Season 1, Episode 25

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Joan writes to the officials of Cervera to provide protection for the chief chaplain of the archbishop of Zaragoza, Pedro de Guardia. This episode also gets into the topic of mail delivery, levels of seals, and the organization of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon.

Today’s Document

• Subject: protection letter for Pedro de Guardia
• Date: January 18, 1387
• Day of the Week: Friday
• Language: Latin
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR Pergaminos Juan I Caja 1 nº3 f3r-v
• Link to Fondo Histórico de Aragón
• Place: Granollers
• Sender: Joan
• Recipients: officials of Cervera

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: apprently, to get done what he needed to in Cervera, this church official from Zaragoza, needed a letter of protection from the king; Pedro de Guardia is identified as a chief chaplain for the Archbishop of Zaragoza, so that would be a high-up official, but still a few levels from the top of a municipality’s ecclesiastical bureaucracy; the letter mentions Pedro de Guardia’s family, so evidently this position in the church is not a priestly one

• Contextualization: this document reveals that when someone traveled to a city 200 kilometers away from their home town, the people in that distant city would often not know them, even in situations within the same province, in this case Catalonia; this document also demonstrates the intertwined

• Corroboration: I examined a similar secular letter of introduction for an ecclesiastical official on January 11th

• Close-Reading: the length of this document makes me wonder about the customs of letters like these - why is so much text necessary?

What is this document doing?

• This document reinforces the interconnection between secular and ecclesiastical authority in the Crown of Aragon.
• The document provides the recipient with status and authority in a city in which he would otherwise be treated as a stranger.

Questions

• Why was a protection document necessary for an official journeying from one part of Catalonia to another?
• Why was so much verbiage necessary?
• What exactly was Pedro de Guardia’s position in the ecclesiastical hierarchy?
• Why was Pedro de Guardia going to Cervera?
• Was this seen as a priority for Joan? If so, why?

Chancery Register Copy Located!

Following the recording of this episode, I started to look around for documents to use for January 19th. Lo and behold, in the first few folios of Register 1890, a Gratiarum register, I saw the chancery copy of the letter in today’s episode. On this webpage, the copy and its original are reunited for perhaps the very first time in 639 years.

Additional Notes

Today’s document is from the website Fondo Histórico de Aragón, a project that works with archives in Aragon to make digitized documents from Aragonese history accessible through cataloging and description.

I commented on how PARES appears to lack a section in Cartas reales for Joan. I took a screenshot on PARES of the Cartas reales directory and I also looked at the Pergaminos, parchments, for Joan and only two were available. Maybe the documents on the website of Fondo Histórico de Aragón are available on PARES somewhere, but I am stumped at how to find them.

If you are interested in purchasing a letter with a wax seal created by someone who has done their research on seals and letter locking, visit the Etsy shop Dear Dungeon.

Bibliography

• Bedos-Rezak, Brigitte, ed. Seals : Making and Marking Connections across the Medieval World. Arc Humanities Press, 2018.
• Clemens, Raymond and Timothy Graham, “Charters and Cartularies,” in Clemens and Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies, 222-239. Cornell University Press, 2007.
• Procter, Evelyn S. “The Use and Custody of the Secret Seal (Sello de La Poridad) in Castille from 1252 to 1369.” The English Historical Review 55, no. 218 (1940): 194–221.

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