Hello! In The Crown of Aragon, 639 years ago,
it was January 24th, 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. So much of the documentation
from the 14th century Crown of Aragon has been
digitized by the Spanish government and is available
on the website Pares, along with millions of
documents from all kinds of archives across Iberia
all right let's get started with today's document
Today's document is a short, just six -line letter
from Violant de Bar to the Pope. And when
I say Pope, I mean Clement VII, the Anti -Pope.
So the term Anti -Pope is very dramatic. And
of course, the Anti -Pope according to Clement
VII, would have been Urban VI. We're talking
about a time when there were two popes, one in
Rome and another in Avignon. This is the Great
Schism of the 14th century, also known as the
Great Western Schism. In the 14th century, the
cardinals got into major conflict not because
of some kind of doctrinal disagreement, but simply
because they disagreed about who should be the
next pope. And so out of that disagreement came
these two different institutions, one based in
Rome and the other continuing on in Avignon.
where the papacy had been located for several
decades, and eventually this did get resolved
at the very beginning of the 15th century. But
in the time that Joan and Violant ruled, there
was tremendous pressure for secular elites to
pick a side, and Pere the Ceremonious had refused
to do so. and was probably just holding out for
some kind of resolution to happen and for the
schism to end, but he did not live to see that
happen and also Joan would not live to see
that happen. The schism continued on into the
beginning of the 15th century. When Joan was
preparing to ascend to the throne of the Crown
of Aragon, he decided that he was going to support
Clement VII, the Avignon Pope. And this really
tracked with Joan's francophilia, his desire
to adopt all kinds of culture and customs from
France. Now, Violant, she was French. Very French.
she was the granddaughter of a French king and
queen. Her uncle was the current French king.
And so, like most elites in France, she chose
to align with the Avignon Pope. And so what's
interesting is that I've been noticing that when
Joan and Violant wanted something from the Pope.
I'm seeing that it's Violant who's writing to
the Pope more often than Joan. Joan, I have seen
some letters from Joan to the Pope, but it's
Violant and the Pope doesn't have any major
familial connections to the French royal family,
the Valois. But there's a lot of other kinds
of mutually beneficial relationship going on
between the ruling elites in France and the Avignon
Papacy, even before this current pope. And so
the allegiance that exists between the French
elites and the Avignon Pope is one that Violant,
I think, feels very at home in. And Joan understands
this. And so that's why Violant is the one who's
doing a lot of the writing to the Pope about
maybe some some low -level matters I have a feeling
that this particular letter is rather low -level
and I wonder if the Pope actually read this I've
got a theory that I mentioned in an earlier instance
when we were looking at a letter to the pope,
I think from Violant too, which is that the
pope didn't really get involved in some of this
lower -level stuff, and everyone understood that
it would be handled by the papal bureaucracy.
That's my theory with this one, too. In this
instance, Violant is writing to gain a promotion
or an ecclesiastical post for someone in the
letter who's identified as Johann Fernandes de
Aranda. And then after his name, this is in line
three, it says baccalaureo de legibus. That would
be a bachelor of law. He has a law degree. He
went to some university and is seen as trained.
It got a degree. It's not a doctorate. It's not
a doctor of law. We would see that title used
a master of law or a doctor of law, but here
it's I guess the lower level, which we also associate
with the undergraduate degree in our time, the
bachelor's degree. And Violant is advocating
for this particular individual to get a seat
in the Barcelona ecclesiastical structure. I
can't quite tell where in the official hierarchy
this position, this open position, is in the
Barcelona see, but it's some kind of opening.
So she's advocating for this person, and I had
never heard of Johan Fernando de Aranda before,
and so I did a Google search, got all kinds of
random stuff, not from this time period. I added
in the date, didn't really do any better, and
this was an instance that I can say the AI chatbot
was really helpful because I prompted that chat
to retrieve a by -priority scholarly results,
and the chatbot came through and found an article
from a very well -respected and prolific scholar
of this time period, whose name is Maria Teresa
Ferrer Mallol, and she had written an article
about this person's brother. So the brother's
name is Francisco de Aranda, and within this
article about his efforts to get all kinds of
glory and riches and promotions in the Crown
of Aragon, Maria Teresa Ferrer Mallol is describing
how the monarchs would try to promote people
in the ecclesiastical hierarchy through a lot
of correspondence to the popes, and really focuses
a lot on the reign of Marti in making this argument.
