Season 1, Episode 33

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Violant orders the transfer of authority over the town of Cubelles away from Bernat da Fortía and to Petrus de Mari.

Today’s Document

• Subject: Legal document regarding the town of Cubelles
• Date: January 26, 1387
• Day of the Week: Saturday
• Language: Latin
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R1822 f120v-121r
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Violant
• Recipients: Petrus de Mari

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: this is a document that manages legal authority over the town of Cubelles and so Violant, exercising her power as queen, can arrange a change in that authority; the person who appears to have lost out in this document is Bernat da Fortía, a known adversary of Joan and Violant

• Contextualization: over the previous decade, with Sibilla as queen, her brother Bernat amassed a large number of additional properties and authorities; typically, for members of the royal family and aristocratic elites, having the authority over a town meant that the person would receive tax revenue directly from that municpality

• Corroboration: this document is likely a consequence, one of many ripple effects, of the overall transfer of Sibilla’s entire portfolio to Violant in the document we examined in Episode 6

• Close-Reading: the persistence of Latin toponyms in documents like these demonstrates the customs associated with legal authority and the legitimacy of the authority of the state

What is this document doing?

• This document punishes a long-time political adversary of the new queen.
• The document reinforces the exercise of power by the new queen.

Questions

• What kind of town was Cubelles at this time?
• Was this a large loss of wealth for Bernat da Fortía?
• How does this exercise of power relate to other ripple effects of the transfer of Sibilla’s portfolio to Violant?
• Who was Petrus de Mari and why was he chosen to receive this bounty?
• What does the presence of Bernat da Fortía’s name in the probata indicate?

AI Usage

To assist me with figuring out the place name in this document, I used Perplexity. Peplexity.ai draws from multiple existing LLMs such as Claude and ChatGPT to search the internet. The widely-used text Orbis Latinus for Latin place names contains toponyms from all over Europe and so smaller places within Iberia don’t appear in it. There are still problems with AI-generated responses listing references that don’t actually have the information claimed to be there by the chatbot. For example, I looked at the section of Thomas Bisson’s monograph that Perplexity used as a reference for its explanation of Cubelles in the Middle Ages and the place does not appear there or anywhere in Bisson’s book.

Bibliography

• Bisson, Thomas N. Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History. Clarendon Press, 1986.

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