Hello. In the Crown of Aragon, 639 years ago,
it was March 12th, 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 was a Latin toughy.
Yeah, this one is in Joan's register, the secret
seal register, and it is to the Pope. So Joan
is writing to the Pope and, you know, we've just
been through a whole bunch of correspondence
from both Joan and Violant. and their three
-year -old child to the Pope, and so, you know,
not that many days have passed since our last
correspondence to the Pope, and yet, it seems
like from this letter, Joan is... displeased
with the Pope. I mean, maybe Joan is just, like,
in a mood because we had him expressing his fury
at the governor of Aragon, and maybe he's starting
to notice that people are maybe not taking him
as seriously as he might have hoped when imagining
what it would be like to be king. I don't, I'm
not sure, because the tone in the Latin is of
course going to be really difficult to ascertain,
because the meaning in the Latin is difficult
to ascertain. And then another factor is that
when I first looked at this letter, I didn't
really feel like it was going to be a difficult
one paleographically, but it turned out to have
a lot of very difficult paleographical ticks,
like a lot of the C's look like T's, and the
N's are sometimes maybe not N's, but CI combinations.
So this particular letter is presenting difficulties
and I spent a lot of time on it in addition to
working through the LLM output I did some hand
transcribing entered that into Claude's interface
during the reconciliation phase but yeah it still
turned out to be pretty cryptic and also paleographically
very challenging in a lot of parts. So, you know,
it's a little rough trying to figure out whether
Joann is frustrated with the Pope. Claude thinks
so, but I just want to sound a note of caution
that we can't necessarily... Conclude that Although
there are some indicators So we'll get into that
and then also I just want to give a little preview
for something We're gonna do at the end of the
episode, but so we're gonna look at the letters
that come before and after Because they are each
interest they each have interesting bits So you're
gonna get three for the price of one in today's
episode maybe as a way of me making up for how
I don't really know what the document of the
day is about. I can't even tell what it's about.
Well, we do have the sourcing information. We
know that it's the pope that is being addressed.
We do have an update about a topic that came
up a little while ago. So You might remember
from some earlier episodes, oh gosh I don't even
know which ones, but on the webpage for for this
episode I'll put in a link. I'll figure that
out. So earlier episodes we had, I think it was
Joan, it might have been also Violant, who
were trying to get the Pope and the College of
Cardinals to admit their family member in Valencia,
James, the bishop of Valencia, to the College
of Cardinals to have him become a cardinal. And
we do see that here in this letter. It seems
to have happened because in line five of the
letter which is the one at the bottom of folio
24 v there's a little punctuation slash after
what looks like t i o r which is i think the
suffix or the second half of the word that came
before well there's a punctuation slash and then
there's nunc which means now n u n c the horizontal
line the macron abbreviation mark is standing
in for the second n in the word nunc so nunc
cardinali that is saying now a cardinal and then
we've got uh after that TUNC VERO EPISCOPUS VALENCIONIUS.
I have no idea what, or is it Valencianoanem?
I don't know, but it is, I think, the genitive
for Valencia, and TUNC means at that time or
then. So what the next phrase is saying is essentially
like earlier, or at the other earlier time, he
was the Bishop of Valencia. So it's clear that
there has been a success that James the Bishop
of Valencia was admitted into cardinalship. I
want to say the College of Cardinals, but honestly,
I don't know enough about how the College of
Cardinals works or like what that institution
is to say that he became part of it. I would
assume and guess that all of the Cardinals are
part of the College of Cardinals, but that is
something I do not know. So... If all cardinals
are part of the College of Cardinals, then good
ol' James of Valencia is in there. But if there
are some cardinals that are not part of the College
of Cardinals, then we don't know. But we do know
that he did become a cardinal. So, there's been
a success. So why is it that there's a possibility
that Joan is grumpy with the pope? That hinges
on the last word in the first line, but also
how the letter starts. So it's got the addressee
sanctissime patrie Patriae? Well, Most Holy Father.
