Season 1, Episode 180

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Joan writes to the Governor of Aragon that he is pleased at the news that, in the region near the Pyrenees, the ‘scandalos e males’ of the bandos have been put to a stop.

Today’s Document

• Subject: the effort to quell the violent factions in the mountain region of Aragon
• Date: June 22, 1387
• Day of the Week: Saturday
• Language: Catalan
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R1751 f69r-v
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Joan
• Recipient: the Governor of Aragon, Sancho Martinez

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: by this date, it is likely that enough weeks have passed with Joan’s health at a good enough condition to dispel the rumors of his imminent death; perhaps this played into the calculations of those involved in the violence in the province of Aragon and those tasked with quelling it; the recipient, here identified only as the Governor of Aragon, is certainly Sancho Martinez because a few folios ahead, on f73r, another document is addressed to him by name and title

• 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 document examined in Episode 119 appears to be the first mention of the problem with ‘bandos’ in Aragon, and it is a document from Violant to the Governor of Aragon; Episode 155 examines a document from Joan to the Governor of Aragon, in which the king castigates the governor for allowing the violence of the bandos to continue, and that document might have indications of Violant’s participation in its drafting

• Close-Reading: the absence of ‘desplaer’ and other negative criticisms from this letter is a striking change of tone from the letters Joan wrote to Sancho Martinez earlier in the year, perhaps indicating that the Governor of Aragon has returned to Joan’s good graces

What is this document doing?

• This document celebrates a victory of the forces of law and order in an unruly region.
• The document pushes the officials of that region to investigate further.

Questions

• Did Joan see this as a meaningful turning of the tide for this particular rulership problem?
• Was Violant involved in decision-making for this matter?
• Why had the bandos been defeated? Had they decided to retreat or had the Governor’s fighters defeated them in battle?
• How did Joan’s current health condition impact some of the developments discussed in this document?
• Why is there no probata for this document and others around it?

AI Usage

The transcription and translation of this document was carried out by my OpenClaw pipeline. I was unsure of the expansion for the abbreviation at the very end of line 8, so I checked it with Claude. With a clip of three lines (37 words), and my own transcription attempt, Claude correctly transcribed all the letters and correctly expanded all but two of the abbreviations. Interestingly, for the two mistakes Claude made, I had provided the correct expansion and Claude, with a definitive confidence, called my reading erroneous. At the very end of the chat, Claude admits that ‘res menos would flow more naturally’ but somehow this observation failed to cause Claude to revisit its overruling of my reading of the first word of the second line in this clip.

In another use of AI, when writing up today’s show notes, I wanted to find out if Sancho Martinez was still the Governor of Aragon on June 22. I opened up the spreadsheet that OpenClaw made as a composite of all the text files from the automated transcription of Register 1751. I did a search for ‘Sancho Martinez’ and the first result was from image 148, which is folio 74r. I looked at the image myself and found that the document that begins in the bottom half of that folio is addressed to Sancho Martinez, Governor of Aragon.

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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