Hello. In The Crown of Aragon, 639 years ago,
it was February 10th, 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. Are you ready for some economics? Yes,
today is going to be really economics focused.
And if that made you groan, if you were like,
Ooh, I think I'm just going to hit that skip
to the next episode button. Keep in mind a couple
things. First, if you're listening to this on
February 10th, you are not going to be able to
skip to the next episode because it isn't released
yet. So just keep listening to this one. Second,
even if you're listening to this at a time when
it's quite easy to skip to the next episode.
Then I want you to just take a step back and
think about when I say the word economics how
what I'm talking about can be expanded. And it's
really easy to think about economics as just
like the boring graphs about supply and demand
and just money and budgets. But economics is
about any kind of human decision making that
takes value into account. And it's also about
exchange and how people related to each other.
So in every economic transaction or in every
economic project, there are all kinds of larger
values imbued and you can see in the budgets
and the numbers and the graphs the result of
a lot of really interesting stuff that we don't
normally associate with money and the stereotypical
idea of economics. And that really is something
that's a major focus of mine in this particular
project that I'm looking at in this season of
the Historian's Notebook, because one of the
major criticisms leveled at Joan and Violant
is that they were financially irresponsible.
And when all these modern historians, well, and
also the early modern historians, or the historians
that came within 100 years of their reign, when
those writers are telling the story of Joan
and Violant, they're almost all going to this
reputation of theirs for being financially irresponsible.
And then you don't get until the end of the 20th
century with Dawn Bratsch Prince, you don't get
a revision of that until a feminist scholar starts
looking. And when you take a point of view, an
historiographical angle, on Joan and Violant
and this question of financial responsibility,
you start to see it in a lot of the writings
that when people are talking about their management
of money, they're also talking about gender.
that it's coupled so frequently that Joan is
seen as a, quote, effeminate king, and then was
bad with money. It's really interesting to see
how these are coupled, these ideas about Joan
are coupled, and then also, especially in the
older... secondary literature on Joan and Violant
there's the criticism of Violant as not knowing
her place and being too masculine and acting
as a man and not being you know womanly enough
and then oh the finances were terrible so I'm
really curious about the story of the money and
what was going on with economics at the time
because I really want to know whether it's accurate
to say that Joan and Violant were significantly
worse with money than others around their time
or maybe just before. And then I also want to
know even if they were. How was the discussion
of financial matters imbued or affected or influenced
by ideas about how a king wasn't really being
the king measuring up to expectations of what
this exemplar of masculinity should be and how
a queen would not be measuring up to expectations
of what a queen should be. And the economics
is a place where you can see this happening.
So when we go deep into the economics, we're
building our background knowledge, our foundation
for being able to understand some of the criticisms
that come later. So that is just a huge historiographical
context for today's document. Today's document
is in Latin. But with the help of good old ChatGPT,
I feel that I really understand what's happening
in this Latin document. Hooray! I feel like it's
been a rough go with understanding the Latin.
But in this situation, I feel pretty confident
that I know what's going on. Also, because ChatGPT
was able to find some scholarly publications
that have filled in the picture for me. And actually,
I should clarify that last part. The second one
that is very helpful, the second article that
I'll mention today, I actually already had looked
at a couple years ago, but I'd forgotten about
it. and ChatGPT flagged it in its search. And
I was like, oh, yeah, I remember that article.
And then I went back, looked at my notes. I'm
going to put a quote from that article on the
web page. All right, let's talk about this document.
It's in the commune register. So it's not a secret
seal document like yesterday's. It's one that
is maybe at this level of just normal business
of the crown, of the king. And Joan is sending
a warning to the officials of Lleida, Lerida.
And he's warning them that if they don't pay
up to a certain fellow named Berenguer de Almencario,
then they're going to be in trouble. So what
does the municipality of Lleida owe to Berenguer
de Almencario? That... Oh, I should have said
his name is Berenguer. Berenguer de Almancario.
The answer to the question gets into this larger
picture of the economics in the Crown of Aragon
at this time. And something that I really want
to emphasize is that this economy was highly
financialized. What do I mean by saying highly
financialized? When there's a lot of commerce,
it means there's a lot of buying and selling
in the marketplace and shipments and stuff like
that. When we say that an economy is highly financialized,
what that means is that there was a lot of investment,
there were a lot of loan instruments, there was
a lot of banking. And so when we look at the
Crown of Aragon in the late 14th century, we're
looking at a very extensive network of borrowing
and lending money, of loans and debts and creditors.
And it is gigantic. If you are interested in
economic history already, and the stuff I was
saying at the beginning of the episode, you were
like, oh yeah, I'm on board. There's so much
to study here because the number of loan instruments,
the number of arrangements of debtors and creditors,
it's just astonishing. It really is something
that makes a person question the difference between
modern capitalism and what we're looking at in
the 14th century, which most would call a pre
-modern time. So what is the nature of the particular
debt that the municipality of Lleida has? It's
called a censal. And the censal is like what
in our time we would call a bond, where the city
has run out of money and they just got to borrow
some and then they pay it back and they pay interest
on it. And Berenguer de Almencario was wealthy
and could afford to loan Lleida some money. How
do I know that Berenguer de Almencario was wealthy?
