Hello. In the Crown of Aragon, 639 years ago,
it was January 25th, 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.
Part of the reason I chose today's document is
because right at the top is this really high
interest word Inquisitorum. And we're talking
about Inquisition. But it's not the dreaded Spanish
Inquisition of Monty Python. It is instead not
that big of a deal. It is basically just the
set of officers who are charged with investigating
any troublemaking that might come up. And yesterday's
document is a good example of the result of an
inquisition in which the people who had been
appointed to be in that role of Inquisitor in
Fraga had determined that it was the Muslims
who were at fault for the violence that took
place during or after or in the midst of the
procession that had been organized to commemorate
the death of Pere the Ceremonious. In today's
document, we're looking at something from a register
that's titled officialium. And this register is
filled with appointments. So when somebody is
appointed to an office within the apparatus of
the state, meaning that they're granted authority
from the Crown of Aragon, government, the authority
vested in the king or one of the other royal
family members, and they're usually paid from
the funds of the crown as opposed to, say, the
revenues that a city might collect from various
streams of revenue of taxation that is carried
out by a municipality. So in this document, the
title is Inquisitorum Ciuitatem Gerundem. So this
is Girona, the place where Joan and Violant
lived until just a couple weeks ago. And there's
some new inquisitors being appointed. Their names
are all strung along in the very first two lines
of the document. And then, as best as I can understand
it, what we're looking at is a whole long justification
for why there are inquisitors from a legal standpoint,
from even a constitutional standpoint. and then
also just in general that they have to carry
out their duties according to the expectations
of the law and according to the customs of the
office. And I did not go through and transcribe
this very long Latin document because I could
tell right away again, that this was just not
really as germane to my main focus of study,
even though it still says a bunch of interesting
things. And I'll point out a couple of those
interesting things. But really, I just wanted
to do a document from the officialium so you could
see what it looks like, and then also to have
a chance to say that the Inquisition varied over
time and place, that it wasn't always the kind
of searching for witches and sorcerers, although
there could be some less than scientific applications
of the Inquisition and Inquisitors. at this time,
it wasn't the fearful entity that you might have
had in mind from some of the documents and media
representations that you've come across before.
The real cruel and outlandish Spanish Inquisition
doesn't really appear in the 14th century and
really doesn't appear in the Middle Ages. It's
more a creation of the early modern period. This
is something that a lot of medievalists really
like to emphasize and repeat, which is that a
lot of the horrible stuff that comes to mind
when people say things like, I'm gonna get medieval,
it's actually stuff that happened after 1500,
which is the general cutoff for the division
between the Middle Ages and the early modern
era. All right, let's get back to this document
here. I just want to point out a couple things.
In the second line, about 75 to 80 percent of
the way through, there's a faint slash after
salut, salutem et graciam. And the phrase begins
cum iu something, there's an abbreviation, iu
abbreviation, and then constituciones catalonem.
I'm not quite sure about the end of that word.
And then in the next line, generales. and then
there's another slash. So I was really, really
wanting to figure out what that i -u word is
after cum, and so I went through some of my notes
from the Mediterranean seminar that I took on
reading archival Latin in the Archive of the
Crown of Aragon, which had a lot of abbreviations.
I couldn't find this one in there. I went to
an online resource that has taken a lot of the
work from the Capelli text of Latin abbreviations
and put it in a searchable online database, tried
to find it there, could not find it. And so I
was about to throw my hands up and then I remembered,
oh my gosh. Trenchs Odena and Baiges i Jardi,
a lot of their documents about minstrels and
troubadours have Latin transcriptions, and I
just was looking at that the other day, and so
I brought it up, and I did a little find search
in the PDF for just IU, and I guessed it was
R, because I... was pretty sure that I had seen
the macron with that looks like a U with like
a long line after the end of the U. I'm pretty
sure I'd seen that used for an R. So I thought
it was probably an IUR and I looked at a couple
documents and went to registers from different
years and tried to and struck out and then I
was about to give up and I said just one more
and yes! Bonanza! I found this exact abbreviation
in a register from 1389, and I found out that
actually I was wrong, because it's just a coincidence
that the IUR was from a different word in that
same little document. about 10 lines long. And
then further down, I was just kind of scanning
it just kind of looking. And I saw that this
was here. And I look at the transcription and
what is it for? Iuxta. So if you're familiar
with the English word juxtapose, well, the first
part of that, of that word is juxta, which comes
from the Latin iuxta, which means next to And
so here we have figured out that this is an abbreviation
for iuxta. So the phrase that happens in this
document after salutam et graciam is cum uxta
constitutionis and then the Catalonian generalis.
So basically what's being said here is according
to the constitution it's so having this with
next these two words meaning or when next putting
them together idiomatically will give you a translation
like according to according to the constitutions
of the catalonian general assemblies so on Then
what follows is the justification legally and
the explanation of the role of Inquisitor that
these fellows are being appointed to. And then
so on and so forth. We've got all the different
expectations, duties, restrictions, and so on
spelled out in full. And that is my Latin abbreviation
Mystery Solved. And let me tell you, it is so
nice when you get to a solution for one of those,
when you've been looking through your notes and
you're like, oh, it looks like it could be Eorum.
I will point out here that when you usually see
the abbreviation for Orum, the descender, the
part that goes below the line. It's usually not
diagonal like this one is. And if I can maybe
find another instance that's close in this document,
it would help to explain that a little bit. But
oh yeah, actually just one, two, three lines
down from Cum. is Eorum, Ab Eorum. And so
you can see that it's not as diagonal of a straight
line as a descender there. And so this is the
X. This is an X. So basically it looks like how
we would write the letter P, but it's an X. And
if you compare it to the way that the scribes
write the Roman numerals for the dates, which
always has some Xs in it, you'll see that this
is an X. And so I was wrong about it being the
letter R indicated in the abbreviation here.
There's no R. The letters are I, U, X, and then
what comes above the word stands for a T -A in
this situation. So there you had a really in
-depth experience with some paleography and some
Latin abbreviation. The scribes just they loved
their abbreviations and This is one that I have
seen before since I started the podcast, and
it was really bugging me today. And so I finally
got to scratch that itch and find out that this
was iuxta, and now I will remember it forever.
Okay, what does this say about the way that Joan
and Violant were establishing their reign? Well,
in a general sense, they're appointing people
left and right, doing a lot of appointments.
There's always people getting appointed to things
and needs for taking care of turnover in these
positions. So... I can't really say that anything
jumps out at me in this document as strange or
weird. It's more of just giving everybody, including
myself, an idea of just what a normal officialium
appointment looks like. So if there is something
really weird later on, I can understand that.
All right, that brings us to the end of 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. Does
that mean that we're never going to hear about
any weird or colorful Inquisition moments? No,
there will be some, I promise, before this year
is done. But for now, you're probably dissatisfied.
Promise fulfilled. 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.