Empuries is. so it's not quite clear to
me why this is seemingly high priority along
with the letters about Empuries but Majorca
does have a history of being kind of a troublemaking
territory in the Crown of Aragon and so I'm gonna
pull back and actually talk a bit about the history
of the Crown of Aragon in order to help you understand
a little bit about the political entity that
we've been talking about and to also understand
a little bit more about how Violant and Joan
fit into the larger operation of the region of
the Mediterranean. The origin of the crown of
Aragon goes back to the 12th century and this
political entity forms in the context of the
weakening of Muslim rule over Iberia the person
who was in charge of the crown of Aragon at the
time that Majorca was conquered that was King
James the first known as the conqueror and James
the first also led troops into Valencia and conquered
Valencia. Both Majorca and Valencia had been
under Muslim rule for centuries and this is in
the early 1200s that James I is doing this. Majorca
is conquered by James I in 1229 and Valencia
in 1238. And something to keep in mind about
the long -lasting Muslim rule in Iberia is that
when James conquers Valencia, that ended 527
years of Muslim rule of that part of Iberia.
I start out the podcast every time by emphasizing
that it's been 639 years between our present
time now in 2026 and the time that I'm talking
about centuries in the past with Joan and
Violant and their reign. But keep in mind
that the scale of Muslim rule in Iberia is just
as vast as the time between now, 2026 and looking
at 1387. So the reason that I'm emphasizing this
is to really, really put the focus on how Muslim
culture and Muslims themselves were really in
iberia for generations upon generations upon
generations in whole parts of iberia it was just
natural to see that part of the world as part
of the muslim world dar al islam so in the process
of the weakening of these polities the Muslim
political states that had at this point when
Jaume that's the Catalan name for James when
James the conqueror started to pick off these
territories the division between the different
leaders, different Muslim leaders around actually
created a weakness that was an opportunity for
Christian military leaders like James to conquer.
So the expansion of the Crown of Aragon is very
much part of the interfaith encounter in the
Mediterranean between Muslim polities and Christian
polities. I'm about to talk a little bit more
about the interaction between Muslims, Christians,
and Jews in medieval Iberia, but before I do
that, I want to mention something about James
and the territory of Valencia. because it relates
to the Archive of the Crown of Aragon and the
very material that we're looking at when we look
at documents in the registers, like today's document.
There's a town to the south of Valencia, not
too far south. It's named Xativa. Xativa is a
town that specialized in paper making. and it
made gigantic amounts of paper and supplied the
merchants and politicians of the Muslim territories
around there with paper and this papermaking
technology had been diffused had been passed
along all the way from China and through all
the different Muslim territories from the Levant
to North Africa and then to Iberia. By the time
James arrives and conquers Valencia, the paper
making from Xativa had been going on for quite
a while. And it continues. That is one of the
reasons why we have all these records in Iberia.
It's so uncommon in other parts of Western Europe
because in other places in Western Europe there
wasn't papermaking technology and so the records
that exist are on parchment which is way more
expensive to produce. Parchment is basically
it's animal hide and so it's way more difficult
to produce parchment in large quantities than
it is to produce paper so the abundance of paper
is one of the reasons why a culture of record
keeping really flourishes in the crown of Aragon
and by the time we get to 1387 there's so much
record keeping that's happening just as a matter
of course and was allowed to grow and grow and
grow especially in the 14th century because of
this original supply of paper. So what we are
looking at in material terms, is the result of
Muslim influence. We have these records because
of papermaking technology developing in all these
different parts of the Muslim world, way ahead
of when it entered into what could be called
Christendom. Another piece of the puzzle here
is that James himself was for a formative part
of his childhood a ward of a high up official
in the church who basically was in close correspondence
with the Pope a whole lot and As James was a
ward of this papal legate, he had a chance to
observe the chancery operations at a high level
for the papacy. And so that allowed him to, when
he became king, institute this regime of record
-keeping as a way to bolster his own authority.
and to hold those who he may deals with accountable.
