A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe

Knowing better than them: diplomatic judgement at Santa Cecília d’Elins

Posted on 2 June 2026 | 4 comments

(Note: this post was all ready to go on Sunday night when I drifted onto Academia.edu for no very good reason and found an exactly relevant article that seriously affected some of what was here. If it looks a bit scrappy now, that is me trying not to do a full rewrite and delay things further… Hopefully it’s not evident though!)

I have, at times, been known to claim that I’m an expert in diplomatic. That’s not diplomacy, or diplomatic history, but an older, I’d even say original sense of the word, from which we also get "diploma" and so on, and it basically means the forensic study of charters. It’s canonical, maybe even right, to give the invention of the word to a seventeenth-century monastic scholar by the name of Jean Mabillon, whose monastery had been accused of basing its foundational claims on forgeries. Mabillon set to the defence of their documents, but in order to do so had to set out a method for the "discrimen veri ac falsi", loosely "telling the true from the false", which he did, in a six-part tome called De re diplomatica that provoked much immediate dispute, largely from the scholar who’d claimed their documents were crook.¹ But this arguably founded the discipline of charter studies. And when I say that, I mean that bits of Mabillon’s work were still being set as teaching material when I got my formal training in dealing with charters, such as that was, in 1999.² There’s a lot in those six books and not all of it is gold (or indeed known to me), but Mabillon’s core concern and methods remain important for charter scholars to this day.

Étienne Jahandier Desrochers, Dom Jean Mabillon, Prêtre religieux bénédictin de la Congrégation de St Maur (1707×1741), licensed under CC 0 International from the Musée Carnavalet, Paris

Now, in my own stuff, I actually don’t have to worry about forgery too often; I’m much more worried about whether the documents were true rather than just authentic, if you see the difference. That is not least because forgeries just aren’t very much of what survives from Catalonia: by way of example, in the volumes of the Catalunya Carolíngia that I cite so much which cover the counties of Osona and Manresa there are 1893 authentic documents registered and 10 forgeries, so less than 1%.³ Girona and Urgell are worse, I seem to recall, but it’s never a huge number. Still, it does come up: I’m on record saying that the foundation documents for my pet nunnery are fairly obviously tenth-century reconstructions, which everyone working on them knows but seems to like to ignore, and my next likely publication includes a tenth-century inventory which is actually a twelfth-century invention, pardon the pun.⁴ But going through the Barcelona volumes of the Catalunya Carolíngia as I was a while back brought me up against an unusual case, a document which was considered to be a forgery in the period but whose editor thinks is not. It is a donation of a church to the monastery of Santa Cecília d’Elins by Count-Marquis Borrell II of Barcelona, Girona, Osona and Urgell, and his wife Countess Ledgarda, which is why I was interested, it’s from 971, if it’s genuine, and I was in the same archive as it only a few months ago had I but done the work to realise.⁵ But I didn’t, so I don’t have a photo, which would obviously help here.

Now, it matters to me whether this document is genuine or not mainly because that is the difference between whether Borrell and Ledgarda actually thought it was important to give this church to Elins and whether they in fact owned this church and held it with the rights that they transfer, or whether Elins, as later owners of that church in an unclear or insufficient fashion, decided that Borrell’s and Ledgarda’s names were the right ones to attach to a grant of it, perhaps because they had indeed given it on different terms, or given something else. It should be noted at this point that the archive also contains three other grants from Borrell and they are, at least, really peculiar, so someone certainly knew who he and his wife were, but that could be borrowed from this document if it’s real… So it tells me something whatever it is, but I’d like to know what. However, I’m also just curious about the logic of the argument here, because in general, forgery detection is not something the Middle Ages was great at, and if it was obvious enough for them I feel it ought to be obvious to us. That said, if there was ever a time to find diplomatic experts in the Middle Ages, early eleventh-century Catalonia is one: the super-scribe Bonhom whom I mentioned three posts ago copied up the old laws about document forgery and how it might be detected, and his own documents are littered with warnings about things which might look dodgy, such as additions between the lines, changes of ink and so on, in order to assure future readers he really had done everything that was in the text.⁶ Mabillon didn’t know Bonhom’s documents as far as I know, but equally Bonhom was not alone; he’s just my local extreme example. Mabillon was not generating his methods from first principles, is my point; he had predecessors.

