Season 1, Episode 120

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Joan orders all the officials in the province of Aragon to stop interfering with the collection of taxes from religious minority communities.

Today’s Document

• Subject: tax collection from the Jewish and Muslim aljamas
• Date: April 23, 1387
• Day of the Week: Tuesday
• Language: Latin
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR Cartas Reales, Juan_I, caja_1, nº60r-v
• Link to Fondo Histórico de Aragón
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Joan
• Recipients: all the officials of the state in the province of Aragon

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: as king, Joan had the direct administrative authority over the religious minority communities of the Jewish and Muslim aljamas; if there had been some kind of challenge to this authority brewing in the province of Aragon, Joan would be highly motivated to send officials there to address that problem promptly, especially in this case involving the flow of revenue to the royal treasury

• Contextualization: the long background of interfaith encounter in Iberia followed some of the major patterns of interaction in other parts of the Muslim world, and in this document we can see vestiges of the dhimmi status that Christians and Jews had under Muslim rule in the alternative governance of faith-based neighborhoods, which were called aljamas

• Corroboration: the documents tagged with Jewish History and Muslim History will provide a lot of corroboration for the royal administration of the aljamas; the document examined in Episode 85 corroborates today’s document very closely, as a similar directive was sent to Valencia on March 19th

• Close-Reading: the official mentioned in the document, García López de Sese, is identified as a majordomo, which might be a high level person in the royal administration and, if so, would indicate a seriousness regarding this matter

What is this document doing?

• This document attempts to counteract the centrifugal political forces in a federation of provinces.
• The document reinforces religious boundaries through an assertion of differences for religious minority communities in terms of governing structures and taxation.

Questions

• What problem occurred that created the need for this document? Why had the situation become unclear to the various authorities in the province of Aragon?
• Is this document somehow related to the authority problems created by the ‘bandos’ referenced in Violant’s letter to the Governor of Aragon from yesterday?
• Does this document show that people were taking advantage of the transition in royal leadership to try to renegotiate the taxation procedures for the aljamas?
• How many officials are there like García López de Sese who can be sent to various provinces to ensure that royal authority is being respected?

AI Usage

I gave an initial transcription by Gemini to Claude for a reconciliation, for which it created an extra notes document. Claude then produced a translation with footnotes.

Bibliography

• Baer, Yitzhak. A History of the Jews in Christian Spain. Jewish Publication Society of America, 1961.
• Bisson, Thomas N. Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History. Clarendon Press, 1986.
• Sánchez, Manuel, Ángel Sesma Muñoz, and Antoni Furió. “Old and New Forms of Taxation in the Crown of Aragon (13th-14th Centuries).” In La fiscalità nell’economia Europea secc. XIII-XVIII, edited by Simonetta Cavaciocchi. Firenze University Press, 2008. Available for free at CSIC

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