A paper record, a documentation record will help
you to establish your authority and to basically
be a way of legitimating a lot of what you're
doing. So the reason that we have the Archive
of the Crown of Aragon in such abundance has
so much to do with this overall story of the
development of the Crown of Aragon and the personal
qualities of James the First and then his ability
to Basically create the military expansion of
his territorial claims in the early 13th century
But a lot of people make the mistake of viewing
this period of time this transition in terms
of a clash of civilizations that there was like
a front line between christians and muslims and
then it was just kind of like this battle and
bit by bit the christian forces reconquer Iberia
in the term used as reconquista this is only
a fraction of an accurate view of what was going
on historically because the real frame to view
this with if you want to imagine what was going
on in this past time is that there was just as
much cooperation as there was conflict. So there
are so many areas of Iberia in which Muslims
and Christians and Jews are getting along and
really cooperating a whole lot that is known
as the convivencia. That is a term that came
up as an effort to present the time, especially
under Muslim rule, of a kind of ideal of multiculturalism
that was I think highly valued in the context
of when those historians were writing in the
19th century, 20th century. So that also is an
error to think that there was always peace between
the three major religious groups in Iberia. And
so Brian Catlos has come up with another term,
conveniencia, meaning that the interfaith encounters
could be characterized by a kind of pragmatic
interaction that Jews and Muslims and Christians
they did business with each other when it made
sense that it was more of a kind of pragmatic
interaction with hey you know what if we can
go into business together and benefit each other
let's do it if there's no real incentive here
we're we're not gonna move forward and we'll
just kind of keep to our own neighborhood or
keep to our own town so even as the conquering
is taking place there's really interesting mixtures
of cooperation and conflict so for example it
was common when christian military leaders were
fighting against some muslim realm they the christians
would have muslim allies vice versa. Sometimes
Christians would ally with Muslims fighting other
Christians based on the self -interest that they
had for their own political goals. So there's
a real mixture here in terms of motivations and
shifting alliances and economic cooperation versus
economic competition. The Crown of Aragon is
called the Crown of Aragon. It's got the word
crown in there as sort of a nod to how this was
more of an alliance of different polities than
it was a centralized state. The whole idea of
a state at this time in the middle ages is very
different from what we imagine the state to be
in our time and what governance and government
looks like in our time so referring to this state
as the crown of aragon is a very helpful reminder
i would say for a lot of the polities in the
middle ages that what we're talking about is
not some kind of government that's able to get
its tentacles into all all these different regions
of the Mediterranean, but instead we're talking
about a lot of deal -making, a lot of centrifugal
force that is leading different parts of the
realm to get interested in splitting away occasionally,
but that the major thing holding them together
is I think an economic growth. framework where
if you are connected in terms of who you are
being ruled by in a sort of confederation sense
then it makes certain trade interactions more
smooth because you're all operating with maybe
Similar understanding of how the ports operate
what the customs are going to be customs in terms
of the taxes but also in terms of just how to
go about doing business and I think that a lot
of the reason for the increasing Catalan presence
in the Mediterranean at this time has to do with
how the people who were part of the initial Crown
of Aragon they understood that they had to operate
in a very multilingual and multi -political context
where they had to be able to communicate with
other across language barriers and cultural barriers
all the time. A lot of this has to do with the
origins of the original entities in the Crown
of Aragon which basically are going along the
coast the southern coast of what is today Spain
and France, and in that region, I would say stretching
from Montpellier to Barcelona, there's just a
tremendous diversity in language groups and cultures.
Part of it is because of the Pyrenees mountains
interrupting contact in some of the times that
these vernacular languages developed out of Latin.
Speaking of language, some of you might be curious
to know about the language Catalan and also how
that influences the names of people like Joan
and Violant. So I'll talk just a little bit
about that. Catalan the way I like to think of
it is if you took Castilian Spanish and French
and put them into a blender and then threw in
a lot of words with the letter x because it really
is if you study Castilian Spanish and French
you can kind of figure out a lot about Catalan
but it is its own thing and I don't want to make
it seem like it's some kind of like derivation
because it comes up along with other languages
like Occitan in the south of France. There's
all these variations like a spectrum that go
all along from Portuguese to French and it's
really a beautiful array of different linguistic
developments and practices so Catalan is its
own language very much so it's got its roots
going all the way back to initial Latin and then
splitting off just as modern -day French or modern
-day Castilian Spanish split off. Catalan has
some different pronunciation tendencies or I
guess you could say patterns and so that's why
we have instead of like a soft I'm not a very
good linguist, so I'm not describing this right.
But instead of a Johan, we have a Joan. And also
we can say Violant is the Catalan version of
Yolanda. Violant was named Yolanda after her
grandmother. and remember Violant is from France
and she's named after Yolande of Flanders so
the name Yolande has a very, you know, very long
history of usage at this time. Another part of
the pronunciation piece here is Aragon. So there's
another language called Aragonese, which is similar
to Catalan, but has distinct differences. I feel
like every time I say Aragon, I say it differently.
Like sometimes it's Aragon, sometimes it's Aragon.
And that is just a legacy of how in the Anglophone
world of medieval scholarship, It's very common
to hear people in the United States call this
region Aragon. And so I've heard it Aragon all
the time. I think that, you know, the actual
pronunciation is more like Aragon. but I just
am all over the place on that so if you've been
listening closely to me you've probably noticed
why is Jonathan saying this differently like
almost every time it's because I have not settled
on any kind of one way to say it so I just switch
it up goodness gracious we have gone so far over
the goal time for these episodes got really into
a lot of the background context I hope that that
was interesting to everybody and yeah I mean
we've got a little document here about Majorca
that then you can use as just the tip of the
iceberg talking about Majorca and it takes you
into all these other areas of what was happening
at this time and how what had been going on for
centuries leads into this moment in the archive
on January 8th 1387. Well, thanks for bearing
with all of that. Of course there's still all
the different kinds of questions that come up
about the document and why is Majorca such a
big deal right now? Is it just always a big deal?
Is there anything happening right at the moment?
Not sure. Have to research that a little bit
more. But we'd better just bring this episode
to a close. 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, maybe you got some questions
answered about some of the historical context,
but you're mad because you want to know more
about... What happened in Majorca at this time
will take that anger and transform it into a
love of how you never really get to know everything
about what's going on in the past. And remember
that this means I've done my job. The motto of
the Historian's Notebook is dissatisfaction guaranteed.
For that reason. So 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.