Hello. In the Crown of Aragon, 639 years ago,
it was February 14, 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 1 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 is Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day,
everybody! Well, at the time that Joan and Violant
ruled as king and queen of the Crown of Aragon,
Valentine's Day celebrations had not really kicked
off just yet. There's some debate over whether
there's a reference to actual Valentine's Day
as we know it today as a celebration of love
in Chaucer. There's a bit of debate about whether
that reference really is to St. Valentine as
we think of Valentine's Day. But then in the
15th century, there's a lot of documentation
of Valentine's Day being celebrated as a day
to commemorate romantic love. But that's the
15th century, and we're still in the 1300s, well
before any known documentation of Valentine's
Day as a day to celebrate love. And so maybe
we should Return to a tradition that It's not
really a tradition at all. Actually, it's a moment
in the reign of King Joan the first of Aragon
and Queen Violant de Bar because on Valentine's
Day Joan and Violant were probably still talking
about the bishop of Valencia, and on Valentine's
Day itself, Violante wrote a letter to the pope
and told the pope how much she and Joan really
wanted the bishop of Valencia, James, Joanne's
first cousin, once removed, to become a cardinal.
So I think writing to the pope together is not
exactly a modern notion of romantic love but
I think that they were really in cahoots together
in this effort to get James the Bishop of Valencia
to become a cardinal and so I am happy to report
that on this Valentine's Day we do have some
evidence that Joan and Violant were, well, I
can't say expressing romantic love to the pope,
or the love that they had for each other to the
pope, but we just have another instance in which
we can see coordination between them in the letters
that we have in the registers. Now, this particular
letter has some interesting features and it's
in Latin so of course I struggled and of course
I went to chat GPT. First of all, we know that
the sender is Violant because it's in a register
of hers and at the bottom of it there's a clear
probata that labels Oh gosh, the ending is abbreviated,
and I don't have a good enough grasp of Latin
to tell you what the real ending is. But anyway,
we know it's from Violant. It's in a register
called varia. another Varia register, not the
same Varia as yesterday. So yes, there were two
different Varia registers being contributed to
at the same time. Or maybe the binding of these
Varia registers happened later and it wasn't
quite as intentional on part on the part of the
chancery staff to have two different varia registers
going at the same time the dating clause has
in it right before the date of the 14th of february
that the seal level is so it's not the same as
yesterday's, which was sigelo secreto acostumat.
This one ends in asueto, so I am just going to
try to investigate that and figure out the difference.
But I don't have it yet, so stay tuned. I'm gonna
get it by the end of this year. The difference
between Sigelo Secreto Acostumat and Sigelo Secreto
Assueto. There's some other interesting stuff
at the bottom of this letter. The first chunk
of Addressi material is the very long official
title of the Avignon Pope Clement. the sixth,
and I just want to point out we've had this once
before in the podcast, but the last line of that
three -line chunk has the word universalis, so
universalis ecclesiae, so the universal church.
It's a statement that keys into the overall tense
context of the Great Western Schism, and you
could hear Shadow feeling the tension of that
schism. Isn't that right, Shadow? Yeah. Yes,
okay. That's enough. It was disturbing. I haven't
talked about the Great Western Schism for a while,
so it'd probably be good to review that and to
explain what has got my cat Shadow so upset about
it. The Great Western Schism arose out of a dispute
over the selection of the pope after Gregory
XI had died, and that's it. So it's not really
much of a doctrinal difference between the two
sides that split. apart, they're instead just
really focused on the leadership dynamics and
the internal politics of the selection of the
pope. And so, oh, I think earlier I might have
accidentally said Clement VI, but actually it's
Clement VII, who is the pope in Avignon, and
the pope in Rome at this time is Urban VI. And
so the leaders of the various polities in Western
Europe had to make a choice or attempt to stay
neutral. This whole thing went down in 1378,
and at that time, Per the Ceremonious was on
the throne, and he had been around long enough,
he was kind of old at that point, he had been
around long enough to have seen all kinds of
crazy instability, and so he figured, you know
what, they're just gonna sort this out. I'm not
gonna bother taking a side here. And he wanted
to just wait it out. But unfortunately, it was
gonna go on for a while. It actually doesn't
get resolved until after 1400. And so Joan,
who had a bit more of a forethought of the future
in his worldview. He decided that he was going
to make a choice, and with his Francophilia,
he chose the Avignon Pope, Clement VII. we see
actually that Joan is one of the most steadfast
allies of the Avignon papacy. And then one other
thing that I'll reiterate from an earlier episode
is that the pope who comes to power after Clement
VII, which is well, this transition happens in
the 1390s at some point, That person is from
the Crown of Aragon. That person is actually
from the DeLuna family, related to Marti's wife,
Maria DeLuna. Not a super close relation, but
like definitely in the clan, and so the Avignon
papacy becomes so closely connected to the Crown
of Aragon over the course of Joan and Violant's
reign. My feeling as I'm looking at the documentation
and reading the secondary literature is that
Violant has some kind of connection also to
Clement VII. I haven't found exactly what that
is, but I think her social network and the social
network of Clement VII have a lot of overlap.
So we see Violant writing to the Pope directly
on a lot of occasions, and this is one of them
because I looked around the other pages in Joan's
register from when he wrote to the Cardinals
about James, the Bishop of Valencia, and I couldn't
find a letter from Joan to the Pope directly,
but here's Violant a couple days later. writing
to the Pope directly and saying, hey, my husband
the King and I would be very pleased if you could
expedite, there's the word expedire there in
this letter, if you could expedite this process
for James the Bishop of Valencia to become a
Cardinal. So that's actually the content of this
letter, but there's one last bit of writing at
the very bottom of the folio underneath the chunk
for the addressee of the Pope himself. And in
this selection, we've got some language that
indicates that all of the Cardinals in the College
of Cardinals are also going to get a copy of
this letter, but it's going to be somehow adjusted.
So the last phrase in that bottom chunk is So
something is going to be left out sine without
the subscript. and I'm not quite sure how much
of an adjustment is being indicated here, but
I do find it really interesting that the scribes
took the time to spell out that there would be
a difference in content for the copies of this
letter that are being sent to the College of
Cardinals, because usually they don't get that
nitty -gritty with what is going to be different
about copies. So maybe this is indicating there's
something a bit more different in the outgoing
letters, the copies that are going to or the
one copy that's going to go to the College of
Cardinals. Or maybe they're just making sure
to be super clear because this is a high status
recipient. I do want to say at this point that
I'm noticing that Violant writes to the Pope
a lot. Like, it's almost like every other day
she's writing to the Pope. So it's like the Pope
update of the day, it seems. But in this instance,
we've got the coordinated effort between Joan
and Violant. on behalf of the bishop of Valencia,
trying to get him to become a cardinal. So it's
not just, you know, the latest pope update or
like the latest thing on the pope list from Violant.
We've got, in addition to that, we've got this
coordinated effort that's happening that I see
again and again and again, and others such as
Claire Ponsich have pointed out is just happening
a lot in the correspondence of Joan and Violant.
I did want to just mention really quickly something
else about Valencia, which is that it is very
closely interwoven into the governance and economy
of the Crown of Aragon. It's been under the sovereignty
of the Crown of Aragon for about 150 years. So
we're not talking about some kind of far -flung
random region. We're talking about a very interwoven
part of the Crown of Aragon, as you can imagine
from the fact that one of the main authorities
there is the First cousin once removed of Joan
himself, and I'm talking about James the Bishop
of Valencia. All right, 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 have done my job. 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,
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.