Hello. In The Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was January 26th, 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 have a document from Violant.
It's in Latin. And that is okay. I'm shifting
my mindset with Latin, where I'm not gonna get
all kind of grumpy when I'm like, oh, it's another
Latin document. I am going to embrace the Latin
because it is just a challenging puzzle. I can
put it that way. I'm going to think of it as
this challenging puzzle that I'm really going
to get better at this year. And in the meantime,
we're just going to piece things together as
best we can. That's the new Latin mindset. All
right. So we start out this letter with Yolanis
Dei Gratia Regina Aragon. Et cetera. So I'm looking
at this and I'm like, it seems like there should
be some kind of ending on Aragon in this, but
maybe they're kind of not always as dedicated
to the Latin endings. Uh, quite sure. But anyway,
what that translates to is Violant. by the grace
of God, Queen of Aragon, etc. So what you see
after Aragon is a little abbreviation for Et,
which looks sort of like the number two. And
then following that, you've got the character
C and then What's happened is that there's been
some repair to the document and it's covering
up a lot of the abbreviation mark that is over
that C, but enough of it remains visible to know
that this is the abbreviation for et cetera and
it also makes sense because there's a lot of
different regions that are if you're spelling
out all of the official title of the queen there's
just going to be a bunch of place names added
in after Aragon so they do et cetera a lot but
then other times when they want to be fancy I
guess when they want to really hit it home. We've
got a lot of territories they will list them
all out and we've seen that before. So the first
phrase is nice and easy to understand and then
after that we have a pretty common construction
with the addressee appearing before the phrase
salutem et gratiam and the salutem is like 80
% maybe 75 % through the second line there's
like a wormhole and then right next to that there's
a big S that there's maybe a stray mark made
by the scribe and that makes it look like it's
a big p or something like that but it's an s
and then a l u t that's all very legible and
then the abbreviation at the end for salutem
and then at gratium so greetings and salutations
so on and the phrase that comes before that is
the addressee and in this case we've got the
procurators and the officials of a Town. We can
clearly see the third word in the second line
is V -I -L -L. So, you know, V -M. I think that
it's a E -M ending there, but easy to know what
it means in English. The town of, because then
we have the letter D for day and then we have
the name of the place. This is where I got stuck
because I couldn't immediately recognize this
place name and I had to go find it. So what happens
in Latin documents very frequently is that the
place name, which is most commonly known by its
inhabitants according to a Catalan name. If you're
in that region, the Catalonian region of the
Crown of Aragon, and of course if you're in some
other region, like, you know, there's the language
Aragonese for Aragon itself, and so then there
might be a slight spelling difference. So the
inhabitants, they refer to the place by its name
that's used in the everyday vernacular speech
of the time. And for most of the places that
we're looking at in these letters, that would
be the Catalan name. You know, there's other
regions of the Mediterranean that are territorially
owned by the Crown of Aragon, so thinking of
Sicily in particular, and so you'll definitely
have other languages as the place name among
the inhabitants, but then it's very possible
that the officials of the Crown of Aragon would
have given those places Catalan names, so then
if you've got a Latin document about some place
in Sicily, then it's the Latin name that then
is being used for what in the minds of the folks
in Barcelona would be a Catalan place name, but
then the actual inhabitants in Sicily, it would
be a name in, like... Goodness, what was the
local Italian vernacular there? Certainly not
the Tuscan vernacular of the north of Italy.
There's just so many different vernaculars. And
you might think, wow, they really tighten that
up. And everybody just started speaking the dominant
vernacular. So the Tuscan vernacular for Italian,
the Castilian vernacular for Spanish, but it's
really important to realize that a lot of these
local, comparatively speaking, local vernaculars,
they did not disappear, and there are still people
who are speaking them. So a Sicilian vernacular,
I think, still exists, but I'm really out of
my subject area knowledge there. So, all right,
point is that it's really sometimes very difficult
to figure out what the place name is and when
we're talking about place names the scholarly
term for that is the toponym or the toponym there
are a lot of resources about toponyms dictionaries
of toponyms and there's oh gosh it can get really
big in terms of the amount of research that has
been done and the lists and the glossaries and
so on. There's a very widely used Latin toponym
dictionary called the Orbis Latinus. The Orbis
Latinus has been digitized and you can search
it and find the vernacular translation for the
way that the word appears in Latin, the toponym,
the way the toponym appears in Latin. So I'll
put a link to that in the webpage for today's
episode, but even though there are thousands
of entries in the Orbis Latinus, when you're
getting into some of the more local areas, the
smaller towns, they're not going to be in there.
