Category Archives: Charters

Correction III: at least one is black on one side

Posted on 21 January 2026 | 8 comments

I suppose it is not inappropriate that after lamenting Josep María Salrach’s death I return to a long-stubbed post in which I put one of the books he allowed me to get for free, and in whose publication he was a major part, to work.1 This comes, you see, out of that brief patch of research leave I had back in 2022 which I spent trying to find Count-Marquis Borrell II and his contacts in the newly-available charters from the county of Barcelona, and it’s one of the bits where that exposure to new evidence shows that, unfortunately, I was wrong about something. It’s not huge, but I do like to try and keep honest about this stuff, so you get the confession.

If you have a really long, like thirteen-year-long, memory of this blog and its record of my activity, you may remember that for at least that long I have had strong oppositional views to a particular theory about place-names in Catalonia, and potentially other places, which derive from the Latin word palaciolum, apparently "little palace". For most scholars it is accepted that the term relates to centres of fiscal extraction, collection or concentration, where renders were collected or brought for the use of the ruling powers, and that such a locus would therefore originally have been at the heart of such a place.2 We have a "broken palace", however, and things like that, so the place-name doesn’t always have to have derived from a going concern.3

Façade of the Palacio de los Hospitalarios, Ambel, Aragón, from Wikimedia Commons

Here is one such palace-that-is-estate-centre, albeit from rather later and in Aragón, the Palacio de los Hospitalarios in Ambel, image by Ecelan – own work, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 v ia Wikimedia Commons.
from Wikimedia Commons. For more details, see that older post of mine.

The theory I don’t like came out of a research group at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and it holds that the Catalan examples actually derive from the presence of Muslim garrisons in these places. There is a philological argument for this, via an Arabic derivative from Latin palatium, balat, but in al-Andalus that seems to have referred to public roads, not estates, and is very rare; I never understood why the derivation from this very rare Arabic derivative of the Latin made more sense in a Latin-speaking area than, y’know, the actual Latin.4 But leave that aside for now The project claimed there are ninety-odd of these place-names, which I believe but can’t verify because they never actually published the list.5 I had a look in the indexes of the Catalunya Carolíngia less the Barcelona volumes a long time back, though, and I found forty-eight, and now a search in the CatCar database gets 132 hits for palacio, some of which will be the same place plural times, so 90-odd is quite plausible. The project team were, however, remarkably light on evidence of any Muslim connection, and elsewhere I’ve critiqued the heck out of this idea; the only reason I haven’t published it, other than overcommitment and exhaustion, is that it seems to be part of a larger argument about continuity of the fisc in Catalonia which I just don’t know how to finish.

Distribution map of place-names in palatium and palatiolum in Catalonia, from Cristian Folch Iglesias and Jordi Gibert Rebull, ‘Arqueològia, documentació escrita i toponímia en l'estudi de l'Alta Edat Mitjana: els casos dels topònims pharus, monasteriolum i palatium’, Estrat Crític 5.2 (Barcelona 2011), 364-377 at p. 370

As close as the team got to publishing a list was this distribution map of place-names in palatium and palatiolum in Catalonia, taken from Cristian Folch Iglesias and Jordi Gibert Rebull, "Arqueològia, documentació escrita i toponímia en l’estudi de l’Alta Edat Mitjana: els casos dels topònims pharus, monasteriolum i palatium" in Estrat Crític Vol. 5 no. 2 (Barcelona 2011), pp. 364-377 at p. 370.

The critical plank of the argument about these names, however, is that while maybe one, maybe just two, have shown archæological evidence of Muslim presence (not easy to establish, of course, mostly a matter of burial rite, which requires actual burial, but still), rather a lot of them can be associated with erstwhile Roman villas.6 And, just as English place-names in -chester seem pretty much always to refer to erstwhile Roman forts in the locality, I reckoned that was probably good enough for a general explanation here: an ex-villa looks like a small palace, may also often be an estate centre or still be where renders are collected, isn’t that just easier than assuming an otherwise unattested massive spread of Muslim fortifications where they sometimes buried people?

We're somewhere in this neck of the woods; the long built-up stretch vertically down the middle is modern-day Palou, which is where our document says the land is, and that's really as close as we can get; all its boundaries are identified by neighbours, not more durable map features. So, it was in here somewhere.

Nonetheless, an absolute blanket statement like that was always likely to be wrong with so many examples, and even one Muslim-rite burial, in play. The Autonoma project team mentioned that several of the Palau place-names were associated with Arabic personal names, and I just forgot about that plank of the argument till I found myself looking at one, a land sale between two people quite unconnected to Borrell II but dealing in land, "in the county of Barcelona, in Vallès, in the term of Torre d’Azar, which they call Palou."7 Now, I’m not an Arabist or even a Hispanist, but I would say, "z" is almost never used in Latin or Romance names, there’s no Latin, Frankish or Gothic name I know which would easily degenerate into Azar (except maybe Nazarius, and the missing "N" is a real problem there), and while I don’t know of an obvious Arabic or Berber one either I’m fully prepared to accept that that’s what this is.8 And, obviously, it is a fortification. In fact, I wonder if finding this document in the Barcelona cathedral edition where it was first published is even what gave the Autonoma team leader the whole brilliant idea.9. Be that as it may, I have to concede the point, wherefore the reference of the title to an old old academic joke. Maybe you know the one. It supposedly originates with a mathematician called Ian Stewart, and goes like this:

A mathematician, a physicist, and an astronomer are riding a train through Scotland. The astronomer looks out the window, sees a black sheep in the middle of a field, and exclaims, "How interesting! Scottish sheep are black."
The physicist looks out the window and corrects the astronomer, "Well, at least some Scottish sheep are black."
The mathematician looks out the window too, and corrects the physicist, "In Scotland there exists at least one field where one sheep is black… on at least one side."10

Likewise, at least one of these sites would appear actually to have been a tower owned by someone with a name favoured by those of Islamic belief rather than Christian. Of course, the name doesn’t make him Muslim, his owning a tower doesn’t make it a garrison, and whatever the truths there are it’s also still possible that the tower was put on the site of a Roman villa that was already being called Palaciolo; but that case is no more and arguably less supported from this document than the Muslim garrison one, so if I ever do want to publish this I have to at least admit the possibility.

Obverse of Arxiu Capitular de Barcelona, Pergamin 1-3-30

The actual document, Arxiu Capitular de Barcelona, Pergamin 1-3-30, hotlinked from the CatCar site, which I hope is OK. You can’t give direct links to that database, but you could find it in the Documents by choosing volume 7 in the drop-down and entering 616 in the search box.

Still, this is not a total loss even if it messes with a pet theory and it’s nothing to do with Borrell II’s people, because it’s also a very interesting charter diplomatically speaking. In the first place, apparently it’s a palimpsest, that is to say, it’s written over an earlier, erased document. I have to take the editors’ word for that, because even in the quite nice facsimile of it reproduced above from the CatCar database, I can see no sign of the remnant first line of the older document by someone called Sunyer which the editors could see up the left-hand edge (presumably under the archive stamp… ?)11 But if that isn’t enough to entertain you, it’s also one of those "charters we shouldn’t have", because it’s actually marked up on the dorse as useless, with a note from someone in the Barcelona cathedral archive reading, "Nothing for the Chapter."12 Why it didn’t then get thrown out is anyone’s guess; good old preservation by neglect, presumably, or perhaps the question was just one of whether it needed to be included in some other list or inventory, but whatever it was we might be quite lucky still to have it. So I will probably wind up using this document to prove some things anyway, in due course; but for now, it stands against me. Well, never mind: this is how we learn, and hopefully you have learned a little along with me on this occasion!

1. Ignasi J. Baiges i Jardí and Pere Puig i Ustrell (edd.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum VII: el comtat de Barcelona (Barcelona 2019), 3 vols.

2. It’s picked up in Pierre Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du Xe à la fin du XIe siècle : Croissance et mutations d’une société, Publications de l’Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail Sèrie A 23 & 29 (Toulouse 1975-1976), 2 vols, as most things are, at pp. 144-153 of vol. I. For palacios further west, my standard reference is José Ángel García de Cortázar and Esther Peña Bocos, "El palatium, símbolo y centro de poder, en los reinos de Navarra y Castilla en los siglos X a XII" in Mayurqa Vol. 22 (Palma de Mallorca 1989), pp. 281–296, online here.

3. Palofret, near Terrassa, on which see Joan Soler i Jiménez and Vicenç Ruiz i Gómez, "Els palaus de Terrassa: estudi de la presencia musulmana al terme de Terrassa a través de la toponímia" in Terme Vol. 15 (Terrassa 1999), pp. 37-51, online here, though I don’t (as you will see) follow them all the way to their conclusions.

4. I think the first statement of this case was actually in Bonnassie’s Festschrift, in Ramón Martí, "Palaus o almúnies fiscals a Catalunya i al-Andalus" in Hélène Débax (ed.), Les sociétés méridionales à l’âge féodal (l’Espagne, Italie et sud de France Xe-XIIIe s.) : hommage à Pierre Bonnassie, Méridiennes 8 (Toulouse 1999), pp. 63-69.

5. I have the numbers from Cristian Folch Iglesias and Jordi Gibert Rebull, "Arqueològia, documentació escrita i toponímia en l’estudi de l’Alta Edat Mitjana: els casos dels topònims pharus, monasteriolum i palatium", Estrat Crític Vol. 5 no.2 (Barcelona 2011), pp. 364-377, but even then it’s not actually stated there; I had to count it off their distribution map p. 370 fig. 3, included below.

6. Although the team have written quite a few versions of this, I think all the basic information you need to support this is in the two pieces I’ve cited above. My older post references some of the other papers. At Folch and Gibert, "Arqueològia, documentació escrita i toponímia", p. 371 they do refer to a survey which surveyed eight sites and found Roman remains at none but early medieval remains at one, some or all (they don’t specify), ceramics of the eighth and ninth centuries, not that those are easy to date. And my previous investigation found at least one which was definitively a new foundation as well, so that certainly has to be allowed for. What none of that is, however, is evidence for Islamic foundation.

7 Baiges & Jardí, Catalunya Carolíngia VII, doc. no. 616: “Et est in komitatu Barkinonense, in Vallense, in terminio de Turrem de Azar, que vocant Palaciolo.”

8 For the basics of personal naming in the area see Josep Moran i Ocerinjauregui, "L’antroponímia catalana l’any mil" in Imma Ollich i Castanyer (ed.), Actes del Congrés Internacional Gerbert d’Orlhac i el seu temps: Catalunya i Europa a la fi del 1r. mil·leni (Vic 1999), pp. 515–525.

9. It was available to them as Àngel Fàbrega i Grau (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Barcelona: documents dels anys 844-1260 Volum I: documents dels anys 844-1000, Fonts documentals 1 (Barcelona, 1995), doc. no. 106.

10. A Reddit that I found says they found it in Simon Singh, Fermat’s Last Theorem (London 1997), citing Ian Stewart, Concepts of Modern Mathematics, 2nd ed. (New York City, NY, 1981), where indeed it is on p. 286, apparently far from the only mention of sheep in the book in fact. His version is classier than mine…

11. Baiges & Jardi, Catalunya Carolíngia VII, doc. no. 616, n. 3: "In nomine Domini. Ego Suniarius". They have better eyes than me (or possibly an ultra-violet lamp). I can’t give you my normal page reference, though, because for reasons I should probably explain next post I’m currently not with my books. I’m therefore using the CatCar database, online here, but that doesn’t permit direct hyperlinking. You have to go in through the Plataforma Virtual and search, sorry.

12. Ibid., editorial commentary, "Al dors: «Saeculi X» (s. XVII) i «Nil pro Capitulo» (s. XVII)", with the same regrets about citation as in the previous note. The classic one of these for English scholars is the so-called Fonthill Letter, which I talked about in this even older blogpost, and which is still in the Christ Church Canterbury archive despite at some point in its history being graded, "inutile", useless, in a similar exercise.

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Correction V: Unifred less-beloved

Posted on 22 September 2024 | 4 comments

Sorry about last week; deadlines, is all I will say, and we’ll see what happens. However, also a factor was that I didn’t really want to write this post. I was telling myself that’s because it would be hard or long, but it’s not really. The actual problem is that it’s one of the posts where I have to admit I was wrong. But you gotta, when you realise; so here goes.