But in the course of highlighting the journey
of Francisco de Aranda, Ferrer i Mallol also
talks about his brother, who is the subject of
this letter from Violant. And it turns out that
later on, Joan and Violant tried to get Joan
Fernandez to get... promoted even higher in the
ecclesiastical hierarchy in Taragon, and it didn't
work initially. They just kept advocating for
him. Not quite sure why it was such an uphill
battle, but it was, and so that there's documentation
of them writing again and again to advocate for
for Joan Ferran de Aranda. So we see this again
and again where the people who are in charge
of the state, the royal family, they're trying
to also influence who gets jobs in the church.
And I think that this is all part and parcel
of the way that, well, elites will, everybody
does, it's networking, okay? So. you're trying
to promote the people that you know, and then
they will then be grateful to you, and it's all
cooperative. It can get into corruption and graft
and selling of offices and so forth. But, you
know, it can also have a very innocent, just,
you know, I know this person's a good person.
I think they should get the job. Their family
has done good work for me. They continue to do
good work. They've benefited me. It'll benefit
everybody and myself if they get this job. There's
a lot of ways to read this. It can be read as
interference. It can be read as recommending
somebody who's high quality for all the virtuous,
selfless reasons you might do so. But it all
is about the ties that all of these folks are
building with each other because authority, legitimacy,
power, status, they are all network -based phenomena.
And the more that you extend your ties and the
more that your recommendations are accepted and
the more that your people your trusted confidants,
the people who've been there for you are rising
up in the ranks, the more power and prestige
you are going to have. So it's a constant activity
that all of the elites are engaged in, recommending
people, promoting people, trying to advocate
for people. And this was just a way that people
of the past as well as people in our time build
up their own power base and also build up communities
that function according to the priorities that
they have. So the more that you have people who
see things the way you do in positions of power,
the more you are going to see the goals and the
values that you hold dear, further promoted and
achieved. So this is something that we can observe
in these documents and say, oh, it was some kind
of, you know, weird blending of church and state
that was like interference or something we can
see as a problem but I think you know you have
to remember that the church was like it was definitely
religious but it was also very much like the
largest corporation in town that the the people
who were in these offices they had a huge amount
of authority as the people who were government
officials also had a huge amount of authority
and so they wanted to cooperate with each other
and there was a lot of overlap. So that's why
we see this level of involvement from the royal
family in advocating for people in these ecclesiastical
positions. But there's another twist to this.
In Ferrer -Mallol's article, she talks about
how the brother of Joan Ferran de Aranda, the
person in this letter, his brother had been a
long -time ally of Martí and had been engaged
in a lot of activities like battles and struggles
and whatever that Martí had been doing and In
the more recent past, as in the previous few
weeks, the brother of this person in the article,
the brother's name is Francisco, Francisco de
Aranda had been with Marti as they were pursuing
Sibylla. And so Violant, maybe as she's advocating
for Johann Fernando de Aranda in this letter.
Maybe she is also trying to boost up a family
member of someone that she has heard was assisting
in the apprehension of Sibilla, her rival. So
we have here the interaction between Violant
and Marti coming to fore, potentially, if that
really is an accurate reading of the subtext
of this letter. So I think this letter can be
seen as another example of what I'm calling team
next -gen, where Violant, Marti, and Joanne
And to an extent, Marti's wife, Maria de Luna,
they are operating as a team and trying to set
up something new after the end of the long reign
of Pere the Ceremonious. I want to make a note
of something that I've been doing in this episode,
and you might have noticed in other episodes,
which has to do with an alternation between the
way of saying somebody's name in Latin, and in
Catalan, and in Castilian, which is known colloquially
as Spanish. The Spanish that's spoken most populously,
like for example in Latin America, is the Castilian
language. that then became known as Spanish.
But there's actually quite a number of languages
spoken in Spain, including the Basque language
in the north, the Catalan language in the region
Valencia, Catalonia, and Aragonese. So there's
a lot of languages in Iberia, even persisting
to this day. And something that's actually quite
common is to see the same names in these multiple
languages, which happened today. So in the article
by Maria Teresa Ferrer Mallol, she's writing
in Castilian, although she's absolutely fluent
and does a lot of writing in Catalan. And then
the document itself is written in Latin, but
then the person was someone who most likely was
in their life most commonly referred to in Catalan.
So we've got, you know, three different ways
of talking about someone named in English John.
So we have the Catalan Joan, we have the Latin
Johan, and we have the Castilian Juan. And so
I've just been going all back and forth in today's
episode, and hopefully that wasn't too confusing.
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. Remember,
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.
The article that I've been referring to by Maria
Teresa Ferrer-Mallol is actually available for
free, so I'll put a link onto the webpage for
today's episode so you can look at that. 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.