Season 1, Episode 45

Joan confirms receipt of a big shipment of jewels and luxury items.

Episode 45

Today’s Document

Sourcing: Berenguer Lobet was a long-serving procurator for Joan, the person who handed out the actual payments for the items purchased by the king¹; although this is much like an inventory or shipping manifest, Joan wants details included in this letter and that leads me to think his purpose is to celebrate the level of luxury in these items

Contextualization: the royal family of the Crown of Aragon had been big spenders on luxuries and one exmaple mentioned in the episode is Pere the Ceremonious ordering gold pillows for his bed²; in The Steppe and the Sea, a book about pearls in the Middle Ages, Thomas Allsen provides an excellent demonstration of the conceptual connection between conspicuous consumption of luxuries and the bolstering of political legitimacy³

Corroboration: this document corroborates interpretations of Joan as a big spender; the mention of a French style also corroborates reports of his Francophilia
Close-Reading: this document abounds with names and descriptions for luxury items; Joan appears to enjoy the details in the long list of items in this shipment; the description of certain designs as ‘barbarian’ might indicate something from as far away as India or China but it is also possible that this is another product from within Islamic culture but far enough away as to appear from outside Dar al Islam

This document indulges in the ornamentation of political rule.
The document furthers the project of legitimizing the king as worthy of the power of his rule.

I first read about Joan’s penchant for eating peacock in an article by Claire Ponsich.⁴

I did not use AI for my work on this document. Instead, I relied heavily on the online dictionary at the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, the DCVB.

Allsen, Thomas T. The Steppe and the Sea: Pearls in the Mongol Empire. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Gampel, Benjamin R. Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Navarro Espinach, Germán. “Textiles in the Crown of Aragon: Production, Commerce, Consumption.” In Textiles of Medieval Iberia: Cloth and Clothing in a Multi-Cultural Context, edited by Gale Owen-Crocker, María Barrigón, and Nahum Ben-Yahuda. Boydell Press, 2022.
Ponsich, Claire. “Perpignan au féminin, 1380-1431. Quand une femme de pouvoir codifie l’espace, maîtrise l’émotion politique mais libère le sentiment familial.” In Perpignan une et plurielle, edited by Raymond Sala and Michelle Ros, 177–203. Trabucaire, 2004.

as demonstrated by the sources from later in Joan’s reign by Benjamin R. Gampel, Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 78 and 83. ↩
Germán Navarro Espinach, “Textiles in the Crown of Aragon: Production, Commerce, Consumption,” in Textiles of Medieval Iberia: Cloth and Clothing in a Multi-Cultural Context, ed. Gale Owen-Crocker et al., (Boydell Press, 2022), 111. ↩
Thomas T. Allsen, The Steppe and the Sea: Pearls in the Mongol Empire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 57. ↩
Claire Ponsich, “Perpignan au féminin, 1380-1431. Quand une femme de pouvoir codifie l’espace, maîtrise l’émotion politique mais libère le sentiment familial,” in Perpignan une et plurielle, ed. Raymond Sala and Michelle Ros (Trabucaire, 2004), 187. ↩