Season 1, Episode 130

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In the midst of a conflict with Pisa, Joan orders the evacuation of Catalan merchants from Pisa and sends Berenguer Morey there to produce a diplomatic resolution.

Today’s Document

• Subject: the evacuation and/or recall of the subjects of the Crown of Aragon currently in Pisa
• Date: May 3, 1387
• Day of the Week: Friday
• Language: Latin
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R1826 f124v-125r
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Joan
• Recipients: the Catalan merchant community in Pisa

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: some kind of political crisis has led to the likely expulsion of Catalan merchants from Pisa; the court officials, if not Joan himself, consider Berenguer Morey a good choice for the diplomatic mission to reconcile with the Pisans; records of Morey as a very wealthy Barcelona merchant exist in several archivals sources

• Contextualization: the dispute between the Crown of Aragon and Pisa was in some ways a consequence of the Great Western Schism, with prominent Pisans throwing their support behind the Pope in Rome as Joan declared support for the Pope in Avignon; at the same time, the conflict appears to have started in 1386, well before Joan’s reign, when Pere the Ceremonious kept the Crown of Aragon neutral in the schism; eventually the Catalan merchant community in Pisa bounced back and the modern scholar José Bordes García quotes a 1397 document from a Datini agent which said the Catalan merchants in Pisa were ‘tutti richi’[jbg]

• Corroboration: no other documents thus far in the podcast have mentioned the expulsion of Catalan merchants from a foreign city; the safe-passage document for a merchant examined in Episode 58 gives us an idea of how it might be difficult for merchants to travel through various localities and the utility of Catalan residents in various ports; Morey is in some ways like Luchino Scarampi, as discussed in Episode 125 in that he is a wealthy merchant who becomes involved in resolving a dispute between powerful states

• Close-Reading: the Latin makes close reading difficult for this document, but I would look for indications of how urgent the problem is for the Catalan community in Pisa at the moment

What is this document doing?

• This document, in issuing advice for evacuation, severely curtails the sense of security for the Catalan merchants in Pisa.
• The document connects a wealthy merchant to diplomatic activity.

Questions

• What had precipitated the recent escalation of conflict between Pisa and the Catalan merchants?
• How had Berenguer Morey been chosen for this diplomatic mission?
• What role did the Great Western Schism play in the minds of the people involved in the various aspects of this conflict?

AI Usage

I gave an initial transcription by Gemini to Claude for a reconciliation. This episode was prepared in the roughly two-week period that Anthropic faced a surge in usage due to Mythos hype and the big increase in agentic AI. As the usage limits were adjusted, I ran out of tokens in my account while working on this document.

I went to ChatGPT for some additional research on the relations between the Crown of Aragon and Pisa at this time. On May 13th, I got the Hurtado article thanks to UNM’s awesome Inter-Library Loan staff. I had only found records of the conference proceedings in European libraries but somehow ILL found a record for it at the Columbia University’s Library. The article was immensely helpful for identifying documents later in the year about the Pisa conflict.

Bibliography

• Bordes García, José. “L’activitat Dels Mercaders Catalans a La Pisa Medieval (Final Del Segle Xiv-Primera Meitat Del Xv).” Estudis Històrics i Documents Dels Arxius de Protocols, no. 23 (2015): 75–90.
• Hurtado, Víctor. “Berenguer Morey, mercader de Barcelona i la seva activitat diplomática amb Pisa l’any 1387.” La Corona d’Aragona in Italia (Secc.XIII-XVIII): Congresso Di Storia Della Corona d’Aragona 14a 1990 Sassari-Alghero. 1996, 527–44.
• Quertier, Cédric. “Le jeu des six différences? Comparer les nations florentine et catalane à Pise dans la seconde moitié du XIVe siècle.” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome - Moyen Âge, nos. 129–1 (May 2017): 129–1.
• Rollo-Koster, Joëlle, and Thomas M. Izbicki, eds. A Companion to the Great Western Schism (1378-1417). Brill, 2009.

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