Season 1, Episode 155

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A letter in Joan’s name to the authorities in the province of Aragon castigates them for allowing feuding bandos to despoil the region around Jaca. For the first time in 639 years, the outgoing copy and the register copy of this letter are reunited.

Today’s Document

• Subject: the failure of the enforcement of law and order in the mountains of Jaca
• Date: May 28, 1387
• Day of the Week: Tuesday
• Language: Aragonese
• Outgoing copy Archival Reference Number: ACA CR Cartas Reales Juan I Caja 1, nº75, f75r-v
• Link to Fondo Histórico de Aragón
• Registro copy Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R1751 f63r-v
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Joan (maybe Violant?)
• Recipients: Portantveus and Sobrejunteros of Aragon

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: Joan, and the officials around him, evidently feel alarmed at the lack of royal authority and unruliness in the province of Aragon; Violant might have been involved in the creation of this document because on the same day she appears in the probata information for another document, also on R1751 f63r; the possibility of the bandos hiring foreign mercenaries must have been especially frustrating given Violant’s recent payoff of the mercenaries journeying to Castile

• Contextualization: the modern historian María Isabel Falcon Pérez has demonstrated that the mountainous region around Jaca had a centuries-long problem of being unruly¹

• Corroboration: the documents examined in Episode 76 and Episode 77 corroborate this one in two ways; first, we have an earlier example of the officials of the province of Aragon dragging their feet when it comes to following directives from the king and queen; second, we have in these two letters from March an example of Joan and Violant co-ruling in the area of managing the province of Aragon

• Close-Reading: in line 11 when the document reminds the officials that Joan is their king, this might reveal that such a reminder had become necessary due to the weakness of royal authority; the use of the metaphor of blind men in line 11 might be an indication that Violant had a hand in composing this document; the tone of the document comes across as unintentionally desperate

What is this document doing?

• This document asserts royal authority and exhorts officials to do their job of enforcing order in a challenging region.
• The document refuses to see the Jaca problem as anything other than a flouting of the king’s authority.

Questions

• When this document was composed, was Joan feeling healthy enough to participate in its creation?
• Was this document written by Violant?
• Would the chancellor have been willing to write a letter like this in Joan’s name?
• Was the admission of Joan’s inability to journey to Aragon an allusion to widespread awareness of his illness?
• Which mercenary companies were available for hire in the cross-border region between Jaca and France?
• Why had the feud broken out? How long had it been going on?
• What were the reasons that the local officials had not already stopped the feuding?

Additional Notes

On May 19th, we looked at an interesting document from Joan about purchasing hunting birds from Turkey. I later discovered that on that same day, Violant wrote a letter to the Governor of Aragon about the bandos in the mountains near Jaca, R2053 f10r-10v. In that same letter, Violant revealed to the Governor of Aragon that Joan was living at the Poblet Monastery in Barcelona on the advice of doctors. Perhaps the air at the higher elevation of the foothills was deemed better than that around the Royal Palace in Barcelona. The fact that we have another document from Violant on the same topic increases my suspicion that today’s document was largely composed by Violant.

AI Usage

The transcription and translation of this document was carried out by my OpenClaw pipeline.

I wanted a better translation than what I got from the agentic AI pipeline so I gave an initial transcription by Gemini to Claude for a reconciliation. Claude then produced a translation with footnotes. If you look at the Gemini output you will see that I have Gemini a chance to help with research and even though it correctly identified some historians who have written on the topic, it hallucinated source citations.

Bibliography

• Falcon Pérez, María Isabel. “La Salvaguarda de La Paz En Las Montañas de Jaca.” Aragón En La Edad Media, no. 20 (2008): 287–99.

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