Hello. In the Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was March 28, 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 is from the Varia Register of
Violant, and it is an intriguing one, to say
the least. So the addressee is the name at the
very beginning of the letter underneath La Reyna,
and that name is Mossen Fransech. So somebody
named Fransech is the recipient and is getting
instructions now i feel like i've seen that first
name before in conjunction with the officials
maybe in the treasury somewhere oh i just wish
i knew who this francesc was because that would
help a lot i think now the content of the letter
is in regard to certain properties and also a
person named Bernat Vilella. Okay, a couple weird
things about this document. In the first line,
the the content is about... it's it's some kind
of officials. They're called Scrivanies del Justicias.
or Justiciat. So there's some kind of, like,
well, I guess like writers of the judiciary,
writers of the judiciary. So this could be like
the clerks. It's, it's not any kind of office
that we've seen before. It's not a notary, because
I think Violant would have used notary. It's
not a bailiff or a vaguer. These are These are
scribes. This is the word for scribes. Scrivanes.
So the writers of the judiciary in a certain
via e loch. So the town and the surroundings.
And then line two is where it gets juicy because
the place names are Boria and Magallón. Violant
doesn't refer back to this in the letter herself,
but on March 10th and March 11th we read some
documents about these two places. Those documents
were the ones that Joan and Violant sent to
the governor of Aragon with a severe reprimand.
Why? Because they had heard that the governor
of Aragon had been dragging his feet to confiscate
on the order that they had placed. Joan and Violant
had given him an order to confiscate properties
from Bernat de Fortia, the brother of the former
Queen Sibilla and so they wrote to him, Joan
wrote on March 10th and Violant wrote on March
11th saying you'd better carry out our orders
or else there's going to be severe consequences
and the tone was the most punishing that we've
seen in the entire podcast so far. They were
mad. and the places that were listed in that
letter are the same places that now we see in
this innocent looking administrative document
being sent to a certain Mossen Francesc and what's
happening with these places well there's been
a kind of document i believe it would it's what's
referred to as the donades something like donation
or kind of I'm not quite sure how to translate
that in this legal sense but the writers of the
judiciary have come up with some kind of documentation
or authorization for these two locations and
guess who is going to be receiving them it's
someone I don't know we haven't heard of before
so you wouldn't really be able to guess but it's
someone who's closely connected to Joan and Violant
and how do we know that? It's because on line
two continuing on we have the name Bernat Vilella
and then after that name we have De casa de Nostra
Molt car Primogenit going on to line three lo dalfi
de Girona so this is somebody Bernat Vilella who
is of the house of our most dear firstborn inheritor
to the throne the Dauphin de Girona that is Jaume
their three -year -old son so there's someone
that is an administrator for the affairs of their
son and that person is Bernat Vilella and he now
is going to be the recipient of these properties
if I'm reading this letter correctly I think
I am so that's what this whole letter is about
basically saying all of the things that are related
to these properties should now be handled by
Bernat Vilella and that's the whole thing basically
and and at the end it's uh we've got a certificants
nos so that Violant will be informed when Mossen
Francesc has processed this order to get these
properties into the control of Bernat Vilella.
So it seems that the governor of Aragon did respond
to those very harsh letters that Joan and Violant
sent on March 10th and March 11th and that by
March 28th those properties are now available
to be given to somebody else. So interesting.
