Hello. In The Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was March 3rd, 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 one of the big lessons from an earlier episode,
kind of getting far back into the start of the
podcast now, is that if you are the outgoing
queen, then you are in big trouble when the king,
your husband, dies and you become a widow. So,
Sibilla had fled. before Pere's actual death,
when it became clear that Pere the Ceremonious,
Joan's father, was not going to recover. She
fled. And this is because she had cultivated
a very, very poor relationship with Joan and
especially with Violant. Now today, we have...
a document that is in the commune et curiae register
for Violant. So a register that's about documents
of her court and also is combined with commune
seems to be something like just general matters.
Oh gosh that does not sound like a good description.
I'm gonna have to dig in a little bit more on
what commune registers mean, but this document
is in response to a request from a draper named
Francisco Martina. The name Francisco Martina
is at the very bottom of folio 134 V and at the
top of folio 135r we see a descriptor for him
the paleography and the latin make it a little
well the paleography is not too bad so it looks
to me like it's but then there's like a mark
above so it's i'm not quite sure if it's supposed
to be But anyway, it's definitely some reference
to the profession of Draper, which is somebody
who deals in textiles. And I've been trying to
work out exactly how much more specific we can
get. Is it a textile? dealer like a merchant?
Is it somebody who does additional work like
could be a tailor or could be some kind of clothier?
It's not clear. So, Francisco Martina appealed
to Violant. Why? Well, the content of the letter
gets into that. and it has to do with the former
queen, Sibilla. So what happened was that somebody
who was indirectly connected to Sibilla through
her brother, that rascal Bernat de Fortia, someone
had given this draper, Francisco Martina, some
money. Quite a lot of money. In fact, it looks
to be something like 2600. Wait a second. Am
I hold on? It's, it's 2400. No, it isn't 26.
Oh my goodness, my Latin numbers are getting
all messed up. Hold on just a second. So uh the
amount is yeah 24 ,200 solides that is a lot
of money and that was what this draper received
from somebody named Guillaume de Piru who's
identified here as of the House de Domo, of the
House of Bernat de Fortia. So the draper was
given thousands of solides. And this took place
in November of the previous year, I think. So,
or maybe there was just like an earlier request
made to Queen Sibylla in November of the previous
year, but in Line 16 of Folio 135R, we have the
date of the 13th of November of the year prior.
Okay, so there's a lot of players in this little
episode, and there's a lot of money. but in the
end it seems quite clear that Violant rules
in favor of the Draper and basically says the
Draper does not have to pay and that her treasurer
is to enforce this and somehow Sibilla's treasurer
was also involved? Or maybe, okay wait, maybe
the draper went to the treasurer's first, because
both treasurers are mentioned. Sibilla's treasurer,
whose name is Johan Callot, and then Violant's
treasurer is actually the addressee of this document,
Alatzar Golluff. the Jewish treasurer for Violant.
Okay, so there's a lot more people now involved,
but I think the way this goes is that the Draper
made a request or is interacting somehow with
the treasurer, who then is going to be the one
to issue out this ruling to basically say that
the creditor, Guillaume de Piru, who's connected
to Bernat de Fortia, who's the brother of former
Queen Sibilla, that the creditor, Guillaume de
Piru, that he's not gonna get his money back.
And I think the clear implication here is that
he's not gonna get his money back from the Draper,
and so the implication is that he's going to
have to extract that money from Bernat de Fortia.
So basically there's a lot of twists and turns
in the story of this money, and I don't know
what justification the draper has for saying
I just don't want to pay it back. Maybe something
happened like the money was used to finance the
purchase of some textiles and the ship that had
the textiles sank or was captured by pirates
or something, and so there's no way to pay the
money back because of that. But I mean, then
we would probably have that mentioned. We'd have
something about a shipment mentioned in the document,
and I don't see anything like that here. So,
Violant, I think the bottom line here is that
Violant is once again sticking it to Sibilla
de Fortia and her brother Bernat de Fortia, who
by the way are still imprisoned and their fates
are going to be decided. in the coming weeks,
and they are not sure whether they're going to
survive. They could be found guilty of being
traitors. There's this suspicion out there that
maybe Sibilla used sorcery in order to make Joan
ill in those early days of January, and maybe
Bernat can be seen as someone who was rallying
forces to put up some kind of a fight and so
they're they're not sure how they're going to
get out of this but i can tell you one thing
they're going to owe a lot of money when they
do and this is just one example of that because
i have a feeling that when this Guillaume de
Piru is not able to get his money back from
the draper. He's going to go to Bernat de Fortia
in order to get his money back. So there's a
lot that's accumulating in terms of financial
arrangements that had they stayed in power, had
Sibilla de Fortia continued to rule as queen
for another year, it probably would have resolved
without any cost to her brother Bernat. But Pere
the Ceremonious has died and Sibilla made enemies
out of the next in line for the throne. I just
don't understand exactly what she was expecting
in terms of being able to get away with that,
but sometimes you're... kind of put on the defensive.
I would guess that Sibilla's perception was something
more like she had to defend her own honor and
was in competition with Violante on a number
of fronts in terms of status and such. So that's
my speculation about kind of the backstory of
why Sibilla made choices that put her and her
brother in this position of I'm sure there's
way more examples like this of when the Financial
deal was kind of getting sorted out and because
of the change in Leadership and losing power
you're now going to get stiffed so I think Her
brother seems to have been just sort of this
rascal. I like the term rapscallion and he seems
to have just spent money on all kinds of things
and was sort of a thorn in the side of Sibilla.
Just a constant embarrassment because of all
of his kind of nouveau riche habits. That's the
sense I get. So this might also be another instance
of Bernat de Fortia just making unwise business
deals and it's coming back to bite them even
harder now that they are no longer in power.
So tons of questions come up. If I spent a bit
more time and when I say a bit, I mean like many,
many, many hours trying to really get to the
bottom of the meaning of the Latin sentences
here. I'm sure that I could be more definitive
and also some other aspects of how this deal
went wrong might become illuminated. but I think
I'm going to leave it there for this initial
run -through. I could totally see myself coming
back to explore this later if I'm deciding that
I'm going to really make the Sibilla versus Violant
tension something important in the historical
narrative that I want to craft out of all of
this research that I'm doing, but I'm not quite
sure that that's going to happen in the narrative
in the end. One last thing, I want to verbally
acknowledge that I did my usual Gemini plus Claude
routine with this, where I had Gemini do an initial
transcription, then Claude had a transcription,
and then had Claude try to reconcile them. I
really like what's happening there. And if you
go to the website for today's document, what
you'll see is that Claude's output is, I think,
really useful in that Claude is, I've been able
to set up a project in my Claude account that
makes it so that the same instructions are applied
again and again and Claude knows that I want
it to surface ambiguities and not hide them.
And so there's lots of footnotes in Claude's
translation. of this document and transcription.
Claude is surfacing questions in a way that I
approve of in terms of historical method. So
it seems to be going well. I think the initial
output by Gemini was a little weird and subpar,
but sometimes Gemini is great and sometimes it's
just striking out. So take a look at some of
the AI chatbot reporting and see what you think
about how all of this is being analyzed, both
by me and by the bots. And yeah, definitely an
interesting new use of technology to try to to
try to just get a foothold in what the documents
are about. And sometimes you can get some interesting
conclusions, but they're always provisional,
always provisional, until you can do the hard
work of really being sure of that Latin transcription
and translation. Thanks for listening to this
episode of the Historian's Notebook, season one,
Molt Cara Companyona. If you are leaving with
more questions than you arrived with, I've 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.