Hello. In the Crown of Aragon, 639 years ago,
it was February 1st, 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. There's a couple documents to choose
from for February 1st and this is From today's
document is from the officiallium register So
it's not at that level of the secret seal But
we're gonna get into some interesting seal conversations
in just a little bit and of course have gone
so many days of talking about seals on this podcast
while suppressing my desperate urge to make a
pun about seals so I just can't help myself gotta
say it today when we are talking about seals
we are not talking about the animal so Yeah,
I I used to in class when I was a teacher Whenever
the word seal came up, I would do the little
seal bark. Oh It'd be it would be pretty funny.
Everyone just loved my puns when I was a teacher
Any of my former students listening to this you
can vouch for that Alright, we will be talking
about seals Did you hear that the seal bark?
No, because I resisted the urge to do it. We
will be talking about them later. Let's first
start out with another fun observation about
today's document, which is that there's another
document squished in to this page. Like someone
at a later time in April came back and squished
it. It's so interesting why they felt the need
to do this when I see all the time. these registers
there's earlier documents being referenced so
it's very typical in one document to have a line
about oh yes in our letter of such and such earlier
date so why was it that a chancery scribe felt
the need in this situation to do something pretty
uncommon which is to put this note squeezed into
the space that is normally left unmarked between
two documents. And try as I might, my friends,
I could not figure out what was so special about
this particular document. So living up to the
motto of the podcast, dissatisfaction, guaranteed.
Let's talk about the sourcing of this, and we
can maybe make some guesses about why this particular
document merited the intrusion of this additional
later update. This document is in the Officialium
of Joan, and so that is the place where There
are commissions made for particular offices,
so someone will be appointed to some role, some
job in the Crown of Aragon somewhere. The person
who is being addressed for the office is Johann
Del Moli. That's the person who's getting the
office. The recipient of the document I believe
is a set of people who are in charge of the castle
of Perpignan, but it's kind of hard for me to
make out because something has been crossed out
in the first line and what was written above
it is hard to make out. something about maybe
the custodians of the castle. The other thing
that gets really confusing about this letter
and its addressee is that there's this phrase
that begins the second line. So that would seem
to read our castle of our city of perpignan that
seems pretty straightforward but then in the
squished in part in line three there's n -o -r
-a which i guess could mean nostra and that's
what chat gpt was really convinced of because
i went to the ai chat bot for help with this
document because that N -O -R -A doesn't seem
to make grammatical sense, but maybe it does,
and it's just a little bit beyond my ability
to read medieval Catalan at this time. So the
sentence that includes that capital N -O -R -A
in the squished -in April update part of this
document is And then after that, I think we've
got... It's hard to see what that... Oh, it's
N! En Johan Del Moli. And then a little bit more.
So en is like saying mister or sir. And so when
you see en in front of somebody's name, it's
just like saying mister. It could be more honorific,
like it could be at the level of sir. not quite
sure the rules for that EN, because I see it
a lot, and I see it in front of different people
who have different levels of status. So another
open question there. What's happening in this
letter? this document, is that Joan is appointing
a Johan del Moli to be some kind of custodian
in the castle at Perpignan. And honestly, I'm
having some trouble figuring out what else there
is to it besides that. I plugged the whole thing
into ChatGPT. Seems like the chatbot boils it
down to just that, but there's a lot more verbiage
here, and also there's the update. So the letter,
the original letter on the page is from February
1st, the little update is from April 1st, and
someone else is mentioned in the update. At the
beginning of the update, You have le Duc as the
person who's sending the letter? So is it from
Marti? Because yes, Marti is involved in this
somehow. In the third line of the February 1st
letter, you see Infantis Martini. That's, that's
Joan's brother Marti. He's the Duke of Montplanc.
So maybe this is actually coming from Marti saying
that this actually did happen, that it was ex
- that action was executed, and he was following
up with this other person named, I think, uh,
something like Gal -Con Dorngase. It's hard to
tell what's happening. One thing I can say, though,
is that I successfully remembered the abbreviation
for Juxta! It's in the second -to -the -last
line of the February 1st portion of what we're
talking about today, and the sentence reads,
Juxta predicte commissionis carte serviam et
tenorem. And this is a very standard expression,
as I learned from the chatbot that told me. And
I think it's, you know, a reliable thing to claim
that this is seen a lot. Basically means that
last part, this serviem et tenorem, it's form
and tenor. So when you use the word juxta, at
the beginning, we're not quite saying next to,
we're saying in accordance with, in the understanding
with. The understanding is what is proximate
here, as opposed to the way we would use the
word juxtaposition, putting two things next to
each other. So what this is saying is that here
we have a commission that has been aforesaid,
predictem commissionis, in the letter. And so
according to the form and tenor of the aforesaid
letter of commission. So that particular phrase
I feel very confident about. And everything else,
it's The understanding is a little squishy, but,
you know, something about this Johann del Moli,
who I could not find any more information about
through various attempts to research, not just
through the chatbot, but also Googling around
and so forth. And also what was going on with
the Perpignan Castle doesn't seem to have had
any major historically significant transitions.
and also why Marti is involved in all of this.