to note that because there's nothing in the document
itself that's like celebrating the successful
confiscation of these properties from the brother
of their nemesis, Sibilla. There's nothing in
the document itself indicates that, but if you
put it together, if you corroborate one of these
historical thinking practices corroboration if
you corroborate it with something we saw before
then we have an inference to make and the story
gets continued with an earlier document so that's
the ideal thing that a historian is trying to
do when working with an archive that doesn't
really give you the answers to the questions
you find most interesting sometimes. Other times
it does, but I just had a ton of questions about,
well, you know, what was going to happen next
with these properties, and I wanted to know why
the governor of Aragon had been dragging his
feet in the first place. We don't get anything
about that, and we still don't, but we do know
that Joan and Violant could, if they were
threatening enough they could get what they wanted
from their subordinates which is really important
because it would it would be a really dramatic
thing and important to know if the subordinates
would continue to try to drag their feet after
receiving a threatening letter like the one that
came from Joan on March 10th. That would be really
something if the governor of Aragon had continued
to circumvent the will of the monarchs, but We
see that the exercise of power, to the contrary,
has been successfully carried out. That Joan
and Violant are building up their ability to
catch people who are circumventing their will
and that they are able to make their will followed,
at least in this particular instance. so we can
chalk this up as a victory for the power and
exercise of power of the King and Queen at the
beginning of their reign Alright, that's what
I got for this particular document I want to
give you an update about what I am doing with
AI usage kind of exciting I have started to explore
the world of agentic AI, which means when you
turn over a lot of tasks to an AI that you've
given permission to follow instructions and act
on your own machine. So I took an old laptop,
and it's speedy enough for the purposes at hand
here. And that's because a lot of the processing
is done by the AIs. you know data center and
using a lot of a lot of energy and Water in order
to do that. So that's distressing ethically again,
you know, I've talked about the ethics of AI
before it's good to always mention that and be
aware of it and not to use it frivolously because
it is costly from an environmental point of view
and So we don't want to forget that and at the
same time these tools are extremely powerful
and have tremendous potential for unlocking a
lot of historical information and providing historians
with tremendous new capabilities for understanding
the past and creating narratives of the past
and we should explore that because the more that
we can innovate in historiography I think the
better for society. So using a lot of AI for
this podcast is something that I think is worth
the cost and also the ethical problems that those
costs are. All right let's get back to what I'm
exploring and doing now. So on this other computer
that does not have access to sensitive things
like my tax returns and stuff on my my normal
computer this computer has been wiped i have
downloaded openclaw you might have heard of openclaw
it's really the most popular ai agent these days
and you know this is march of well the end of
march of 2026 and so of course that could change
what open claw does is it helps to do things
on your computer but it always is going to be
working with some other ai providers so you get
to choose when you download open claw whether
it's going to be working primarily with clawed
or with uh chat gpt So you make that choice I
chose Claude and so I have the images from the
registers on my this this other computer and
I Tested out open claw to see if it would be
able to do the process that I do so for the last
several episodes what I've done is I've taken
the image of the document, and I have had Gemini
do a transcription, gotten okay results. Not
really, I wouldn't call it usable, well sometimes
it is, but it's on the borderline of usable and
not usable. And then I have Claude do an initial
transcription, and then I have the two get reconciled
by Claude. So the output from Gemini helps Claude
to improve its transcription. then Claude does
that reconciliation and I've been giving it feedback
after that reconciliation and then it does a
final transcription based on my feedback and
then a provisional translation. That's been my
process and I can report to you that OpenClaw
is able to do all of that with one exception.
The part where I give Claude my feedback before
it does that third stage of a final transcription,
that is not something that is possible when OpenClaw
does this. But OpenClaw has been able to do,
and I've done it for one register, it's able
to do over 250 images of all the pages in the
register. Okay, I think it was like 297 total.
Yeah, I think that's right. So 297 images, it
was able to do that on its own. So I now have
a transcription of 297 pages from register 1819
that was the first one I did a test for and it
took open clot working with Gemini and Claude
it took it about eight hours to do that and it
also had a cost because when you use the when
you use the AI chat bots I don't even know if
you can Yeah, I guess they're still chatbots.
When you use the LLMs this way, the companies
will charge you money. So it's not going to be
economically feasible for me to do this for every
register that contains content for 1387, but
I'm going to do it for a few. And then I'm able
to do a keyword search. So, for example, we had
a document a few episodes ago in which Violant
wrote to her father about how Joan had recovered
from his illness. And that was in Register 1819.
And I was able to use full text searching from
what OpenClaw generated in order to find that
letter when I asked it to search for transcripts
that were about illness and had the word malaltia.
So we are now at the point where we've got I
would call it a rudimentary full text searching
capability for late 14th century gothic secretarial
hand documents from the archive of the crown
of aragon so that's a pretty awesome result it
is something i thought i would get through transkribus
but it's been it's been rough going with transkribus
i've done 60 transcriptions of documents by hand
for Transkribus in order to give it some ground
truth to train on, and I gotta tell you that
the process I have with Gemini and Claude is
better than what Transkribus is able to produce
at this time. So I'm going to update the Season
1 FAQs about the OpenClaw process on that section
that I have about AI usage. And you'll start
to see some different notes about AI usage on
the web pages for documents. And I can't use
this all the time, every time, because it costs
about $50. to do a single register so I mean
yeah I cannot do there's and there's probably
about 40 registers that have information from
this year in Joan and Violant's reign 1387 so
not going to be able to not be able to do that
but it is a proof of concept for sure and it'll
help me with the registers that seem to have
the most interesting and relevant content for
my research question. So that's the update on
AI usage. It's getting interesting. I mean, we're
still at the beginning of 2026 and I am just
astonished at how far AI has come in just the
last three months. And if you then turn the clock
back even further and think about where AI was
in say October of 2025, this is a pace of improvement
that is really, you know, really something. Whew.
Okay. Well, 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!