Hello. In the Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was January 21st, 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. If you're looking at the image of today's
document on the website, then you might notice
that we have seen this document before. And that's
because way back in episode five, I went to this
page in the treasury records and noticed that
there was a record on the top half for a baker,
someone who was a baker in the household of Violant
during her time as the Duchess of Girona in the
second half of 1386, and the payment though was
made in 1387, but within the date of the terms
for which that baker was being paid for, the
period of time, it had ended on December 31st,
and so I linked it in to the day of December
31st in that episode, and now we've arrived to
the date that the record was actually written
down on January 21st, and I'll tell you... January
21st was a big day for treasury records because
if you go to this register on PARES you will
see that there are actually pages and pages of
records dated on January 21st. I don't know what
to make of that. Was it that there was a backlog
and they just kind of got around to entering
all these things on January 21st? Was January
21st actually a day that was designated for recording
a bunch of treasury records, payment records,
and will we see this again in a lot of the other
treasury record books that there's a particular
day when it's just I guess maybe that day in
the cycle when they enter in a lot of records,
I will be watching to see if I can understand
why January 21st is over -represented in the
payment records for this period of time. What
I can also say is that they had to get up and
running with the record -keeping services of
a whole new reign. Keep in mind that Pere the
Ceremonious had ruled for over 50 years and all
of the record -keeping and operations and bureaucracy
had been, you know, done according to traditions
and plans and Moving from one year to the next,
they knew how to do it and they didn't really
have to do as much starting over from scratch.
And so when Joan begins his reign, they're gonna
have to figure out, well, how are we going to
handle payment systems when a lot of the people
who are getting paid would have been paid out
of a different fund or a different process being
a member of the staff of the Duke of Girona and
now that same person is getting paid out of a
different fund probably now that Joan and Violant
are king and queen and then how are they going
to make records for all of that it's quite possible
that it them a while to figure out, okay, how
are we going to arrange the records? So today's
document is the one that's on the second half
of that same page, and this document was listed
in the collection by Trenchs i Odeña and by Jaiges
i Jardi that I referred to in episode 22 on January
15th. So it's minstrels and the document collection
has a full transcription of this payment record.
Nothing in it is immediately eye -catching with
one exception. This is a husband and wife team.
The first line has the name of the treasury official,
Johan Callos, and then in the second half, it
lists who's going to be getting the payment.
So starting from a little bit after the first
half of the line, En Jacquet de Port Albert e
Ana Isabel Mullier. Seva. Mullier Seva are the
first two words on the second line. His wife.
This is a husband and wife troubadour team. It
is very unusual to come across a woman troubadour
at this time. So they are naturally really interesting.
And it turns out that these two are pretty awesome.
because there's quite a lot of documentation
of their services to the royal family of the
Crown of Aragon over the years and also to others
in the region. So in 1385, Père the ceremonious
recommended the Portalberts to the King of
Navarre and then Many years later, in 1388, Violant
recommended them again, but of course to the
next king and queen of Navarre. But Violant
recommended the Portalberts to somebody else
as well. Someone who hasn't yet come up on the
podcast, but was hugely influential from a cultural
standpoint for Joan and Violant. That person
is Gaston Febus, the Count of Foix-Bearn. Gaston
Febus has become very well known to scholars of
the Middle Ages who are interested in hunting
because he wrote, Gaston Febus, wrote one of the
most copied and most prominent treatises on hunting
of the Middle Ages. And Gaston Febus was quite
the guy. He was like the sort of masculine political
elite that I think Joan aspired to in a lot
of ways. He was not like Père the Ceremonious
in that Gaston Feboux didn't have quite the kind
of cruelty and warmongering level that Père the
Ceremonious did. but they had something in common,
Père and Gaston Febus. They were really like
womanizers. So Gaston Febus did not have anything
like a relationship of respect and equity with
his wives that we see taking place between Joan
and Violant. I think Joan aspired to write
some kind of manuscript on poetry, music, and
hunting and just culture in general. And I think
if he had lived longer, he would have done that.
Because Gaston Febus's book, which was titled
Le Livre de la Chasse, The Book of the Hunt,
The Book of the Chase, it was one that Joan
read and I'm pretty sure he enjoyed it immensely.
And it was very much like a kind of self -fashioning
project from Gaston Febus. Gaston Febus was very
famous for basically building himself up as a
big man of the elite class. He was very successful
in battle and also got a lot of plunder, and
so he was very very wealthy. His territory was
kind of like a mountainous territory in the in
the region of the Pyrenees, and also he had this
amazing blonde hair so that when people looked
at him, it was like looking at like this yellow
sun shape because of how golden his hair was.
And so that's actually how he got that name,
Febus, which is from Phoebus. The name for Apollo
in Greek myth, you know, the shining of the sun
basically is what's attributed to the glow around
Apollo. Alright, so I got a little sidetracked
talking about Gaston Febus, but all of this is
to say that when Violant was writing about the
Portalberts, she recommended them to one of the
brightest cultural luminaries in the entire region,
Gaston Febus, as well as to her buddy, the King
of Navarre. So the Portalberts, they're really
good. They have a track record performing for
the royal family of the Crown of Aragon according
to the documentation we have from 1385 until
1393 and there might be more than that that we
just haven't found yet in the documents. So they
are one of the favorite troubadour performers
for Joan and Violant and so here we are looking
at their payment record which is one that covers
about a three month period of time and they get
267 Solidis which is about this it's like comparable
like well actually it's a hundred Solidis less
than what the Baker got but the record here is
interesting because there's this other amount
that's listed as like the per day so maybe they're
not actually there every single day during that
three months and so it actually comes out to
being a higher rate than the baker on the same
page but not not quite sure about that what is
clear in this record though is that they were
minstrels that performed for Joan and Violant
when they were living in Girona in the latter
part of 1386. And then they continued on with
them and moved to Barcelona. So it's interesting
to see that the minstrel team, the husband and
wife minstrel team, were one of the staff members,
the household members that we know accompanied
Joan and Violant from Girona to Barcelona. So
you might be wondering, as I'm wondering, what
were their performances like? Were they doing
any of the Ars Nova or Ars Subtilior? I don't
know. And one of the things that I'm hoping to
find out over the course of this year that I'm
working with these documents is a little bit
more about what troubadour performances were
like. So I'm going to be doing a little bit more
reading in the secondary literature about that.
And then we'll see if anything comes up as I
look at other records that are in the collection
from Trenchs i Odena and Baijes i Jardi, and see
if I can get a little bit more information about
exactly what they did when they performed. Alright,
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 have done my job. Because remember, the
motto of the Historian's Notebook is, dissatisfaction
guaranteed. You always want to know more at the
end than you had thought of at the beginning,
hopefully. 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.