Remains of the monastery of Santa Cecília d'Elins

Santa Cecília d’Elins, the origin of our charter of today, as it stood in the early 1980s, much altered by later use as a farmhouse; photo by Joan-Adell Gisbert from Maria Lluïsa Cases i Loscos and Adell, "Santa Cecília d’Elins", in Jordi Vigué (ed.), Alt Urgell. Andorra, Catalunya Romànica 6 (Barcelona 1992), linked through

Mabillon distinguished two sorts of criteria for judging documents, intrinsic and extrinsic. In the former category went its own features, such as is it in the right script and language for its claimed date and place? Is it an original or a copy? Basically, does it look right? In the latter go the factors which are not visible in the document itself, but require outside validation: are the actors historically known, could they have been there at this time, and so on? When Elins 20, CC8 594 or whatever we want to call it, failed its test, in 1024, it was on extrinsic grounds: it is signed by Bishop Guisad II of Urgell, and it seems that the prosecution compared it to other documents with his signature and declared that it didn’t match. If the trial was being held at the cathedral of Urgell, as seems likely – the useful article didn’t make this clear and the document isn’t online– they would certainly have had some examples to use.⁷ But Ramon Ordeig, who edited it for the Catalunya Carolíngia, also had a good few examples and he thinks it’s fine, and that furthermore Guisad’s successor, the cunning Bishop Sal·la, also signs as the archdeacon he then was, and we have lots of examples of his signature and this one also matches.⁸ So Ordeig passes the document as an authentic original (which is good, because the digital version of the Catalunya Carolíngia, all I had access to at point of drafting, annoyingly doesn’t include the forgeries so I’d have struggled to write this if he’d condemned it).

Now, at this point we should mention the context of that hearing, because I think it’s relevant.^{8^bis} Y’see, it wasn’t just this document the Bishop of Urgell, none other than warrior conqueror and simoniac saint Bishop Ermengol (no relation to Count Ermengol I or indeed II, the latter of whom was presiding), was out to contest. His case was that the monastery held its tithes illegitimately, because the counts did not have the right to grant them. The monastery therefore brought out all its charters of Borrell and indeed one of Ermengol I, which all variously concerned the same group of properties, one being granted three times over, and Bishop Ermengol condemned them all as forgeries. Climent Miró, from whose article I got this detail, doesn’t explain on what grounds they were condemned, though in all cases I could think of some reasons, but it can’t have been Guisad II’s signature which was the problem for all of them, as he didn’t sign the others and was indeed long dead by the time of the last one. But Ordeig doesn’t mention the falsification process with the others, so I don’t know.^{8^ter} In any case, as well as claiming these grants were false, Bishop Ermengol also claimed prior right by virtue of the consecration act of his cathedral, from 839, which gave the tithes of these areas to the cathedral fair and square. Now, trouble is, that act is also a forgery, though the scholarship has never really settled on when it’s from and it’s all too common to see people using it in demographic arguments anyway.^{8^quater} So it’s possible that the bishop overswore the poor monks with a document he might only recently have had made up, or that his predecessor (also his uncle) had; or it’s also possible that they put their own dossier together in a hurry when he came on a visit and said tough things about possession of tithes, and that everyone came to the trial with fake documents. Anyway, the warrior bishop won, but Ordeig, and for that matter Miró, think the accusation was groundless.

