Season 1, Episode 164

Return to episodes list

Joan asks the jurados and hombres buenos of Zaragoza to furnish him with two bullfighters.

Today’s Document

• Subject: Joan wants to have a bullfight event in Barcelona
• Date: June 6, 1387
• Day of the Week: Thursday
• Language: Aragonese
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R1952 f23r
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Joan
• Recipients: the town leaders of Zaragoza

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: Joan planning for a big event at which he would have to present himself likely indicates that he is feeling more confident about his recovery from illness; Joan’s longstanding passion for hunting probably overlaps with the event of a bullfight; while a 1387 bullfight is noted in a lot of scholarship, the first ‘documented’ bullfight was in the 1500s, meaning that 1387 records are sparse or nonexistent for information like who the matadors were or other details about the event

• Contextualization: there is not a lot of documentation for bullfighting in Catalonia in the Middle Ages but several scholars, including Noa Maria Carballa Rivas and Beatriz Orgaz Sánchez have considered Joan’s 1387 bullfight as the first one mentioned in the history of bullfighting in Catalonia¹; this activity also fits in with the larger context of hunting and spectacle in the Middle Ages, with the activity of hunting among the elites more of a pageant than what constitutes hunting in the twenty-first century

• Corroboration: the documents about hunting dogs and hunting birds examined in Episode 144 Episode 145 and Episode 146 corroborate this one in that Joan is planning for activities outside the castle walls

• Close-Reading: the scribe for this document, Bernardo de Jonquero, was experienced and so it is surprising to see that he forgot to include the date and had to add it in superscript later; perhaps Bernardo was overly-excited about the idea of a bullfight

What is this document doing?

• This document activates subordinates in the arrangement of a leisure event for the king.
• The document presumes that the town leaders work together to make arrangements for luxury provisions.

Questions

• Is this document a sign that Joan had really turned a corner with his health?
• What other information did the messenger named in this document, Johan de Quart, have to provide to the jurados and hombres buenos of Zaragoza?
• Did Joan have any reason to doubt that this bullfight could be arranged and held in Barcelona?

AI Usage

The transcription and translation of this document was carried out by my OpenClaw pipeline. For researching a bit more about bullfighting in medieval Catalonia, I used Claude.

Bibliography

• Carballa Rivas, Noa María, and Beatriz Orgaz Sánchez. “Un recorrido por la fiesta de los toros en Cataluña. Origen y evolución.” Revista de Estudios Taurinos. Revista de Estudios Taurinos, no. 39 (2016): 69–102.
• González, Antoni. Bous, toros i braus: una tauromàquia catalana. Edicions El Mèdol, 1996.

← return to episode list