Season 1, Episode 177

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Violant, based on information she has received from Joan, instructs the Bailiff General of Aragon to comply with a property transfer.

Today’s Document

• Subject: a transfer of property in Aragon involving Sancho Bohil
• Date: June 19, 1387
• Day of the Week: Wednesday
• Language: Catalan
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R2037 f30r
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Violant
• Recipients: Garcia Lopez de Sesse, Bailiff General of Aragon

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: nothing in this document indicates the reason for this property transfer, and it could be related to the need that Joan and Violant had to generate additional revenue around this time; Sancho Bohil is likely the receiver of this property, but I am uncertain of that; for some reason this transaction involved both Joan’s and Violant’s portfolios and required them to work together, or alternatively this is something that did not require joint action but ended up becoming a moment of cooperation

• Contextualization: the towns of Ejea and Sos are both in the Cinco Villas district of Aragon, in the modern province of Zaragoza; transactions like the one in this document were frequently carried out by the monarchs, and recorded in the archive registers; sometimes these sales were rewards for loyalty and other times because the transaction played a role in generating additional funds

• Corroboration: the document examined in Episode 37 offers a good opportunity for corroboration because that land sale is also possibly related to generating revenue for Violant but does not explicitly say so

• Close-Reading: in line 6, Violant makes explicit mention of the handoff of this process from Joan to her authority, that they are acting in accord (acor), possibly an indicator of an atypical level of co-rule; the LLMs struggled with ‘almudi’ in line 3, and the Diccionari catala-valencia-belear identified this word as one used for a storage house for grain

What is this document doing?

• This document presents agreement between the king and queen as a key part of the process for authorizing a transaction.
• The document reinforces the legal position of the bailiff as one that oversees transfers of property.

Questions

• How did this property transfer come about? What change set it in motion?
• Was the receiver of the property Sancho Bohil? Who was he?
• How might this transaction have related to the general revenue problems of the monarchy at this time?
• Does the description that Violant uses for her level of ‘acor’ with Joan show up frequently in documents from previous and later queens of the Crown of Aragon?
• Could this document have been the product of the king’s councillors and the queen’s councillors working together, not so much Violant and Joan themselves?

AI Usage

I used Gemini for a transcription and it provided a translation of the document without being prompted to do that; Claude’s new usage limits, or maybe a new process that it has for working on handwriting recognition, prevented me from getting anything beyond the Stage 1 output of my three stage process

Bibliography

• Feliu i Montfort, Gaspar. “Finances, Currency and Taxation in the 14th and 15th Centuries.” Catalan Historical Review, no. 9 (2016): 25–44.
• Sánchez, Manuel, Ángel Sesma Muñoz, and Antoni Furió. “Old and New Forms of Taxation in the Crown of Aragon (13th-14th Centuries).” In La fiscalità nell’economia Europea secc. XIII-XVIII, edited by Simonetta Cavaciocchi. Firenze University Press, 2008. Available for free at CSIC

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