Display commemorating Saint Ermengol in Urgell Cathedral cloister

Bishop Saint Ermengol’s reputation has of course only grown over time, as the word ‘saint’ there suggests. This is his memorial, in Urgell Cathedral’s museum. The gold plaques commemorate his various deeds and miracles. Image by Patalín, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This, for me, opens up a really interesting question that is as much ethical as it is methodological, which is: where do we get off claiming to know more about the Middle Ages than the people we study who lived in it? An answer is that while we can never be as immersed in their world and environment as they were, equally the hundreds of years of compiling and interpreting evidence since then means that we have been able to check, verify and just know things that they could not. In this instance, for example, if we assume that there was sincere diplomatic evaluation going on at that hearing, I’m sure that the people making the judgement call on Elins 20 had seen a fair few charters, and likely several of them also written some. But it would have been hard for that fair few to have been more than the high hundreds for any individual unless they had systematically visited other archives and then gone through them, whereas probably no person alive now or then has seen as many Catalan charters as Ramon Ordeig has, because of how much work he’s done on the Catalunya Carolíngia. Even I, who have probably only seen dozens of the real things, have probably read the texts of more such documents than any of the people who were at that hearing had (largely because of Ordeig publishing them). Also, and specifically, it is likely that Ordeig has seen and, importantly, could immediately compare, more copies of Guisad’s signature than the people of 1024 could, because he could get photographs together, whereas they would have been relying on what could be found in the archive, presumably more than there is now but not necessarily indexed in a way that made them easy to find for this purpose. To exemplify, I know of 40 documents which feature Guisad II. I can’t straight away tell you which ones of those are originals, though probably most of them, or of those which bear his signature, but I can tell you that only 15 of any of them are from Urgell cathedral’s archive, and some, like this very Elins one, probably only got there later than 1024. (I’m not going to give references here if that’s OK; apart from anything else, he can now be looked up in the CatCar database, which will get you a more accurate count anyway.) At the very least then, our comparative set is probably not much worse than was available then, and it may even be better, not least because of involving documents to which neither side of the dispute had access. And adding Sal·la’s signature as a validation check is a smart idea and one they apparently didn’t have in 1024; admittedly, as said, Bishop Ermengol was Sal·la’s nephew, so whether that would be a neutral sample might have been questioned, but it still helps the case for authenticity. Added to all of which, while people of eleventh-century Barcelona and Urgell certainly had some good ideas about how to check for forgery in charters, it would be nice to think that Mabillon’s systematized treatise and then the subsequent three centuries of accumulating scholarship gave us a slightly better toolkit with which to do these appraisals then they could have had, and that we’re not just perpetually engaged in catch-up with what used to be known.

So one might ask, what’s your problem, Jarrett? Why not accept the judgement of the man most expert? Well, at first it was just my basic disinclination to accept that we know better than a hearing full of contemporaries who knew the scene and the archives of the time better than we can. But to be fair, that there was a dispute at all already meant that someone didn’t like what this charter said and had a reason to attack it. Even if we didn’t know the fuller context, we would already have reason to doubt that the people calling, "forgery!" were disinterested seekers of truth. So again, aren’t we in a better position? But there is another extrinsic problem that Ordeig hasn’t considered, which is the date. That date is 6th January 971, to us, and "mense ianuarii, VIII idus eiusdem mensis, anno XVII regnante Leutario rege, filio Ludoici" to them, id est, "the month of January, 8th Ides of the same month, in the 17th year of the reign of King Lothar, son of Louis". Now, this is intrinsically fine, but nonetheless extrinsically it must be wrong, because in January 971 Borrell was in Rome trying to get one of his other bishops promoted to a metropolitan by the pope; I’ve written about it.⁹ So he could not have been in Urgell granting churches to people. Admittedly, the dates of that voyage have been disputed, largely because it bears on the appointment as Bishop of Girona of Miró III Bonfill, also Count of Besalú, but such an engaging figure in the record that those who have worked on him have generally preferred to see him as honest and canonical in his doings. But because of my actual research, always a surprise to me these days, I can tell you what perhaps no-one else can, that Borrell doesn’t appear in Catalonia between June 970 and October 971, except in this document; and in fact, both his June 970 and the preceding May 970 appearances are also dodgy copies from monasteries in the county of Urgell, though I’m not sure that can be more than coincidence.¹⁰ So at least something is wrong with Elins 20. And once something is wrong, any interpretation either works on the basis that it’s forged, or we’re choosing the "mistake" whose fix works out best for our preferred ideas.

