Hello, in the Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was March 29th, 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 we have another document from
Violant. It's from her more businessy register,
the Commune et Curie. And before we get into
it, it's got a lot of interesting aspects. I
do want to touch base about the AI usage that
I'm experimenting with. using OpenClaw and having
an AI agent do some of the uploading and transferring
of transcriptions from Gemini to Claude. So it's
proceeding along. It's got its downsides, that's
for sure. So let me explain. Well, it's got its
tremendous upsides. So I tested it out. for one
register and had it run overnight and it went
really well in the sense that I was able to get
some output that I can search and I did a couple
full text searches and I was able to find some
interesting things. So the problem is that the
Gemini part of the process just didn't happen.
So there's some kinds of restrictions on usage
that this sort of thing really runs up against
because what I'm asking to have done here is
a pretty intensive task, a lot of tokens as they
say, because the AI Well, the large language
model has to analyze the image file, find the
letters, do the paleography, produce a transcription.
That is asking a lot. It's not the same as having
an AI agent just manage your calendar for you
or send some emails. Which, by the way, I would
not advise doing at this point. um because i
don't know i just think you should sort of know
what's going on i don't know maybe i'm just not
thinking of that in the right way and someone
can help me understand why that would be a good
thing to do anyway so i'm really hitting usage
limits a whole lot and in the second register
that i'm trying this out with i have to essentially
have the AI agent the open claw on this machine
that I'm using delay its requests to Gemini,
so Basically it has to and I'm not the one that
thought of that so the open claw agent checked
what was going on with Gemini and found that
even though I have signed up for the level of
service that you pay for, that there's just these
universal usage limits that this kind of task
makes it so that you can't do it at the speed
that it can be done from the agent's point of
view. So the agent is changing its workflow so
that instead of sending things to Gemini at the
speed that it can, it's basically adding in a
30 second pause between every single document.
And then that will hopefully comply with the
usage requirements that Gemini has. I feel like
in five years time, people will look back at
this and just kind of chuckle. Well, if there's
not an AI apocalypse between now and then. But
if we're still around in five years time, people
will look back at this and chuckle because these
usage limits are of course... going to disappear
as capabilities increase over the next couple
years. I would be quite shocked if this sort
of problem would occur after five years of further
development. Alright, so that's one issue where
I have not yet successfully replicated my exact
workflow with open -claw running things because
of that Gemini usage limit. But Claude is able
to move at that speed. It is just costly. So
basically the price that I paid for the first
register that I did this with from start to end,
it was about $50. so like that's not going to
be happening for all of the registers that contain
content from 1387. I think I'm just going to
be picking five registers, and still that's a
chunk of change right there. So the cost barrier
is significant right now, and I have to make
some choices because I don't have institutional
funding for this, and I guess that's something
I should look into, but that takes a lot of time
to figure out. All right, well anyway. So those
are the limitations, the usage limits, and the
time. So we're going to see what happens with
this next round when we have OpenClaw building
in a 30 second pause in the way that it interacts
with Gemini, it'll probably help to manage things
with Claude also. But let me talk about the quality
of the output for a moment, because, well, for
today's document, I did what I have been doing
for the last couple weeks, which is I've uploaded
it to Gemini, had Gemini do a transcription,
then I upload the image of the document to Claude,
and I have Claude do a transcription, and then
I take what Gemini did and I feed that into the
Claude chat and say reconcile these. Now today's
document is in Latin. and it's a little bit more
challenging because, well, I don't know, sometimes
I get a feeling like the language difference
doesn't really matter to them too much, but maybe
the paleography in this one is a little bit more
difficult. It doesn't, as I'm looking at it,
it doesn't strike me. I guess there's more abbreviations
when they're writing in Latin, actually. More
of a diversity of abbreviation in the Latin documents,
I think I'm noticing. So I think that's part
of the issue. and possibly this particular scribe
is challenging. He's not good old Bartolomeo
Sirvent. Oh, Bartolomeo Sirvent is my favorite
scribe, I think. No, this is Andres Granelli,
who we've had a couple times before. So both
Gemini and Claude struggled mightily with this
one, and I actually thought that the product
that I got after Claude reconciled what Gemini
had done was so problematic and the document
was short enough that I just went in and I typed
in my own transcription. And I mean, I'm not
good enough to have found everything perfectly,
but I did enough to be able to make some breakthroughs
on certain words that had been stumping everybody.
Like in the fourth line, there's the second word
it's got a pro abbreviation and then a little
like looks at first you look at it and you think
it might be a v and then you realize oh that's
an x but i didn't quite get to the x i really
i feel now that i'm looking at i'm like come
on i really should have understood that that
was an x and for some reason i was just not wanting
To go that route when I was looking at it before
I can't quite figure out what I was thinking
because it is Pro and then X with a macron and
above which would make sense to expand is Proxima
so that line Doesn't seem to have anything about
time but if you go back to the end of line three
you've got the word dia day so something like
the sixth day after and then some kind of form
of domina or dominica proxima or it could actually
be the sunday the sunday because what we have
that would be interesting if that if that first
word of line four is actually the word for sunday
like domingue so uh that's super interesting
i think it is now that i'm working it out because
the fourth word of line four is quasimodo and
when i hear quasimodo i immediately think of
the hunchback of notredame and like the disney
version that I saw when I was younger, but of
course it's based on a novel by Victor Hugo.
And there's a character named Quasimodo in there.
