Hello. In the Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was February 27th, 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.
Alright, we're getting to the end of February,
and I don't know about you, but I'm really gonna
miss those double Fs for February. They were
really fun to look at each day this month. Alright,
let's talk about this document. Guess what? Violant
is writing to the Pope. Again. And, spoiler alert,
tomorrow, February 28th, She's gonna write to
the Pope yet again, Violant. She's like real
pen pals with Clement VII, writing him almost
every day, it seems. What do we make of that?
Well, hopefully by the end of this year we'll
make something of that. All right, so this is
Violant writing to the Pope again, and... This
letter seems to be a pretty straightforward recommendation
regarding personnel. Yeah, so there's another
vacancy. So it seems like someone named Bonanatus
de Podio has died. And that person, I think,
was somehow like maybe a bishop or somebody in
Urgell. So the place name of Urgell comes up
a whole lot and Violant is recommending somebody
for that post named Jacobo de Avelanda. Oh gosh,
here's the problem is that When I'm looking at
this letter, it seems to me like the last name
for Jacobo is A -V -E -L -L -A -N -E -D. Avelaneda.
Avelaneda. But it is possible that the second
letter of that name, that surname is a n, so
it might be anellaneda. Oh gosh, could go kind
of either way. So well anyway, Jacobo is apparently
a stand -up fellow, and Violant goes on for
a little while about how he's really qualified
to take over for the dead Bonanatas de
Podio. And there's someone else that appears
in the letter. I think the bishop of Urgell who's
somebody else named Berenguer. Yeah Can't have
too many Berenguers in medieval Crown of Aragon.
So Urgell is the place here being mentioned.
We haven't really talked too much about Urgell.
There's a Count of Urgell that Joan is really
close to and over the course of his reign he
shares a lot of his treasures with. Actually,
it's more like the other way around that Joan
demands that the Count of Urgell sends him a
lot of treasures, especially... Unicorn Horn.
I don't know if I've mentioned the Unicorn Horn
yet on the podcast, but Joan was a big fan.
I'm not sure that he writes about Unicorn Horn
at any point in this the First Year of His Reign,
but he might and hopefully we'll get one of those
letters and that'll be fun to talk about because
Joan was a big believer in the power of the
Unicorn Horn. Well, this was actually Narwhal
Tusk, and there's a whole lot of research about
that. I'll just kind of fill in some additional
notes on Unicorn horn in today's episode, but
we are like way off on a tangent here talking
about Unicorn horn. It's just that one of the
most funny episodes in the story of Joann and
his pursuit of Unicorn horn is when he finds that
the Count of Urgell, which I think is like...
Is it his cousin? They're related, uncle -cousin,
something like that. He finds out that the Count
of Urgell has obtained some unicorn horn, and
he writes him to say, hand it over, give me your
unicorn horn. So, moment of family tension there.
So anyway, Urgell, that's all I think about when
I think of Urgell. Apologies to all of the current
listeners who live there. So, all right, we've
got this letter. It's about an ecclesiastical
position. Violant is making a recommendation.
And what else is there to say? I can't really
pick out any subtleties here in this particular
letter, even though it seems pretty long. I did
try a new technique with the AI chatbots. Yep,
I used... basically a whole lot of resources
environmentally, a lot of water probably, in
order to have both Gemini and Claude work on
this sort of together. So I started with Gemini.
I got a transcription. I was not too pleased.
Again, I mean Gemini was doing so great. couple
days ago and now it's just flubbing it. So it
got some things right. And so what I did is I
had Claude do a transcription and then put Gemini's
results into a reply and said to Claude, hey,
I had another LLM generate a transcription. Please
use it in order to identify some things that
you might improve. in yours. And I think that
that was good. I'm quite sure that there's a
lot that's missing from the transcription. There's
a lot that's missing in the subsequent translation.