The church of Sant Martí de Cortiuda, looking down the valley

And this is the place the fuss was about, Sant Martí de Cortiuda down south in the Solsonès, image by Isidre Blanc, own work, licensed under CC BY SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Now really, that is about as far as I can take this here. If I ever make it back to la Seu d’Urgell, I will try to get a look at this charter, but to be honest, if it looked authentic to Ramon Ordeig, I assume it will look authentic to me. Probably the easiest solution here is that the date is a mistake; it’s easy to put one too many or one too few strokes in a Roman numeral and if the scribe should have written XVI or XVIII instead of XVII then things would probably seem fine. But what still nags at me is: it looks authentic to us, but it didn’t look authentic to a bunch of actual medieval Urgellitans with lots of diplomatic experience, learned from doing. Perhaps that was indeed a stitch-up; Urgell was in the hands of powerful aristocratic interests in the 1020s and comital jurisdiction was weak. But I just don’t like the idea that we know better than them, and when in one tiny aspect I also know better than the relevant representative of "we", I find myself wanting to side with my subjects. Evidently, I identify more closely with the central and aristocractic interests at Urgell, whose documents were the first substantial sourcebase I got into with my doctoral research, than with the poor old monks at Elins, though! So I’m not finished musing here by any means, but that, of course, makes it something I can put before you all and see what you think!

1. The big work itself can be read as Jean Mabillon, De re diplomatica libri VI, in quibus quidquid ad veterum instrumentorum antiquitatem, materiam, scripturam, & stilum, quidquid ad sigilla, monogrammata, subscriptiones, ac notas chronologicas, quidquid inde ad antiquariam, historicam, forensemque disciplinam pertinet, explicatur & illustratur : accedunt commentarius de antiquis regum Francorum palatiis : veterum scripturarum varia specimina, tabulis LX comprehensa : nova ducentorum, & amplius, monumentorum collectio (Luteciae-Parisiorum 1709), thanks to the Getty Institute whose copy is in the Internet Archive here, and for studies deeper than mine here you could see what I was set when I was young, viz. David Knowles, "Jean Mabillon" in Knowles, The Historian and Character and Other Essays, edd. C. N. L. Brooke & Giles Constable (Cambridge 1964), pp. 213–238, or Peter Gay & Victor G. Wexler, "Jean Mabillon", in Gay & Wexler (edd.), Historians at Work (New York City NY 1972), 4 vols, vol. 2, pp. 161–163, but as proof anyone still cares in the twenty-first century, also Caroline Williams, "Diplomatic Attitudes: From Mabillon to Metadata" in Journal of the Society of Archivists Vol. 26 (April 2005), pp. 1–24, DOI: 10.1080/00039810500047417.

2. I got it as Jean Mabillon, "On Diplomatics", in Gay & Wexler, Historians at Work, vol. 2, pp. 164–198. Leonard E. Boyle, "Diplomatics", in James M. Powell (ed.), Medieval Studies: an introduction, 2nd edn (Syracuse NY 1992), pp. 69–101, also, is basically a systematization of Mabillon.

3. 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.

4. I’ve argued the case against Sant Joan’s endowment most recently in Jonathan Jarrett, "La fundació de Sant Joan en el context de l’establiment dels comtats catalans", trans. Xavier Costa in Irene Brugués, Costa and Coloma Boada (edd.), El monestir de Sant Joan: Primer cenobi femení dels comtats catalans (887-1017) (Barcelona 2019), pp. 83–107, but that wasn’t my first go. The dodgy inventory is Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. no. X.

5. Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum 8: Els comtats d’Urgell, Cerdanya i Berga, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica 111 (Barcelona 2020), 2 vols, doc. no. 594. The document was previously edited as Benigne Marquès Sala (ed.), "Els documents del monestir de Santa Cecília d’Elins (881-1198)", Urgellia Vol. 15 (Urgell 2005), pp. 9–174, doc. no. 20, which I haven’t been able to access.

6. For Bonhom, once again, see Anscari M. Mundó, "El jutge Bonsom" in Jesús Alturo i Perucho, Joan Bellès, Josep M. Font Rius, Yolanda García & Mundó (edd.), Liber iudicum popularis, ordenat pel jutge Bonsom de Barcelona, Textos Jurídicis Catalans: Lleis i costums 1/1 (Barcelona 2003), online here, pp. 101‒118.

7. The trial record is Marqués, "Els documents", doc. no. 33, which again I haven’t been able to get at, and because of its date, misses publication in the Catalunya Carolíngia.

