Hello. In the Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was February 17, 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. In 1387, February 17th was a Sunday,
and I think that that explains why I had a bit
of a problem locating letters, documents from
this day. I'm really trying to track whether
there seemed to be fewer... letters and documents
from the Saturdays and the Sundays. So I went
to Daniel Girona y Llagostera's itinerary, and
he has listed the documents that we're looking
at today in his itinerary that tracks a document
for every day of the reign of Joan, and places
his location. So Daniel Girona y Llagostera has
done a really wonderful service to my mission,
which is to actually have at least one document
a day for every single day of Joan's reign,
and even actually he did this for when Joan
was the Duke of Girona. He did not do it for
Violant de Bar, so sometimes it's harder to
find documents for a particular day for Violant.
Today's document is in the register that's labeled
Curie, C -U -R -I -E, and in my understanding,
thus far. That means the court, the king's court.
And so I believe that these documents have more
of a group authorship than what we would see
in other registers. I'm kind of coming to a better
understanding of some of the organization of
the archive of the Crown of Aragon. I'm also
on a reinvigorated mission to really untangle
some of the Latin abbreviations in the probata
section. The signature of whatever chancery scribe
was copying down the letter. And so we're going
to look at some of that today. This particular
document is, I think, something that I have a
good understanding of even though it's in Latin.
And I feel kind of good about myself because
I'm trying to have a good growth mindset about
Latin and how it's very difficult for me. But
if I... think of it as a puzzle, and then I have
a bit of a helper in terms of the AI chatbot,
then I can make some progress. And little by
little, I'm getting a sense that when I encounter
a Latin document, especially if it's a short
one like this, then it's within my grasp. So
I'm happy to say that I'm quite sure about the
general content of this letter, but we're going
to get a little bit more into the sourcing of
it first. So again, I think that this is a letter
from the court that this is something not necessarily
attributed to Joan as like an individual decision
on his part, but is more about the business of
maybe a governing council or a group of people
that of course Joan has final say over. The
addressee of the letter is the vicario of Roussillon,
that's the Latin term, and this I'm pretty sure
is translatable to veger, so in Catalan, V -E
-G -U -E -R. We've encountered veguers in earlier
documents, and they're basically a chief administrative
authority for the state in a particular region.
So the overlap between Bailiff and Veguer can
be a little bit confusing for me, but I think
that the Veguer has more authority. And this
is not somebody that is an employee or an authority
under the municipality. This is definitely a
person who reports back to the overall government
of the Crown of Aragon, the larger state above
the municipality. So we have the addressee. We've
got a little bit about possibly the authorship
here as different from, say, a letter that Joan
himself would have written or dictated. And so
now let's get into the content of the letter.
It appears that there's a fellow named Guillem,
or Guillermo de Modes, or de Modas. And I'm a
little shaky on that last name because Modas
is a Latin word, but I'm pretty sure it's the
surname of Guillermo. This Guillermo is currently,
I think... arrested and imprisoned. He's, I'm
pretty sure, referred to as a captive, and he
is in money trouble. There's a word in line five
of this letter that has survived from its ancient
Roman usage all the way into English today. And
that says something once you hear what this word
is. The word is creditor. So when somebody has
lent you money and you owe it to them, that is
that person is your creditor. And goodness, it's
telling that this is one of the Latin words that
has survived in its spelling and in its meaning
across the ages and across all of the linguistic
development that took place as classical Latin
got broken into all these regional vernaculars.
Yes, people have been lending money and have
been owing money pretty much consistently for
a very, very long time. So the word creditor
is very stable over time and place. Here in this
letter, we've got a Latin ending on the word
creditor. So the word as it reads on line five
is creditoribus. Now the i -b -u -s ending can
make the word creditor either the dative or the
ablative. And what that means is that the word
creditor could be functioning in the sentence
as if it was with the preposition to that would
be the dative to the creditors and that is plural.
And then it could also be something like with
or for or about the creditors. That last scenario
would be the ablative. And then if we were to
say to the creditors, that would be the dative.
So I've given you a little bit of a grammar lesson
there in terms of Latin grammar, but all of that
is to illustrate something that I've mentioned
a couple times, but I haven't really taken the
time to break down with an example, which is
that in Latin, the nouns have endings, and it
can change the function of that word in the grammatical
sense of the sentence. So this makes it very
difficult to unpack when translating, because
you have to, in a sense, decide, like in this
case, well, what is the preposition that's being
used before the word creditors. And if you have
a lot of these in a sentence, you can get very
easily tangled up in how the phrases are put
together. And in fact, one word at the far end
of a sentence can refer back to a word way earlier,
and sorting this out can be incredibly time consuming.
