Hello. In The Crown of Aragon, 639 years ago,
it was February 24th, 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.
Today we've got a document from Violant and the
recipient is a certain Brother Guillaume de Urges
I think is how we would Expand the abbreviation
there for that name. It's got a U -G -E -S. I
think that would be a something like an Urge
or I don't think it would be an Urgelles. So
the identity of this recipient is I think a little
bit up for grabs. I'm trying to figure out if
I can really be sure that the Commendador identity
that's listed next to his name in the addressee
line below the text block of this letter means
that he's a commander of a hospitalers unit in
a place named Aliaga. And the reason why I'm
thinking this is a member of the hospitalers
is because, first of all, that's what Gemini
presented to me in its analysis of this letter
all on its own. But then I started to look around
the folio here and I noticed that the letter
that precedes this one and actually begins on
folio 87V, the previous page, it's about the
same people. So, the letter that precedes this
one in the register, it's from five days before,
and it's addressed to the Pope, and Violant in
that letter discusses a Garcia Aznar and also
a Guillaume de Urges. So in that letter, and
in fact, it's really easy to see right at the
top of Folio 88R, we've got the word hospitalis,
and so that made me feel like I could trust the
conclusion that Gemini reached. But goodness
gracious, I have grown quite frustrated with
Gemini's analysis and quote -unquote, deep thinking,
because yet again, Gemini has carried out a hallucination,
and it has told me when I asked it about a particular
phrase, it gave me an answer and cited sources
that don't exist. The sources that it came up
for are like weird amalgams of different sources,
so it just is still having this problem that
I encountered with it when I tried to use it
for research purposes back in the fall of 2025.
So I think I'm done with Gemini when it comes
to trying to substantiate information in the
academic secondary literature. It's just going
to keep making things up. I tested out two of
its sources in what it gave me in response to
my follow -up questions today, and both of those
sources were non -existent. The authors existed,
and then they had pieces that were sort of like
similar in title maybe, but basically Gemini
just made up the titles of articles and then
when I pressed Gemini on one of them by an author
that I recognize and I've referred to a bunch
of times, Josep Trenchs i Odena, well Gemini said
that I could find information about my the phrase
that I was looking for and information about
the kinds of phrases used in Chancery documents
at this time in one of the books by Trenchs i Odena
and I have that book and I looked at it and it
doesn't have anything about the phrasing that
I'm asking about or or you can see the transcript
I was I was looking at the phrase So it's the
last line of the letter before the dating clause,
and Violant is saying that the recipient should
be... oh, and see, this is why I was trying to
get some help, because I think that the recipient
of the letter is trying to get to a a good conclusion
the Buena Conclusión with the Pope or I think
it is also possible in the wording of this to
to interpret it that Violant is going to be
telling Guillaume de Urge about the conclusion
of the business at hand with the pope and i'm
trying to figure out exactly who is doing what
about who there is certainly a request about
garcia aznar and trying to get garcia aznar some
kind of ecclesiastical position so all right
all of this is to say that Gemini is quite good
at transcribing. It didn't get everything right.
It made some significant mistakes, but I would
say it was like 90 % correct. And so it's way
easier for me to take a transcription that Gemini
does and proofread it as opposed to typing out
an entire transcription. I will use Gemini for
that, for the transcription purposes here. I
might go back and try Claude again. I've heard
that Claude has had a really powerful upgrade.
But anyway, Gemini is good for this image stuff,
you know, transcribing the the gothic secretarial
hand, but when you try to ask Gemini to do research
and to give you some direction and sources from
the secondary literature, it's just not up to
the task right now. For some reason, it is just
prone to hallucinate its answers. All right.
We are in this stage and I don't know how permanent
of a stage it is when Violant is just writing
to the Pope a lot. I mean it's like February
just really like picks up where Violant is writing
to the Pope about all kinds of things and there's
a lot going on with her interests and trying
to promote her goals through the means available
in the Avignon papacy in that diplomatic nerve
center. So she's, I think at this point I've
tracked about like four different people that
she's sent over to Avignon in order to carry
out some different parts of her agenda. And I
think that maybe this Guillaume de Urge is
one of those, but it's really hard to tell from
this little letter. And this one I actually might
come back to because the way that Violant and
Joan are arranging their correspondence with
the Pope is starting to get really interesting
to me. It appears that it is Violant who is
in charge of communicating with the Pope. I have
to kind of just keep tabs on this because I'm
not quite sure, but from the looks of it to me
it seems like there's just this imbalance happening
where there's just way more letters from Violant
to the Pope than there are Joan to the Pope,
but that could just be what I'm happening to
look at at this point and I would need a bit
more of a systematic search in order to really
conclude something from that and goodness I'm
hoping that that sometime this year there's going
to be a really great breakthrough either through
my own work trying to get these documents to
be full -text searchable or through the work
of somebody else or one of the AI programs so
that I can build a database of all the letters
in these registers from this year and be able
to arrange them and search them and answer questions
like what is the total number of letters that
Violant sent to the Pope versus what is the
total number of letters that Joan sent to
the Pope? But let's just hold off on that question
for the moment, because right now we don't have
the technological resources to answer it. I mean,
I could just painstakingly go through and do
some counting, but there's only so much time
available, and I do not have time to do that.
Let's turn our attention to something in this
letter in particular that I think indicates a
piece of the puzzle regarding this question about
how Joan and Violant arranged their communication
with the Pope in Avignon. The letter begins,
fray guillem. It's being addressed to Guillem
d 'Urges, the commander of Aliaga. All right,
so what that translates to roughly, and I know
I messed up something a couple things in there
due to Abbreviations that needed to be expanded
and I wasn't quite sure how but anyway what it
roughly translates to is to brother William,
the Lord King Lord and husband of mine most
dear right so you Joan says molt cara companyona
and Violant usually phrases it something like
like this marido nostro muy caro so my my most
dear husband and and what is the verb
he's written, he's written in favor of Garcia
Aznar the some kind of religious position canongue
de Vic, so Vic is a place in Catalonia, and he's
written about, so it's Joan, he has written about
Garcia Aznar to our Lord, Nostra Senor, lo Papa,
the Pope. And what's interesting is that violant
has also written to the pope as we were just
looking at that latin letter from five days before
and so it's interesting how violant is doing
this kind of coordination i do want to say that
i'm i'm actually growing somewhat uncertain about
the way that violant addresses the pope because
there's this weird variation and I am pretty
sure that the prior letter to this one in this
register is to the pope, but I might have to
come back to this because there's other letters
that are way more deliberate in reverence and
include way more of the titles of the pope than
the one that we're seeing. earlier here on this
folio that starts well it actually starts the
previous folio on folio 87 v so a lot of questions
are coming up about why violant is not mentioning
her correspondence to the pope the one that appears
right before this that she had written five days
before and then also why she feels like it's
helpful to coordinate this communication and
why is it that Joan isn't simply writing to
brother William Frey Guillem. So there's those
questions. There's also the Chancery operation
question about why is it a five -day difference
between the Latin letter about the same people
and then this Catalan, you know, this might actually
be some kind of Aragonese Catalan hybrid. Gemini
had that idea and I just thought that might be
because of transcription errors, but I'm actually
looking at this and it seems like some of the
prepositions might be not so much what I usually
see in Catalan, so just kind of that idea popped
into my head. But basically there's just a lot
about the chancery operation that this set of
letters, one from the 19th and the other from
today the 24th, just kind of brings up more questions
about about that aspect of of this archive and
these particular letters and the issue at hand.
So lots of questions still coming up. And that
brings us to the end of the episode. Thanks for
listening to this installment 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.