8. Sal·la’s appearances are very numerous (I counted 71 when I did), but of those more than half are in the Urgell archive and so printed in Cebrià Baraut (ed.), "Els documents, dels anys 981-1010, de l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell" in Urgellia Vol. 3 (Urgell 1980), pp. 7–166, and the pre-1000 ones in the Catalunya Carolíngia. However, there isn’t really a focused study of the man I’d recommend more than Jonathan Jarrett, "Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia" (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2005), online here, pp. 294-308.

8^bis. Although as said in n. 7 above I can’t actually get at the text, that article I mentioned gave me this extra context, and it is Climent Miró i Tuset, "Els monestirs com a part de l’estratègia dels comtes d’Urgell en el control del territori: el cas de Santa Cecília d’Elins (881-1085)" in Annals del Centre d’Estudis Comarcals del Ripollès Vol. 25, IBIX: Col·loquis d’Estudis Transpirinencs 8 (Ripoll 2014), pp. 349–360, online here, where see pp. 356-357.

8^ter. The others are Marqués, "Els documents", doc. nos 13, 16, 17, 18, 25 & 29, of which the first four are printed as Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia 8, doc. nos 445, 467, 468 & 508, and are thus online. For extra points, tell me what’s wrong with no. 468 (Elins 17) that means it, at least, must be a forgery… Otherwise that’ll be a future blog post!

8^quater. I don’t want to try and cover all the references in this debate here at this late stage, but a recent treatment which puts Bishop Ermengol squarely in the hotseat is Carles Gascón Chopo and Oliver Vergés i Pons, "L’acta de consagració de la catedral d’Urgell: Un fals del temps del bisbe Ermengol redactat entre 1016 i 1024" in Afers Vol. 32 no. 86 (2017), pp. 191–220, on Academia.edu here. I don’t agree with everything Vergés has written but I think he’s on the mark with this one.

9. Jonathan Jarrett, "Archbishop Ató of Osona: False Metropolitans on the Marca Hispanica" in Archiv für Diplomatik Vol. 56 (München 2010), pp. 1–42.

10. The outside frames of the window are Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia 8, doc. no. 586 of June 970, surviving only in a seventeenth-century copy and almost certainly interpolated, or failing it ibid. 585 of May 970, also anachronistic and suspicious, failing which you have to go back to Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. no. 1057 of February that year, and then at the other side ibid. doc. no. 1107, while in the middle we have two papal bulls he asked for which, annoyingly, don’t carry dates, but for which we have external dating that makes January 971 most likely. In late June 971, also, an embassy arrived at Córdoba which Borrell was understood to have sent, and I don’t see how that impression could arise if he hadn’t sent it, which probably makes his return from Rome no later than March the same year. For that see Dolors Bramon, De quan érem o no musulmans: textos del 713 al 1010: continuació de l’obra de J. M. Millàs i Vallicrosa, Jaume Caresmar 13 (Vic 2000), §§425 & 426. On Miro’s appointment at Girona, apart from Jarrett, "Archbishop Ató", compare Ramon Martí, ‘Delà, Cesari i Ató, primers arquebisbes dels comtes-prínceps de Barcelona (951-953/981)" in Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia Vol. 67 (Barcelona 1994), pp. 369–386, online here, and Josep Maria Salrach i Marès, L’assassinat de l’arquebisbe Ató (971) i les lluites pel poder en els orígens de Catalunya. Discurs de recepció de Josep Maria Salrach i Marès com a membre numerari de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica, llegit el dia 30 de maig de 2018 (Barcelona 2018), sadly but predictably no longer online.

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Posted in Catalonia, Charters, Currently reading..., Now working on...

Tagged Borrell II, forgery, Mabillon, Ramon Ordeig i Mata, Santa Cecília d'Elins, Urgell

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One-Man Churches in the Western Isles

Posted on 27 May 2026

Stub of a possible cross-shaft in the churchyard of Kilmeny, Islay

This gallery contains 16 photos.