Entrance to the Archivo de la Corona d'Aragón

Entrance to the Archivo de la Corona d’Aragón in 2011, where if I’d been able to spend any time in my doctorate some things might have been different

This one goes back to my doctoral research, when while working through the charters from the comital archive of Barcelona that are now in the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón I noticed a man called Unifred turning up a lot, and once with a woman called Riquilda. Lots of women were called Riquilda, but once I also had the charters from Vic in play, I thought I saw more bits of what had been going on and it was pretty interesting. Unifred, or as we might now say it if anyone still used the name, Umfred or Onfret depending on what language you want, was the name of one of the sons of the vicar Sal·la, who founded the monastery of Sant Benet de Bages; FACT.1 Riquilda had been married to someone called Unifred, Unifred Amat in fact, and had a son called Guillem; also FACTS.2 But plot twist! Sal·la’s son Unifred also turns up with a woman called Sesnanda, who seems to have been running his foundation at Òdena for him and after his death, defended her claim to lands there on the basis of him having been her man, vir; also FACTS!3 And I put all the documents I could get together and concluded that what seemed to have happened here was that Unifred son of Sal·la had been married to Riquilda and had Guillem, but had then put Riquilda aside – and in the charter which mentions her and Guillem a priest called Seniol who is elsewhere shown to be her brother apparently felt it necessary to warn her of the dangers of an active libido, so I wondered if she’d been caught sleeping with someone else.4 Then once Unifred and Riquilda were separated, or even before who knows, he had taken up with Sesnanda and passed a lot of his property onto her, but without marrying her, so that her inheritance lay open to challenge. And in that latter phase of his life he seemed to be carrying this extra name, Amat, in the documents Amado, which literally just means "beloved", so I thought his romantic entanglements might actually have brought him a nickname. Not FACT, but a smart reading of limited evidence! And so I put this in the book.5

My own copy of my book, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power

Remember the book? Still available, kids! Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power (Woodbridge 2010)…

Nonetheless, I should have thought harder about that byname. In the period of these documents the folk of what would become Catalonia didn’t use surnames, which can be extremely frustrating when trying to distinguish them. If they use two names at all, then the second one is either their father’s, by way of identification, or a nickname or byname.6 I knew who Unifred’s father was and that he wasn’t called Amat; so I went for the latter explanation because my theory fitted nicely with it. Even then, I should have remembered that the main reason you ever get these extra names is because someone needed to distinguish their holders from someone else. A few charters ago we met Guitard Beraza, remember; he’s almost certainly recorded thus because he’s not the only Guitard following Count Borrell of Barcelona around at that time.7 So the fact that Unifred Amat had a second name should have made me think there were probably two contemporary Unifreds, and then maybe look at the two relationships and think: two people, two partners? But I had a theory, and the evidence didn’t outright contradict it, so I didn’t think any of these things, and as long as no new evidence came to light no-one was going to be able to say I was wrong. Oh well.

Castellví de Rosanes nowadays, from Wikimedia Commons

Home of the Amats? Read on. This is Castellví de Rosanes in deep Barcelona, image by Pere López Brosa – own work, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

So, remember that back in late 2021 I was going through the Barcelona documents in the last volumes of the Catalunya Carolíngia? There’s the new evidence. Unifred Amat is in there and one document identifies him nice and clearly as the son of Sendred, vicar of Castellví de Rosanes.8 So, two people. At that point, of course, the whole thing comes crashing to bits. They’re still quite big bits: Unifred Amat was married to Riquilda, her priestly brother still smack-talks her urges and, note, Amat actually is a surname the family carries, as neither Unifred nor his son Guillem had fathers of that name. Also, Unifred son of Sal·la did apparently have a long but unofficial relationship with a lady castellan of his that nearly left her without means after his death. It’s just that these weren’t the same story. And I know it’s not changing the face of the earth, but I did put it in the book, and rested several blog posts on the story as well, because it was a good story. But my version, at least, was only a story. Sorry, sorry, I’ll try not to do it again…

1. He is identified as Sal·la’s son in the act of consecration of the church of Sant Benet de Bages, printed in Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia volum IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològico 53 (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, doc. no. 1127, and in Sesnanda’s court case, mentioned below, ibid. doc. no. 1736, to name but two.

2. All visible in ibid. doc. no. 1564, with the family links set out in the earlier Ignasi J. Baiges i Jardí & Pere Puig i Ustrell (edd.), Catalunya Carolíngia volum VII: el comtat de Barcelona, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològico 110 (Barcelona 2019), 3 vols, doc. no. 688.

3. She makes that claim in ibid. doc. no. 1736, as said above, and previously called Unifred "my lord", senior meus, in ibid. 1133; she otherwise occurs in conjunction with him in ibid. doc. no. 1263 during his life, and posthumously, executing his will, in doc. nos 1276 & 1283.

4. Ibid. doc. no. 1564, where the gift is made, "in such a way, namely, that while you shall live as long as you do not through any libidinous urge join yourself with another man you may hold and possess [this land] and provide for your sons and daughters from it and do as well as you can to do as much better as you can see with it, and after your death indeed let it revert freely and integrally and let them hold and possess it and divide it among themselves equally," in tale videlice racione ut dum ti vixeris si ad ullum ominem ten non coninuxeris per nullam libidinem teneas et possideas et filiis et filias tuas exinde nutrire facias and bene facere ut melius viderius vel potueris, post obitum vero tuum ad illis remaneat liberum vel integrum et illi teneant et possideant et inter se equaliter dividant. He has already specified that he means this gift to go to "your sons and daughters from one father", et filios et filias tuas ex uno patre genitis. I might be over-reading this, of course, but these phrases are unusual; I’ve never seen them elsewhere.

5. Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880‒1010: pathways of power (Woodbridge 2010), pp. 148‒150.

6. See, if you want, Josep Moran i Ocerinjauregui, "L'antroponímia catalana l'any mil" in Imma Ollich i Castanyer (ed.), Actes del Congrés Internacional Gerbert d'Orlhac i el seu temps: Catalunya i Europa a la fi del 1r. mil·leni, Vic-Ripoll, 10-13 de novembre de 1999 (Vic 1999), pp. 515–525, or the older but more accessible Jordi Bolòs, "Onomàstica i poblament a la Catalunya septentrional a l'alta edat mitjana" in Philippe Sénac (ed.), Histoire et archéologie des terres catalanes au moyen âge (Perpignan 1995), pp. 49–69, online here. In English there is the less directly relevant survey of Lluís To Figueras, "Personal naming and structures of kinship in the medieval Spanish peasantry" in George Beech, Monique Bourin and Pascal Chareille (edd.), Personal Names Studies of Medieval Europe: Social Identity and Familial Structures, Studies in Medieval Culture 43 (Kalamazoo MI 2002), pp. 53–66.

7. See, indeed, Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled, pp. 155‒159, for two more.

8. He therefore occurs in Baiges & Puig, Catalunya Carolíngia VII, doc. nos 324, 682, 688 as said above & 711, and also Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia volum VIII: els comtats d’Urgell, Cerdanya i Berga, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològico 111 (Barcelona 2020), 2 vols, doc. no. 662. Of these, CC7 324 is a gift from his father in 951, and even his father calls him Unifred Amat.

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Count Ermengol I of Urgell was a bad man (by some standards)

Posted on 4 August 2024 | 14 comments

I’m not going to do it just now, but you don’t have to look very far to find me saying that it is not the modern-day historian’s job to judge our subjects as moral beings. Indeed, trying to decide whether someone’s conduct in their historic life was good or bad not only imposes our own standards on people who obviously could not have shared them, since we came along later, but makes it harder to understand the standards they did have and thus why they were doing whatever they did. And this is a position I will argue with some persistence, but occasionally you do run across someone who challenges your detachment. My 2021 digging through the Barcelona-area documentation in the then-just-finished Catalunya Carolíngia included one such example…1

View of Castellciutat, Seu d'Urgell, Catalunya, from below

Images have been hard to find for this post. As far as I can see there are not even modern romantic depictions of Ermengol I; his tomb does not survive for obvious reasons (read on), though many of his descendants are commemorated in the cathedral which has been entirely rebuilt since his time; he did not issue coins; and the castle from which he probably mainly ruled was flattened and replaced in 1692. The best I can do for local colour, therefore, is the hill it was on, which maybe he would still recognise if he were able to see this view from the Ajuntament’s web site

Count Ermengol I of Urgell was the younger son of my pet subject, Count-Marquis Borrell II of Barcelona, Girona, Osona and Urgell, who ruled 945 till 993 CE.2 However, Borrell only ruled Urgell from 947 onwards, because he inherited it from his uncle not his father, and it was geographically separate from the rest of his dominions, so when time came to settle his inheritance he seems to have thought it best to have it governed separately again. Or, he had two sons and this was a solution, or perhaps both. Anyway, Ermengol inherited it in 993 and ruled it until 1010, in which year he died in battle against the Muslims. That episode turns out to be a post in itself, but without giving away too much, it is possible that he got what he deserved, in several senses, although it was seen as glorious at the time. But Ermengol’s documentary trace in earlier life also suggests a lot of ways his contemporaries would not have approved of him, so that perhaps his death served to wipe clean the slate of a man whose posthumous reputation would otherwise be quite a lot worse. What do I mean? Well, here’s the chargesheet. In all of these cases, I should say, I should really be prefacing the accusation with, “One charter claims that…”, which is very much not the same thing as it necessarily having been true. But the thing is, they’re all charters in his name…

  2. So, firstly, because this one I’ve already mentioned on the blog and because we can’t date it, Ermengol was involved in one of the very very few documentable cases of simony we know of before the eleventh century, which I wrote about here. Now, we might argue that Ermengol was not here actually selling ecclesiastical office, only charging for investiture of the next candidate, and that the real question should hang over the sitting bishop who was sewing his see up for his own nephew, but it’s hard not to see Ermengol as complicit in uncanonically deciding who the next bishop would be and getting paid for it to boot.3 But as we will see, Ermengol liked getting paid for stuff other counts might have done for free…
    3. Display commemorating Saint Ermengol in Urgell Cathedral cloister

    It should be said, not that I haven’t before, that his conditions of appointment and a similarly busy history driving Muslims out of places have not redounded to the detriment of Bishop Ermengol’s posthumous reputation either; he was being culted as a saint within a few years of his death and is still regarded as one in the Catholic Church today, which this display in Urgell Cathedral’s cloister commemorates; image by Patalín, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

  3. For example, in a complicated case in 1007, Ermengol gave a guy named Sunyer some property in Solsona for 5 denarii and a horse. It wasn’t exactly a sale, however, as Sunyer had already bought the land off a priest called Goltred some time previously. Unfortunately for him, Ermengol’s father Borrell had then taken over the land and given it to one Guisad instead. Then Guisad died, and I guess the land reverted to the count, by now apparently Ermengol, and Sunyer went to him for justice, which he sort of got – but Ermengol still made him pay for it.4
  4. Ermengol, it turns out, was quite good at keeping land he shouldn’t have had. As one of his father’s executors in Borrell’s will of 993, he was sworn on an altar to ensure that certain properties at a place called Tuixèn, where both the counts of Urgell, apparently via Borrell’s second wife, and the viscounts of Conflent and sometimes also Urgell, held land and gave bits of it to the cathedral, were indeed given to the cathedral for Borrell’s sins.5 But he didn’t; he just kept them, which we know from his own will, in which he enjoined upon his son, Ermengol (II) the duty of completing the bequest.6 Which, for what it’s worth, Ermengol II didn’t either, instead suing the bishop his father had been paid to install, the future Saint Ermengol above, who was from that vicecomital family, for the other lands there.7 Ermengol II lost that case and in the end had to restitute the bequest of thirty years before as well, but both Ermengols obviously learned a lot about how far the count could ignore the courts from their respective fathers…8

The village of Tuixén

The selfsame villa of Tuixent, as it is now spelt, image by Jordi Picart (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons


And yet this is still neither the worst thing nor the clearest evidence that Ermengol himself knew his conduct was questionable and indeed that his contemporaries might question it. The new piece for my puzzle this time was a document of 997, which begins with a whole preamble about how he was a terrible man. I mean, look:

“I Ermengol, by the grace of God count and marquis, recognise myself to be a most unhappy man and the worst of sinners, but nonetheless not disbelieving in the mercy of God, that omnipotent God may be propitious to me, and believing that which God said through the prophet: ‘Be you converted to me and I shall be converted unto you’, I therefore give…”9

This is not formulaically unusual in charters, but it is unusual for Ermengol, and it suggests either that he knew he was in the wrong, or as I have argued about his father with a similarly hand-wringing document, that he had accepted that the cathedral scribe writing this document was going to give him a hard time for good reason.10 So what was the reason this time? Well, Ermengol owed the cathedral chapter money, in fact 200 solidi which is quite a lot. In an effort to pay this debt, which he had presumably borrowed from these priests at some earlier point and didn’t have any more, he gave the cathedral the entire villa of Sallent, which was a decent size frontier property with its own castle and dependencies as we happen to know from elsewhere – and I will come back to how. We might still wonder if it was worth 200 solidi, which not many estates were in this world, but Ermengol obviously didn’t think it was because in exchange for it he also got a further 300 solidi from Bishop Sal·la.

Well, how fortunate for Ermengol that he had this spare castle, you may say, when he was otherwise so keen to hold onto land. And to that I would say, yes, in the very limited sense in which he had it. By that I mean, it was held for him by a guy mostly based in Osona and Barcelona, Sendred, Vicar of Gurb and Queralt, among other places. Sendred still had Sallent in 1005, and his son held it, from the counts, in 1022, so there’s no obvious sign that the bishops of Urgell actually ever got hold of it.11 So Ermengol rinsed the bishop for 300 solidi for a castle he didn’t really control, held by someone who then didn’t concede it, in order to get the Urgell priests to stop nagging about the 200 solidi he’d already had from them. I have often observed that it was tough to be up against the man in tenth-century Catalonia, and Pierre Bonnassie legendarily argued that it got harder in the eleventh century, but this is still kind of dishonest.12

Castle ruins and church of Sant Esteve de Sallent

Sallent has been changed a lot by industry but Ermengol might have recognised this bit, the church of Sant Esteve and the ruins of the castle, that is if he ever actually went there; image from Sallent’s tourism website

But it doesn’t stop there. There are a couple of smaller gifts that follow, a pair of hamlets sat on the hill around Castellciutat, where the bishopric had once been but which earlier counts had taken over as the comital citadel. And for these, he did not charge anything. How generous of him? Not really: these were to pay off a 15-year penance he’d had imposed upon him for homicide, presumably by the bishop.13 In the end, you can buy your way out of anything you can’t fight your way out of, right? And it would seem that the fates only disproved this maxim in his very last attempt (wait for the post…).

