Hello. In the Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was February 3rd, 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 short, and it's
in Catalan, so one would think I've got this
one solid. And to some extent, well, yeah. There's
always some mystery, right? Because dissatisfaction
is guaranteed. You can never know. for sure what's
going on because you're only getting the tip
of the iceberg even though there's so many documents
in this archive so many tips of icebergs well
let me tell you what i'm talking about here we've
got a letter it's very clear who the addressee
is it's from violant and to charles the third
the king of Navarre the folio that we're looking
at today is packed with a bunch of short missives.
The top of the folio is the continuation of what
came before on 78R. And this particular letter
is getting sent, the one that came before, is
getting sent to a bunch of different recipients
and that's why what we have at the beginning
of each of those three lines at the top it well
actually there's four lines so three of the four
is i t with the macron abbreviating for the em
Item likewise so it's going likewise to all these
different people then we've got a short letter
going to a particular marquesa And that is from
the 1st of February. And then the document that
is our focus for today to the King of Navarre
from February 3rd is the next text block. So
it's the middle of the three text blocks on this
page. Interestingly, below it, we have someone
who's written into this register at a far later
date than the original composition. You can see
that in a different style of handwriting, different
form of cursive, a different script, we have
someone who's written the words Pro Bernardis
del I'm not quite sure what that that says actually
at the end there, but that cursive handwriting
is of an obviously different style from the script
on the rest of the page, and I would say that
this is either someone from the 19th century
or the 18th century, but it could be earlier.
I'm not too too studied up on my early modern
to modern cursive scripts. So someone at a later
time was looking through these and just decided
to add a little helpful header to the top of
the next letter down on the page, the one that's
at the bottom of the page. So You know, there's
these intrusions of later archivists, later historians,
and it's not always clear when that intrusion
was written, but we have it there in certainly
a script that just cannot be contemporaneous
to the script that we see here. No one in the
Crown of Aragon was writing in cursive like that
at this time. I'm pretty confident in asserting
that. So we've got a bunch of stuff on the page.
We've also got some like tape to repair some
wormholes and tears. So just as a material object,
this particular page has some interesting aspects
to it. Let's get to the content of the letter
itself. So this one I plugged in my transcription
to chat GPT and got some help and as always when
I use AI I copy out the entire transcript of
my chat and post that as a PDF that you can click
on on the web page for today's episode. And what
you'll see in there is that the chatbot had no
hesitation translating a word that appears, it's
the second to the last word on the first line,
Al -Guatsar or Al -Guatzir. This is certainly
a holdover from the Islamic period of Iberia
when Muslims ruled Iberia all the way up until
well i mean it was really only in 14 the 1492
i think when the granada fell and so there's
muslim rule on the iberian peninsula from around
700 to that late date so seven centuries so there's
these terms that you see in common usage in documents
written in Catalan or Castilian or one of the
other vernaculars that are clearly holdovers
from Arabic and the way you can recognize them
is the way that they began with al and then maybe
have a g or a q but it's that al beginning that
is such a common way to start words in arabic
and so what we've got here is the name of some
kind of category of official that was a term
that had been used during the time of muslim
rule and has stuck around Sometimes the term
is used in the context of someone who is specifically
an official for the Muslim community or the Jewish
community within a particular municipality, and
other times it's applied more generally. Yes,
Shadow. You've probably heard Shadow mewing.
And she has been contributing to today's work.
And I am just going to leave her in the podcast
so you can enjoy the lovely sonorous intrusions
from Shadow Cat here. Because I'm saying some
good stuff and I don't want to have to re -record
it, Shadow. All right. So. Yes. Okay, we've heard
enough from you. That's enough. All right. The
al -Guatzir in this document seems to be just
synonym to bailiff. Some kind of official that
handles cases, like a chief bailiff maybe. I
went to a really great resource for Catalan and
Medieval Catalan. It's an online dictionary that
is a product of the Institut d 'Estudis Catalans,
and it's called the Diccionari Catala Valencia
Belear. So it's like the Oxford English Dictionary,
where it will give you an example of what has
been identified as an early or earliest usage
of the word. And when I went to the entry for
Alghutzir, A -L -G -U -T -Z -I -R, I was
able to find on site that the usage applied to
it was actually a piece of writing by Pere the
Ceremonious. Per the Ceremonious' name, his cognomen
is ceremonious because he really liked
ceremony and organizational behavior and I've
already talked about how he reworked the chancery.
He wrote this long document called the Ordinances
and in it he made up all kinds of rules and codification
for what different officials are supposed to
do and I think he got like really hyper specific
with like how to celebrate certain feast days
and He just was he was really a control freak.