And then it says, Dudum iteratis. And that phrase
means something like, a while ago we repeated.
Or it's actually like a passive participle. And
so it's something like, having repeated a while
ago, but that's not quite right. It's something
about how there was a repetition a while ago,
and what this is all setting up is what's on
the second line, the letters that were presented
to the Pope from us, the royal we. Okay, so that
much is clear that this is a reiteration of letters
that came before. But that's not all, because
the last word of the first line, which is the
one that hinges this interpretation for tone,
that last word, quadruplicatis. quadruplicate
so four it's been done four times so it's like
I mean I kind of if you are writing to somebody
and you start out your letter or like even let's
let's make it current day like you're sending
a DM to somebody a text message yeah and you
say something at the beginning like, this is
the fourth time I am asking you. I think it's
very difficult to interpret that as just a friendly
reminder because if you're stating that basically,
you know, you've already approached that person
on this topic four times, It's really, you know,
I think revealing that you're frustrated. And
also it raises this question of, do you think
this is going to result in the outcome you desire?
Because if you have to ask a fifth time for something,
it probably means the person is not going to
be doing it. But... I guess Joan is like, well,
you know, maybe the fifth time is the charm for
this thing that he's asking for. What is he asking
for in this letter? We are really, we don't know.
And when I say we, I am including, it's not the
royal we, it's the me plus the large language
models. I am really trying to find the... nouns
in this letter that will help to unlock what
it is that Joan is you know trying to get and
it's taking five times for him to get it but
it's been rough in terms of even finding that
information and I have already put in about an
hour and a half working on this Latin document
and so I think I'm just gonna have to pause on
the mystery of because you might not even find
it because a lot of times when they're writing
these letters they're just referring to it vaguely
right we've seen that again and again you know
these affairs or that earlier request or whatever
so maybe we'll find a letter from Violant that
helps to clarify what it is that Joan is asking
for for a fifth time. Alright, so quite dissatisfying
with the document of today, but in order to make
us feel better about that, I've got a couple
little gems from the surrounding letters on these
folios. So the first letter on folio 24 v the
letter above the one we're talking about is to
another count and i'm and i'm not quite sure
who this is Joan identifies this person as
a nebot so the letter starts that means nephew.
So Joan is writing to someone who he identifies
as his nephew. If it's someone from his side
of the family, it probably has to be the one
of the two sons of his half -sister, Joanna,
who was the daughter of pair in his first marriage
before Joan's mother. So it could be them.
It could also be someone on Violant's side, and
there is an Addressee line, and I'm going to
try to track down a little bit more about who
is being identified there in that Addressee line.
I don't recognize it right away. It says Comte.
So that even looks like something that's not
a place name. So I'm gonna have to dig a little
bit for that. But the reason that I brought this
up, I wanted to talk about this letter. There's
a little gem in it. I mean, most of it is just
talking about he was just saying, I hope everything
is good with you. He does refer in the middle
of it to his accident, his misfortune, and calls
it a desponicio de nuestra persona. So he is
his person, his which I think means his his body
is in this was in this state of being you know
undisposed or not quite sure exactly how to Translate
that and also the paleography is a little hard
to make out exactly what word it is But you know
nothing super revelatory but then in the third
to last line he is asking this person, his nephew,
to send him some bells labrers de Bretanya.
