Season 1, Episode 108

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Violant writes directly to the captains of a band of mercenaries, telling them to not journey through the territory of the Crown of Aragon.

Today’s Document

• Subject: prohibiting the entrance into the Crown of Aragon of a band of mercenaries heading to Castile to fight John of Gaunt
• Date: April 11, 1387
• Day of the Week: Thursday
• Language: Catalan
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R2053 f4r-v
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Violant
• Recipients: Gautier de Passac and Guillaume de Naillac

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: somehow Violant began to suspect that, despite her earlier action, the mercenaries were still intending to pass through the Crown of Aragon; perhaps Violant feared that her rejection of the King of Castile’s request to have the mercenaries pass through the Crown of Aragon was not enough to prevent them from showing up at the border; as queen, Violant could imply that the mercenaries would be stopped by force if they attempted to cross into the Crown of Aragon; the recipients of this letter, as mercenary leaders, would likely have been displeased at being refused a direct route to Castile; it appears that Violant had sent Ramon de Perellos, one of her most trusted diplomats to contront the mercenaries

• Contextualization: due to his marriage to Constance, the daughter of Pedro the Cruel, John of Gaunt, made a play for the throne of Castile in early 1387; it seems that at this moment John of Gaunt had already arrived in Portugal, welcomed by yet another King John, João I of Portugal; John of Gaunt’s invasion of Castile constituted a proxy war between England and France during a lull in the direct fighting of the One Hundred Years War, and the regents ruling France, the Duc de Berry and the Duke of Burgundy apparently authorized French mercenaries to travel to Castile to help Juan I to fight off John of Gaunt

• Corroboration: for some reason, Violant’s earlier letter, examined in Episode 80, to the King of Castile did not produce the desired effect of stopping the mercenaries from planning to pass through the Crown of Aragon

• Close-Reading: Violant invokes the authority of the King of France although she must have been completely aware of the continued rule of the regents; she is trying to tell the mercenary captains that it’s not just her authority that they must obey but also the highest authority in France; Volant writes that she is ‘marvellada e non sens deplaer,’ astonished and not without displeasure, to hear that the mercenary captains plan to ignore her wishes; when Violant tells the mercenaries she doesn’t want them in her kingdom, she does not mince words and instead says to them that they will do damage to her people

What is this document doing?

• This document applies reputational power at the highest levels without threatening violence directly.
• The document directly calls out the mercenaries for the toll they take on the populations they encounter in their travel.

Questions

• What led Violant to so directly communicate to the mercenary captains that they essentially despoil the lands they travel through?
• Did Violant feel that there was a real risk that the rulers of France would not back her up?
• Had Ramon de Perellos been recalled from Avignon for this task specifically?
• Did Joan write any documents about the threat of these mercenaries? If not, why not?
• Was this document the deciding factor in the mercenaries’ eventual choice to travel through Navarre?
• Had Violant and/or Joan marshalled any military forces to stop the mercenaries?

AI Usage

ChatGPT helped me to identify the recipients of this letter and actually I don’t think I could have found their names in any other way that would not involve a ton of reading through books on the One Hundred Years War. This register was later in my OpenClaw agentic AI pipeline, but the transcription and translation came through badly garbled. The general sense was somewhat accurate, that the letter was about troop movements, but the ouput for this document, both for folio 4r and for folio 4v was largely unusable.

Bibliography

• Allmand, C. T. The Hundred Years War: England and France at War, c. 1300-c. 1450. Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Goodman, Anthony. John of Gaunt: the exercise of princely power in fourteenth-century Europe. Routledge, 2014.

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