In recent years a lot of my posts have been collections of photos from very long ago of things medieval, and while that is in some ways fine – I’m here to tell you about them – it has struck … Continue reading →

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Frontier warlords in Ankara

Posted on 17 May 2026 | 2 comments

[This is a post that got shunted down the queue for reasons of respect and priority; I originally wrote it about four months ago. It still might want reporting, though, so here you are.] Every now and then I remember that the ostensible purpose of this blog is to publicise my endeavours, rather than report on academic things that happened years ago or sadly commemorate dead scholars. Of course, for much of the last decade, and especially the last few years, there hasn’t been as much to report as once there was, but I’m kind of getting through that now. You will recall, probably, that I have left the UK and headed for India via a stay in Türkiye which, for visa reasons, I had to punctuate with a short stay in my actual research area, and more specifically in Seu d’Urgell, a bit of Catalonia I’d never before visited. I will, I promise, report on that; I am reckoning to be pretty brutal about chewing up backlog from here on. But right now, something on more than just tourism (even though it was really useful academic tourism).

Jonathan Jarrett nervously presenting his research before a Turkish lectern

Your humble author indicating his nerves in his body language before a lectern in Bilkent Universitesi, Ankara; image by Luca Zavagno and used with permission

No, instead, I gave a paper. Hey, that had been a while! And the previous one, for no fault of the organisers, not really a great experience. Anyway, the gap had been long enough actually to give me nerves before presenting, though that was also because I was less than confident in my material. Even on the train down to the place in question I had a 12,000 word text with no clear argument rather than the lucid 7,500 which was really desirable, a situation from which my beloved wife had calmly to help me down.¹ It did go all right in the end. But let me tell you how this had occurred.

Alarmingly, this is a story which goes back to 2016, when at a set of sessions at the International Medieval Congress under the auspices of my Rethinking the Medieval Frontier project (whose website, I see, has finally gone as I assumed it would; I will have to resurrect it here…), I presented a paper which as I saw it filled a gap. I admit it was mainly a teaching gap, right then and there. I had that spring been trying to use the infamous Banū Qasī, Andalusī frontier warlords par excellence, as a teaching example of the kind of space for independence granted by the breadth of the Christian-Muslim frontier zones in the early medieval Iberian Peninsula. (There is probably a separate post to write about my twisting efforts to avoid using the words "Spain" or "Spanish" here, but for now just take my word for it I have reasons for not doing so.) Now the thing about the Banū Qasī is that pretty much every book on al-Andalus, and a fair few on the Christian polities north of it, contain something on the Banū Qasī, and it’s usually max two paragraphs. Roger Collins finds a page and a half and in 2014 Jesus Brufal published an article (which I hadn’t then found) which uses them as one of its case studies and gets up to six.¹ There is a lot more in Spanish, though still not huge amounts, but of course I couldn’t set Spanish to my students.² So my double goal then was to have a Leeds paper that responded to our frontier theme, which also put something about the Banū Qasī into a hopefully-printable form for my students. Of course, both needed an argument, but I didn’t have too much trouble with that. The paper, however, rested very heavily on a book by Jesús Lorenzo Jiménez that had come out in 2010 – and he turned up for the paper as well, so probably wasn’t very impressed by my novelty – so next year I gave my students the draft version and wondered what, in the end, I would do with it.³

This is Arnedo, the oldest certain base of our subject family. Jesús Lorenzo’s book made me look this place up and suddenly understand a bit more of why they always had somewhere to bounce back from! Image by Exequias – Flickr licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

Now, fast forward to 2022, when the International Medieval Congress returned to the theme of Borders which it had been meant to have in the pandemic year and couldn’t. I was reluctantly persuaded that it would probably look a bit feeble if the Leeds-based project on medieval frontiers and borders couldn’t make some kind of a showing at this huge conference on medieval borders and frontiers in Leeds, so I put together two sessions and a round table with the aid, much needed, of Catarina Madureira Villamariz of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, who has become a friend of the project in recent years. Of course, I never got as far as reporting all this here because, well, the usual reasons, but they did happen, and at the end of it, while I was unknown to myself busy incubating the dose of Covid-19 I’d picked up during the sessions, we sat at benches outside the Old Bar and decided together that, even though my other publication plans for the project were dead in the water, we could manage at least to put together a themed journal issue, and that would be something to show at last for all of these years of effort.⁴