Meanwhile, we can certainly get some other historical points out of this. Apart from anything else, there is Ermengol’s very close but conflictual relationship with Bishop Sal·la – we see here a succession pact, for money, a penance, which he paid off, a bequest he never delivered, and a massive payment for settling his own debts, but these can only have rested on a vexed but interdependent personal relationship that we can only speculate about. One thing that is clear, though, is that he’d inherited the relationship from his father Borrell, as I’ve shown elsewhere.14 It may have been mainly because of that that Sal·la even thought he could impose a penance on the young murderer, as I know of no other cases of such penances from the area and in other dramatic actions Sal·la had tended to leave the counts clear of his sanctions.15 Nonetheless, we do see here a prelate and a magnate trying each to find the limits of what they could and could not dictate about the other’s behaviour.

We also see the arbitrary edges of comital power; there were expectations about how the counts should behave and the justice they should do, and sometimes (other) counts show signs of caring about this.16 But not Ermengol; he was obviously aware that in the end, if he didn’t want to do it, no-one could make him. Sal·la may have tried, but we see how that worked. Perhaps a bishop who was less ready to buy his way himself wouldn’t have so easily been bought… But whatever we may think of Sal·la, I find very little about Ermengol to like in his documents, and much to lament. I don’t think he was a good guy, and that is, I think, how he was probably seen at the time as well.

1. That is, Ignasi J. Baiges i Jardí and Pere Puig i Ustrell (edd.), Catalunya carolíngia volum VII: el Comtat de Barcelona, Memòries de la Secció Històrica-Arqueològica 110 (Barcelona 2019), 3 vols.

2. On Borrell the best thing to read might now be me! To wit, Jonathan Jarrett, “El comte marquès Borrell II de Barcelona: arquitecte involuntari de Catalunya?”, transl. Mònica Molera i Jordà, in Borja de Riquer (ed.), Vides catalanes que han fet història, Història mundial de Catalunya (Barcelona 2020), pp. 95–102.

3. Cebrià Baraut (ed.), “Els documents, dels anys 981-1010, de l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell” in Urgellia Vol. 3 (Barcelona 1980), pp. 7–166, doc. no. 276. The pre-1000 Urgell documents are of course in the Catalunya Carolíngia, and where possible I cite that below instead of this older edition, because then you can look them up online (there are even images of the charters now in some cases!); but this one and those below where I don’t do that are post-1000 so the Urgellia printing is the best there is.

4. Baraut (ed.), “Diplomatari del monestir de Sant Sadurni de Tavèrnoles (segles IX-XIII)”, ibid. Vol. 12 (1995), pp. 7–414, doc. no. 35.

5. Baiges & Puig, Catalunya Carolíngia VII, doc. no. 1214.

6. Baraut, “Els documents, dels anys 981-1010”, no. 295.

7. Baraut (ed.), “Els documents, dels anys 1010-1035, de l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell” in Urgellia Vol. 4 (Barcelona 1981), pp. 7–186, doc. no. 425.

8. Domènec Sangés (ed.), “Recull de documents del segle XI referents a Guissona i a la seva plana” in Urgellia Vol. 3 (Barcelona 1980), pp. 195–226, doc. no. 9.

9. Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum VIII: Els comtats d’Urgell, Cerdanya i Berga, Memòries de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica 111 (Barcelona 2020), 2 vols, doc. no. 857: “Ego Ermengaudus, gratia Dei comes et marchio, recognosco me hominem esse infelicissimum et nimium peccatorem, sed tamen non defidens de misericordia Dei, ut propitius michi sit omnipotens Deus, et credens illut quod Dominus dixit per prophetam: «Convertimini ad me et ego convertar ad vos». Idcirco dono…”

10. Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia VIII, doc. no. 444: “Recognoscens me multis divine legis preceptis transgredientem atque variis vitiis et iniquitatibus subiacentem, misticis divinis conlatis mihi verbis inobedientem atque in deliciis huius militie seculi comorantem…”, which I have canonically translated as, “recognising that I have transgressed many of the precepts of the divine law, and been subject to many vices and evils, disobedient to the words of the holy mysteries lavished upon me, and a dallier in the delights of this military age”. This is going to get more space in the book, if I ever get back to that, as I think I know what was going on here, and, as with Ermengol here, it was a moment of vulnerability vis-à-vis Urgell’s churchmen.

11. See for this Albert Benet i Clarà, La família Gurb-Queralt (956-1276): Senyors de Sallent, Oló, Avinyó, Manlleu, Voltregà, Queralt i Santa Coloma de Queralt (Sallent 1993), pp. 49-51. More generally, see Benet, Sallent, dels orígens al segle XIII, Episodis de la història 220 (Barcelona 1977).

12. Bonnassie did that, of course, in La Catalogne du milieu du Xe à la fin du XIe siècle : Croissance et mutations d’une société, Publications de l’Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, Sèrie A, 23 & 25 (Toulouse 1975), 2 vols.

13. Back to Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia VIII, doc. no. 857 again here, in case that wasn’t clear.

14. Jonathan Jarrett, “Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia”, unpublished Ph. D. thesis (University of London 2005), online here, pp. 290-298.

15. Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia VIII, doc. nos 794 & 795, dealing with an excommunication directed at two comital advisors, from which Sal·la nonetheless exempted the ruling countess and her sons.

16. Josep M. Salrach, Justícia i poder a Catalunya abans de l’any mil, Referències 55 (Vic 2013), pp. 108-118.

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Once as tourist, once as prisoner

Posted on 21 July 2024 | Leave a comment

I once told Professor Wendy Davies, no less, when she was threatening to get into Catalan charters as well as those from further west, that all the weirdest stories came from the archive of the near-Barcelona monastery of Sant Cugat del Vallès. I suspect this is probably being quite unkind to some other archives – have I ever told you all about Ramio’s and Julio’s bread dispute, for example? Doesn’t look like it – but there is still a bit of a concentration of oddity in the Sant Cugat documents.1 In so far as I can explain it, it might be because Sant Cugat got a very early royal grant of rights over a whole swathe of frontier lands that were still at that point beyond local control, and unexpectedly remained so for a century plus, so that when they finally did start running sheep through them and suing people who tried to stop them, the resulting documents expose a lot of the border strategies the people they now met were using to get by in that fairly dangerous world.2 That explains how we get things like the story of Hisnabert’s tower, which I told here long long ago, but I’m not sure it explains this one, which I found during my 2021 attempt to get through the newly-published Barcelona-area documents featuring Count-Marquis Borrell II.

Here's where at least some of the places concerned this week are, down where the rivers start to come out of the hills and meet in the Barcelona lowlands.

The hero of this story, then, is a guy called Ramio, a different Ramio I’m pretty sure, this one of els Gorgs in Vallès, whom we know mainly from his will, which exists as a 13th-century copy in Sant Cugat’s cartulary.3 It was declared in December 985, a date which turns out to be significant. I forget how I came across this one, as Borrell II isn’t in it, but I guess someone else was I then wanted to track down. I’ve had a very quick look for Ramio in other documents, but his property was so widely-scattered that a focus is quite hard to discern. He was a wealthy man, indeed, and it might be worth setting out his bequests just to show what that means in this context. So this was all being done at the chapel of Santa Eulàlia outside Sant Cugat, which is only mentioned in this will so was probably pretty tiny. In there were squeezed two priests, a judge, four named witnesses and a more general crowd, and then three sworn witnesses came to testify that Ramio had appointed three different people his executors for if he died. None of the executors appear to have been able to be present, though only one is said to be dead, so that’s odd, but reasons for it emerge. Anyway, these were the bequests that Guitesèn, Salomó and Fruià swore that they remembered Ramio telling those guys to make, with as you will see varying levels of recall:

  1. 10 mancuses of "cooked" gold to redeem an unnamed alod that someone called Guiu had in pledge from him;4
  2. an alod at Gorgs itself, in Barberà (Barcelona county), to go to Sant Cugat;
  3. an alod at el Congost, Sadurà or Valldaneu, I presume big enough to bound on all three of those settlements, which are miles to the north up near Ripoll, also to go to Sant Cugat, with a pair of oxen and their harness but less the alod that was Dacó’s;
  4. a modiata of vineyard and a piece of land at Sevedà (in Osona county) to Santa Maria de Seva;
  5. a half-modiata of land next to Rimilà’s alod, not said where, for Rimilà;
  6. houses, yards and gardens and a vineyard, again not said where, to Sant Pere de Rodes (in yet another county), less the bit around the bridge (what bridge? Not said);
  7. the piece around the bridge, to Santa Maria de Ripoll;
  8. an alod in Cervià (in Girona) to the cathedral of Sant Pere de Vic;
  9. an alod in Villalba (in Barcelona) to Sant Miquel and Santa Eulàlia de Barcelona; the latter of these is the cathedral but I think this is the last mention of Sant Miquel, and I personally don’t know what happened to it or whether it was perhaps a separate church on the same site which got built in;
  10. an alod in Maresme (Barcelona) to the nun or religious woman (deo vota) Quintilo for her life, and then to Sant Pere de les Puelles, Barcelona’s nunnery;5
  11. an orchard at les Arcs in Barcelona proper, to Santa Maria Tresvics;
  12. a cow, four sheep, a goat and kids, an irco (from context, a hog?) and a sow, a bed and bedclothes and some cookware to a woman named Òria, along with half a modio of grain from the new harvest and 7 quarts of wine;
  13. a cow, five sheep with lambs, and a sow to Salomó;
  14. two sheep to Fruià;
  15. all other sheep and pigs and one cow to be given to the poor;
  16. his bread and wine, including the new stuff coming, to be given to the poor or the priesthood;
  17. one pensa of silver to Odó his executor (named as Ató, if at all, at the beginning of the document, but see next entry);
  18. half a pensa of silver to Ató;
  19. all his crockery to the churches to which he’d given the relevant alods;
  20. and two pesas (probably the same as pensas, which is a much less usual spelling) for himself to fund a trip to Rome on pilgrimage.6

I will come back to the pilgrimage bit, but just to take stock there, that is land across three or four counties (depending what you think the Ripollès was at this point), all apparently close enough to operating homes that they had crockery in. Who knows where he actually lived? I suspect that the fact that the els Gorgs property comes first only relates to the fact that it was closest to the church the ceremony was in, rather than because it was his 'first' property. Some of the land, the Ripoll estate especially, looks as if it was pretty extensive, too. The specified money isn’t a huge amount – it would probably only have bought another smallish estate all together – but having that much liquid cash or bullion around is a marker of some substance all the same. But there is also the possibility that by the time this was carried out, he didn’t have as much (or had more), because even without the information which follows, one can see that there was some time over which this all panned out. It was long enough, for example, for one of his original executors to die, the other two perhaps to become unable to travel, and one of the planned sworn witnesses (Odó, who was obviously being paid for something) to be replaced (by Ató, I assume). But in fact we do know a bit more about timescale, because the document goes on to tell us what he did with his wealth, which turns out to be, travel. I think it’s probably fairest just to translate this bit entire, as best I can:

“And those two pesas which are mentioned in his testament for the selfsame abovesaid founder Ramio, he took to the house of Saint Peter when he travelled there. And once he had ordained all these things, he went to Córdoba, where he walked around (ubi ambulabat), and after he returned from there he lived some years and never changed his will, neither by witnesses nor by written order. And with this same will he went into the city of Barcelona to guard it with the other dwellers in that county, at the same time that it was besieged by the Saracens and was taken on the 8th Ides of July. If he was killed there, things remain just as he ordered or the law requires, and if he was taken alive from there as a captive, and should afterwards have changed his will and ordered it according to the law, just as it shall have pleased the Lord, let it be thus.”

So here the shoe drops, although everybody present must have known the story already: Ramio was one of the unlucky defenders of Barcelona on the day it fell to the attacking army of al-Mansur, and his fate was not known, I guess "missing presumed dead".7 Perhaps he was still alive and could come back; but they obviously didn’t think it was worth waiting to find out. This will had been made for entirely different purposes, though, for a trip to Córdoba that he was apparently able to conduct in peacetime with no special purpose; he just "walked around" and came back, and subsequently apparently went to Rome on pilgrimage as well.8 But maybe ten years after the will was made and he’d done his walking round Córdoba, maybe more, Córdoba came back to get him. So quickly could the worm turn in this world of two-plus cultures. And given that I do have this paper about military service to finish some day, it’s nice to have yet another example of the few people we can see actually doing it being really quite well-off. But in the meantime, here is evidence, apparently, of a tenth-century tourist!