But my main goal, remember, is at this point
in the initial run through of the documents to
try to identify documents that I would come back
to later that are really pertinent to my research
question. And certainly, if I'm using these chat
bots, I'm going to miss some stuff that I would
not miss if I was spending, you know, multiple
hours. on doing the transcription and translation
myself, but I would say that for a letter like
this where it seems to just kind of fit a lot
of the patterns for the way that the king and
queen interacted with the ecclesiastical administration
and personnel changes, there's just not a lot
to really work with here in terms of what I'm
focused on. So I'm going to just kind of let
it go with the kind of sketched out knowledge
that I have about this document and maybe come
back to it. if it reappears in some way, any
of the people in there happen to show up again
in different context, different situation that
is connected to my main research question about
how Joan and Violant ruled together. And of
course I'm always kind of flipping back and forth
in the registers trying to just develop a general
sense of what else they're writing about on these
same days. And maybe I'll happen upon a document
from Joan that is also about the ecclesiastical
vacancy in Urgell. And then it becomes very connected
to my main research question. So this might be
a good time to take a step back and just remind
everybody what this project is. all about. Yeah,
I kind of want to do that every, you know, dozen
episodes or so, and I don't think I've done it
for a while. So this project is all about conveying
the abundance of the archive of the Crown of
Aragon. The documents that we look at every day,
they are copies of the official thing that was
sent out. Before the letter was folded and before
a wax seal was applied to it, the chancery scribes
would write a copy of it on a different piece
of paper that would be kept. And that's what
we're looking at. So for every single letter
that we see in these registers, there is a twin
that went out there and maybe has not been preserved.
I mean likely has not been preserved. So there
are a couple that came back to the Archive of
the Crown of Aragon. for the letters generated
in the year 1387 and I was lucky enough to be
able to reunite one of those to its copy because
there's been a scan of each so the outgoing letter
was found its way back into the archive and then
there was the copy so if you're interested in
that definitely go back to episode recorded for
January 18th and I didn't know it when I was
recording the episode that I would actually find
the the copy the register copy because I had
actually chosen to use the outgoing copy for
that episode and so that was a pretty satisfying
experience to reunite the outgoing copy a digital
image of the outgoing copy with a digital image
of the register chancery copy and I wrote about
that on the website even though I didn't mention
it in the episode itself because I only discovered
it later kind of by happenstance. So that's a
little bit about the material that we're looking
at in this podcast in terms of how it was created.
One thing I also want to review is that the paleography
is called Gothic Secretarial Hand. It's 14th century
Gothic Secretarial Hand, and it's like a cursive.
So there are manuscripts that are produced at
this time that are not in this script but are
in the I guess what you could call like stereotypically
like what you would think of when you think of
a medieval manuscript like kind of the blocky
letters and those are scripts that are reserved
for the fanciest products and these letters that
we're looking at they are businessy so there's
not really a concern with the art history of
the written word as it appears on the page. The
purpose of these documents is to record the information
quickly and efficiently, and so it's a script
that could be written very fast. cursive handwriting.
The letters will flow together much more easily.
And then also there are a ton of abbreviations
and all of those abbreviations added up will
cut down on the amount of time that it takes
to get letters entered in to the archival register.
The abbreviations are indicated most frequently
by a horizontal line across the top of the word
we call that a macron and then there are other
abbreviations that are like curved above the
letter or like a little loop or there's a bunch
of different abbreviation marks and so you kind
of get used to recognizing which marks mean which
letters or entire words can be rendered as a
mark or a kind of non -alphabetical character
so that when these scribes are writing, they're
deploying all of these conventions and fortunately
for me, it's a lot of these have been recorded
and they're quite standard. So it's pretty rare
that there's some kind of unusual novel never
-before -seen abbreviation in one of these letters.
It all makes for a very big challenge to transcribe
and translate. I'll talk a little bit more about
that tomorrow and some of the really wonderful
resources that I have in order to help with that
challenge, not just in terms of technology or
in terms of glossaries, but in terms of people
that have helped me out along the way. So you'll
hear a lot more about that for tomorrow's document.
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've done my job. Because 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 to 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.