So, once I was over the Covid-19, I started on this. I sort of resolved to myself that if I could get it done with no more than an e-mail a day, and hopefully fewer, I could find the time somehow, and so it has proven though we’re not finished yet and my goodness there have been a lot of those e-mails. The story of this publication will be told in its due course, like, when it’s out, but for now let’s just observe that it left me with the problem of what I myself wanted to offer. And I decided that, given the global theme we were intentionally adopting, and the very sketchy nature of some of the papers I’ve given for the project, the best option was probably to finish the Banū Qasī paper at last. And as it turned out, a fuller literature search led me to a conference paper by Lorenzo and Juan José Larrea, arguing that in fact the Banū Qasī were not on the frontier, and I thought: this is just what I need, because that is only a matter of how you define a frontier and how it changes, which is kind of exactly one of the things I think this project is about.⁵ So in what time I could find, I wrote a new version explaining what I thought was missing from that perspective and sent it in. That was, in fact, pretty much what I was doing instead of being at the 2023 IMC; it went off in late July 2023.

A solarised image of the landscape around Tudela through a train window

Later, in 2025, in another adventure as yet untold (and for which I haven’t yet properly processed the photos, because that is also a backlog…), I got to see the landscape around the family’s second base, Tudela, and again understand why it was they kept losing it. Especially around the town itself—where I seem to have no good pictures—it is pretty approachable. But still dramatic! Photography by me through a train window

Peer review, when it came, was, shall we say, decently robust, and I think I know who at least two of the (three) reviewers were. One of them felt that really this wasn’t doing much about the Banū Qasī themselves that Lorenzo hadn’t already done, and I was encouraged to consider what I was actually adding to the scholarship. Another insisted I stop being lazy and actually do some proper reading (not how they put it, but how I felt it) on the kingdom or princedom of Pamplona and its relations with Islam, and doing so made me realise that the foundation on which I’d based my argument was in part faulty.⁶ This was one of a number of things which made me aware that with this step across the frontier I really wasn’t in my core zones of knowledge any more. But because I was by then properly in the hole, and also chasing other submissions for the issue which made mine redundant unless they came in, I didn’t find time to address this until I entered my lately productive period of unemployment. But at that point, I had so many things I’d promised, and each took longer than expected.⁷ And that would have been fine except that I had allowed a good friend of mine to set me a deadline…

A poster for a paper by Jonathan Jarrett outside a seminar room in Bilkent Universitesi

Look! There was advertising and everything!

That friend was Dr Luca Zavagno, who has been on board with the Rethinking the Medieval Frontier project since the beginning, and who was also rewriting something for this same journal issue. So I felt there was only one thing I could reasonably present when he asked me, especially in the time I had; it had to be something which I was already working on and which spoke to his interests somewhat, and that meant it was this. But things went closer to the wire here than I would have wanted, because I was essentially trying to do three things at once:

write something that gave a usefully focused account in English of the Banū Qasī, actually the least important of my goals given that other paper but not one I let go of easily, and which loaded the paper down with narrative;
write something which actually did what I claimed the project could do and demonstrated the potential of medieval situations to add something to our understandings of frontiers which existing theories wouldn’t cover, which gave it a substantial sort of Anhang of theoretical analysis in which the reviewers were not at all interested;
and lastly, write something which actually answered the reviewers’ various objections, actually a different goal.

And this is how we wound up basically rewriting my Frankenpaper together on a high-speed train a day and a half before I was due to give a version of it in front of one of my main collaborators in the project.

Well, I’m not sure how much credit I can take given all of that but it went OK, in the end. I found a thread, kept the theory in but at a minimum and made the narrative serve the new argument about Pamplona, and on the day managed to deliver with reasonable flair and more or less in the allotted time, like the professional I sometimes forget I am (except for where right then no-one was paying me). I was giving this in a Turkish university, of course, so I had no real idea what kind of reception it would get. But the first one was a quite focused one about whether what Bernard of Septimania (a rebellious Marquis of Barcelona, for those to whom he is not a familiar figure) was doing at the same time needed to be part of the picture, and it was a bit like being handed a gold-embossed licence that just read, "Do your thing, man." And the rest of the discussion did not fall short, either. I owe considerable thanks not just to Luca and to his colleagues David Thornton and Paul Latimer for being there and contributing, but also for training up so lively and well-informed a bunch of students.