And I think, let's see, then he says, So I think
he is asking in that second half for, um, maybe
a servant that his, the person he's sending this
to is, um, well recommended. But the Lebreres
de Bretanya, that's, so these are dogs. Lebreres
are like hunting dogs. so he wants some beautiful
or or very good bells les prayers so he wants
some beautiful dogs of i think that's uh brittany
Bretanya i think would be brittany and not like
great britain but uh not 100 sure about that
so that's a little jet so this is joan's passion
for hunting dogs so he we saw it in earlier letter
from sort of the beginning of the podcast whereas
his father is dying he asks his brother to secure
for him a bunch of pears stuff and one of those
things is a particular hunting dog and now we've
got another reference to joan seeking out some
really great hunting dogs from Britannia, so
that's exciting. The other thing that I wanted
to point out is in the letter that follows the
document of today that I wasn't quite able to
get as far in as I would like. So on 25R, the
letter that begins in the second half of the
folio is to an interesting correspondent. So
the beginning of it reads Don Johann etc. So
that's just him stating himself. So this letter
does not begin in the first couple words with
the addressee. We've seen this before where Violant
will start her letter with la reyna or her titles
or something like that. So it's really interesting
how you can have that option where, like in the
document of today, the first words are the addressee.
And now in this document that we're about to
go deeper into, the first names that appear are
the sender. So the addressee comes after the
word al. So we have Don, Johan, et cetera, meaning
all his titles. And then we have a capital A
and then L for all. And what this then says is,
Al muy noble e muy honrado Don Mohamed, Fillo de
Abdul Haziz is what's there. But I think that
would be Abdul Haziz. We had shadow piping in
there just a moment ago. All right, so. Then,
after Abdul Haziz, we have the phrase, Fillo de
Ismael, Fillo de Nazar. So this whole string of
son of, son of, son of. And then we have Rey
de Granada, de Malaga, del Maria, de Cuadish,
de Roda. And then we have an abbreviation that
I cannot quite make out. And then one more place
name that looks something like Dininos. So anyway,
Joan has listed out all of the names in the
lineage of Muhammad, the current king of Granada.
And then he after that lists out all of the realms
that are the territories under the kingdom of
Granada, and then he goes on to talk about how,
you know, they want to be friends, but there's
been depredations with certain merchant shipments,
and this is a common thing, and this actually
is going to be again and again a topic that Joan
and actually Violant get into with the King
of Granada where there's very regular, I wouldn't
say it's happening like every day, it's like
a few times a year there are merchant shipments
that get seized by groups groups of Muslims in
ports in Grenada and so in those situations and
there's one in particular that I've studied a
little bit more in depth there's basically a
ransom demand or they're just taking all the
stuff and In the example that I have looked at
from a few years down the line, what ends up
happening is that the merchant who was the financier
of one of these ships that that got captured
by a group of Muslims in one of the ports of
Granada, he goes to Joan and says, help me to
arrange for the ransom of the crew and the products.
And as the correspondence continues, basically
the king of Granada tells Joan, sorry, all of
the crew members of that ship have converted
to Islam now. and so it's a really interesting
moment in the story of interfaith encounter on
the Iberian Peninsula, and this idea that you
could end up having people converting to Islam.
It could have been like a cover story, like maybe
they didn't all convert to Islam, but just the
fact that the king of Granada says that that's
what happened is reflective of how that is a
plausible fate for the group of sailors merchant
sailors that had been captured so all of this
is to say that the Shipments that were going
around the Mediterranean and when I say around
remember all of these boats were were very close
to the shores almost all their routes were close
to the shores because it was safer they were
vulnerable to capture so Christians would capture
Muslim ships Muslims would capture Christian
ships and there was an economy of ransom in the
Mediterranean in the Middle Ages, and there's
a really great article on that that I'll put
a link to in the webpage for today's episode.
But that is part of the explanation for why at
the bottom of this folio, Joan starts to talk
about the transportation that happens in the
zones between the countries. So they also share
a border, so there's like land transportation
too, but I think that what's being referred to
here are the at times very troublesome piracy
actions that characterize the way that people
in the merchant realm had to kind of... contend
with as they were doing their journeys of trading
goods and so forth. All right, so we got a bunch
of different things. This document about the
about the relations between the Crown of Aragon
and Granada was also sent on March 12th. So we
have definitely a two -for -one situation here,
and then the letter about the dogs from Bretanya
that was from March 11th. 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
have 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 documents 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.