Joan commands the Governor of Aragon to attend to the discord in Barbastro and do something to remedy the situation.
Episode 97
ACA CR R1751 f38r Source: PARES
Sourcing: although Barbastro was somewhat distant from Barcelona, it still was in the mainland of the Crown of Aragon and Joan might have felt annoyed that a town under his rule faced feuding and discord; the recipient, Sancho Martinez, might not have been motivated to address Joan’s concerns since he had received such a scolding letter from him earlier that month
Contextualization: at this time, a feud between different ruling factions caused strife in Barbastro1
Corroboration: the documents examined in Episode 76 and Episode 77 corroborate Joan’s general displeasure with the Governor of Aragon in this document
Close-Reading: Joan starts out the letter by saying that he has heard, apparently not from the Governor, that the town of Barbastro is in a ‘muyto mal estamiento,’ a very bad state due to ‘discordia’ and ‘malas voluntades’; an easy way to recognize that this letter is not in Catalan is that the word used at the end for small seal is ‘pequenyo’
Since I could understand the Aragonese quite well, I skipped using the AI chatbots for this episode. I looked up a few words in my medieval Catalan glossary, at the back of Russell-Gebbett’s Mediaeval Catalan Linguistic Texts..
María Teresa Sauco Álvarez, “Actividad económica y transformación social en la ciudad de Barbastro durante la Baja Edad Media,” Aragón en la Edad Media, no. 27 (2016): 299–331, at 304. ↩