1. Ramio’s and Julio’s bread dispute is in Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum IV: Els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica 53 (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, doc. no. 1575, and I will happily write about it if anyone wants, though I don’t have a picture of it, which I really should have got when I had the chance.

2. See Josep M. Salrach, "Formació, organització i defensa del domini de Sant Cugat en els segles X-XII" in Acta historica et archaeologica mediaevalia Vol. 13 (Barcelona 1992), pp. 127–173, online here.

3. Ignasi J. Baiges i Jardí and Pere Puig i Ustrell (edd.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum VII: el comtat de Barcelona, Memòries de la Secció Històrica-Arqueològica 110 (Barcelona 2019), 3 vols, doc. no. 857.

4. I once thought that this "cooked gold" is stuff that had been melted down to assure its purity – see Jonathan Jarrett, "Currency Change in Pre-Millennial Catalonia: Coinage, Counts and Economics" in Numismatic Chronicle Vol. 169 (London 2009), pp. 217–243, on JSTOR here, at pp. 234-235 – but I now think it’s more likely that it was coinage tested for colour in a flame, which is a non-destructive form of assaying.

5. Deo vota didn’t strictly mean "nun" in this era, for which there were other words like sanctemonialis; instead it was more usually a laywoman living a religious life privately. See Montserrat Cabré i Pairet, "«Deodicatae» y «Deovotae»: la regulación de la religiosidad femenina en los condados catalanes, siglos IX-XI" in Angela Muñoz Fernández (ed.), Las mujeres en el cristianismo medieval: imágenes, teóricas y cauces de actuación religiosa, Colección Laya 5 (Madrid 1989), pp. 169–182.

6. On pesas see Jarrett, "Currency Change", p. 226, and refs there.

7. See Gaspar Feliu i Montfort, La presa de Barcelona per Almansor: història i mitificació. Discurs de recepció de Gaspar Feliu i Montfort com a membre numerari de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica, llegit el dia 12 de desembre de 2007 (Barcelona 2007).

8. Pilgrimage to Rome had become quite fashionable among the pre-Catalan wealthy since around 960, but we know this mainly from the wills people made before going. I can’t right now locate any discussion of this, however, sorry.

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The young viscounts’ birthday party

Posted on 16 June 2024 | 20 comments

As well as providing some good photos, summer 2021 was about the last time I was able to do any serious work on Catalan charters, which is of course my whole big thing. (Not being able to do much since then is more or less why I’m not at the IMC this year, since a number of people have asked about that; nothing fresh to present…) The form that work took was a methodical chomping through the final volumes of the immense Catalunya Carolíngia project, those for the medieval county of Barcelona, looking for Count-Marquis Borrell II, its joint or sole master from 945 to 993 CE. This is the part of Catalonia I know least well, but I had tried to look in all the archives I knew about. Still, the team who did the Catalunya Carolíngia had better access and more time to look; it was inevitable there would be stuff in there I hadn’t found, and maybe I was lucky it was only twenty-odd documents. Some day I will also be able to finish this job, but as it is the summer ended with me about two-thirds of the way through and that’s roughly where things remain. But, point of this post, some of them were pretty odd.

Parc de Can Falguera, Sant Feliu de Llobregat, Barcelona

I think this is where our charter used to live, in the Palau Can Falguera near Sant Feliu de Llobregat. Its new residence is more forbidding.

The charter that gives us our title is one of the odd ones, nearly not even found by the Catalunya Carolíngia team (it has no. 674bis, because they had their numbers fixed already), and it survives only through an 1163 transcript in a private archive (which you see above) that was later gathered into the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón.1 The basics of it are not too odd: in late March 977, Borrell sold an alod, an estate, near Ullastrell to a guy called Otsèn for 140 solidi, which is quite a lot and suggests it was a good few acres. However, almost every step you can take from there is slightly unusual. Borrell had the land from one Guitard Berazà, which is just an odd name. Surnames or bynames are still unusual in tenth-century Catalonia, though Borrell’s world contained several important Guitards and that may be why the scribe specified; but I’ve never seen "Berazà" before and wonder if it’s a very early Romance patronymic genitive, son of Bera, like Díaz would come to signal "son of Diego" in Castilian, a direction Catalan didn’t in the end go. But also, whoever he was, we are told that he in turn got the land from Otsèn. The document doesn’t say it’s the same Otsèn both times, but usually land charters here would only give the tenure history one step back; that this time they gave two does suggest to me that the reader was supposed to understand the link. So why Otsèn would, if that were right, have had to sell up and was now able to buy back again (as well as why Guitard didn’t hold onto the land for very long) would all be nice to know. Otsàn does occur twice otherwise, once before and once after, both in documents from this archive, which suggests to me that he was very local; we only see him when this specific area is visible.2 In the former of these he is one of a small group of people selling land to a Guitard, which fits; and Guitard is said to be a vicar (which here is a secular title, basically meaning someone who runs a castle for the count, and a castle is mentioned in the boundaries of our main document). But he isn’t given his odd byname and the land has different boundaries, so this isn’t the matching jigsaw piece. Still, if a vicar was involved it would explain why Borrell might be in the loop, and it has me wondering if it’s one of those three-pointed sales I wrote about years back.

The CatCar team who did the digital version of the edition place this document's properties here. I don't know how they did so – the network of rivers and rivulets in the bounds may be telltale if you work on it? – but I'm glad I have an excuse not to try!

But the oddities don’t end there, and one of them is really useful (not the one I got the title from though; I’m saving that till last). As with most land charters in most places, this one gives the boundaries of the property, which run:

"on the part around in the little river which they call Masurgus; on the northern part on the street that leads everywhere or on the vine which was the late Lleopard’s or on the clearing that was the late Guadamir’s from the southern part indeed it bounds on the road that goes everywhere; from the west it lies next to the street or on the term of Ultrera or on the waste land of Quintila or of Ansoald."3

This already gives one an impression of the land, part wild country, two properties abandoned after their owners’ deaths, and a weirdly dense street pattern even though apparently only one route out. But this may be misleading, because the charter then goes on to specify four more pieces of property that are included, and the first two’s boundaries run thus:

"at the part around on the torrent which runs thence from the castle [told you]; on the north and on all the other parts on the same abovesaid alod [i. e. the main property already outlined]. And another piece which is above Athanagild’s house similarly bounds on all sides on the abovesaid alod."4

So OK, let’s sketch that. Obviously we don’t know what shape these land slices were, and even though they are conventionally given four sides that doesn’t make them square or even rectangular, especially in this country, but the logic of the description is that they can be thought of that way, so diagrammatically we are being told something like this.

Sketch diagrams of property boundaries of the main alod (top), piece 1 (bottom left) and piece 2 (bottom right); click to embiggen

Now, you don’t have to be a spatial genius, don’t even really need diagrams, to see quite quickly that if these two pieces have boundaries on the main alod, they’re not among the boundaries it’s given; or at least, it’s weird that these pieces of land are not referred to among those main boundaries when they’re then listed in the same document. But also, especially in the second case, how could it possibly be? The alod actually surrounded that land. The only place for these properties to be is therefore inside it. Now, that might not seem like a big deal; numerous scholars, including me, have deduced that some of the big properties they see in these documents must have encompassed subsidiary properties which were not necessarily part of them.5 It probably happened very widely. But it is pretty much unknown to me for a document to actually make that even this clear, because of course usually those subsidiary properties were not owned by the same person or included in the same sale. But here, even though these all apparently belonged to Borrell, he had not found it necessary to erase the old boundaries between big and interior holdings. You see what I mean? The alod and the pieces of land must all have been his, or he couldn’t here be selling them; but they had never been joined up. Presumably the castle too remained his, and wasn’t included in this, but it was probably also inside the alod, or that torrent would have to be crossing the alod’s boundaries (whereas I assume instead it ran into the Masurgus, which from the CatCar map would be the modern Torrent d’en Cintet I guess, somewhere between the holdings we’re seeing). So Otsèn’s land had had a comital castle stuck inside it. (It has not been found; I wonder if it was wooden.) One can see why the vicar, I guess of that castle, might have been keen to buy him out; less clear why Borrell, apparently, then bought the vicar out (or resumed the property at his death, maybe?) and sold it back to the original owner. But you might not expect to be told all this by some boundary clauses…

Still. None of this is either of what I promised you or the oddest thing about the charter, which for me is its witnesses. There are lots of these, seventeen in all including three priests and the vicar of Palofret which was quite nearby, but because of their number and because the others also include the frontier pioneer of many masters, Ennegó Bonfill (son of Sendred), I think this gathering was probably happening in Barcelona. But I’m not sure it was at Borrell’s palace, because four of the witnesses are specified as being sons of viscounts, not viscounts themselves but sons of. Specifically, we have: Ermemir son of Viscount Guadald; Llop son of Viscount Guadald; Miró son of Viscount Guadald; and Geribert son of Viscount Guitard (him again—maybe). Now these are all known people; Guadald was Viscount of Osona, Guitard of Barcelona. Ermemir and Geribert would both succeed their fathers pretty shortly, in fact Ermemir (who may actually be called viscount here; the term is in the nominative so should agree with him, not Guadald) maybe already had; the other two would not. But the daddies aren’t in the list; only the kids were present (and there’s also an Ató son of the late Terçol Guitard, unknown to me but evidently not to the gathering, as if the four vicecomital kids weren’t the only ones who for now were defined principally by who their fathers were or had been). Presumably they were of legal age, that is 14 or up, or they couldn’t legally have witnessed, so we’re talking adolescent teenagers at least; but apparently they were all together in Barcelona that day and their two fathers were somewhere else.

So my first thought was, as you see from the title, that perhaps it was one of their birthdays, or some other celebration, and all the contemporary noble kids were out to party with him. I still like that idea but of course there’s absolutely no way to tell; this is a document about Borrell and Otsèn, to an extent Guitard Berazà (perhaps so specified so that it was clear it wasn’t the viscount meant), and everyone else is just an extra whose business that day was not this. Even the actual viscounts may have been around and just busy chairing a court or committee or something; they could have literally been in the next room. What was actually happening in someone’s palace in Barcelona on the day Otsèn rocked up and offered Borrell 140 solidi to get his old lands back, we will never know. But therefore, it may as well have been a party thrown by the count for some teenage viscounts-to-be as anything else, eh?

1. Ignasi J. Baiges i Jardí and Pere Puig i Ustrell (edd.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum VII: el comtat de Barcelona, 3 vols, Memòries de la Secció Històrica-Arqueol&ogravelgica 110 (Barcelona 2019), vol. II, doc. no. 674bis.

2. Ibid., doc. no. 573bis.

3. Ibid., doc. no. 674bis: "Affrontat hec omnia: de parte circi in riunculo que dicunt Masurgus; de parte aquilonis iniungit in ipsa strada qui pergit ubique vel in vinea qui fuit condam Leopardi vel in area qui fuit de condam Vudamiro; de meridie vero parte inlaterat in via qui pergit ubique; de hocciduo vero adherit in strada vel in termine de Ultrera sive in terra erema de Chintela vel de Ansoaldo."

4. Ibid.: "Et iterum vindo tibi alias IIII pecias de terra in supradicto terminio. Affrontat ipsa una pecia de terra: de parte circi in torrente qui exinde discurrit de castello; de aquilonis et de omnes aliasque partes in isto suprascripto alode. Et ipsa alia pecia qui est supra domum Adanagilde similiter affrontat de omnesque partes in suprascriptum alodem." The next piece is located by the house of Almondo, which looks to me like an Arabic name…

5. Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power, Studies in History New Series (Woodbridge 2010), pp. 30-35 and more concretely and wide-rangingly, Gaspar Feliu Montfort, "El condado de Barcelona en los siglos IX y X: organización territorial y económico-social" in Cuadernos de Historia Económica de Cataluña Vol. 7 (Barcelona 1972), pp. 9-31, still good despite my quibbles.

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IMC through a screen: the International Medieval Congress for 2021

Posted on 29 May 2024 | 6 comments

The late post this Bank Holiday weekend is partly because of various stuff involving builders and friends that has kept me from a keyboard. But, it is also, I admit, because when I looked at where I was in my backlog I realised it was up to the International Medieval Congress of July 2021, and then my brain rapidly grabbed at anything else that would be easier to do for a while. And I asked myself as usual, what is the point in reporting on conferences from years ago? But on reviewing my notes quickly just now, it seemed to me that there was still a point, partly because apparently I saw some very interesting papers, but also because in 2021 the IMC was still fully virtual and I’ve never reported one of those before.

