Hello. In the Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was March 23rd, 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.
Well, yesterday I was so excited about what I
was able to figure out in the archive and I felt
very masterful. in my ability to understand the
paleography and the catalan and to put it all
together. And now today I am humbled because
I'm working with a Latin document and it has
just been really rough going. Oh my goodness.
So this document is in the Commune et Curiae
folder for Violant folder register and that
register is for the more businessy things that
are done and less about the personal updates
like the kind of stuff we see in the secret seal
so today's document is one that concerns a number
of people. There's so many people named at the
beginning of this, but then as we get further
into it, we see that the focus is about the person
whose name starts off the whole thing, a certain
Tome, a certain Thomas. And this document has
some damage to it from some wormholes, but it's
not really blocking a lot of the text. The holes
are occurring, for the most part, outside of
the written letters. And I think I made a mistake
with the AI chatbots this go around. I had an
idea that if I forewarned them about the damage
to the paper that it would help them, but I think
actually it caused a problem. So Gemini just
kind of like gave up on whole lines thinking
that there was damage blocking letters when really
there wasn't and then Claude did the same thing.
So I think in the future if there's damage to
the paper like what I'm seeing here I might I
might just you know not provide that information
to the large language model chatbots and that's
so weird because you would think the more information
the better but it's all about how you describe
it when you're trying to give instructions to
the chatbots and they might have taken my little
cautionary note and really overextended it in
its interpretation thinking that there's damage
all over the place so I tried to correct for
that but I still feel like it just kind of Degraded
the whole process and then that's on top of the
fact that it is Latin and there are a lot of
abbreviations there are a lot of names and This
particular document it's not multiple pages.
It all fits on one folio, but it still just has
a lot of References in it. So there's I think
two earlier documents that are referenced inside
this one So there's just a lot going on and someone
who has really been primarily working with legal
documents or financial documents, documents about,
I think this is about a pension of some kind,
well, they would be able to identify the subtleties
here. But I am going to be the first to admit
that for this particular document, the subtleties
are completely out of reach for me. So I'm going
to tell you what I do know about this. I know
that there's some kind of problem with somebody
named Thomas. I think the other people in the
document are going to have to do something to
deal with this Thomas problem. I think that they
might need to be giving restitution to Thomas,
but I do not know that for sure. And the clues
that I have about that are at the end of this
document. So on line 15, we have the penalty
mentioned. We've got the phrase sub pena centem
florin auri. So a hundred gold florins is the
penalty if the directive from Violant is not
followed. And then further towards the end we've
got on line 21 So but then on the line before
we've got pre -mesis so pre -mesis and then a
word that I don't know what it's really hard
the paleography but then on the next line we
have dicto tome so the said thomas is promised
or I'm going to be given something I think And
he's not the one being fined, I'm pretty sure,
but I'm not even entirely sure about that. And
this issue has been dealt with previously because
in the document, there are two earlier documents
referred to. So in line eight, there's mention
of a document from February of 1386. And then
line nine makes it clear that that document was
actually written by Pere the Ceremonious, Joan's
father, we have at the end of line 9, Regis Petri.
And then line 10 mentions yet another document
from the 30th of March of, it looks like, the
same year 1386. It says, Anno Proximo Primo,
maybe? Yeah. So, you know, there's a lot being
referred to here. And I think one important thing
we can take away from this is that for all of
the seemingly difficult organizational choices
that are made about what is going into what register,
when we have some kind of problem in March of
1387, in the reign of a new queen, the chancery
staff is able to either locate or refer back
to earlier documents. Now, it is possible that
when this Thomas made his supplication, his complaint
to Violante, he mentioned these documents and
everyone's just taking his word for it. That
would kind of surprise me. I would guess that
before the officials here are going to be issuing
some kind of subsequent ruling or additional
enforcement of an earlier ruling, they're gonna
actually check. So I think that they were able
to go back into the records and verify these
things But I'm not sure they might have maybe
the original letter was somehow included But
that's not the kind of thing you'd want to really
get rid of You wouldn't want it to leave your
hand if you were this Thomas You wouldn't want
to send in the original letter with your current
Supplication because then you don't have that
original letter anymore Maybe there was maybe
Thomas could have made a copy I'm not sure. My
guess though is that at some level the chancery
staff do verify these things, and that's really
the only big takeaway I have from this. I, of
course, will be looking out as I'm proceeding
along and just trying to look out for another
Thomas. I don't even know where this Thomas is
located. I couldn't find a location in the opening
lines, so maybe It's Barcelona? Maybe all these
people are in Barcelona? I just... yeah, this
was a really really tough one. The paleography
was tough, the abbreviations were tough, the
AI chatbots seemed to also struggle, and I couldn't
pull out anything here that seems like it's related
to... the big research questions that I have.
And so in that kind of situation, I just make
some notes about what this document is about,
some brief notes, and then just kind of put a
pin in it. And if something comes up later that
links back to it, then we'll come back and look
through it again in more detail. But yeah, we're
really living up to the motto of the podcast
today. 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, yeah, who are all these
people in this document? Well, then 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.