It seems like someone has been doing a good job
for Marti, and I think it's Johan Del Moli, and
that's why Johan Del Moli is getting this commission.
So... After working with this letter a bit, I
think I can fit this into the ongoing theme of
Team NextGen, where they're working as a team,
Joan, Violant, Marti, and to an extent Maria
de Luna, and they're making decisions together
based on each other's recommendations. They're
reinforcing the network connections that they've
all brought in the time in the lead up to this
moment of the major changeover from the staff
administration institutional behavior of Pere
the Ceremonious to this new rain, and they're
bringing their people in, they're making changes,
and I think we see another example of that in
this document here. Alright, one other thing
I want to mention before we get to the discussion
of the seals. Look at February in the last line
of the February 1st letter. It has two Fs. Also,
if you look at the top of this folio, there's
the end of another letter that was written on
the first day of February. You can see that in
that letter at the top of the page, the last
line of it has Barcinone, which is the Latin
form of Barcelona. And then P -M -A, and there's
just, it's easy to miss, but there is that curving
macron over the P for P -R -I, primera, and then
dia de februari. Two F's. So they really liked
to double the F when it was a proper noun. when
it was the name of a person, or in this case
the name of the month. So I think we'll pretty
much always see the month of February spelled
with two Fs. If this month we come across any
instances where there's only one F for February,
that's going to be really interesting, and that
could be a quirk of that particular scribe. And,
I mean, I think that would be interesting, because
clearly we've got a pretty set convention to
double the F if we've got a proper noun that
begins with an F. Let's talk about the seals.
So in... did you do the little sound of the seal?
All right. In the document from the 1st of February,
we have the seal mentioned and Where is it? Sigello
Nostro. It's in the one two three four
Fifth line Nope, sorry. Yeah, fifth line down
fifth line down sigello Nostro so They're
mentioning in there which seal is being used
for this. And then we have it again at the very
last line. The thing that I want to point out,
I think it's only in the little the little note
and this gets super hard to read. So. What is
part of the little addendum from April and what
is part of the original? It's getting a little
bit confused on the right side of the paper because
we have the year from the last line's date, so
looking at Primera, dia primera, February, and
then we have ano, a Nativitat Domine, and then
we've got the Roman numerals for 1380, and then
Septimo on the next line. And then what we have
is something else, which I'm not quite sure what
it looks like. Almost a double F right there.
And then if we kind of just go right across on
the bottom of that line, then we see some writing
that I think is actually part of the April note,
but you can make out suo siello annuli and then
something that looks like sigularum. So this
is the ring. Okay. the seal of the ring talked
about this in yesterday's episode and it comes
back this idea of the seal of the ring in the
last line of what was added in April so if you
look at the last line of the smaller handwriting,
it comes, you can kind of track it because the
next letter starts with nos johannes. So right
above that, if you read along, it is saying K,
I think that's la te scri, something I think
that's Barchinona again. Then we've got a clear
primera dia. This is in Catalan. De abril. First
day of April. And then we've got something that's
really hard to read. We've got a couple words
that are hard to read, but then it's a clear
segell. De nostra. It's abbreviated. You can
see the n -r -e. And then I think that could
be, again, another an l. It does look like the
first letter is a, and then what comes after
it might not be an l. It might not be an n. Then
we do have the l's. So I think we've got a mention
of the ring in association with the seal, but
it's iffy. It is iffy. I am not going to push
this as like a certain interpretation here, but
just because in yesterday's episode we saw that
letter from January 6th when Violant is sending
Joan the rings that are associated with at
least one of the rings is associated with the
seal. And now here we've we've got this mention
of a maybe a certain type of seal that's associated
with a ring. But it could just be I'm primed
for that, and there's actually some kind of other
meaning here for these words that I'm trying
to read as related to Anell, the word for ring.
Okay, that brings us to the end of this episode
of the Historian's Notebook Season 1, Molt Cara
Companyona. Thanks for listening! If you are
leaving with more questions than you arrived
with, I have done my job, and how could you not
after this particular episode? And all of this,
remember, is covered by our promise here at the
Historian's Notebook of 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.