Postcard for the 2021 International Medieval Congress, Special Thematic Strand: Climates

Even that very modern feature has now acquired depths of history, however. After a reasonably successful trial the year before, when I just hadn’t been able to face being involved, the IMC had this year pinned their conference on a piece of conference software called Pathable. Now, I realise that there are quite a lot of tools for virtual conferencing, but the IMC, which usually runs between 24 and 30 parallel sessions over 4 days, day and full registration, and quite a few extras besides, scales up beyond what almost any of them will cope with. Pathable, I thought, was not bad given what we were asking it to do; it filled in its graphics behind loading the page in such a way that where you thought you were kept jumping away from you, but otherwise as an interface it was usable; it didn’t crash, which was kind of critical and always possible; and it managed to replicate or at least imitate a lot of the possibilities of the real conference. By that I mean it had facilities for inter-delegate messaging and personal meeting slots one could book between each other, standing pages for the various sellers (even if these were just static links out to their normal webpages) and so on. The one thing I don’t think it had was any way of replicating the serendipitous on-campus meeting, and looking back it occurs to me that maybe what it needed was an old-fashioned talker or something more like an IRC channel, where just anyone could chat with anyone else who was there. Maybe it did have that; or maybe we decided that was a netiquette horror-show waiting to be screened and forbade it; but either way I don’t remember it being bruited as a possibility. But whatever we might also have wished, it made the conference possible to hold, and we used it again for the hybrid portion the next year, and I think we’d have gone on using it had the company not gone out of business in spring 2023, hence all my past tenses in this paragraph. (Although, as the link above suggests, something seems still to exist, so it may be that a path out of bankruptcy was found… I don’t know, but we stopped using it.) Oh well…

Entry page for the Pathable site for the International Medieval Congress 2022

Entry page for the 2022 IMC Pathable site

Anyway. Using this software, I had a pretty good conference, and this is what I went to. The sessions titles are linked through to their static webpages, where the abstracts can be found. Detail comments on at least some of them follow below the cut.

Monday 5th July 2021

A day mainly of fine-grained Iberian Peninsula documentary stuff, with some Carolingian breaks out, a very on-brand bit of Jarrett conference paper selection, including in the former my sole actual contribution to the conference.

1. Keynote Lectures 2021

  • Innocent Pikirayi, "Towards New Climate and Environment Change Understanding in Africa: Re-Engaging the Medieval Climate Optimum/Anomaly and the Little Ice Age"
  • Jean-Pierre Devroey, "How to Write and Think about Political, Social, and Economic History in Dialogue with Climate and Environmental Data: a case-study in the age of Charlemagne, 740‒820"

103. Proprietary Memories: Notitiae-Inventories in Early Medieval Iberia, I – Making and Copying Lists

  • Wendy Davies, "List-Making in Old Castile before the Year 1000"
  • Julio Escalona, "An Inventory in Time: two versions of a San Millán List of Property"
  • R. M. Quetglas Munar, "Church Consecrations in Early Medieval Catalonia: the liturgy of making an inventory"

203. Proprietary Memories: Notitiae-Inventories in Early Medieval Iberia, II – Inventories and Serfs

  • David Peterson, "'Casati' and 'Collazos' in the Inventories of San Millán"
  • Lluís To Figueras, "Inventories and the Development of Serfdom in Catalonia in the High Middle Ages"
  • Letícia Agúndez San Miguel, "Counting People: lists of monastic dependents in the Kingdom of Castile and León (10th-13th Centuries)"

318. Living in the Carolingian World, II: peasants and the limits of social organisation

  • Noah Blan, "Conserve and Cultivate: peasants and a Carolingian moral economy"
  • Elina Screen, "Life in a Royal Landscape: evidence from ninth-century Carolingian royal charters"
  • Ellen Arnold, "Finding the Fishermen: hagiography and medieval traditional ecological knowledge"

403. Proprietary Memories: Notitiae-Inventories in Early Medieval Iberia, III – Inventories as Windows on Early Medieval Societies

Tuesday 6th July 2021

A day principally composed of sessions missing one person and a single super-powered keynote.

613. Frontiers and Crossroads of Italy in the Early Middle Ages

  • Christopher Heath, "Across the Border: communications, collaboration, and contact – Avars and Lombards, 567‒662"
  • Clemens Gantner, "Living in Interesting Times: the south Italian frontier in the ninth century"

699. Keynote Lectures 2021

    Ling Zhang, "Geoengineering an Empire – the Consumptive Mode of Analysis and China’s Medieval Economic Revolution"

718. Living in the Carolingian World III: testing the limits of the Carolingian world

813. Climate, the Environment, and the Natural World in Byzantium, III: environmental adaptation and social history

  • Anna Kelley, "Cotton Production and Environmental Adaptation in the First Millennium – a Chicken or Egg Argument"
  • Daniel Reynolds, "Political Climates: climatology in the Byzantine Negev and the politics of state building during the British Mandate"

Wednesday 7th July 2021

A day where I had to do my first digital moderating and apparently found it so taxing that I then missed almost all the rest of it.

1014. When Natures Punishes Humankind

  • Nikolas Hächler, "Natural and Supernatural Explanatons for Famines, Plagues, Natural Catastrophes and War under the Reign of Heraclius, 610‒641"
  • Chloe Patterson, "Contempt for the World? Apocalyptic Piety and Natural Retribution in Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum"
  • Roque Sampedro López, "The 'Climate' of Political Opinion in the Libro de Gracián in Castile during the Reign of John II, 1405‒1454"

1303. New Faces in Medieval Iberian Studies, IV

  • Elisa Manzo & Donato Sitaro, "Orosius’s Hispania and Gildas’s Britannia: Roman imperialism through the Christian mirror"
  • Lilian Gonçalves Diniz, "Religion and Culture in Early Medieval Galicia: Christianisation, religious crafting, and popular piety on the outskirts of the world"
  • Abel Lorenzo Rodríguez, "Killing Bill? Murder Accounts and their Consequences through Documentary and Economy in Early Medieval Iberia"

Thursday 8th July 2021

A day in which I mainly stretched eastwards and backwards in time.

1501. Between Byzantium and Sasanian Persia, I: settlement and movement between limits of Erānshahr and the eastern Roman Empire

  • Kodad Rezakhani, "Between the Hammer and the Anvil: Byzantium, Sasanians, and north Syrian trade in the 6th century"
  • Domiziana Rossi, "How Did the Environment Affect the Spread of the So-Called Justinianic Plague?: New Reflections on Settlements and Movements between Persia and Byzantium"

1601. Between Byzantium and Sasanian Persia, II: the climate of leadership between Erānshahr and the eastern Roman Empire

  • Alberto Bernard, "Persian Military Officers: social and geographic mobility in the late Sasanian Empire"
  • Spencer C. Woolley, "Imperial Sacred Violence: Heraclius and ideological climate change between Byzantium and Sasanian Persia"
  • Sean Strong, "Vindicated, Dismissed, or Crushed: Roman-Sasanian Generalship and Punishment in the Late 6th Century"

1709. Late Antique Frontiers, I: authors and texts

  • E. V. Mulhern, “From Aurora to Britannia: Claudian and the limits of empire"
  • Allen Jones, "'It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)': Gregory of Tours, c. 594"
  • Conor Whately, "Ammianus Marcellinus on Frontier Landscapes and Romanity in the Fourth Century World"

1801. Between Byzantium and Sasanian Persia, IV: the climate of religious warfare between Erānshahr and the eastern Roman Empire

  • Callan Meynell, "From 'Eastern Rome' to 'Byzantium'? The Impact of the Last Roman-Sasanian War on the Intellectual Climate of the Miracles of St Demetrius"
  • Joaquin Serrano, "Relics, Icons, and Christian Holy Devices in the Roman-Persian Wars, 4th-7th Centuries"
  • Cosimo Paravano, "Political and Religious Warfare through Hagiography: The Case of St Golinduch between Byzantium and Persia in the Reign of Maurice, 582-602"

Even with all those missing papers, that’s still quite a lot. Where to start? Continue reading →

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Seminars CLXXIV-CLXXVI: Crusaders, Cistercians and more at Leeds

Posted on 21 October 2023 | 1 comment

Hullo again! Firstly, I should apologise for the unexpected skip week, which I can best explain as backwash from the end of the industrial action at Leeds; everything is now back at full power in our educational machine and I disappeared briefly back into the gears… But, on taking stock of where I was in my blog backlog, it turned out that for a while it was almost all papers I’d heard in Leeds at the end of 2020 or early 2021. And it’s worth remembering that there are reasons to be an academic in the UK system, for all the trouble it’s in, and that if you’re a medievalist Leeds’s name is still famous for some of those reasons. So I thought I’d showcase four of those papers here, and maybe do some more slightly later on.

So we start on 17th November 2020, when our then-resident Teaching Fellow Dr James Doherty, who is now helping to run things at Birmingham, spoke to the Institute of Medieval Studies Seminar with the title, “Count Hugh of Troyes and his Charters”. Jamie has for a long time been working on people who went on crusade when there wasn’t one of the big, numbered, crusades happening, of which there were many – he works on a project with a database you can look at – but Hugh doesn’t quite fit the profile, because he was to begin with a person who stayed home when others went, including two of his brothers, who died on crusade in 1100 and 1102. Now, if you’ve heard of Hugh at all it’s probably either because you’re Charles West (or one of his readers) or for bad reasons that Jamie should get to tell people about himself; but he was big news in his day: by various channels of inheritance he ended up running much of the future Champagne; he married a daughter of the King of France in 1095 and then lost her in an annulment in 1104; he donated Clairvaux to the Cistercian Order, ensuring that Bernard of Clairvaux would have somewhere to be of; he survived an assassination attempt in 1102; and he finally joined the Templar Order.1 And this, you know, is all notable.

Impression of the seal of Count Hugh I of Troyes

Impression of the seal of Count Hugh I of Troyes, image from Anne François Arnaud, Voyage archéologique et pittoresque dans le département de l'Aube et dans l'ancien diocèse de Troyes, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The failed marriage, however, presumably coming on the back of his loss of his brothers, seems at first to have been some kind of turning point for Hugh: he went east himself for three years in 1104, went again in 1114-1116 and then lastly, as a Templar, in 1124-1127 and possibly until his death in 1130. Some of that has been studied, but Jamie was looking at the bits of his life where he stayed home to find out what he did there. And part of the answer is that, at least for the First Crusade, he was working for Pope Urban II, settling cases to do with the properties of those who had gone on Crusades, trying to get donations completed that crusaders had made and not finished before they went, and also representing Urban’s candidature for the papacy in an area whose bishops largely did not recognise it (because people, and especially students, tend to forget that the pope who called the First Crusade was in France because he couldn’t get into Rome because of the rival, more successful, pope who was there already). Therefore, argued Jamie, instead of envisaging a dramatic change of heart from a man who had hitherto resisted the call to go east, we might see his departure in 1104 as a man who was finally free to follow his heart in a matter where he was already committed. And that seemed fair enough to me, although I did wonder whether he was also trying to make up for his brothers’ failure somehow. The documents, sadly, don’t give us that kind of perspective, but Jamie showed us that they do add something.

Jumping chronology slightly so as to stay on a theme, on 14th January 2021 the Northern Network for the Study of the Crusades met at Leeds, and I made it to that too, not least because the second speaker was someone who had taken part in my Rethinking the Medieval Frontier project a while before and I wanted to show solidarity. That was Professor Nicholas Paul, who was up second, but preceding him was Louis Pulford, speaking to the title “‘I can give no better or more authentic account of this’: the sources and intellectual context of Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay’s Historia Albigense“. For those not familiar with that text, of whom I was one, Mr Pulford described it as a Cistercian preaching history of the Albigensian Crusade, which was directed not against Muslims but against the kind-of-Christian Cathar sect of southern France, the text being written very soon after 1219.2 Peter was nephew of the abbot of the place where he was a monk, but both were crusaders, having been on the disastrous 4th Crusade until its attack on Croatian Zara, and the abbot had also been in Cathar territory as a counter-preacher, with Peter sometimes there too, so this is a sort of religious soldier’s narrative. The text has been dismissed as being basically calqued from much older theology, however, and so is not reckoned much use as an account of the Cathars, and so Mr Pulford wanted to do a proper analysis on it to see just what texts it used and where it didn’t. There turn out to be lots, from the Bible through to Peter’s own day, including several papal letters (recorded as such), and Mr Pulford thought that the mass of this material, including some stuff from quite high up the command chain of the Crusade, might actually imply a role as official historian of it. I think I’d want a writer to say that if it was true – and why would you hide it? – so I asked and it turns out that it is dedicated to Pope Innocent III, but does not name him as sponsor. So my personal jury remains out on that, but at least this was a set of reasons to think that Peter was doing something quite specific with his text, and that its purpose might be worth divining as a source of understanding of the politics around the crusade in itself.

Ruins of Byblos Castle, Lebanon

The ruins of Byblos Castle, in modern Lebanon, a possible setting for crusader performance! Image by Heretiq – Own work, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

After that, Professor Paul spoke to the title, “Setting the Stage: aristocratic performance and the Eastern theatre of crusading conflict”. I thought I’d heard this paper before but actually this was a revamped version with little left of the one he’d done for us. In it, he framed crusading, which we now appreciate was dangerous, very very expensive and in general not a surefire way to advance as a Christian aristocrat in the Middle Ages, as the ultimate performance of chivalry in a world where that was a competitive sport. At home you had tournaments, which were also good stages, but this was the real deal. It was also, however, a kind of Grand Tour avant la lettre, which might include visiting Constantinople, usually as a pilgrim, and of course the Holy Land itself. One would come back having seen the hearts of the Christian world and briefly, perhaps, added one way or another to the blood flowing through them. This much was cool, but not perhaps hard to see; but Professor Paul’s next step was one I recognise now from pilgrimage study, in which he argued that romances and stories of crusading became scripts for the would-be performers to follow, and that those who moved out there, knowing from such texts what they thought they should find there, were trying to perform those scripts, even in things as material as castle-building, making them sites of hospitality and giving them gardens which made it possible for them to be the fantastic eastern sites the romances had already told them of. Apparently Hildebrand of St-Omer, otherwise unknown to me, even reports that this was being done competitively with the Muslims, trying to out-east the Easterners.3 By the end of this I wanted to read Professor Paul’s book…4

View from the west end of the north aisle of the church eastwards at Kirkstall Abbey

View eastwards from the west end of the north aisle of the church of my local Cistercian ex-establishment, Kirkstall Abbey, a building whose purpose was pretty clearly not just estate management. The photograph is mine.