He was he was just He was a micromanager and
these ordinances if you read these you're just
like why? Why does the king need to be at this
nitty gritty level of? Rulemaking for all these
little things but Pere just loved that and I
think that Paper is such a part of this story
that all of these little rules were able to be
enforced and reiterated and communicated because
there was just this abundance of paper in 14th
century Crown of Aragon as another holdover from
the time of Muslim rule, where papermaking technology
had made it to the Iberian Peninsula way earlier
than other parts of Europe. And there was this
papermaking town basically, Xativa, that just
churned out a lot of paper for people to use
all over the place in Iberia. And so basically,
because he's got this medium that can communicate
out all of his little rules, he uses it. And
as I'm talking about this, I'm really alluding
to something that I've been reading recently.
I'll put it in the bibliography for this page.
It's the book Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari. It's
such a great read. It's just come out in the
last, I think, year. And Harari makes these really
interesting connections between the technology
of a time and the definition of information and
so I'm just seeing that I'm just seeing that
connection in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon
in words like Alguatzir that have their earliest
attestation in Pere the ceremonious's long document
of rules and it's just ah it just inspires me
so much to be able to work with this stuff and
connect in with just this information technology
from so long ago. Ah, goodness gracious. I'm
just having such a great time. Well, let's get
back to this letter. What's it about? I just
gave you just this gigantically broad context.
What's happening in this letter? and it's so
short because it's got a really simple message.
Hey, Charles, buddy, I'm sending you this guy!
His name is Geraud de Vullars, or Vullats.
It's really hard to figure out whether that's
an RS or a TS because his name is repeated in
line three and it really looks like a T, but
then in the first line it looks like an R. Anyway,
this guy named Gerau, I'm sending him to you.
And then there's this wonderful line about how
you have to give him creyenza, you have to give
him belief, as if I was saying it myself. So
whatever this guy says, it's like you can trust
it as if I was saying it, which is it's quite
a statement. And by the way, let me just share
another medieval Catalan glossary moment with
you. I was curious about this Dehiem, and that
there's an I after the H, or that there's an
H at all, because the root of this is the infinitive
dir, d -i -r, and that has one of the longest
entries in my go -to, my short medieval Catalan
glossary, and that's because a lot of people
talk about what people say, and the infinitive
dir is to say. And so there's a lot of variations,
a lot of ways to spell out and conjugate the
verb for to speak or to say. So here we have
basically this chief bailiff person, job title
alguatzir, being sent from Violant to the
king of Navarre, her buddy Charles III. who she
danced with so hard, and he's basically just
going to give a message verbally. So remember
how I said at the beginning of today's podcast
that each document is the tip of its own iceberg?
We don't know the information that is going to
be transmitted from Violant to Charles through
the person of Gerau. we don't know what the message
is. The letter is basically vouching for the
accuracy and truthfulness and fidelity of what
Gerau is going to say. So, I mean, obviously
Violant trusts Gerau to be truthful to her
message, but what this is indicating is that
there's certain matters that are not going to
be written about. So what kind of topic would
necessitate a personal messenger to verbally
transmit it versus just writing it down? I mean,
they certainly don't have a problem writing down
all kinds of stuff, right? But what is it that
is in this situation creating the need for Gerau
to make the journey. Is it because it's super
sensitive? Is it because it's just long and Violant
is like, I just don't want to have to bother
writing this out? Is it because Gerau is just
going there anyway, and it's just like random
updates and it's not sensitive at all, but he's
heading up there to do other stuff. And so might
as well just stop by and, you know, give a nice
sort of like singing telegram kind of experience.
I'm pretty sure he was not a singing telegram.
A talking telegram is more like it. Ooh, I like
that phrase. I'm going to keep using that. So
what I want to do is corroborate. I want to find
other documents that are indicating that there's
going to be a talking telegram, there's going
to be a person sent with a verbal message, and
what's going on around that time, and can I identify
when that would be needed and desired, and topics
that were okay to just write about, and didn't
necessitate having this kind of messenger, or
whether it was just like a bonus, maybe it wasn't
even a need at all. questions questions questions
right that's why we are here and as we move forward
we accumulate more questions and generally something
might come into focus and we can maybe make some
guesses all right that brings us to the end of
today's episode 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. And
speaking of dissatisfaction, how many podcast
episodes has it been? since we talked about Joan
and Violant and how they related to each other.
We're not getting it very easily because they
are together and they don't need to write to
each other right now because they're both in
Barcelona. So we have to go at it from a kind
of oblique angle in order to try to infer some
of what's going on here. It's very difficult
in this particular stage of their story, but
who knows what we'll see tomorrow? Maybe we'll
be less dissatisfied, but there's always some
dissatisfaction guaranteed. That's our motto.
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 John... King
John? Oh, goodness. I've been a little loopy
today. What's going on here? King Joan I of
Aragón and Queen Violant de Bar. In the meantime,
take care.