Hello. In the Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was February 4th, 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. We have so many documents
to choose from due to the huge abundance of paper
in the 14th century Crown of Aragon and the amazing
digitization effort carried out by the Archive
of the Crown of Aragon in the last 20 years.
Let's begin today's document. knocked my socks
off This is why I'm doing this project and We're
in February and if I had just stuck with January
I wouldn't have found this so There is an advantage
to my method There's still flaws disadvantages,
but oh my gosh. Okay. This is this is wild I
didn't have a February 4th document lined up
from, like, another secondary source or anything.
I didn't have the document for today already
chosen when I recorded yesterday's episode. And
I just had this desire to go back to the secret
seal documents for Joan. because I had a Violant
document already chosen for tomorrow. So I kind
of as much as I can like to alternate them. So
I'm going into one of the secret seal registers
that I had used before and I find I'm just kind
of looking at the end of the letter to try to
ascertain. OK, is this date even close to the
date that I'm looking for for the document of
the day? And generally looking at a couple words
in the letter to get a sense of what it's about.
I noticed that it was a letter from February
4th. We've got a minim situation there where
it's just four short strokes. That's how they
did Roman numeral four instead of what we do
today. When we do Roman numerals, we do an IV,
but they didn't do that at this time. They wrote
four I's in a row. All right. Then I look down
to see who the addressee was, and I see Comte
Fuxen. And there's a macron there. I can't quite
figure out what the macron is standing for, but
this is clearly the Count of Foix. So that's
F -O -I -X. And the Count of Foix -Bearn was
Gaston Febus. And I've talked about Gaston Febus
in a previous episode. He is quite the towering
figure in the politics and culture of the border
zone between France and Iberia at this time.
The biographer of Febus, one of the recent biographers,
Richard Vernier, who wrote a fantastic book about
Gaston Febus called him the lord of the Pyrenees
so he's really the most politically powerful
person in that zone that border zone between
iberia and france and he's also a cultural luminary
he wrote what has been probably the iconic book
about hunting in the late middle ages the livre
de la chasse the book of the chase which is has
had some amazing illustrated copies produced
in the time around when gaston febus was around
and i think shortly after his death was the one
that that was illustrated by i think the the
same people that did the Tres Riches Hueres the
one that was commissioned by the Duc de Berry.
I think the duc de Berry might have commissioned
this other illustrated manuscript I'm getting.
I'm digressing, but basically we've got some
magnificent illustrated manuscripts of the book
on hunting by Gaston Febus. really into hunting,
really into the luxurious hunting, the rituals
around hunting, and the whole kind of majestic
culture of it all. And the intersection between
political dominance and the dominance over the
natural world, that is something that Gaston
Febus really epitomizes. in his persona and in
his writing and I think Joan was really impressed
by that and wanted to emulate it. So when I see
a letter from Joan to Gaston Febus, I am really
looking for this kind of desire to make more
connections with this figure who he deeply admires
and so I start reading this letter and I get
into the content of it and in the second line
this phrase pops out contra nostra persona propria
against our own person so there is something
that Joan is saying here about some kind of
action that was taken against him. And we can
think of Kantorowicz's whole thesis about the
king's two bodies and imagine that, well, maybe
Joan is talking about this in a metaphorical
way, like it was something against his new government.
But the word propria at the end of that phrase
makes me think that no there was some there was
something done that was against himself like
his his own personal body there was some kind
of attack on him or at least like a political
maneuver against him himself but it it sounds
so personal when we add that word propria after
contra nostra persona, our person, our own person.
So I immediately got intrigued by what is being
referred to in this letter and I kept on reading
and then the next line, oh my gosh I couldn't
believe this, I couldn't believe this, the next
line mentions the same guy that Violant was
talking about in her letter that we talked about
yesterday. She sent Gerau des Vullats to Navarre,
to Charles III of Navarre, saying, I'm sending
this guy what he tells you. You need to give
it the same amount of credence as if you heard
it from me directly. And now Joan is sending
the same person who's also referred to here as
an Alguazir, but we have another word added in,
Lieutenant d 'Alguazir. So it's sort of this
riff on that title of Alguazir yesterday that
we didn't see, so why is Joan calling him the
Lieutenant d 'Alguazir and Violant just calls
him the Alguazir? I don't know, I think it speaks
to some of the looseness of these job titles,
but that's beside the point. The point, the point
is that we see Joan and Violant once again
working in tandem. Is every royal couple doing
this? I just don't think so. Where we just, we
see this level of cooperation. where it's literally
they're sending the same person who speaks for
both of them. It's got this incredible symbolic
resonance. There's this one guy, Gerau, and he
is going to Navarre and he vocalizes. Violant he
channels Violant and the same guy is now gonna
go to Gaston Febus and is gonna channel Joan
so it's just this like yeah I don't even I'm
I'm verklempt I don't even know what to say
about this other than it's just got this resonance
for me that I'm just completely excited about
it and it took me like a second to it was just
so serendipitous that I found this particular
letter in conjunction with yesterday's oh this
project it's charmed telling you it's charmed
Oh, one detail before I forget. You might be
wondering, how can this Gerau person be in two
places at once? He's going to Navarre and vocalizing
Violant, and then he's going to the land of
Gaston Febus, which I think would be the capital
of that foix bearn territory, which is Orthèz,
today in France. And So how can he be in Pamplona,
in Navarre, and Orthès, in Foix-Bearn, at the same
time? Well, he's not going to be there at the
same time. If you look at the geographical relationship
between these two places, Navarre, Pamplona,
is on the way. If you're journeying northward,
you can go from Barcelona to Pamplona. generally,
and then you can go through one of the passageways
through the Pyrenees and get to Orthez afterward.