But in between all this crusading stuff, another theme you may not have spotted there popped up again, that being Cistercians! I admit that this is actually a pretty strained link, but only because when our local Cistercians expert, Professor Emilia Jamroziak, spoke to the School of History Research Seminar on 25th November 2020, with the title, “The Theory of Modernisation and the Historiography of Medieval Monasticism”, you can tell she was working a much broader theme than just one monastic order studied more for their land-use or their angriest writer than for much else.5 She started by pointing out that monasticism is a subject whose history is usually written pretty much directly from its own institutional memory, which is of course selective, but usually written about monasteries’ connections to the wider world.6 Emilia was here instead looking at how the history that is written about these institutions come from the other side of a medieval/modern divide effectively set up by the Enlightenment (or, I might say, even earlier), preventing it being seen as a ‘rational’ response to the world whereas, of course, it did make sense to the people who did it (as they fairly clearly tell us). This tends to bring the Cistercians and their famous land management out on top as looking most ‘rational’ and ‘future-minded’, when actually the future on which all these places were focused was in fact the big eternity. Even the more recent historiography has tended to start valuing monasteries as innovators or precursors of phenomena which would later become significant, like eye-glasses, book production, and so on, which is all still basically an industrialised capitalist perspective that ignores the actual religion in these religious institutions. As Emilia said in questions, this kind of thinking lets modern Protestants engage with this Catholic movement without having to engage with its spirituality, which they consider suspect. Or else, monasteries get seen as tools of Europeanisation, bringing the periphery of the North and East onto the master narrative’s progressive track for their own teleological passages towards the Enlightenment and the current world order.

I’m putting my own spin on this, for sure, but you would be able to tell even more clearly from my notes that Emilia was quite ready to tear all this down and wants a history of monasticism at least to be told in its own terms to see what that looks like. There were lots of questions, including one person asking whether we shouldn’t therefore let monks do the history-writing themselves, to which Emilia suggested that monks wouldn’t want her doing it but that an outside perspective might still be desirable. Graham Loud suggested that another problem is that our sources are most vocal when things were going wrong, making normally-functioning monasticism much harder to see than you’d expect. But most of the questions focused around the idea of a ‘linear narrative’ which Emilia wanted us to abandon. By this she meant the progress narrative of modernisation, I’m pretty sure, but the phrasing led to various people asking if non-linear narratives are possible – Bill Flynn, liturgist until recently also at Leeds, suggested that monasteries themselves tend to see the narrative running backwards, from the age of perfection to them, and I unwittingly invoked the idea of cyclical establishment, corruption and reform that gave rise to the Cistercians themselves, which offered Emilia another pattern to suggest. As far as I can see from my desk at home, Emilia is still working on the new narrative that will answer these objections, and I should really just ask her about it, though conversations on my corridor these days tend to revolve around teaching and exhaustion and get no further. But I do rather want to see it.

The Parkinson Building, University of Leeds

The corridor is along the top of this, the Parkinson Building, University of Leeds, home of the IMS. Photo by Tim Green from Bradford [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Anyway, this all gives you some idea of the kind of things which go on in the Institute for Medieval Studies when it’s not the International Medieval Congress; and there is, as I say, more where this came from! I only wish I had then been and now was contributing more to it myself…

1. For Jamie’s take, see James Doherty, “Count Hugh of Troyes and the Prestige of Jerusalem” in History Vol. 102 (Oxford 2017), pp. 874–888, DOI: 10.1111/1468-229X.12521. For Charles’s, see Charles West, “Count Hugh of Troyes and the Territorial Principality in Early Twelfth-Century Western Europe” in English Historical Review Vol. 127 (Oxford 2012), pp. 523–548, DOI: 10.1093/ehr/ces080.

2. It has for some time been available in English as Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, The History of the Albigensian Crusade: Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay’s Historia Albigensis, trans. W. A. Sibly and M. D. Sibly (Woodbridge 2002).

3. I can’t find any real trace of this person (bar this), but Professor Paul cited an article which must, I think, have been Uri Zvi Shachar, “Enshrined Fortification: A Trialogue on the Rise and Fall of Safed” in Medieval History Journal Vol. 23 (Cham 2020), pp. 265–290, DOI: 10.1177/0971945819895898. That said, the details don’t match perfectly and the only Latin source I can see in Schachar’s citation is Laura Minervini (ed.), Cronaca del Templare di Tiro (1243-1314): La caduta degli Stati crociati nel racconto di un testimone oculare (Napoli 2000), and I can’t find much out about that either. But that’s as far as I think it’s probably sensible to chase this particular hare…

4. It is Nicholas L. Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (Ithaca NY 2012).

5. Although if you are interested in Cistercians, obviously we at Leeds recommend Emilia Jamroziak, The Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe, 1090-1500 (London 2013), and Jamroziak, “East-Central European Monasticism: Between East and West?” in Alison I. Beach and Isabelle Cochelin (edd.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin World (Cambridge 2019), 2 vols, vol. II pp. 882–900, is also important more generally, as is lots more of Emilia’s work.

6. I have to admit guilt here: this is exactly what Jonathan Jarrett, “Power over Past and Future: Abbess Emma and the nunnery of Sant Joan de les Abadesses” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 12 (Oxford 2003), pp 229–258, DOI: 10.1111/j.0963-9462.2004.00128.x, does, though in my defence Jarrett, “Nuns, Signatures, and Literacy in late-Carolingian Catalonia” in Traditio Vol. 74 (Cambridge 2019), pp. 125–152, DOI: 10.1017/tdo.2019.7, is more like what Emilia suggests, so in this sense I have developed.

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From the Sources XVIII: A lost letter from a Caliph

Posted on 25 September 2023 | 10 comments

It’s been a while since we had one of my source translations, and there’ve been a lot of photos of Scottish castles in poor weather just lately, so by way of the now-legendary "something completely different", let’s do some source stuff for a change. My candidate today, however, is a bit of a mystery and that needs explaining first.

Anscari M. Mundó

Anscari M. Mundó

So, in 1983 the immensely learned and influential Catalan palaeographer and liturgist, as well as sometime monk, Anscari Mundó, published a short paper about the handwriting used in early medieval documents from the Iberian Peninsula in a birthday volume for his colleague Manuel Cecilio Díaz.1 He used quite a range of examples, all given in tiny photographs, but among them were two previously unpublished pieces from the Archivo de la Corona d’Aragón which Mundó thought were letters from the (secretariat of) the Umayyad caliph in Córdoba to the count of Barcelona. For Mundó’s immediate purposes they served as almost the only known example of Latin handwriting in the Muslim part of the Peninsula which survives, but he was not blind to the fact that such a piece of diplomatic correspondence might be quite a big deal, and in a note he explained that he would give no further details right now, because he was imminently going to publish these documents separately.2 And fair enough, except that publication never came. Even at Mundó’s death in 2012, the documents remained unpublished and, more importantly, since he had given no archival reference, inaccessible to anyone else. My personal belief, having dealt with the Archivo a bit, is that he found them in some documents yet to be filed, and then they got filed while he was away and no-one could tell him where, or else the stack got moved or something like that. Anyway, I assume it wasn’t for want of trying that he never managed it.

Entrance to the Archivo de la Corona d'Aragón

Entrance to the Archivo de la Corona d’Aragón in 2011, easy enough to pass through but very hard to do anything inside…

So what was to be done? In 1990, Roger Collins, himself now publishing on literacy and writing in the Peninsula, expressed his frustration with Mundó’s apparent secrecy and somehow, with a really powerful magnifying glass or something, went over one of Mundó’s inch-and-a-bit facsimiles (the other was either not photographed or was even smaller, I don’t remember—long long time since I saw it!) to get all the text he could out of it. From this he concluded, firstly, that the document in the photograph had been addressed to two counts of Barcelona, which dated it pretty closely to the years 947 to 966 CE, when my man Count-Marquis Borrell II was ruling jointly with his brother Miró III, and secondly that since these men were addressed as "brothers", it was unlikely in the extreme that the document was in the voice of the caliph (who would have been either the somewhat terrifying ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III al-Naṣir (r. 912-961, caliph from 928) or his more severe son al-Hakam II (r. 961-976)), and it was more likely to have been sent by a Cordoban Christian dignitary of some kind.3 And there things rested until this happened.

The Catalunya Carolíngia volumes for Barcelona

Ignasi J. Baiges i Jardí and Pere Puig i Ustrell (edd.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum VII: el comtat de Barcelona, 3 vols, Memòries de la Secció Històrica-Arqueològica, 110.2 (Barcelona 2019), in its physical form on my desk, where it has spent sadly little time since I got it

The now-completed Catalunya Carolíngia project, without which I could never have done my PhD or therefore had my career, took a long time to get round to the archives covering Barcelona, but part of the reason for that was their exhaustive searching of them, including the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón. Still, I personally hadn’t dared expect that one of the things they’d come up with was this lost letter, and so I was very excited to find it was there, as no. 393 in Barcelona part 1.4 Mundó is finally absolved and Collins has his text! Except that it’s not that document. Remember that Mundó had found two? Well, this is the other one, and reading it proves Mundó right and Collins, if not wrong, at least not right about this. And of course, the editors maybe should have realised which one they were looking at. None of the text that Collins saw in that photograph, importantly including the salutation to plural counts as brothers, is in this text, which implies that that document is yet to be found. But what is is actually much more interesting, although, inevitably, the document is defective… I suspect it has only survived because of being binding or wrappings for something else. So here we go with what is left.5

… Córdoba. And the same man is my messenger and his name is ‘Abd Allāh ibn al-Qumis, who is called ‘count’, and he is out of all these messengers our private minister, which they will tell you [singular] and indicate to you from their mouths. But give them your ear and your attention to their speeches and apply yourself to understanding them. And place your trust in everything which they report to you, lord [Lenr]et. And once [you have], in the same hour send to me that old man Guitard Arnau without any companion. God, God considers you, so give you no order or pact or guidance or promise until he return to you… predominantly your case. You, moreover, will know for certain […]
… [and] if it is allowed to […] this case in the Christian faith and how it [should?] fall […] into the cursed Jewish faith. Nevertheless, consider and act sen[…] and then you will see the glory of your God in all your cases […]

And that’s all folks, not all he wrote, obviously, but all we have. And, as I say, it has no overlap at all with the text Collins pieced together and is definitely addressed to a single recipient, whose name could apparently be mangled as "Lenret", with the first four letters dubious. I don’t feel as if "Borrel" is too much of a stretch there, not least because whoever it is has to be contemporary with Guitard Arnau, who is probably Viscount Guitard of Barcelona (r. 974-985), because Guitard went to Córdoba as Borrell’s envoy in 974 and 976. That would tend to place this document in that bracket, and probably 975 since Guitard was already familiar to the writer, rather than the Borrell-and-Miró-based dating of 950-957 the editors have given it (thinking, I guess, without reading their own text, that they were dealing with the document to the brothers that Mundó, and Collins, who goes unacknowledged, had worked on).6 There are some problems there: Viscount Guitard is usually reckoned to be the son of Viscount Gombau, not Arnau, and would actually have been quite young at this point, and that makes me wonder if the Guitard who went to Córdoba, otherwise only attested (as ‘lord of the city of Barcelona’ and Borrell’s ‘vicar’) by the eleventh-century historian Ibn Hayyān, albeit with apparent access to the court records, was actually someone else, or if our dubious grip on Viscount Gombau is actually somehow mistaken.

However, all that is really down in the weeds. What was actually going on here? It’s hard to say, but it seems like the following are halfway safe deductions.

  1. The person receiving this letter had sought an intervention from an authority in Córdoba who had a Christian count as one of his privy counsellors; it seems really difficult to imagine anyone other than the caliph in that position, so the letter really is from him, presumably via a secretary such as we know the ninth-century emirs used.7
  2. The issue about which Borrell (let’s say it’s Borrell) had consulted was one which could potentially be judged by Jewish or by Christian authorities, and the caliph was apparently going to have to decide which. We can’t go any further but I’m reminded of the ninth-century exile convert to Judaism, Bodo who became Eleazar, and wonder if some similar religious switch was part of the problem.8
  3. However, the issue was apparently one about which Borrell might have been able to take local action; we can see that because the caliph is keen to forbid him that possibility. If you submit to caliphal jurisdiction, you gotta submit.
  4. The demand for Guitard to be sent is part of that strategy; not only can Borrell not act without caliphal approval here, he is also going to be told what to do by one of his subordinates, without anyone else knowing whether what Guitard advises is what the caliph ordered. Given the later persistent conflict between viscounts and counts of Barcelona, I see a divide-and-rule strategy here in which Borrell’s independence is compromised by the equivalent of having a British Resident in his palace, or a Communist political officer if you’d rather, someone who can countermand him from below in any case.

