Hello! In The Crown of Aragon, 639 years ago,
it was January 14th, 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. The Archive of the Crown
of Aragon is available online because of a massive
digitization project from the Spanish government,
and we are able to see hundreds upon hundreds
of pages of what was written down during their
reign. It really is an amazing resource. Let's
begin today's document. My journey with today's
document can be summed up in one question. Pigs
or patios? Now before we get into how we got
to that kind of question, I'm going to just go
over some of the sourcing information for the
document. This is from Joan's register. It is
dated, of course, January 14th. It's written
and in Granoller's where we know Joan has
been for several days and will be until after
that January 16th big meeting the person group
that it's addressed to is the pro homens the
officials in charge you could think of it as
like the City Council the you know people who
really are deciding matters for the city. And
in this case, it's the Prohomens of the city
of Girona, where Joan has been living for a
very long time. So we've got the writer, the
addressee, we know the location and the date.
we know that it's a busy, sensitive time for
Joan. And this document, which is in Catalan,
so it's more accessible to me, this document
just feels so low in importance that I just am
really trying to wrap my head around what is
going on with the workflow. that Joan is taking
on this time. So this particular document is,
it seems authorizing some kind of sale, possibly
about real estate, likely about real estate,
which is a journey that I got to. There's a person
in the first line, a Berenguer And then in the
third line is somebody else, Joan's treasurer,
Ramon de Soler. So Ramon de Soler is arranging
some kind of sale. Maybe this Berenguer Compani
is purchasing some property. It's actually really
hard for me to figure out. who's doing what.
And that's because later on in the letter, the
person who appears in the first line, Berenguer,
appears again. And it seems like in that instance,
Berenguer is the seller, not the purchaser. So
it's not like this is a source of income for
Joan, I think the person getting the income
from the sale is this Berenguer, and so I can't
quite figure out what is happening here in terms
of the bigger picture. It just looks to me like
Joan is authorizing this sale. Why does he
need to authorize this sale? It would make sense
if it was some gigantic purchase, but it doesn't
seem to be that way, because in the second line,
there's the verb vendre, which means to sell,
and then following that is the word certs, which
means certain, and then there's three words,
patis, porches, e... And then the third word I'm
trying to figure out because it seems like it
should be kind of easy, but it's not because
of minims. Minims is the paleographic term, a
minim for when there's like the top of the
letter M like some kind of curvy top or or even
like an eye like some kind of it's sticking up
and and so the letter M has two minims at the
top like two points that stick up and so here
there's a possibility that I'm looking at E N
U it's also possible I'm looking at E M I and
then there's an outside chance that the first
letter is c i don't think it is but it could
be and then it could be something like c u n
so the number of minims can clue you into what
letters are being written there's also a macron
above that word and so there's a letter that's
been excluded in services of abbreviation. You
might be wondering why on earth is there so much
abbreviation when it seems like there's no real
purpose to just leaving out one letter here and
there. Why is that something that scribes would
do when it doesn't even seem to make that much
difference in the amount of writing or space?
Two answers. First, it was customary. To abbreviate
was just the way things were done. Everybody
abbreviated, you just keep on abbreviating. Second,
every little bit helps, because even though there
was an abundance of paper, there wasn't like
an unlimited supply of paper. And also, more
importantly, there wasn't an unlimited supply
of time. The more you abbreviate, the faster
you can get a letter done. So the more abbreviations
that you internalize, the less time it takes
to write the thing down. And that all will accrue
when we're talking about hundreds of letters
into some serious time savings. So all of this
custom of abbreviation adds up to a big problem
for me when I'm trying to figure out what is
that word, the third word in this set of three,
unless patis is somehow modifying porches. And
this is where I got thrown off, because the word
porches could actually be pronounced por -case,
as in pork. And I've seen that word in its exact
spelling as it appears here, P -O -R -C -H -E
-S, used to describe wild boars. The kinds of
wild boars that Joan would go out and have fun
hunting out in the forest. So when I first encountered
that word, I was thinking, we're talking about
pigs. And then I put the... transcription that
I did of this letter into chat gpt and chat gpt
was like no that's just there's no way that this
is pigs we're definitely talking about a real
estate sale here and I looked back at the overall
context of the letter and yeah it does seem to
be about a real estate sale but at the same time
I'm still I've got these lingering doubts because
it just seems so Well, I guess it's weird to
kind of purchase certain wild boars, and that
would also be weird, but I just can't quite settle
on what is the meaning of the phrase patis, porches,
e, envenas? I don't know, and I can't quite figure
out what unit is being sold here. have a very
helpful Catalan medieval Catalan glossary that
I looked these words up in or tried to find them
couldn't couldn't really get anywhere I have
a feeling like a month from now or maybe like
four months from now I'm gonna look back at this
and say oh it's so obvious but I'm just in it
right now and so I'm kind of you know As the
cliche goes, I can't really see the forest for
the trees, so I'm not quite sure what is being
sold, but Joan is authorizing its sale, and
he's informing the city officials of Girona that
he has authorized this sale, which brings me
back to the question that I was talking about
earlier about Joan's workflow. Why is he spending
time on this? It just doesn't seem all that urgent.