So basically, Gerau has an itinerary. He's going
to first stop in Navarre and vocalize Violant
for Charles III, and then he's going to go to
Orthez and channel Joan for Gaston Febus. And
there's more. We haven't even finished with the
wildness of this letter, because in line two,
in line two, there was a word that I couldn't
figure out because of the paleographical challenge.
So before the phrase, contra nostra persona propria,
we have two words. And they both seem to start
with the letter C, although the letter C is written
differently in the initial letter for both these
words. The word right before contra seems to
be cameses, so something like carried out. Alright,
and then the word before that I was really struggling
with because the first letter is a C and then
it looked like the second letter was like another
C but one of the keys to recognizing the letter
R is there's always like this little curl that
comes up at the at the bottom of the R and I
mean not always but a lot of times when it's
in the middle especially when it's in the middle
of the word and so there's also more of a curl
at the top. So it's almost like when you see
the letter R in the middle of a word, it almost
looks like the way today we write the letter
C. And then it gets connected back to the letter
beforehand at its top on the left side of the
character. So we have CR and then we've got a
bunch of minims again. So is it an m is it an
n it's an m it's an im and that is c -r -i -m
and in medieval catalan crimance or crims that
is a cognate for the english word crime so there
were crimes against joan himself there was a
crime carried out. And a crime can be a word
for like an attempted murder. So it's not just
like, you know, some kind of shenanigan or like
someone was rude. A crime is a word that's used
for serious attacks. So somebody, somebody carried
out some kind of attack on Joan. And I'm telling
you, like, I've not encountered information about
this before. I've read quite a bit about this
initial period. I think I've read everything
there is to read about the first months of January,
or first months of this year, 1387, and Joan
and Violant. The only thing that comes close
is this notion that develops that Sibilla had
carried out some sorcery and caused Joan to
fall ill. That is something that we're going
to see in some letters later on this year. It's
something that I think maybe they're verbally
talking about but not writing down. It's something
that is connected to the way Violant writes about
this time period when she's writing about it
later especially in a document that Josep Roca
found from April and it seems that there's some
other documents out there that haven't that I
haven't seen cited in the secondary literature
but are referred to in the secondary literature
and those documents are the basis for this idea
that people around Joan and Joan himself
concluded that Sibilla or someone in her employ
had carried out a curse had put a curse on Joan
and that's why he became so ill in the early
weeks of January 1387. So this crime against
Nostra Persona propria could could have been
that. It could have been someone that Joan thinks
put a curse on him. But in the first line, I
didn't even talk about the first line, kind of
working backward through the text here, it starts
out with the addressee comte car cosi the count
cousin most dear cousin count so i'm not quite
sure there's an actual like uh blood relationship
that connects Gaston Febus and Joan but there
might be so he he starts out the letter uh most
or not we don't have most it's just dear dear
cousin count and then the letter begins and we
talked about the crimes so the letter starts
there is somebody who has left this city somebody
has fled Barcelona and I'm sending Gerau to fill
you in on the details and he is possibly going
to be in your land and you'd better apprehend
him, please. So this is just bonkers. Like, I'm
really wondering who this person is and why wouldn't
Joan put his name in writing? That's an interesting
question to me. So there's just this next -level
feeling to today's document for so many different
reasons. There's the working in tandem between
Joan and Violant through this person, Gerau.
And then there's also just what is the crime
that was carried out against Joan? Is it the
sorcery? Or is it something else? Just don't
know. And I... goodness, I hope I find something
that reveals this later. Ah! Thanks for listening
to this episode 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. I'm leaving with more questions than
I arrived with, too, by the way. If that's you,
if we share this, then that's the sign of some
good history doing. 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, including
a bibliographical citation for Richard Vernier's
book, Lord of the Pyrenees. It's really good.
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.