Season 1, Episode 86

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Joan exchanges pleasantries with the King of Navarre and claims that he is all better from his illness.

Today’s Document

• Subject: exchange of pleasantries with the King of Navarre
• Date: March 20, 1387
• Day of the Week: Wednesday
• Language: Aragonese and Castillian
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R1751 f27v
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Joan
• Recipient: Charles III, King of Navarre

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: Joan seeks to quell rumors of his ill health and project an image of strength for his fellow sovereign; the boilerplate content of this letter indicates that perhaps his relationship with Charles III of Navarre is not as close as Violant’s connection to the King of Navarre

• Contextualization: the outset of a reign presents an especially vulnerable time for a new king and many medieval monarchs sought to project strength and virility especially in their first months as king¹; The Kindgom of Navarre and the Crown of Aragon by this time had a track record of peace and cooperation despite the attempts of Charles II to capture large swaths of French territory

• Corroboration: at this point in the podcast, there have been seven episodes tagged with ‘illness’ and that would be too much to list here; at this time, Joan appears healthy enough to carry on all the normal duties of kingship, but the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence; the tone of this letter largely matches Joan’s letters to other soveriegns such as the document examined in Episode 83 to the King of Castile and the document examined in Episode 36 to the King of France

• Close-Reading: Joan again uses the term ‘accident,’ misfortune, to describe his illness; at the end, in the second addressee line, the scribe has indicated that a similar letter was sent to the Queen of Navarre and specifies that this is the wife, ‘uxore sue,’ of the King of Navarre; for the queen’s letter, the scribe would have probably on his own switched out all of the male gendered word endings for female gendered ones

What is this document doing?

• This document projects an air of normalcy and stablity.
• The document works to maintain peaceable and positive relations between two soveriegns.

Questions

• What was Joan’s health status on this date?
• Did the King of Navarre believe this report or did he suspect that Joan was still quite ill?
• What explains the timing of this letter? Did Joan ensure that he wrote check-in letters to various fellow sovereigns on a regular basis?
• Did Violant write another of her own letters to Charles III of Navarre around this date?

AI Usage

I used Gemini for an initial transcription, which I then had Claude reconcile with its own initial transcription. Claude then produced a translation into English with footnotes. Claude immediately solved the problem of ‘uxore sue’ for me although I like to think that I could have eventually figured it out myself.

Bibliography

• Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton University Press, 1957.

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