Season 1, Episode 26

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Joan adds his input to a business problem encountered by a group in Montblanc which includes Joan’s brother, Martí.

Today’s Document

• Subject: a business deal in Montblanc
• Date: January 19, 1387
• Day of the Week: Saturday
• Language: Latin
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R1953 f10r
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Joan
• Recipients: Martí and business partners in Montblanc

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: this document was produced on the day that Joan entered Barcelona after a long delay; it is likely that he was busy with in-person interactions and didn’t have much time to devote to paperwork; the document’s audience are the participants in some kind of business arrangement in Montblanc, involving Joan’s brother Martí; Martí has just been promoted with the title Duke of Montblanc

• Contextualization: increasing commercialization in the Late Middle Ages spread throughout Catalonia and more frequent business deals, seen through contracts, enter the archival documentation as a result

• Corroboration: Nuria Silleras Fernandez has located a letter from Martí to his wife, Maria de Luna, in which he expresses great excitement about being titled Duke of Montblanc¹; to know more about the business deal in question here, I would very much like to see previous contractual documents that might help me to make a judgement about Martí’s role in all of this

• Close-Reading: the invocation of Martí’s new title as Duke of Montblanc must have an effect on the impact of Joan’s intervention here; the phrase alioquin imputabitur merito culpa vestra, ‘otherwise the blame will rightly be imputed to you,’ definitely contains an implied threat that if the actions Joan wants are not taken, the consequences will be negative - but for whom?

What is this document doing?

• This document invokes newly established political authority after the succession of Joan to kingship and Martí to dukedom.
• The document brings the threat of negative consequences into whatever previous interactions occurred with the business arrangement at hand.

Questions

• What about the topic of this document made it a priority for Joan’s attention on his first day in Barcelona as king?
• Why is the name of Georgius in the document not a Catalan name like Jordi? Or maybe the person is known as Jordi, but this is transferred into Latin for purposes of this document? (Maybe this is done for everyone named Jordi in the Latin documents in the ACA, but I haven’t seen it before)
• What circumstances made it necessary for Joan to include the phrase about who will deserve the blame?
• Did Martí request Joan’s intervention?
• What was Martí’s role in this business deal, if any?

AI Usage

I had encountered the use of ‘albi’ for white in some earlier work on a set of documents from Joan and Violant. I did want to make sure, though, that the ‘Montisalbi’ in this document really did refer to Montblanc in Catalonia. I used ChatGPT to confirm it with scholarly references.

Next, I went to ChatGPT for help with the Latin in this document. It was the work of the AI chatbot that led me to think more deeply about the phrase alioquin imputabitur merito culpa vestra, ‘otherwise the blame will rightly be imputed to you.’ In this transcript, I also tried to train ChatGPT to include its thinking within parentheses inside its translation. We’ll see if the chatbot starts to do that more after I gave it positive feedback.

Bibliography

• Silleras-Fernandez, Nuria. Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

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