Season 1, Episode 167

Return to episodes list

On Joan’s behalf, and in Joan’s register, Violant instructed officials in Aragon to calculate the cost of damages suffered by the Kingdom of Navarre.

Today’s Document

• Subject: the need to add up the cost of damages incurred by Kingdom of Navarre
• Date: June 9, 1387
• Day of the Week: Sunday
• Language: Latin
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R1954 f3v
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Joan
• Recipients: Sancho Martinez de Biota, Governor of Araton, and Michael Capelli a magistrate of Zaragoza

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: the probata for this document indicates that it was composed by the queen on behalf of the king, even though it is in Joan’s register; the recipient was earlier in the year upbraided by Joan for not moving fast enough to confiscate property of Bernat da Fortià; the immediate cause of this document is information received from the King of Navarre about ‘dampnatge,’ damage, that has been brought about in his land

• Contextualization: although I was not able to figure out from this document what caused the damage in Navarre, it could very well be mercenaries passing through or factional violence; the hinterland near the Pyrenees, especially around Jaca, was known for factional violence in the fourteenth century¹

• Corroboration: today’s document makes for an excellent comparison to the one examined in Episode 76 since that earlier letter to the same recipient is filled with invective and castigation; Episode 155 discussed violence in the northeast part of Aragon, possibly near the border of Navarre; the damage could also have been caused by the mercenaries that Violant paid off to not journey through the Crown of Aragon on the way to Castile, as discussed in Episode 140

• Close-Reading: the frequent use of the word ‘marché’ indicates that the frontier zone between the Crown of Aragon and Navarre saw significant damage; this implies a far less monitored and defended border between the two lands than might otherwise be assumed from looking at historical maps; this document offers a wide range of vocabulary for injury, destruction, and damage

What is this document doing?

• This document puts state resources into investigating and tabulating destruction.
• The document acknowledges the Crown of Aragon as the entity responsible for restitution.

Questions

• Is there an increase in the frequency of co-rule documents like this after Joan’s severe illness in late April and early May?
• In what way did Violant and Joan cooperate in the composition of this document?
• Who caused the damage referred to in this letter?
• Was Charles III of Navarre angry about what happened?
• Was the tabulation of the damages going to be an easy task for Sancho Martinez and Michael Capelli?

Additional Notes

Gerenti is the present active participle, in the dative or ablative case, of the verb gero, gerere. As an online Latin textbook explains, the present active participle is when a verb is used to describe what a noun is doing, such as the word ‘walking’ in the sentence, ‘the walking man suddenly jumped.’ My explanation of this in today’s podcast was a muddled but generall accurate.

AI Usage

The number and distribution of worm holes made this image unlikely to produce useful results from automatic transcription using LLMs, so no AI was used for this episode.

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.
• Fancy, Hussein Anwar. The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon. The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

← return to episode list