Joan commissions Johannes de Monte as an official royal messenger.
Episode 99
ACA CR R1890 f161v Source: PARES
Sourcing: Joan, as king, held the power to appoint all sorts of officials and provide them with salaries; however, it is very possible that appointments like this were handled by his advisers, such as the chamberlain and that Joan simply signed off on them
Contextualization: in the Late Middle Ages, the growth of the state, and the expansion of its bureaucracy, required more messengers and couriers
Corroboration: the documents examined in Episode 41 and Episode 42 feature a messenger named Gerau who delivered personal messages for Joan and Violant and thus might have had much higher status than Johannes de Monte; there are also messengers directly mentioned in the documents examined in Episode 47 and Episode 56
Close-Reading: the use of the phrase ‘latorem presentium’ might indicate that Johannes de Monte has been present in the province of Aragon for a while and is part of this document’s review of his well-established reputation
I used Gemini for an initial transcription, which I then had Claude reconcile with its oWn initial transcription. Claude then produced a translation into English with footnotes. This episode features a great example of how errors can compound when using LLMs for automatic text recognition. In this case the ‘ad’ early in the document triggered Gemini to interpret the word as ‘admiral’ and then both LLMs got stuck with thinking that this document was about the navy in some way. In addition to the use of AI for this episode, I also used the online Latin dictionary, Whitaker’s Words.