Hello. In the Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was February 15th, 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.
Alright folks, you ready for a time warp? This,
I mean we're already in a giant time warp, but
even further, or I guess even more winding, this
document takes us back all the way to episode
two. from December 26th, the second day of 1387.
If you weren't here for the beginning of the
podcast, you might not know this, but the day
for New Year's Day shifted. And in some places,
it was all the way in March on Annunciation Day.
But in the Crown of Aragon in this time period,
they celebrated the new year and changed over
the date of the year on December 25th and so
our first episode of the podcast, following along
everything that happened in 1387, it was December
25th. And then episode two, second day of the
year, was December 26th. And on that day, Joan
wrote a letter to somebody who he started the
letter off as Maestro Caro Amigo. Maestro Caro
Amigo. And this letter starts off the same way.
But if you go back and look at our document from
December 26th, Episode 2, what you'll notice
is that there's a difference in the addressee
listed at the bottom of the letter. And this
really threw me off. I didn't really connect
it back when I first was working on this letter.
I've actually seen a lot of letters from Joan
and Violant to the master of the hospitallers,
Juan Fernandez de Heredia. and they almost always
in the address line at the bottom will have the
term roda the master of Rhodes because the title
of the head of the hospitallers was the master
of Rhodes as in like the island the greek island
Rhodes because that's where the headquarters of
the order of the hospitallers was located by contrast
This letter's addressee line at the bottom gets
into some really tough paleography at the end.
The first part is pretty readable. It's a dirigir,
so directed to Magistro, the master, and
then we got our tough word. The first letter
is almost certainly an H. it just does not look
like an H, but if you compare it to the, let's
see, sixth word in the third to last line, it's
there saying, havemos, that H, this particular
scribe just puts like the hump of the H really
high up. And so if you compare, the H there to
what we see at the beginning of this last word
of the line. It becomes a passable H and a better
contender for the letter H than as it would be
a contender for any other letter. And then the
O is sort of clear, and then the letter S, it
just looks a lot like the P that follows it,
but it's a little bit skinnier, so I think we
can be pretty sure that this is H -O -S -P, and
then I -T is pretty clear, and then the A is
not clear, but it sort of follows the strokes
that an A would usually have, and then L -I -S.
I used ChatGPT, for this letter and I have to
say this is the instance in the podcast where
I have gotten the most leverage out of what the
large language model chat bots can do because
while I could have gone through and googled a
lot of the stuff in here and figured out the
same thing that ChatGPT retrieved for me pretty
much. It would have taken me three hours and
ChatGPT was able to provide it in like 10 minutes
at most. So first off, I wanted to just have
ChatGPT run through some other possibilities
for what this last word in the addressee line
could possibly be, but chat GPT came down on
the same side of this as I did that it's really
got to be hospitalis especially because at the
end of the second line of the letter we've I
think got the word orden so we're talking about
an order and then other little clues in the letter
help out with that too so Joan is writing to
somebody that he calls Maestro Caro Amigo. The
person could be identified as the master of the
hospitallers. And so I think it's just got to
be Juan Fernandez de Heredia. And I am just really
surprised to not see some form of Rhodes in the
Addressee line, so I'm still holding out like
a little cautionary note here that maybe this
is not Juan Fernández de Heredia, but I'm...
I don't know, I'm like at this like 98 % sure
that it is. And then that can take us back to
compare to corroborate what we had from December
26th of 1387, which is, remember, before February
15th of the same year. And in that earlier letter,
we've got a recommendation for some kind of ecclesiastical
post. This letter takes that whole thing a step
further. And again, it's it is just it's chat
GPT that has surfaced some of this for me in
a way that I honestly don't think I would have
had the time to discover on my own just through
Googling and so forth. What I learned is that
the place name that is mentioned in the seventh
line is near Tourelle and that place in the letter
is Vielle or Ville. And that is a small town
that is near the city of Teruel. And Teruel has
been around ever since Roman times and was actually
the site of a really terrible bloody battle during
the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Teruel is about
halfway between Zaragoza in the north and Valencia.
in the south on the coast of the Mediterranean,
and it's a mountainous region, generally speaking.
