Season 1, Episode 139

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Joan expands Johan de Muntros’s previous financial arrangements to include all sorts of financial instruments.

Today’s Document

• Subject: authorization for a wide variety of loan instruments, such as mogubells
• Date: May 12, 1387
• Day of the Week: Sunday
• Language: Latin
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R1751 f60v-61r
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Joan
• Recipient: Johan de Muntros

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: this does strike me as the kind of document that a cash-strapped monarch would produce, but we don’t have information about Joan’s and Violant’s financial status at this moment so this motivation must remain a conjecture at this point; after three documents involving Pere and Johan de Muntros, it is clear that these two merchants have access to major sources of money or are willing to generate those sources energetically; certainly Johan de Muntros would benefit from a commission on these large financial dealings; Joan was criticized by his contemporaries and modern historians for his willingness to use mogubells¹

• Contextualization: this authorization to raise funds somehow involves further taxing various communities and the instructions apply to Christians and Jews alike, which references the long-term interfaith context of royal direct rule of the aljamas; in this situation, an equal application to both communities might come across as radical; the term mogubell represents the big picture context of Muslim rule in Iberia because it is derived from the Arabic term ‘muqabala’; that term was used in the sense of balancing of equations in the influential treatise by the mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, The Concise Book of Calculation by Restoration and Balancing, the text that essentially invented modern algebra, which is derived from another Arabic term, al-jabr

• Corroboration: for the Muntros family of merchants, the documents examined in Episode 137, Episode 138, and Episode 149 involve either Pere or Johan de Muntros; today’s document, though, has a different tone in its repetition and more expansive license, indicated by ‘quodmodolibet,’ for Johan de Muntros to generate financial deals at his discretion

• Close-Reading: the repeated forms of the phrase ‘necessary for our upkeep’ might hint at a certain level of desperation for funds; the word ‘dampnum’ possibly indicates a major loss of money recently incurred by the monarchy; the term ‘re-mogubellum’ likely indicates a doubling of the interest on these notorious financial instruments; the scribe uses the Chi-Rho to abbreviate for Christians

What is this document doing?

• This document, possibly for the first time in Joan’s reign, brings large mogubell loans into the status of acceptability for solving financial problems.
• The document invests Johan de Muntros with a very wide latitude for financial dealings on behalf of the monarch.

Questions

• What was the financial emergency that inspired this document?
• How was this expansive authorization for Johan de Muntros connected to his earlier commission to collect tithes from churches?
• Would Johan de Muntros have been surprised to receive this document only a day or two after the earlier ones from this register?
• How involved was Violant or her chancellor in the creation of this authorization?
• What, mathematically, was a re-mogubellum?

AI Usage

The transcription and translation of this document was carried out by my OpenClaw pipeline. The agentic AI process failed to produce much that was usable for this document.

Bibliography

• Kagay, Donald J. “Poetry in the Dock: The Court Culture of Joan I on Trial (1396-1398).” In Donald J. Kagay, War, Government, and Society in the Medieval Crown of Aragon, XI, 48-99. Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS 861. Ashgate/Variorum, 2007.

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