Hello. In the Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was March 2, 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's document is a short letter from Joan
to somebody he addresses as Marquis Car Cosi.
This is in the... Secret seal register and remember
secret is a little bit of a false cognate here
Because it's more of just like it's the private.
I mean, it's it's secret in the sense that it's
got a different level of protection Like it's
not a document that just anybody can access You'll
have to have special permission to look at these
later if you're wanting to consult them in the
archive but in this particular case, we have
family correspondence and that's usually where
the the secret seal comes in where when it's
kind of family correspondence. That's what I'm
noticing. It's not like the only things in the
secret seal registers are family correspondence,
but but that's typically it's here's what I'll
say. It's rare to see a family letter. someone
who's Joan or Violant are writing to, or it's
a family relative, in something that's not the
secret seal. And in the case of Violant, we've
got that register called Varia, which I believe
is actually composed of a bunch of different
types of seals, but they were just getting organized
with her chancery. processes in the beginning
of the reign, and so they hadn't yet set up the
separate secret seal register, and so they dumped
a lot of the early stuff of all kinds of different
levels of seal into the register called Varia.
Okay, so today's document is in the secret seal
register for Joann. The addressee is Marquis
car cosi that's in the first line but then at
the bottom of the document we have an expanded
version of the addressee and that reads marquis
de villena consanguinis domini regis i think is
how we expand the end of that so What it means,
regardless of the exact Latin ending there, is
that the person who is addressed by this letter
is the Marquis of Vienna. Consanguinis means
relative. So you can see the word for blood in
this sanguine. So of a blood connection, consanguin,
a relative of the Lord King. So this is a relative
of the King who has the noble title of Marquis,
which is below the level of a Duke in the hierarchy
of nobility titles in this realm. Somehow, Joan
considers him at the level of cousin. Alright,
did a little bit of research here on the Marquis
de Villena, and what's also really helpful is that
in the last sentence of the letter before the
dating clause, and it's the second to the last
line of the letter, there's a name. Don Alfonso
vostra fi. So Alfonso, your son. Now, this gets
really tricky because there was in the lineage
of the Marquis of Villena, there were two Alfonso's.
There was an Alfonso the older and an Alfonso
the younger. So is this person that's being addressed
in this letter, the father of Alfonso the Elder,
or is it is the addressee Alfonso the Elder himself
and and he has a son named Alfonso. So we have
to kind of work out according to lifespans and
dates in order to figure that out. And it's very
clear that in 1387, This would be Alfonso the
Elder as the recipient of this letter, as the
addressee. And Alfonso Vostra Fill is Alfonso the
Younger. Okay. The Marquis de Villena, in this
letter, he has been very active in a lot of battle
campaigns and such that I am just not going to
get into the weeds about. But the part of this
that really caught my attention and got me excited
when I saw it was that he, the addressee of this
letter, is the grandfather of somebody who is
very important in understanding the cultural
efflorescence of the reign of Joan and Violant.
The grandson, so the son of Alfonso the Younger,
right? The grandson of Alfonso the Elder. His
name is Enrique. Enrique de Villena was a writer
of several different treatises. One of them,
weirdly, was called The Art of the Scissors,
in which he wrote this whole book about the correct
way to cut meat. It's like really... I could
write a whole book about that? Yes. And to say
the art of the scissors is a little bit of a
mistranslation, but it's sort of like that. I
mean, it's the art of the cutting. All right.
So anyway, that is a little interesting sort
of factoid about Enrique de Villena, but way more
important is that, alas, these Alfonso's die
and Enrique is left as an Orphan? Okay, wait
a second, hold on, I got that wrong. Wait a second.
Alfonso the Younger dies, and that was Enrique's
father. And Enrique is raised by his grandfather
for a little while, but then his grandfather
does die. And at that moment around then is when
he gets shipped off to live in Barcelona. And
Violant is actually involved in getting Enrique
de Villena to have a lot of time in Barcelona during
his childhood. He grows up witnessing the big
troubadour competition that takes place in 1391.
Oh gosh, and then I think it happens a second
time in 1393. The initial Jocs Florals.
The Game of Flowers. And that is a troubadour
competition based on something that had been
happening in Toulouse that Joan decided to
import into the Crown of Aragon. and it's Enrique
de Villena who writes down some of what the procedures
were and so it's actually the earliest record
that we have of what the troubadour competition
was like and what some of the rules were like.
So I got really excited when I saw Marquise de
Villena because of that larger connection. So What
is this letter about? Really focused on the identity
of the recipient and the place of this letter
in the longer story of Joan's cultural efflorescence,
along of course with Violant, who was like the
key to having that cultural efflorescence. Because
remember, he's importing this stuff from France,
so anyway. Joan gets credit for the Jocs
Florals, but it's got it. It must have been
both Joan and Violant together. And now we
have Shadow back to put her contribution into
this. Okay, what's going on in this letter? What's
going on in this letter is that Joan is demanding
that the Marquis de Villena comes to Barcelona
It seemed that there had been some kind of injury
or condition that had prevented the Marquis de
Villena from coming to Barcelona and Joan saying,
okay, you're well enough now, so you need to
come show up, right? I'm summoning you. Sorry
that you went through that difficult thing, but
now you gotta come. And then he also says something
interesting at the very end that he has sent
this messenger, Pere March, to deliver that summons,
but also to bring the to Alfonso the Younger
a designation. to a chivalric order. So the last
sentence of this letter before the dating clause
reads That was kind of like a rhyme. It seemed
like a little rhymy. What that means is that
we have sent to you through our messenger, Sir
Pere March, we have sent to you the cross of our
order of Saint George. San Jordi is Saint George.
So Alfonso the Younger has been awarded admittance
into this Cross of Saint George society or designation.
It's just like an honor that the king bestows.
And Joan got really into this and later on
the order of the Cross of Saint George dwindles.
But at this time, Joan is trying to really
build it up and have a bunch of really elite
people. in it, and I don't really have a ton
of information about it. There is an article
that Claude found that explains more about how
Joan instituted these different chivalric orders.
I think it's a little bit too in the weeds for
my particular interest, but maybe not. I mean,
I don't know, could be something gendery in there.
But in any event, The content of this letter
is basically saying, hey, we know you couldn't
come to Barcelona before, but now you need to.
And by the way, I'm giving your son a pretty
cool prize. All right. Couple things I want to
point out about this letter in its. more material
aspects. First of all, if you're looking at the
image, you can notice that the digitizers struggled
with keeping the page open to the point where
the margin could be captured by the photograph.
So a lot of the words at the very right hand
side of the page are kind of squished and I think
the binding was just too tight to be able to
get a good photo of this, so I just want to once
again give a shout out to all of the people who
worked to take photographs of these documents
in this massive project that the Spanish government
arranged in order to make these records from
over 600 years ago available for anybody to see
at any time. It's pretty amazing. and took a
lot of work on the part of the staff of the digitizers.
Okay, something else about this letter. Notice
the handwriting. It's a little bit more, what
do you want to say here, flowy than we're used
to. And there's certain scribes that just have
a different kind of handwriting than what I would
consider something more of the standard. It looks
a little bit more rushed, and this scribe actually
had two crossouts. So the first one is at the
beginning of the second line. It looks like Creenca
is crossed out, but I'm not even sure about that.
The more clear strikethrough is in the fifth
word of the third line when the scribe was going
to write venguda and accidentally wrote vengad
and saw oh no i put an a instead of a u and so
the scribe crossed that out and did venguda as
a correction so a couple interesting moments
in this letter to bring out some of the materiality
of these documents as we're looking at them.
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.