Hello. In the Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was January 27th, 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's document is from Joan and it's
in a register called the commune register and
this register appears to be one that contains
documents that are not as sensitive and are maybe
responses to petitions that are I guess like
regular business in some ways, you could say,
like not matters of, you know, intrigue or like
diplomacy necessarily, but but internal business
like arrangements. Again, these categories, they're
very difficult to separate out in my mind because,
you know, what makes this commune register or
commune register different from the officiallum?
I mean, I think Officialium is about appointments,
and this one's about maybe petitions, but then
there's also other registers that have results
of petitions or decisions about petitions in
them. So that's one of the goals of the whole
podcast, is to, you know, figure that out. Okay,
so here we've got one from Joan, and the initial
line for the addressee is a little bit different,
and I'm not quite sure why. It's in Latin again.
We are embracing Latin now. And I am just gonna
take a pass on digging into the very beginning
of this letter because I think that it's just
maybe a variation of the kind of opening that
one sees a lot. I'm going to keep my eye on these
openings and see if this one comes back again,
but it starts out with something like Satis Guidem.
I can't quite figure out the expansions of the
abbreviations here, but then we get to the name
of the addressee in the second line, Nicolaus
de Pomerio. And what's nice about this register
is that the person's name, who's the main addressee,
of the letter appears at the top above the text
block. So that's nice. And then I eventually
figured out that the place name at the end of
the second line is in Catalan Ripoll. There's
a very old monastery in Ripoll that gives me the
chance to mention the name of I think probably
my favorite person in early Middle Ages Iberian
history. Well, not favorite person, but favorite
name. Wilfrid the Hairy! Yes, someone has gone
down in history as Wilfrid the Hairy. Wilfrid
the Hairy was a Visigoth who was fighting against
Muslims in Iberia and captured the town of Ripoll
and helped to found a Benedictine monastery there.
And I just am very tickled by the name Wilfrid
the Hairy. That's just really funny. But okay,
so we have an appearance from Wilfred the Hairy,
finally, and the subject matter of this letter
has nothing to do with Wilfred and his apparent
hairiness, but instead we are looking at something
that came up in yesterday's document from Violant,
which is the dispersal or rearrangement of the
properties and authorities of the Da Fortias.
So yesterday we saw Violant rearranging some
kind of authority arrangement that had previously
been in the portfolio of Bernat Da Fortia, and
today we've got something like that going on
with a office or authority that had been in Sibilla
de Fortia's portfolio. So for those of you that
have not listened to any earlier episodes about
Sibilla, this is a major figure at this point
in the story of Joan and Violant. Sibilla
de Fortia was the queen before Violant. And
here, in this line of this letter, she's not
referred to as Queen. What she's referred to
is something like, servicemi Domini Petri Regis.
Felicis. And what that phrase means is something
like, most servant -like of the Lord -King -Peter
pair. So already we're seeing rhetorically show
on downgrading Sibilla, and the two words that
come before Sibilla's name are fabulosam suggestionem.
And I consulted with ChatGPT on the Latin here
and then confirmed the way that it interpreted
fabulosum as something like slander, slanderous.
And it's more like, I think it could be slanderous.
I looked at two different Latin dictionaries
and Gossipy is the way that it seems to be coming
through in the dictionaries, but certainly these
words can have a change of valence in different
times and places. So there's something happening
here where there was a some kind of slanderous
statement or bad statement from Sibilla, and
now Joan is getting involved at the behest of
this Nicolas de Pomerio in regard to an issue
in Ripoll in the monastery. There's another name
that appears further down in this. letter Guillermo
de Bardo can't quite figure out what's going
on with him. But then in line 13, there's the
phrase sub pena millem florem auri, which means
under the punishment of a thousand gold florins.
So basically something's happening. That Joan
is saying stop doing that or you're gonna be
fined a whole lot of money and Exactly What is
the subject of this fine? What is it that Joan
is trying to put a stop to? How is it a change
from what was going on when? This was all being
run by Sibylla All these questions are ones that
will be unlocked if I can learn Latin to a higher
degree than is my Latin ability now. This letter,
I think I'm going to come back to. And yesterday,
when I was looking at the letter from Violant,
I thought to myself, I'm probably not going to
come back to this. But actually, now that I've
got a pairing between Violant's letter having
to do with a property of Bernat de Fortia, and
now I've got the next day a document from Joan
that has to do with something Sibilla de Fortia
had been in charge of. Now I've got an interesting
pairing that could help me get at the question
of how Joan and Violant were working as a team,
which is one of my big questions that I'm trying
to figure out as I look through all these documents.
And so now I'm curious and at a later stage,
after I've had... more Latin practice, which
is something I am embracing and going to be doing
in the coming months. I'll come back to this
one, and I think I'll be able to unlock its meaning
a little bit more. And then also, I'll be able
to figure out maybe some hints regarding that
big question of how Joan and Violant worked
together. One last thing I want to mention is
that I did a search using ChatGPT for Nicolas
de Pomerio and his involvement with the Ripoll
Monastery and ChatGPT did seem to return some
dependable references for that association and
so That helped me actually to decide on the place
name at the end of the line, because I didn't
mention this before, but I was really having
a hard time getting from what I'm looking at
on the page to RIPOL, which is spelled R -I -P
-O -L -L. And the first letter of the place name
there at the end of line two, it's an R but it
at first glance looks like a B but these Rs the
scribes would really go all out with capital
R like all kinds of additional curls loops and
fanciness so if you're looking at something that
is capital letter and it's got a lot of flourish,
you should really think of it as a likely R.
And be skeptical about the other possibilities,
especially if you've got something where the
most bold parts of it, like in this situation,
if you take out the lighter strokes and just
look at the heavier strokes of that letter, then
you've got something that looks like an R. But
then, look at how many strokes of the pen there
are between the capital letter and the letter
P. There's so many. And in the Catalan spelling,
it's just R -I -P, but here we've got something
like another R and maybe a U and then an I. What
you have maybe noticed if you've been looking
at some of these documents is that sometimes
the initial letter is doubled when you've got
a proper noun. You see this a lot. We will see
this all the time next month when we start looking
at letters and documents from February. because
pretty much all the time. Well, a lot of the
time, February is spelled with two F's. So that's
something I look forward to, but let's pull back
for a moment from the very close attention to
that one specific word, and I just want to reiterate
that there are a lot of. questions about the
context of this document as well as yesterday's.
I am just really curious about how much work
it was to bring in the new regime because on
one level things probably have a certain inertia
to them where when one monarch takes over from
the previous, you can just kind of things just
kind of keep going like everybody wants to keep
getting paid every so on and so forth. But then
there's going to be certain things where there's
just urgent attention required in order to undo
some of the arrangements that are problematic
for the way you want to run things. And specifically,
I think there's a kind of slicing and dicing
of a lot of the portfolio that was from the former
queen, the former queen's brother, and these
are going to get rearranged and certain people
who might have been well known for being quite
loyal to the previous person, they're going to
be replaced by others who perhaps have more trust
on the part of Joan and Violant. Are we seeing
that here? Is that a lot of work? Is it something
that is an easy process, or is it going to take
some follow -ups to make sure things are happening
the way they want them to? So how rough, how
smooth is the transition? That's the larger question
that I have. And also how much work falls on
the monarchs themselves versus officials that
are in the know about all these different places.
So those are just some of the questions. Many,
many questions always come up with each and every
document, which is why The motto of the podcast
is, of course, dissatisfaction guaranteed. Thanks
for listening to this episode of the Historian's
Notebook, Season 1, Molt Cara Companyona. 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!