I think in both of those I have not read the
novel. Anyway, that is very misleading because
this is not about the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Actually, what I learned today because of Well,
I think also Gemini picked up on this. I can't
quite remember, but at least one of the chatbots
understood that Quasimodo was potentially actually
the name for a holiday. The Sunday following
Easter Sunday, one of its names is Quasimodo.
And that's because the word Quasimodo means something
like that's like newly changed. And there's something
about like the baby Jesus newly changed. I don't
know. I didn't get into it too much. I'll put
in the Wikipedia page. I'm being super lazy about
that. All right. So that is just one example
of how I was able with my intervention to get
past something that Well, and the chatbots helped.
We worked together. We worked together. It was
a real, you know, Ethan Mollick has his book about
AI, which I highly recommend. I'll put in the
bibliography for this page. The title is Co -Intelligence,
and this is absolutely an instance of a co -intelligence.
So that's the update with AI. And if you haven't
noticed already, this podcast is almost like
has like a shadow podcast in it and You know
the the you know the shadow podcast is a journal
of how AI has developed in the months that I'm
looking at these documents and we're adding to
that as We try our AI agent and we'll see what
happens but all of that is to say that even when
the AI agent is able to run an entire register
of images through Gemini and Claude and to replicate
what I do, it's still missing that step that
I used today, which is to notice that the transcription,
for whatever reason, was particularly low quality
and to intervene before... the final thing. I
can still intervene as I'm looking at these things
later, but just think about the implications
for what I'm trying to do, something like a full
text search for letters about certain things.
So it's just a reminder that if I'm going to
be searching the big data that comes out of what
the AI agent, what the AI agent generates, I
need to be searching for different things in
different ways and not just one little search
and saying, oh, nothing came up, that must be,
and it's not there. Nope, nope, nope. It's gotta
be treated as like a rudimentary data set and
not anything like a critical edition. All right,
let's talk about this document. This document
is an example of interfaith context. So Violant
is telling the addressee, who appears right in
that first line, Cresques Bonafos. Crescques is
a pretty common Jewish name, and in fact, that
name came up. I don't know if it's a family relation
or just a coincidence, but in the letter from
Joan about the map, the Catalan Atlas, the Majorcan
school of cartographers had the Cresques family,
the father, son, and probably others who were
cartographers there. But I don't see that there's
any connection to this particular Cresques in
today's document, because this person lives in
Figueres. Now I'm pretty sure we're talking about
Figueres. The third from the last word of line
one has the two Fs, which clues you in that it's
a proper name, and it's got F -I -G -I -I -S
as the spelling, and that diagonal stroke above
the word I think is like the dot on the I. I
don't think that there's an abbreviation. I think
that the Latin name for Figueres just doesn't
have the R. but I'm not entirely sure. The chatbots,
that's what they came up with too, that it's
Figueres. We're going to go with that for now,
but I still want to say that's provisional. And
the word before de Figueres or de Figuis is Iudei,
actually. So he's being identified as a Jew of
the town of Figueres. And then what's really
interesting is that really quick into it on the
second line we see that there's been a supplication,
some kind of petition, and the fourth word is
regino. I think that means that it was a supplication
to the queen. And then we have UX and then t
-u -e. And the macron over the u -x is very faint,
but it is there. So this is uxore tuae, your
wife. And then we've got some adjectives afterwards,
paupis et miserabilis. So she's poor and miserable.
So something has gone wrong with this marriage
because the wife of Cresques Bonifos has made
some kind of supplication to the Queen. And the
chatbots were thinking that the name of the wife
is Regina. I do not think so. I don't think so.
I think that's dative, the Regino, and that it
means that the supplication was for or to the
Queen. And so basically the letter is mandating
that Crescas Boniface on the sixth day after
Quasimodo shows up to Barcelona and answers this.
And they're gonna work it out. And they're gonna
get some justice. And I think that's... pretty
much what it amounts to. There's some other intriguing
words in this letter that I'm quite, I'm not
quite sure how it all fits together. And I think
the paleography prevented the chat bots from
getting like a really great translation of this
into English. But I think that this is absolutely
fascinating that we have the queen getting involved
in a complaint. about a husband being in that
complaint has been submitted by the wife and
that this is a Jewish couple. And so I think
this is super interesting. There's another instance
that has come up in the historiography that this
reminds me of, and it's in the latest book by
Marie Kelleher, The Hungry City. and Marie Kelleher
tells the story of Bonadona, who was also a Jewish
woman who used the legal system to get justice
against a husband. And so I think this is a super
interesting echo of that because the episode
that Marie Kelleher talks about occurred earlier
in the century in a different a different monarch.
And well, I don't even know if that one went
to as high as the king or queen, actually. So
here, I mean, they're going all the way to the
chief legal authority, since this is in Violant's
portfolio. So it's super interesting, and I really
want to know what happened here. And this is
where, you know, my progress using the AI agent
can come in, because once this is improved, and
once the cost comes down, there's so many records
in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, not just
the letters from the royal family, but all kinds
of civic records, and then there's other in the
same kind of paleography, there's the same kind
of script, there's other records from other archives,
and to make them full -text searchable, one day,
maybe not too far in the future, I would be able
to go in and do a search for Cresques Boniface
and find out more about what was happening here,
because in its usual form we have a letter that
doesn't really state specific things. It's all
just, you know, the case. or the complaint, right,
or the supplication. All right, 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. The AI chat
transcripts for today's episode I think are going
to be really interesting to look at, the one
from Claude in particular. There will be two
that you can look at. 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.