Hello. In the Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was March 20th, 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.
Today's document comes from the secret seal register
of Joan and again, just want to repeat because
I haven't said it for a little while when we
use the word secret. We're really talking about
something that would today in English be designated
as private. It's not like the top secret designation
of classified documents. It's more about how
these are the letters that have a level of privacy,
but it's not like they're revealing anything
dangerous if they fell into the wrong hands.
And this letter is a really good example of that
because it is a whole bunch of pleasantries and
vague positive updates. There's a few things
in it that are definitely worth noting, and we'll
get to that. The sender is of course Joan. The
recipient is the King of Navarre. the letter
begins muy caro hermano, and you might notice
that that sounds a little bit different than
the Catalan words that we're used to, and that's
because this letter is not in a kind of pure
Catalan. This letter is really a Castilian and
Argonese and maybe a little bit of Catalan thrown
in there here and there, but it's demonstrating
an effort to write in the language that's more
comfortable for the recipient. So it's not a
Catalan letter, and also hermano has an H, which
is something that anyone who speaks Castilian
today would immediately recognize when often
in the Catalan you'll see hermano with a G at
the beginning. Also, muyto in Catalan versus
muy in Spanish. And then caro with an aro with
an aro with an o at the end. All right, so I
went out of order there with those three words,
but you know, you get the idea, right? This is
not the kind of Catalan that is typical. And
that's just a reflection of how either Joan himself
or the Chancery scribes are making adjustments
in order to come across as more inviting and
pleasant and considerate and courteous to the
recipient, the King of Navarre. Something else
about the Addressee line. So the first line in
Latin, Fuit missa regi navarre. or Navar -i?
Navar -em? Oh gosh. Once again, this would, I
think, be the genitive of Navarre. Ah, okay. Just
gonna let that go. That line is very clear. All
right, this was sent to the king of Navarre. The
second line, similis fuet, and then we've got
something like another word with an F, so I think
that is amounting to a similar one was also sent,
and then we've got regina for queen, and the
next word was one that really stumped me, and
initially it also stumped Gemini and Claude,
and I like to think that if I just really worked
at this for another 10 minutes or like taking
a break and come back to it, I could have figured
it out on my own because once Claude came up
with the answer based on my just telling Claude
what I could see, Claude was able to figure it
out quite quickly. So the letters that I see
are a capital U or a V. They were very interchangeable
at this time, U and V. Then the letter X, and
then there's a space, and then an S -U -E. And
I was not remembering one of the most early words
that you learn as you're learning Latin, which
is uxore. It means wife. And so once I put in
UX into the conversation that I was having with
Claude, Claude was like, ah, of course, this
is Uxore Sue, his wife, the queen, his wife.
So once again, we have an episode in which the
chat bot is able to help me make the breakthrough.
In this situation, it saved me some time. I am
quite sure that I would have gotten that eventually.
I like to think so. Is it diminishing my abilities
by using it as a crutch like that? Yeah, but
again, bigger picture. My destiny is not to be
a long -term practicing medievalist, and so for
my purposes, this is an okay thing. If you are
listening to this, and you plan to do about 20
or 30 years of work in medieval studies, please
don't do what I do. Please take that time to
really learn Latin, because it will pay off for
you in all kinds of ways. And then later on,
I'm sure AI will have developed where you can
do some supervision of it. And that's great.
