Hello. In the Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was February 21, 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.
So on this podcast, we tackle a lot. We make
our best attempt at the Latin. We really flex
our Catalan vocabulary. We manage cats who jump
up on the desk right as we start recording. And
so there's a lot happening. And then we're also
trying to understand some big mysteries. like
how was the Archive of the Crown of Aragon organized?
And also some thematic questions, like how did
Joan and Violant relate to each other in a
way that might have been unusual and especially
in consideration of gender roles, non -conformist?
Or were they actually not that unusual and rather
conformist. These are some of the big questions,
but there's another one that's been with us all
along, and that's the part about the technology
that I'm using in order to engage with the history
here. And there's a bunch of different technological
angles that are happening all at once as I make
this podcast. I mean, first of all, I'm recording
on digital device and broadcasting out through
the podcast distribution network and and just
kind of bringing you in to the sound of my voice
as I interpret these documents as opposed to
just blogging about it or writing a little newsletter
that I can print out and put in an envelope and
put a stamp on it. So the very way that I'm communicating
this out in this moment is a technological angle.
There's also the technological angle of the Archive
of the Crown of Aragon having been digitized
by the Spanish government, and a lot of unnamed
labor done by digitizers who went through and
took digital images of all of these pages in
these registers. And they are available at any
time of day. on the internet on a website that
is funded and maintained by the government of
Spain. So there's a lot of resources just out
there that are incredibly useful for this project
that were not there just about 20 years ago.
Then there's the brand new technological tools,
and I'm talking about the AI chatbots. And you've
seen me work with chat GPT primarily. And I'm
trying to model how to use those responsibly.
And thus far, the chat bots have been a good
assist. They've helped me to notice some things
that I might not have otherwise noticed, but...
I don't feel like I've been able to really just
like hand it over to the chatbot, especially
because the paleography is so difficult. Well,
there's been a development, and in this process
of going through and looking at how the year
progressed day by day for Joan and Violant,
I'm also simultaneously charting how the technology
available for me from the AI, well I don't know
what you want to call it, the AI wave that's
hitting, how that is changing throughout the
course of this year. And today I'm sharing with
you the results of the latest Google Gemini release.
I had heard that Gemini 3 was a big deal, but
I hadn't really played around with it. There
had been a time last year at the end of the year
when I was really disappointed with Gemini when
it came to some of its analysis, and so I've
kind of been a little shy to go back to Gemini.
But then I was having a conversation in the Amaranth
Digital Humanities Studio at the University of
New Mexico, my workplace. I'm the studio manager
of Amaranth. Check it out. It's a link on my
website. If you haven't visited the website for
Amaranth, check it out. Well, I was having a
conversation there with my dissertation advisor,
Fred Gibbs. He said, you know what? Gemini is
really strong with the analysis and generation
of images. See if it can handle the paleography.
And I was skeptical, but holy cow, I am here
to report to you all that I... cropped today's
document from the image of folio 132 R in register
1822. I uploaded it into Gemini, hopefully not
in a gross violation of the rules from Pares,
but this is, I mean, this is a big deal. This
is an educational endeavor that, I mean, the
the benefits totally outweigh the detriments
in possibly not using this document in a way
that is what the folks at Pares would be comfortable
with because it was able to transcribe this document
with all of the paleography and the abbreviations
with like a 90 % or higher accuracy. And it did
mess up a couple things, but when I corrected
those couple things, it then gave me a transcription
that it could then in turn translate from the
Latin. And I've tested out some of the phrases,
and it looks like... it did an accurate job of
translating. And I will tell you that I did my
due diligence because I'm currently in a Latin
study group, and that's led by Dr. Timothy Graham,
one of the premier Latinists, not just at the
University of New Mexico, but in the United States.
he leads our group through different documents
that we get to choose and this month I've been
able to submit to the group a document from actually
February 28th. The February 28th episode is going
to be about the document that the Latin group
is working on and so we transcribed and translated
it and I then tested Gemini and Google Gemini
produced pretty much the same product in terms
of transcription and translation that our Latin
group did. So to say that this is a breakthrough
is an understatement. There's just this gigantic
benefit of being able to get to the meaning of
these documents so much more quickly. I'm not
going to hand over everything to Google Gemini,
but For example, in today's document, which I
did, as I said before, upload onto Gemini, I
have a crystal clear understanding of at least
the general topic, and I do not have to worry
that I've got the general topic wrong. When it
comes to the exact valence of the translation,
there's definitely going to be areas where it's
just not correct, but in terms of, like, if I
spent two days on this document, that's how long
it would take me to get to where Gemini got,
and I would probably not do better because Latin
is just so darn challenging. which I've explained
about why on this podcast before, so I'm not
going to go into that anymore. So this is February,
and we're already at this level of technological
sophistication with handling the 14th century
paleography of the secretarial hand, the cursive,
right? It's not even like the kind of paleography
that could have been made with with a printing
press because it's so exact and careful. There's
a lot of in this document you can see there's
wormholes and there's a lot of places where the
scribe was just you know ambiguous in the way
that the letter was written and Gemini 3 was
able to handle that. It's just really it's astonishing
and what's going to happen I said we're in February.
Where are we going to be in July? Where are we
going to be in October of this year in terms
of the power of these tools? So that's something
that I'm charting as we go. And it's part of
the project because how history gets made is
going to change because of AI. The principles
behind the choices that we make and the information
that we work from, those are not going to change.