So there’s actually quite lot here of interest. In the first place we see a strong caliphal hand in diplomacy, although also that (unless it was in a lost bit of the text) there isn’t much actual sanction the caliph can deploy against Borrell short of actually sending an army, which might be excessive; this moment of weakness however affords a lever with which the caliph tries to fracture Borrell’s authority. In the second place, against the increasingly common complaint that despite the tenth-century caliphate’s famous or infamous reputation for interreligious tolerance, we only actually know of one prominent non-Muslim courtier at Córdoba for the whole tenth century, the uniquely qualified Hasdai ibn Shaprut, here is another, an Arabicised but presumably Christian count of Córdoba, one of the caliph’s key confidants.9 (As well as whoever wrote this letter, I suppose.) So that’s a bit of evidence for the convivencia supporters. And we see the caliph arbitrating between the Peoples of the Book as we would expect, and so on.10

Count-Marquis Borrell II of Barcelona, Girona, Osona (945-993) and Urgell (947-993), as pictured in the Rotlle genealògic del Monestir de Poblet, c. 1400

I’ve used this before, obviously, but it is the only medieval illustration of Borrell II there is, in the Rotlle genealògic del Monestir de Poblet, c. 1400, image from Wikimedia Commons

But for me most important, I think this is the only information we have about what the several submissions to Córdoba which Borrell made over the course of his career actually involved, beyond sending very expensive gifts. In 940, just after raiding Saragossa, his father Sunyer had been made (by Hasdai, no less) to swear off a marriage alliance with Pamplona and any kind of Christian cooperation north of the caliphate’s borders, but what the later submissions cost Borrell has only ever been guesswork; it doesn’t seem to have been military service, tribute or anything like that.11 And I think this letter supports that: it fits into a context where the default relationship was detachment, to the point where when an intervention was requested by the supposed subject, the price for it would have to be negotiated individually, under some vague shadow of threat that the caliph was actually not well-placed to carry out. And yet it doesn’t appear that Borrell’s position here was the strong one. I do wonder what was going on. But now, so can you, and of course I’d love to hear your guesses…

1. Anscari M. Mundó Marcet, "Notas para la historia de la escritura visigótica en su período primitivo" in Bivium: homenaje a Manuel Cecilio Díaz y Díaz (Barcelona 1983), pp. 175–196.

2. Mundó, "Notas para la historia de la escritura visigótica", p. 187 & n. 6.

3. Roger Collins, “Literacy and the laity in early mediaeval Spain” in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), Uses of Literacy in Mediaeval Europe (Cambridge 1990), pp. 109-133 at pp. 112-113.

4. Ignasi J. Baiges i Jardí and Pere Puig i Ustrell (edd.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum VII: el comtat de Barcelona, Memòries de la Secció Històrica-Arqueològica 110 (Barcelona 2019), 3 vols, vol. I no. 393, with an online version here.

5. Usually I’d provide a Latin text here as well, but since there is now the CatCar database, at last, as cited above, I don’t have to. Phew!

6. Baiges & Puig, Catalunya carolíngia VII, vol. I p. 410. For Guitard see José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, Quan els vescomtes de Barcelona eren: història, crònica i documents d’una familia catalana dels segles X, XI i XII, Textos y documents 39 (Barcelona 2006), online here, pp. 23-41.

7. We even have the somewhat sideways testimony of one of those secretaries, Samson of Córdoba, that he did such work, in "Samsonis apologeticum contra perfidos", ed. Joan Gil in I. Gil (ed.), Corpvs Scriptorvm Mvzarabicorvm, Manuales y Anejos de «Emerita» XXVIII (Madrid 1973), 2 vols, vol. II pp. 505-658 at II.Præf.9. Samson even mentions someone, Servandus, in the office of Count of Córdoba. Given that the rôle fairly clearly involved office within the Christian community, it seems overridingly likely that a Christian held it, despite the tenth-century incumbent’s name, but then, Samson had contemporaries who complained about Arabicization among the Christian community and we have a few Arabic Bibles; see Hanna E. Kassis, "The Arabicization and Islamization of the Christians of al-Andalus: evidence of their scriptures" in Ross Brann (ed.), Languages of Power in Islamic Spain, Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Program of Jewish Studies, Cornell University, 3 (Bethesda MD 1997), pp. 136–155. That would all matter less had arguments about the speed and extent of conversion not been hung on such changes of name… For critique, see Alwyn Harrison, "Behind the Curve: Bulliet and Conversion to Islam in al-Andalus Revisited" in al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean Vol. 24 (Abingdon 2012), pp. 35–51, DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2012.655582; for a reply to criticisms like that by the originator of the arguments, see Richard W. Bulliet, "The Conversion Curve Revisited" in A. C. S. Peacock (ed.), Islamisation: Comparative Perspectives from History (Edinburgh 2017), pp. 1–11, on Academia.edu here.

8. On this intriguing story see Frank Riess, "From Aachen to Al-Andalus: the journey of Deacon Bodo (823–76)" in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 13 (Oxford 2005), pp. 131–157.

9. The best general statement of the case about Hasdai ibn Shaprut, by which I mean it contains all the usual claims but doesn’t go beyond them, is probably Jesús Peláez del Rosal, "Hasdai Ibn Shaprut in the Court of Abd ar-Rahman III", transl. Patricia A. Sneesby, in Peláez (ed.), The Jews in Cordoba (X-XII centuries), Studies in Hebrew Culture 1 (Córdoba 1987), pp. 61–77. Sadly, the case is usually made instead from Eliyahu Ashtor, The Jews of Moslem Spain, trans. Aaron Klein and Jenny Machlowitz Klein (Philadelphia PA 1973), 3 vols, which for all its manifold virtues, in its forty-odd pages on Hasdai goes mostly without evidence or citation. On its limits, see Danica Johnson, "A Reassessment of Scholarship: Hasdai ibn Shaprut", unpublished MA dissertation, University of Leeds, Leeds, 2021, but as Johnson and I found (and hope someday to publish), most of what can be relied upon in Ashtor came ultimately from Philoxène Luzzatto, Notice sur Abou-Iousouf Hasdaï Ibn-Schaprout, médecin juif du dixième siècle, ministre des khalifes omeyyades d’Espagne `Abd-al-Rahman III et Al-Hakem II, et promoteur de la littérature juive en Europe (Paris 1852), online here and almost the only person ever to write about Hasdai with primary citation. On Hasdai’s questionable representativeness see Jonathan P. Decter, "Before Caliphs and Kings: Jewish Courtiers in Medieval Iberia" in Jonathan Ray (ed.), The Jew in Medieval Iberia, 1100-1500 (Boston MA 2012), pp. 1–32, or less sweepingly David J. Wasserstein, "Jewish Élites in al-Andalus" in Daniel H. Frank (ed.), The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Society and Identity, Études sur le Judaïsme médiéval 16 (Leiden 1995), pp. 101–110.

10. On this see most recently David J. Wasserstein, "Christians, Jews and the Dhimma Status" in Maribel Fierro (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Muslim Iberia (Abingdon 2020), pp. 208–227.

11. The 940 treaty is recorded by Ibn Hayyān in an extract printed in English in Olivia Remie Constable (ed.), Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources, 1st edn (Philadelphia PA 1997), no. 13B; it is presumably also in the 2nd edn but I don’t have that available to check. There is a short discussion of it in Philippe Sénac, "Una expedició de la marina califal" in Josep Maria Salrach (ed.), La formació de la societat feudal, segles VI-XII, Història política, societat i cultura dels Països Catalans 2, 2nd edn (Barcelona 2001), pp. 326–327. On the diplomatic context more widely see Sénac, "Note sur les relations diplomatiques entre les comtes de Barcelone et le califat de Cordoue au Xe siècle" in Sénac (ed.), Histoire et archéologie des terres catalanes au moyen âge (Perpignan 1995), pp. 87–101, online here.

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From the Sources XVII: more Pavians destroying important people’s houses

Posted on 13 July 2023 | 2 comments

Rather than just drown you in pictures of symbol stones for the next few weeks, it seems wise to intersperse some other material, so let’s jump forward a bit to the month after I was back from that trip when I was reading something really old and Italian for details of early medieval military service.1 It wasn’t much use but one of his sources, a charter of King Berengar I of Italy to Bishop Adalbert of Bergamo, reminded me of something. You would have to go back a long way on this blog to remember me writing about the destruction of the royal palace in Pavia in the period of Conrad I of Germany’s reign before he could get down to claim Italy as well; that is a thing that happened in 1037, and it caused Conrad more or less to invent the theory of the king’s two bodies.2 However, turns out it wasn’t a completely new thing for Pavians to do. Check this out:3

“In the name of the Lord God Eternal, King Berengar. We wish it to be known to all the faithful of God’s Holy Church that the venerable Adalbert, chief-priest of the holy see of Bergamo, has proclaimed to our care that his Church had manses and a solar in the city of Pavia in the place which is called Farmanya, and that when an attack of the Hungarians was imminent, in order to fortify the selfsame city, firstly the houses were destroyed by the citizens and then the wall of the city was built upon his Church’s land and his own, just as it is now seen to be built, and therefore he was describing himself as being without an episcopal house in the aforesaid city.

Roman and medieval wall fabric in Pavia

Wikimedia Commons tells me that this is actually a part of the Roman, and then early medieval, city wall of Pavia, which was later incorporated into the monastery of Santa Agata; but since it has Roman fabric, I guess it can’t be the bit that they built in this charter. Still, it’s a wall that was there at the time, that’s good enough, right? Image by FabioRomanoni – opera propria, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“And since we found this to be so, desiring to console all the oppressed and especially the churches and priests of Christ, we decided it worthwhile that in the same place which is called Farmanya upon the wall of the selfsame city both he and his successors should have licence from us and power to construct a building and a road there which is laid from west to east, so that it is close enough to the aforesaid wall, but not next to it, as far as the postern, and on the southern side the boundary should be set between his land and the land of Saints Peter and Thecla, since we have directed that to the provision of Bishop John of Pavia. Let moreover the wall on which which we have conceded the right of building his and his church’s property extend for twelve legitimate perches.

“If therefore anyone should attempt to infringe or violate this our authority and concession of a precept, let him know that he must compound for it with fifty pounds of gold, half to our chamber and half to the aforesaid bishop Adalbert and his successors.

“So that it may be more truly believed and diligently observed, confirming it with our own hand we have ordered it to be signed with our seal below.
*** Sign of the lord [seal] Berengar the most serene king. ***
*** John the chancellor, in place of Ardingus, bishop and archchancellor, have recognised and subscribed. *** [Signum]

“Given on the Kalends of September, in the year of the Incarnation of Our Lord 915, in the 28th year, indeed, of the lord and most serene king Berengar, in the 4th Indiction. Done at the estate of Coriano. Happily in Christ’s name, Amen.”

As usual with these things, the text sort of stands by itself, but there’s still some things I’d like to pull out of it.

  1. Firstly, it’s hard to call this kind of destruction mob violence; they built a wall over the destruction, so they must have been coordinated somehow. Either the bishop of Bergamo was complicit in the destruction of his own house, therefore, or whoever was in charge in Pavia was happy to evict him.
  2. It’s not exactly clear when that destruction happened, either, and therefore how long Bishop Adalbert had had to stay with friends when he visited Pavia. Hungarians raided Italy in 899, defeating King Berengar, and in 904, when he paid them to fight for him instead. They didn’t come south of the Alps again till 920, but they got close in 911. I can’t tell from what I have to hand whether Pavia was really threatened at any of those times, but if we assume that you don’t go demolishing bishops’ houses without clear and present danger, then it seems likely that this situation had been hanging awaiting repair for at least 11 years, perhaps because it had taken Berengar that long to admit that anything that happened in 904-5 wasn’t completely splendid.4
  3. We can also deduce something about Berengar’s régime from the fact that no-one was summoned or punished for this… At least, no mention is made of it, or specifically of anyone but the bishop paying for the work on his land which Berengar had taken so long to give.
  4. On the other hand, enough was still functional about the royal capital, even in the lamented absence of a king, that the bishop of Bergamo, 90 km from Pavia, still needed a pad there, suggesting he frequently had to be present. That might be Church rather than royal government but it’s still a system with central attraction, not what one might expect from some histories of tenth-century Italy.5
  5. Also, while there is no specific military obligation stated, neither is it excluded and you’d assume, probably, that someone holding property next to a city wall had some obligation to help man it. If so, this charter may have got the bishop somewhere for a new house; but it also made him or his retinue part of the defence of a city not his own.