And so this particular location is in the province
named after Teruel, and the town in this letter,
mentioned in this letter, Vielle or Ville, is
the site of what is today ruins of what was originally
a templar castle. The Order of the Templars,
the Knights Templars, when they were going strong
they had a castle in this town and it was part
of their overall network of castles and so on
and so forth. And then the templars were persecuted
and started to peter out, and the hospitallers
took over a lot of their properties and territories,
and this particular castle is one of those. So
Joan, in this letter, is recommending somebody
named Brother Almany de Choulouet, or Ehoulouet,
and The last part of the name there is correspondent
to the modern town of Ejulve. So maybe even at
that time that U would have been pronounced as
a V. In Latin, by the way, the U's and the V's
are interchangeable. So Joan is recommending
this particular friar. for the command position
of this hospitaller castle. But then there's
more! This particular posting was actually the
first major assignment, the first major posting
for Juan Fernández de Heredia himself, decades
earlier. And so this is an interesting full circle
moment, maybe rife with nostalgia. But I don't
know if Joan is aware of that. My guess is that
he is because this letter seems to me to be pretty
overflowing with praise and it's a strong recommendation
letter. I think in today's parlance we would
say something like, I recommend with the highest
enthusiasm. And so possibly Joan is nudging at
Juan Fernandez de Heredia saying, I've found
somebody that you would be proud to have in the
post that you once held when you were starting
out. So there's that little poetic resonance
that honestly I would not have been able to connect
very easily. It would have taken me some time.
It would have gotten there eventually, but This
is still a bit tangential to my main research
question. I'm not really seeing much about the
relationship between Joan and Violant together
surfacing in this letter. Maybe something else
will come along down the road and it'll trigger
that connection, but I was able to leverage the
large language model very beautifully to bring
out some interesting details in this letter.
So I'm not one to say that you should always
use ChatGPT or always use an AI chatbot. I'm
just saying that if you use it, cautiously, and
you practice with it, and you don't give yourself
over to it, but you remain open to what it could
deliver for you, then you have a lot of benefits
to be gained. And in other situations, I've been
really like, oh, it was more of a waste of time
to use chat GPT. But in this situation, it really,
it really paid off. I also want to One last thing
that Chat GPT didn't really pick out, but I want
to highlight is that in a close reading of this
document, I just want to note this word that
to me is helping to think of this letter as invoking
a bit more of an emotional connection, not necessarily
the nostalgic twist that I was talking about
before. but it's this word that is in that third
line from the bottom where we had looked for
the letter H and that weird way of writing H
in havemos and right afterwards it's the word
acorazon and the last three letters are CON,
but the C has a çedilla, which makes it a soft
C, which then what could later be turned into
the letter Z. And so we have some kind of reference
to the heart here, if unless I'm reading this
wrong, and there's like another definition. But
that's what I think right now is that there's
this reference to the heart that there's some
kind of extra umph emotionally that had to do
with the deeds that have have been carried out
by this this um i think it's referring to the
deeds of the friar alamani but it could actually
be um in connection Joan has some special connection
to this friar emotionally, or it could be invoking
the special connection between Joan and Juan
Fernández de Heredia. So, not quite sure where
the corazón connection is, but it's there. And
I just want to note that particular word and
see when that word might come up again in future
letters. Of course, there's still so many unanswered
questions, like, did Fray Alemani de Ejulve
get the job? And what happened to him afterwards?
Did Violant also correspond with Juan Fernandez
de Heredia, the master of Rhodes, the master of
the hospitalers, around these days? Was this
particular person mentioned in her letters? Well...
It's really hard to figure out until these become
searchable. And as the paleography presents so
much of a challenge, it's incredibly difficult
to make them searchable. Although with advances
in optical character recognition and handwritten
text recognition, there might actually be full
text searchability of these in the not too distant
future. Alright, 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, including links to
little Wikipedia pages about all these different
places, and also a link back to episode two,
where you can see the other letter to Juan Fernandez
de Heredia. 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.