He appears in a dissertation by Joaquin Salleras Clarió
and he's listed in a couple different
records as having lent out money to other municipalities.
He seems to have been... a very wealthy person
in Valencia, which I'm not quite sure what to
make of because that's pretty far from Lleida,
and maybe he just wasn't in Valencia the whole
time and he was living someplace closer, or maybe
he was really wealthy and just had loans, these
censal loans to a bunch of different municipalities.
I'm not quite sure what to make of that Valencia
connection. But here, this Latin letter is Joan
writing to this municipality saying, as king,
doing a little sourcing here, as king, I'm telling
you that you need to pay this guy. He's let me
know you haven't paid him and you owe him quite
a lot of money. So it seems like we're looking
at a sum. of I think uh well it says a hundred
what does it say a hundred three hundred pounds
it's the unit of currency is llibres so that's
a lot of money I'm not quite sure why we don't
have a thousand numerical I just noticed this
that the unit uh the The number is like a hundred
of three hundreds. Anyway, it's a lot of money.
And what Joan is saying is that if you, city
of LIeida, don't pay up, then I am going to fine
you, that you'll have to pay to me, a hundred
florins. So you better pay up. And so here what
we have is the king advocating on behalf of a
creditor to a city. And the article that gives
some really great background context to this
is won by three authors actually in a collection
on pre -modern European finances. Manuel Sanchez,
Angel Selma Muñoz, and Antoni Furio in 2008 wrote
in an English language, which has a native English
speaker I'm really grateful for. They wrote a
real great breakdown of the financial instruments
that were utilized by cities in the 14th century.
And it's available. They've generously made it
available for free on the academia .edu website
for I can't remember which one of them. I'll
put a link to it in the web page for today's
episode. So cities often found themselves short
of cash. And there were all kinds of different
types of loans that they could take out, and
the censal, which is mentioned here in Latin
a couple times in this letter. Censualem is,
I think, how you pronounce it in the Latin. In
this particular document, it appears a couple
different times. I think, well, one that's sticking
out to me is in the fifth line from the bottom.
in the middle of that line, you can see it. Oh,
it's also in the fourth line, third word from
the end. So these Censals were a type of loan
that we would call a bond. And yeah, you just
paid it back with interest and you could get
a cash infusion if you were a city that was running
out of money. And so There were all kinds of
lone instruments, and this was one of them. And
the exact details of it, that granular level,
you have to kind of dig a little bit deeper into
that. But basically, they all had different lone
terms, like in duration, and when the interest
would accumulate. frequency of what's the term
for for this I can't remember but the frequency
of when that interest is is accrued all of that
could vary and so that is why we've got a bunch
of different terms here and then also levels
of guarantee would affect a loan instrument being
categorized in one category versus another the
Loans that Joan and Violant took a lot of heat
for taking out are called mogubells. And hopefully
I'll encounter a record of a mogubell sometime
this year. And at that point, I'll go into greater
detail about the mogubells, but they were really
usurious. I mean, the interest rates on these
could be really out of control. There wasn't
a lot of regulation about interest rates, and
so you could charge someone a gigantic, exploitative
level of interest rate, and if they accepted
that contract they would be on the hook for paying
that exorbitant amount of money as it compounded
over time. There was what the authors of this
article that I have just been talking about There
was a, quote, constant financial emergency on
the part of municipalities and also on the part
of the royal family, pretty much from the 1340s
all the way until the end of the 14th century.
Père, the ceremonious, Joan's father, was
a wrecking ball when it came to the financial
networks of the Crown of Aragon. He at one point
in 1381 just said, I'm not gonna pay the loan
back. You're just gonna have to eat that. And
he said that to one of the most prominent banks
in Barcelona. And that bank, it collapsed and
it was like a financial crisis for the banking
system of the Crown of Aragon. and what Joan
and Violant inherit is the aftermath of a lot
of of that. So basically there's a very intense
financialized system that at the same time is
rocked by certain scandals occasionally and then
also by bankruptcies, and as we look at who's
taking out loans, which government entities,
which individuals are taking out the loans, and
then who is giving the loans, who are the creditors,
we will start to see some very interesting things.
And I will just put out one name for the moment
for you to keep a lookout for when thinking about
the economics. of the Crown of Aragon in the
late 14th century, and that is a Genoese fellow
named Lucchino Scarampi. And we've got a document
that involves Lucchino Scarampi coming up in a
little while. All right, thanks for listening
to this episode of the Historian's Notebook,
season one, 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. But hey,
over the course of this year, we're going to
come back to economics, so maybe at that point
it'll be less dissatisfying. 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.