So I just wanted to draw out this one example
in order to help you understand why it takes
me sometimes several hours, even after getting
the help from an AI chatbot to figure out the
meaning of a Latin document. Now, that's not
even taking into account the paleographical challenge.
Line five, the same one that has the word creditoribus,
also has a really difficult paleographical challenge.
The first word in that line, the initial letters
are small and it's like I think the scribe forgot
the word that He had intended to write and then
added in a prefix later so he had one word in
mind as he was copying the letter and then maybe
looking back at it or Like halfway through the
line or something he realized. Oh wait that's
not the right word and so he squeezed something
in and you can totally tell that he did it because
he's really good otherwise about starting the
lines in a way that they're all lined up they're
they're all you know very well i guess we would
say justified according to to the margin so it's
clear to me that What happened here is that the
scribe had intended to write, well, what I figured
out eventually, nonnullis, and accidentally wrote
simply nullis, and then later on came back and
put in an NO with a macron on top in order to
put in the non for nonnullis. that really changes
the meaning because it's basically putting a
negation prefix in front of the word and then
what it turns into when you have non nullis is
several like it's the equivalent of saying like
not none but it's not to say that in English
is not very colloquial, at least these days.
And so in Latin, it's it's not as weird sounding
to say no, no less. It just means several. So
the phrase we have here is to several of his
creditors. Because the next word is suis, which
is his possessive. All right, so. I did not immediately
recognize the little letters that were added
after the initial writing to the left of nullis
on line 5. I thought that possibly there was
a letter M followed by an O because I guess it
just... to me it it looks like there really could
be like three minims and and i think the scribe
intended to write two minims i don't know you
kind of look at the n in nullis and then compare
that to what's being squeezed in there to the
left and you can see that there's maybe an intention
to have the letter N, but at first glance it
really looks like it could be the letter M, and
so initially when I put in my transcription into
ChatGPT, ChatGPT returned this idea that it was
the word monelis, and that this was referring
to coinage, and it had this very confident statement
that monilis was common in medieval Latin to
refer to coinage, which I had never heard before.
And so I had some doubts. And in the transcript
later, after asking it to search for this Guillermo
didn't really find anything. After that, I returned
to this earlier question. about its interpretation,
Monilus, and it turns out that ChatGPT just
made that up. And there was just no basis for
it to say that it was a common word for coinage
in medieval Latin. So this is a really good lesson
to hit home the fact that as of February 2026,
these large language models, these chatbots,
they cannot be depended upon 100%. They are tools,
but you've got to treat them as helpers and rough
guides and not as the final authorities. When
I am using the AI chatbots which I use like all
the time to help me with translation I always
take it with a grain of salt and I'm always looking
to see if there is something I can catch it at
because I know that situations like this happen
and I'll bet you that in probably over half of
what I've done with the AI chatbots I've missed
something like this so You just cannot use them
as a solid 100 % foundation. You've got to use
them as a rough guide, a starting point for future
work, not as the end of your knowledge building
process. Great example in this one. All right.
I mentioned earlier that I'm reinvigorated in
my search for unpacking the probata information.
Just look at the probata for this document. It's
almost like the scribe added extra curves little
like river pathway curves to the probata symbol
at the end because he knew that there was a lot
going on just compare it to the probata that
appears higher up in the page that's associated
with the document that ends the first half of
this folio and so there's a lot of abbreviation
i definitely can see that In the third -to -last
and second -to -last words of the first line
of the probata, we've got X pro, but then that
word that begins with F, not quite sure what's
going on there. There's an abbreviation at the
end that could be a UM, but I'm not sure. And
then I definitely see second -to -the -last word
in the last line of the probata. But I don't
know what's coming after that. So I asked another
AI helper perplexity to do a search to see if
there were any articles that really just kind
of broke down what's in the probata. And it didn't
really find anything directly, but it did come
up with an article by Joan Bertrand Todoli.
about some of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon
practices. And in that, there was a citation
from one of our friends of the show. I mean,
not literally. Don't know him, but he comes up
all the time. Josep Trenchs i Odena. He co -authored
a book with Antonio Maria Argo and Rafael Conde
Delgado de Molina. about the documentary notarial
practices of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon.
So I'm ordering that through interlibrary loan
and that might have some information about the
probata because it was cited as possibly really
breaking down some of the Chancery practices
into a longer explanation. It was cited by Beltran
Todoli. So I'll put both these sources in the
bibliography and Stay tuned in the coming weeks
for more. Yeah shadow stay tuned. I know For
more information about the probata. We are gonna
crack it. I have a feeling All right, should
I rerecord that shadow or should we leave your
little exclamation meows in? I think we'll leave
you in. I think people like hearing you. At least,
when it's not quite as shrill as it could be.
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.
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.