But um yeah Shadow is echoing my sentiment there
if you're really going to go into medieval studies
then learn that latin because it will open up
meanings and understandings for you and is an
investment that will pay off if you're in this
for that long haul let's talk about the content
of this letter It is, like I said before, just
a series of general pleasantries. Hi, I hope
you're doing all right, I think of you affectionately,
blah blah blah, give me good news, I have good
news, da da da. There's a couple things though
that have additional resonance when we have in
mind what we've already learned about Joan and
Violant. First, in the fifth... So he is saying
he has been delivered and he has been freed well
from the accident misfortune that he had had
in his body. So he's talking about the illness
that they're trying to make everybody forget
about. So there's this major damage control that
we've seen happening from Violant as she's writing
to her family and others in France. Don't believe
the rumors! And Joan here is saying to the King
of Navarre, you might have heard that I was kind
of sick, but you know what? It is done. I am
totally fine. Everything's fine. Nothing to worry
about. It's all great. And then he goes on after
that to talk about how the Queen and the Prince
Jaume, who's referred to here as the Dauphin,
they are also doing great and his daughters the
infantas they're doing great too everybody's
so great thanks to god and i did want to point
out that in line six we've got Violant referred
to as I'm not sure why he doesn't go for the
full -on Molt Cara Companyona, like the title of
the podcast, but he I think is really, you know,
indicating still that by using this word he's
saying, you know, this is the person that is
my companion in this whole journey here of co
-rule life, so on and so forth. So... Nostra
cara companyana. Our dear companion. And then
all of the rest of the letter is, hey, you know,
there's all these things that, you know, I know
would be great if you just told me your news,
all your happy tidings, blah, blah, blah. It's
all just very boilerplate. In some earlier episodes
where we had Violant writing to Charles III,
there was a lot more personal touch and not so
much the boilerplate. And I think that's definitely
reflective of how Violant might have had some
longer -term history with Charles III of Navarre.
I have a theory that they knew each other in
Paris way back when Violant was in the court
of Charles V of France just because she was part
of the royal family Charles V was her uncle and
then the future Charles III of Navarre had been
sort of like taken prisoner in Paris around the
time, like the late 1370s, so he was sort of
like a hostage. They didn't really call him a
hostage. I like to use the phrase quasi -hostage,
but anyway Charles III of Navarre was in Paris
and not able to leave while his father was working
out some issues. with whether he was going to
continue being oppositional to French interests.
So that's the past, about more than 10 years
in the past, and in the current moment, in 1387,
Charles has ascended, Charles III has ascended
to be the king of Navarre, and he's kind of of
the same generation. as Joan and Violant.
So Violant, when writing to Charles III of Navarre,
you can really tell that there's some more personal
touches in there, but it seems that Joan just
doesn't have that level of closeness. And I say
that because it's really hard to pick out any
personal touches in this letter, like this could
have been written by anybody. you know, who just
said it could have been written by a chatbot.
I mean, it's like, it's like the scribes were
like the AI chatbots of the time, where Joan
basically just put in a prompt saying, I just
need to let the King of Navarre know that I'm
very healthy. Fill this thing with pleasantries,
make it nice. And that's what the scribes then
provided. And not only that, but he just does
like a copy paste for the Queen. by not writing
anything separate, just trusting it to the scribes
that they've made another copy and changed the
gendered endings to the nouns, like from hermano
to hermana. And he's just like, yeah, copy paste
that. So that's my interpretation of the surface
level kind of boilerplate feeling of this letter
that Violante has some additional history or
rapport with Charles III of Navarre, and Joan
just doesn't have that. There is definitely a
need to make other people, other powerful people
believe that he's perfectly healthy. And in my
mind, if you send a boilerplate letter, that,
you know, doesn't have any kind of personal touch
to it all that much. You're not really being
all that convincing, but I don't know. Maybe
it's like if you get a direct letter from one
king to another, it's got, you know, some additional
umph in terms of its believability. And so I
don't know. I mean, I just don't quite see how
this is better than just the rumor mill. Like,
just, you know, let the King of Navarre know
that I'm healthy now. And maybe it's because
Showan is not all that healthy. So maybe this
is not a purely honest letter. And they're still
in damage control mode because maybe the truth
of the matter is that Joan has not really been
bien quitio of his accident. Maybe there are
some lingering effects. Well, there's no way
to know. Maybe we can treat this as its surface
-level meaning and say, ah yeah, he would only
write this to a fellow king if he really was
100 % recovered. Or we can doubt it. and we'll
see what else we can find as we continue on in
our journey through the documents. 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,
which will include links back to those earlier
episodes that involved Charles III of Navarre,
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.