It's all the same documentary record and it's
all the same sets of tools and interpretive lenses
and the expertise of knowing which questions
to ask. That all is the same, so AI is not taking
over the writing of history unless you want really
bad history. But it's assisting those with the
expertise in order to get to some stuff more
quickly and from a different angle. But... you
always have to keep in mind that doing it the
old way will get you some different results that
can be just as interesting. So we shouldn't be
talking about wholesale replacement of methods
here. Hopefully there will be plenty of people
that want to keep using the traditional methods
and we need them in order to help catch when
the new methods are making a mistake. So what
is this document about? Goodness, we're all the
way into this episode, and I haven't even talked
about the document. Well, that just happens sometimes.
This document is a really great window into interfaith
encounter in the 14th century Crown of Aragon.
And anybody who's interested in the history of
Jews in medieval Iberia should look at this document.
and look at it in context with some of the work,
some of the foundational work of Yitzhak Baer,
who wrote about the town just a little bit in
his two -volume history of the Jews in Christian
Spain all the way back from the 1950s. He wrote
about Alcañiz. Alcañiz is a town about 90 kilometers
southeast of Zaragoza. And there is a very significant
Jewish community in that town. And it actually
produced later on, when we get into the beginning
of the 15th century, a figure who was very prominent
in the Disputation of Tortosa. And that was an
event in which the conversos, those who had converted
from Judaism to Christianity, had a debate with
Jews who had not converted. And so the process
of conversion and the pressure to convert is
already something that's going to be starting
in the late 14th century. It really picks up
after 1391. So we are before that 1391 dividing
line. Why is 1391 a dividing line? Because there
was a massive wave of anti -Jewish riots. in
1391. It started in Castile. It quickly spread
into the Crown of Aragon, where people just decided
we're gonna riot and take the property of the
Jews, get into violent altercations, murders.
It was awful, and the whole explanation of that
is one that completely contradicts the convivencia
narrative. of the history of medieval Spain,
and it's not like it marks the end of Convivencia
because there was always conflict in the interfaith
encounter between Christians, Jews, and Muslims
in medieval Spain. There was also always cooperation.
It's just a question of what was winning out
and why at different times. So the mass movement
of the anti -Jewish riots in 1391 is its own
separate topic of study from, I would say, a
historical sociology point of view. And it's
an interesting one, and please read Benjamin
Gampel's book. It's just so good, and it's about
the royal response, so it's really prominently
about Joan and Violant. All right, the town
of Alcañiz was also written about more recently
by a Spanish historian Carlos Laliena Corbera,
and I'll put a link to that article in the bibliography
on the web page. There were, according to the
documents that Laliena Corbera analyzed, there
were about 300 to 600 people in the Jewish quarter
in Alcañiz around 1370. So it was about 60 families.
And by the middle of the 1300s, some of the members
of that community had become very large bankers,
you could say, and moneylenders. So there's that
stereotype of the Jewish moneylender that is
so easy to fall into. Just keep in mind that
this was a segment of the population that had
gotten involved in lending money to the larger
community members around Alcañiz. It doesn't
describe the entirety of the Jewish community
at all. However, something that does inform what
happens in this document is that by the middle
of the 1300s, there were many Christian peasants
who owed money to Jews in the town of Alcañiz.
So that's all work laying that out. That's been
done by Laliena Corbera. What do we see in this
document here? It's by Violant. The recipient
is a certain Berengario Eximeno, who is somehow
connected in official capacity to a Petri De
Calada. Calumada, maybe. I'm not quite sure what
the expansion of that abbreviation is in the
name that reads as Calada. So I think this letter
is to both of them, but maybe not. The official
title of Berenguerio Eximeno is confusing because
it looks like it should be lieutenant like locum
tenses but the the letters don't quite add up
to that in terms of there's an s in the middle
it seems to me so this is where gemini was just
not having it i was like no that cannot be locum
tenses but maybe that was maybe there is some
kind of other way of writing out locum tenses
this letter is a cease and desist letter in fact
the word appears in line 9. So what's going on
is that these officials who are, it seems, employees,
officials of the royal family of the Crown of
Aragon, are doing some kind of unjust seizure
of property or fines. some kind of money is being
taken from the Jewish community. And the Jewish
community known as the Aljama has written or
informed through messenger. It's not sure. I'm
not sure how Violant knows, but she uses the word
intellectimos. We have learned, we have understood
that this is happening and you need to stop.
And so this is a direct order to this official.
to stop carrying out whatever kinds of property
seizures or confiscations are going on. So here
we have an example of the Aljama appealing
directly to the head of the royal family, really,
like the queen, saying, we are being mistreated
by your officials. Please help us." And Violant
is helping. This is a pattern that we see again
and again and again. It also crops up during
the 1391 anti -Jewish riots, where the royal
family is sending people, directing people, in
order to restrain the injustice that is happening.
to the Aljamas and individual Jews all throughout
the kingdom. There's a financial incentive for
this because the tax revenue from the Aljamas
was supposed to be going directly to the coffers
of the state and did not and it bypassed the
municipality which is you know one of these background
reasons for for the resentment that was building.
So here we again see Violant relating as a royal,
like others in the royal family did, relating
to the Jewish community as what's been called
by them at the time the royal treasure. They
referred to the Jews of the land as the royal
treasure. So, in fact, there's a whole book by
John Boswell called The Royal Treasure about,
I think that one might focus on the Muslims actually,
but about the religious minorities in the Crown
of Aragon and their financial connections to
the royal family. So that is today's document,
a really good window into interfaith encounter
in the 14th century Crown of Aragon. But also
methodologically, this one is kind of a turning
point in the podcast where I'm going to be going
to Gemini to get some transcriptions in the upcoming
episodes. And I'll tell you more about that as
I evaluate those. 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, lots of bibliographic
citations, and a copy of the transcript that
I got from Google Gemini 3. 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.