The other thing that strikes me about this is the division of the section of the wall between two bishops, Adalbert and Archbishop John of Pavia. The place that immediately reminded me of was Saxon London, which when restored by Alfred the Great (or perhaps better, reassigned by him) involved neighbour bishops, not on the wall (though we don’t know it didn’t) but on the river, with Worcester and Canterbury being given neighbouring plots at Queenhithe to develop in 886.6 Of course, those concessions were meant to build up an economy, not a defensive system, though it could reasonably be supposed that those plots were subject to the famous trinodas necessitas (‘three-part duty’) of fortress, road and bridge maintenance, in so much as, as far as I remember, the grants don’t mention exemptions from it.7 But in any case, we’ve already seen in an earlier post that the cathedral clergy in Pavia were quite deeply concerned with trade as well, so it is very tempting to see the Queenhithe grants in London and this one in Pavia as two sides of the same coin struck by kings trying to re-establish beleaguered capitals. Of course, there are lots of differences in terms of threat, damage and authority contexts, and it could equally be that Alfred and Berengar adopted divergent policies for their troubled cities. But at least one can imagine both cards in a late-ninth or early-tenth-century king’s hand.

Queenhithe Dock in London

You’d have to say it worked at Queenhithe, on present evidence, though it might be quite a while since the dock was used for anything much. Image by Pymouss – own work, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Now, the scholar who put this all before me didn’t care about any of this; he was interested in the place-name Farmanya, which he was considering as part of a search for an obscure category of soldiers among the Lombards, a couple of centuries before, called faramanni. He decided that that wasn’t what lay behind the place-name here, which he had rather have read as deriving from Foro Magno, the ‘great forum’.8 But he gave the document in full in his appendix anyway, and I’d not have read it any time soon otherwise, so I have to thank him for that; it almost made the reading of his 152-page conference paper worthwhile… Almost. But hey, doing so got me a blog post, and so it got you that too. Here you are!

1. Ottorino Bertolini, "Ordinamenti militari e strutture sociali dei Longobardi in Italia" in Ordinamenti militari in Occidente nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 15 (Spoleto 1968), 2 vols, vol. I, pp. 429–629, of which mass pp. 581–607 are a separate "Appendici dei testi" and pp. 609–629 are the discussion.

2. Hagen Keller, "Das Edictum de beneficiis Konrads II, und die Entwicklung des Lehnswesens in der ersten Hälfte des 11. Jahrhunderts" in Il Feudalesimo nell’alto Medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 47 (Spoleto 2000), 2 vols, vol. I, pp. 227–261; more distantly, I refer of course to Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, 2nd edn (Princeton NJ 1985), on JSTOR here.

3. Bertolini, “Ordinamenti militari”, Appendici dei testi, pp. 603-604, more deliberately printed in Luigi Schiaparelli (ed.), I diplomi di Berengario I, Fonti per la storia d’Italia, 35 (Roma 1903), doc. no. C (pp. 262-264).

4. Kornél Bakay, “Hungary” in Timothy Reuter (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History volume III: c. 900–c. 1024 (Cambridge 1999), pp. 536–552 at pp. 539 & 541-543.

5. Such as that old classic Ferdinand Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, transl. Annie Hamilton (London 1894-1902). We might now refer to Chris Wickham, Medieval Rome: stability and crisis of a city, 900-1150 (Oxford 2015) instead.

6. I am here running off Tony Dyson, "Two Saxon Landgrants for Queenhithe" in Joanna Bird, Hugh Chapman and John Clark (edd.), Collectanea Londiniensia: Studies in London archaeology and history presented to Ralph Merrifield, London and Middlesex Archaeological Society Special Papers 2 (London 1978), pp. 200–215, online here and Dyson, "King Alfred and the Restoration of London" in The London Journal Vol. 15 (London 1990), pp. 99–110; I should now cite Rory Naismith, Citadel of the Saxons: the Rise of Early London (London 2018) too but sorry, I haven’t yet had time to look it out.

7. I don’t actually have a reference to the primary source charters here, bothersomely, because I had to go back to my undergraduate dissertation for these data and apparently I only cited Dyson, as in n. 6 above; but damn, it’s not bad work for a 21-year-old despite that failing.

8. Bertolini, "Ordinamenti militari", pp. 511-512, then defended in discussion wth Guido Mor pp. 626-629.

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Stock Take VII: research I can’t do

Posted on 18 February 2023 | 13 comments

The industrial relations situation between university employers and employees in the UK is getting increasingly surreal. On Friday, with more strikes called for next week, they were paused because progress in the negotiations had got to a point where some goodwill gesture was required. But because ACAS is involved, these negotiations are confidential. Now part of the University and Colleges Union regards this as capitulation with nothing concrete gained and is protesting against the Union leadership. Presumably at this point I am teaching on Tuesday, but it’s not clear. Meanwhile, I wrote most of this on Thursday, while quite angry, and then thought I’d better defang it after I’d slept, and the result is what you have below.

Between 2007 and 2009, when this blog was very young and had not succeeded in its then-primary purpose of helping me land an academic job, I did occasional reflexive posts on my academic progress and projects, I guess in order to help me understand where I should be focusing my efforts. I think I would now tell that version of myself that I needed to focus on my actual applications and being positive about everything, but some sort of sense that I’m due another evaluation has been settling on me over the last little while, I suppose since the pandemic, when my employers first told us to stop research and focus on what really mattered, i. e. teaching. They never did rescind that instruction, I should say, but it has come up again during the current industrial dispute. Since this runs along with the threat of 100% pay deduction until the teaching has happened as well, despite the progress towards a settlement at national level, it’s clear where we have got to, and that’s here:

Not, I should say, that it seems as if many people in charge have seen that film. So I wondered, in the light of all this, how my research goals have fared and are faring since I started this job, since as you know it hasn’t all worked out. At first, I thought that the best way to do this would be first to see what had happened with the stuff in the last Stock Take post. Now, as it happens, firstly, that post was private, so you can’t see it; and secondly, most of the stuff in there on which I was seriously working came out in 2011-2013, and then a few more fell out in 2019-2021 because I used them to bargain passing my probation. But it didn’t seem worth going through that when they were all reported here. I also looked at my research goals file, which I hadn’t opened since 2019. The sad thing there is that, while I could now add new plans to it, and change some priorities maybe, nothing can be deleted; nothing in there has moved at all since then. And then I looked at what else has come out since 2011 which was not part of any of these plans, and found it to be two book chapters in Catalan, a book review, two numismatic conference papers (one in Chinese) and a numismatic article that I haven’t even mentioned here (must fix that!), all round roughly the same topic, and a collaborative historiographical article, plus one more book chapter currently in press. And I thought, I don’t need to list all these for you again and what would the interest be anyway?

So instead, I thought I would just take the projects which are in some sense on public record, because they have appeared in my sidebar here as things I am actually working on, and just say when they started, what state they’re in and what if any hope of publication they have, because this time, I’m not taking stock of what I ought to be working on; I’m taking stock of what I can’t. This is the stuff there’s no hope of me giving the world until the silly situation the UK academy has got itself into is at least partially resolved. It’s not going to make any minister cry, but it upsets me somewhat. So this is a vent; please forgive, and something more palatable will follow.

In setting this up, of course, even I have to admit that my plans are never completely realistic, and there is stuff in this list I probably haven’t even tried to work on since first mentioning it or presenting it. So I’ve divided this into two categories, and they express how I accept or don’t that unrealism…

Not My Fault (I Would If I Could)

  • Agent of Change: Count Borrell II of Barcelona (945-993) and his Times: well, you’ve heard this story, and this is still my official first priority; but there isn’t any more of it actually written than there was in 2017, there are a lot of documents still to process, as well as the reading which might get it past the reviewers…;
  • “Aizó of Ausona: the identity of the rebel of Roda de Ter, 826”, first written as a blog post in 2009, already, but first properly researched and written up 2014, sent out 2015 and flat-rejected, my first time ever; I still think it’s basically sound, though, so it has had some peer feedback and minor revisions since then but not the final edit to make it ready for somewhere else; it basically exists, and was last revised January 2021, but now needs my new knowledge about the supposed Jewish garrison of Osona built in too;
  • “Critical diplomatic: a tool for analysing medieval societies”, ultimately derived from the first chapter of my thesis of 2005, presented 2009 and sent out in that form, came back wanting major revisions which I then wasn’t equipped to do but now might be, the how-to-use charters several people have asked me to point them to but which doesn’t exist in English;
  • “De Administrandis Marcis: The 10th-Century Frontier with Islam seen from Barcelona and Byzantium”, given as a conference paper in 2015, bound for the first Rethinking the Medieval Frontier volume if that ever occurs but ready to go in and of itself, after some minor updates probably;
  • “Documents that Shouldn’t Survive: Preservation from before the Archive in Catalonia and Elsewhere”, first presented as a Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Diplomatic paper way back when, in 2007 I think, but not used for the resulting volume on the basis that I was only allowed one chapter (which was, I admit, the longest); revised 2011, since then I have been reading for it now and then, mostly of course the volume of which it might also have been part, and did a skeleton redraft in late 2021, but would have to read a bit more to make it go now; probably my second most practical to resuscitate;
  • “Heartland and Frontier from the Perspective of the Banu Qasi, 825-929”, my second Rethinking the Medieval Frontier paper, presented 2016, basically complete, may actually now have a home to go to and of course I can’t do anything to send it there;
  • “Keeping it in the Family? Consanguineous Marriage and the Counts of Barcelona, Reviewed”, arisen out of work on Agent of Change above, more or less a critical review of the early medieval part of Martin Aurell, Les noces du comte : mariage et pouvoir en Catalogne (785-1213), Série histoire ancienne et médiévale 32 (Paris 1995); needs more reading to make it clearer why it needs doing for anyone other than me, and hasn’t been brought together as a piece rather than as bits of a chapter about something else, but I’d still like to;
  • “Miles or militia: war-service and castle-guard in tenth-century Catalonia”, first presented 2014; sent out as a probation requirement in 2017, and accepted but subject to revisions it’s never been possible to carry out the research for; this one is very much "not my fault";
  • “Our Men on the March: middle-men and the negotiation of central power in three early medieval contexts”, 2017 Rethinking the Medieval Frontier paper, bound for the second of those volumes if that ever happens, which is at least some distance off for now;
  • “Pictlands: rethinking the composition of the Pictish polity”: based in some sense on this blog-post, exists only as outline notes, and not something I’ve worked on properly for decades, but so much exciting new stuff has been happening in the field lately that I have been reading some of it, in my spare time (really), which makes it the only one of these obviously likely to emerge just now…;1
  • “The ‘Heathrow Hoard’: an emblematic case of antiquities trafficking”, as described here, something I would like to do more with but which derives ultimately from work by someone else whose cooperation I would ideally have and can’t get; exists as their work plus a catalogue by me that really needs checking against the collection, currently impossible.

My Fault (I Haven’t Even Tried)

  • All that Glitters: the Byzantine solidus 307-1092: much blogged here, but not much advanced since then; it would ideally be both an article and a book/catalogue, but it means either coordinating six people or doing it rogue and so far I haven’t mustered strength or permission to do either;
  • “Arabic-named communities in ninth- and tenth-century Asturias and León, at court and at home”, whose story was told here long ago and which hasn’t changed;
  • “Brokedown palaces or Torres dels Moros? Finding the fisc in late-Carolingian Catalonia”, a paper given in summer 2013 and not touched since then;
  • Churchmen and the Church in Frontier Catalonia 880-1010, a sort of holding title for a possible book based on the various papers I gave in 2013 about Montpeità and its priests, filled out with my other thoughts about monastery foundation and church structures in this area as a kind of partner to my first book; I haven’t done anything with this since May 2015;
  • “Identity of Authority in pre-Catalonia around the end of the Carolingian succession”: to be honest, this is a more of a project folder than an actual work, though I would like to do something under this title at some point, perhaps as a book conclusion;
  • “Legends in their own Lifetime? The late Carolingians and Catalonia”, presentation version of “The Continuation of Carolingian Expansion” as mentioned last post, presented 2008, sent out 2010 and has sat ever since that experience bar some updates in 2014; hard to blame anyone else for this;
  • “Neo-Goths, Mozarabs and Kings: chronicles versus charters in tenth-century León”, basically the same as “Arabic-named communities” above;
  • “The Carolingian Succession to the Visigothic Fisc on the Spanish March”, although presented in 2010 also more of a project than a paper and not one I’ve been pursuing.

And so at the end of that, what do we conclude? Well, to me it looks as if, though some things I’d like to do have just been stopped for a long time, I was still generating new work till 2017 or so, still able to generate conference papers on new topics until about 2018, and in numismatics until 2019 somehow, and then everything bogged down and hasn’t got better. I’ve managed to finish a few things already in process, and I can carry on doing that if pressed, but I’m not making more.

It also, of course, looks as ever as if I think I am working on far too many things at once and feel as if I am working on none. But it is frustrating, to have this many things one would like to say, and to find one’s mouth stopped by other duties too far to say them as anything other than Internet asides. I don’t see how even the current crisis can solve this problem of the university sector; but I do wonder how anyone else is still managing.

1. The most obvious things that have changed the picture here is the work of the Northern Picts Project, whose work is mostly collected in Gordon Noble & Nicholas Evans (edd.), The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce. Collected Essays Written as Part of the University of Aberdeen’s Northern Picts Project (Edinburgh 2019), but there’s also Alice E. Blackwell (ed.), Scotland in Early Medieval Europe (Leiden 2019) and quite a few monographs, none of which as far as I can tell from abstracts and descriptions say what I want to say, but I will have to, you know, check.

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Posted in Catalonia, Charters, Frontiers, Institutions, Now working on..., numismatics, Spain

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