The Orbis Latinus covers the larger Mediterranean
world, and so when I went to consult it for whatever
place name this is that starts with CUB, I could
not find an entry in there. And so I decided
to go to a new AI agent, and, oh, I don't even
know if I'm using the word agent correctly, but
a new AI product is maybe what I should be saying.
So I went to a new AI product that I haven't
used for the podcast before, and I've only used
a couple times. It's called Perplexity. And apparently
what happens when you go to perplexity .ai is
that it will utilize existing LLMs like Claude
and ChatGPT and somehow, in consultation with
them, search the internet. I'm not quite sure
how all of that fits together, but perplexity...
did a really good job with my query in the sense
that it provided me with a lot of references
and gave a well explained case for why I should
interpret this word as the Latin toponym for
the town of Cubelles. Cubelles is about 55 kilometers
down the coast south from Barcelona, and it makes
sense that this would be of concern to the Crown
of Aragon. It's close to the big city of Barcelona,
relatively speaking, and so to have a document
about it makes sense versus some of the other
possibilities that perplexity provided for this
place name. So, you know, it was it was okay,
but there's still a problem with the AI generated
responses, which is that you are getting references
associated with claims that the chat bot is making.
And then when you go to those references, it's
not actually supporting the claim. And in this
situation, the AI generated response said that
Thomas Bisson's book, A Short History of the
Crown of Aragon, would have information in it
that supports this being interpreted as the town
of Cubelles. and it didn't. Like, I was able to
do just a keyword search in that text, and this
town is not in there. So, you know, maybe I need
to search more carefully through Bisson's book,
but it shouldn't be that hard to track back a
reference that the AI -generated response is
providing you, especially if it's only one reference,
which for this section of the AI -generated response,
it was the only reference that would substantiate
the claim. So even though that reference was,
I would say, a failure on the part of the chatbot,
the overall conclusion I think makes a lot of
sense, and I'm going to go with it until I see
something else that would make a better argument
for what this place name is. which I need to
not abandon in my mind as a possibility because
you've got to use the AI chatbots provisionally
and not as your final step. So anything that
I arrive to with the help of the AI chatbot always
needs to be subject to revision and not treated
as the you know, conclusive end of the investigation
for whatever question I might be using the chat
bot for. Alright, so wanted to get into the topic
of toponyms, and that covered pretty well. What
is this letter about? This letter is about the
ownership of this town, I think in terms of its
governance and also probably some of the revenue
that's coming from whatever kind of taxation
will go on. And I'm gathering this from just
understanding a few of the words in the document.
So that too is provisional. I mean, everything
is provisional in this stage of the research,
but After the salutem e gratiam, in the second
line we have the name Petrus and then in the
third line De Mari. So there's a Petrus De Mari
that has reached out to Violant and made some
kind of request about being able to be in charge
of this town in some way? And who was the previous
person that was in charge of it? Well, that is
in the end of line five. We've got Bernardi De,
and then on the next line, Fortiano. So that
is Sibilla's brother, Bernat de Fortia, the rascal
type brother that has kind of been a source of
embarrassment for Sibilla and so he is being
dispossessed in this document and the ownership
of this town I'm using the word ownership very
like lightly here the authority over this town
is being transferred to Petrus de Mari and there's
something that's pretty weird in the probata
for this document so on the next folio at the
bottom you have three lines in the right side
of the page there that are usually where it just
says I am the scribe and this was dictated to
me or given to me by the person that is being
attributed as the sender. But in this case, we've
got Bernard de Fortia at the very beginning of
the probata. So what I'm thinking is that this
is fulfilling a function of removing the authority
of Bernard de Fortia. as well as being testified
to as a faithful copy of the document that's
going out. So it's interesting that Bernat de
Fortia appears again. There is an outside possibility
that Bernat de Fortia was somehow there. I don't
know his exact whereabouts at this point in the
story. I know that everyone is being kept track
of all of Sibilla's people are being watched
over, and some of them are indeed imprisoned.
I don't think that someone as high status as
Bernat de Fortia is imprisoned, but it could
be a some kind of house arrest situation, but
I doubt he's in Barcelona, although he might
be. So I'm not quite sure what's going on there
with Bernat de Fortia's name in the probata statement
there. So I will try to look out for another
instance of that in an upcoming document. For
now, though, we've arrived to the end of this
episode, and thanks for listening to this latest
installment of the Historian's Notebook, Season
1, 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 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.