Season 1, Episode 103

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Violant demands that authorities in the province of Orihuela pursue justice against a group of Muslims accused of sexual assault of a recent convert to Christianity.

Today’s Document

• Subject: criminal law enforcement in an interfaith context
• Date: April 6, 1387
• Day of the Week: Saturday
• Language: Catalan
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R1819 f95r
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Violant
• Recipients: Paulo Crucadia, Portantveus of Orihuela

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: Violant, as a secular sovereign of a Christian country in the Middle Ages, would see herself as an ultimate upholder of the faith and would want to fiercely defend any converts to Christianity; it is unlikely that Violant heard about this particular case from Muslim sources because key aspects of the situation would be uncomfortable for Muslim leaders to discuss - the fact that one of their own converted and the accusation of a sexual assault of a man; it is reasonable to infer that Violant likely received information about this case from Christian authorities who would be motivated to exaggerate details of the story in their effort to paint the Muslims worthy of disdain and punishment

• Contextualization: the fact that Novelda was close to the border with Granada is very significant because it was common for Christians in the southwestern territories of the Crown of Aragon to suspect that Muslims were commiting acts of sabotage in order to help Granada’s plans to invade and conquer territory; even as there was a lot of economic cooperation and even friendship between Muslims and Christians in these borderlands, the act of converting from one religion to the other was not tolerated in the least

• Corroboration: the documents about sexual assault examined in Episode 9 and Episode 49 provide a very useful corroboration for this one; in the case of the Montpellier students who raped a woman at night, Violant and Joan were quick to downplay the severity of the crime and to advocate for a lighter treatment of the students, some of whom came from prominent Aragonese families; in the situation of today’s document, Violant takes the side of the victim and it was probably far easier for her to do so because it placed her as a defender of Christianity and she probably felt less reluctant to think of Muslim perpetrators, versus upper-class Aragonese Christians, as guilty of an enormous crime; the fact that this case involved men sexually assaulting another man made a large difference because that made it less easy for Violant to dismiss male sexual violence due to a larger social context that largely accepted men’s dominance of women, sexually and politically

• Close-Reading: the Diccionari català-valencià-balear has medieval usages of the word ‘abcegar’ to mean literally to lose eyesight and also metaphorically to lose the ability to reason; however, the addition of this specific injury to the description of the case leads me to think that there is truth in the report that the convert to Christianity was severely physically harmed by members of the Muslim community

What is this document doing?

• This document links sexuality to the tensions around religious conversion.
• The document perpetuates an image of an othered social minority as beastly.

Questions

• How had Violant heard about this case?
• What had the Muslim leaders of the Novelda aljama said about this case?
• Who were the perpetrators?
• How many Muslims had converted to Christianity in this town in the last ten years?
• Did any criminal prosecution or trial happen after this?

Additional Notes

In this episode, I mentioned the book by Jaume Riera i Sans, Sodomites Catalans: Història i Vida (Segles XIII-XVIII). It is a monumental volume that collects documents directly from archives and also ones mentioned previously in the secondary literature. Riera i Sans paraphrases each case and does not always quote directly from the primary source. The first document is from 1263 and the last document is from 1790. For the years of Joan and Violant’s reign, there are four documents and today’s document ACA CR R1819 f95r-v is not included. To my knowledge, no modern scholar has discussed this document.

AI Usage

Today’s document is within a register that I put through my OpenClaw agentic AI pipeline. The report thus includes all three stages that would previously appear as three separate PDFs on the webpages of many episodes in March.

Bibliography

• Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality : Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
• Cadden, Joan. Nothing Natural Is Shameful: Sodomy and Science in Late Medieval Europe. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
• Karras, Ruth Mazo. Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto Others. Third edition. Routledge, 2017.
• Riera i Sans, Jaume. Sodomites Catalans: Història i Vida (Segles XIII-XVIII). Editorial Base, 2014.
• Salicrú Lluch, Roser. “Crossing Boundaries in Late Medieval Mediterranean Iberia: Historical Glimpses of Christian-Islamic Intercultural Dialogue.” International Journal of Euro-Mediterranean Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 33–51.
• Scott, Samuel Parsons, and Robert I. Burns. Las Siete Partidas, Volume 5: Underworlds: The Dead, the Criminal, and the Marginalized (Partidas VI and VII). University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
• Tortorici, Zeb. Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain. Duke University Press, 2018.
• Weeks, Jeffrey. What Is Sexual History? Polity, 2016.

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