Yesterday, we had a document in which Violant
is saying that there is urgent business. There's
difficulties being encountered. And then we encounter
this kind of humdrum matter of business being
undertaken by Joan. Again! Like this has already
been an issue that I've been struggling with
in earlier documents from a couple days ago.
Now what I will say is that I have seen documents
where the king is making a ruling on something
that seems very, very small. And that's something
I have noticed in documents from Joan, as well
as other royal family members at different times
and different years. For example, I did a whole
study on Joan's ruling about a certain hot springs.
called Caldes d'Estrac and he made this ruling
in 1394 and he's basically also ordering that
the hot springs infrastructure gets cleaned up
and because it's kind of run down and so it just
seems like Gosh, it seems like the the monarchs
were just involved in these very granular issues
and that it's just like a constant flow of these
small things in all these different localities
within the realm. And maybe Joan is just like,
I gotta take care of at least a few of these
each day or else it's gonna hopelessly pile up.
Maybe that's what's going on here. Also, it could
be that if I knew more about the people in this
document and the property being discussed, it
would be clear to me that it is important that
it's a big deal. One last thing that I noticed
about this document. At the very end of the text
block, after the year, there's what looks like
the Latin abbreviation for Videt, and then S
-P -E -R -E -N -D, followed by some large cursive
letters that are kind of hard to figure out exactly
what they're signifying. Sperand, and that kind
of reminds me of how Joan had asked Esperandu
cardona to get to granolaires as fast as possible
so maybe Esperandeu Cardona is making some kind
of additional approval of some of this esperandu
cardona is not necessarily indicated by this
but it would be just an interesting coincidence
if if that was not Esperandeu Cardona getting
involved in this business somehow. The same the
same thing appears at the end of the next document
on this this folio so at the bottom of the page
you'll see the same thing again and that one
is from the 10th of January so maybe it's not
going to work out because the letter asking for
Esperandeu Cardona was on the 12th so unless there's
something weird with the date going on here then
maybe it's just a coincidence or maybe Esperandu
Cardona is involved in these documents after
the fact, and the date of the 10th of January
for the second letter on this folio is not exactly
reflecting the time of composition because we've
got Sperand at the end of that one too. I am
stumped on that. I'm gonna have to figure out
this Videt Sperend, and why it's starting to
appear at the end of these letters. And I'll
probably figure out it's something completely
different, not related to Esperandeu Cardona.
And you've just kind of heard me thinking aloud
through that problem, because actually, as I
was recording the episode today, I just happened
to notice it. So I do a little bit of prep work
for each episode to kind of think about, all
right, what am I going to try to bring out in
this document? But this one, as I was just looking
at it during the recording, is when I saw that.
And so, OK, that's been a nice sort of live experience
there of sort of seeing me go through the thought
process of how to interpret that at the end and
just wondering, wondering about connections to
other documents and the people that I know are
around. Okay, thanks for listening to this episode
of the Historian's Notebook, season one, Molt Cara
Companyona. If you are leaving with more questions
than you arrived with, I've done my job. Remember,
the motto of the Historian's Notebook is dissatisfaction
guaranteed. Visit the website jonathanseyfried.net
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.