A small gathering listening to Jonathan Jarrett give a paper in Bilkent Universitesi

This doesn’t really convey the flavour of the room, which went on a few rows further back, but I think it does show everyone living I’ve mentioned in this post except the man behind the camera, Luca Zavagno, whose image is here used with permission

So that happened, it is done, it was good and the article is resubmitted, with hand-drawn graphics, yet, already, because I’m a bit between technical accesses right now. But would it ever have happened without the invitation down to Bilkent to give it before an interested and hospitable audience? We may never know, so thankyou Luca for catalysing the event and Bilkent for the reception! Çok teşekkurler & molte grazie!

1. In the words of Mr B. the Gentleman Rhymer, "Not how it usually happens on such occasions, I can assure you…": Mr B. the Gentleman Rhymer, "Sherry Monocle" from Flattery Not Included (Grot Music 2008).

2. To be fair, I did have a reasonable proportion of Spanish-reading students on that module over the years, and I would find Spanish stuff for them if I could, to try and add some dimensions to the discussion; but we had to make it possible to do the module with only English. I don’t mind that, either; I would want someone who didn’t have the languages still to be able to learn about the subject. It became more difficult, however, if those students liked the topic so much that they wanted to pursue it at postgraduate level, though there were some honourable exceptions even there!

3. Jesús Lorenzo Jiménez, La dawla de los Banū Qasī: origen, auge y caída de una dinastía muladí en la frontera superior de al-Andalus, Estudios Árabes e Islámicos: Monografías 17 (Madrid 2010), which is brilliant, but (I was relieved to begin realising) is not the end of all discussion.

4. It would probably not be helpful to explain what had dismasted the original publication plans here, so let’s just say that a journal issue seemed more likely to find support from those who had support to offer.

5. Juan José Larrea and Jesús Lorenzo, "Barbarians of Dâr Al-Islâm: The Upper March of al-Andalus and the Pyrenees in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries", in Guido Vannini & Michele Nucciotti (edd.), La Transgiordania nei secoli XII-XIII e le ‘frontiere’ del Mediterraneo medievale. Trans-Jordan in the 12th and 13th Centuries and the ‘Frontiers’ of the Medieval Mediterranean, British Archaeological Reports (International Series) 2386 (Oxford 2012), pp. 277–288, seen a while ago on Academia.edu here.

6. Most of that reading took the form of Ángel J. Martín Duque, "El reino de Pamplona" in Jos´ María Jover Zamora (ed.), La España cristiana de los siglos VIII al XI, Historia de España Menéndez Pidal 7 (Madrid 1999), 2 vols, vol. II, Los núcleos pirenaicos (718-1035): Navarra, Aragón, Cataluña, ed. Manuel Riu y Riu, pp. 39–266, and that was certainly enough to keep me busy. And yes, that is a tiny change to my citation format; who are you that noticed? I admire you deeply, but I’m worried about you…

7. Mind you, it is an indication of how things are elsewhere in the Academy what has happened to the two things I finished before I finished this. One I sent in to a journal whose editor had just left academia at the same time as I departed the UK, and it has just never been acknowledged by the supposed new editors. I know how things are where they are and it’s only an out-of-date review, so it seems a bit mean to chase it. And the second, a book chapter that the editors had been actively chasing me for, finally went in only for one editors to admit that among the chapters they were still waiting for was their own… and as far as I know that’s where that rests! But I bear no grudges here, I should say: in the words of a very different musician to the one in the first note, "I’ve been where you’re hanging; I think I can see how you’re pinned"… (Leonard Cohen, "Sisters of Mercy", from Songs of Leonard Cohen (Columbia Records 1967)).

2 Comments

Posted in Frontiers, Islamic Crescent, Next paper is due..., Now working on...

Tagged al-Andalus, Banū Qāsī, Bilkent Universitesi, Luca Zavagno, peer review, Rethinking the Medieval Frontier, seminars

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good (c. 985)

Posted on 13 May 2026 | Leave a comment

Let’s go back to my actual research area for a post, shall we? You remember, perhaps—gosh, it seems a while ago—that in one of my two brief interludes of research leave in my previous job I got hold of the Barcelona volumes, nearly the last, of the monumental Catalunya Carolíngia project to publish all the pre-1000 charters preserved in Catalonia, and found numerous real gems in there?¹ Or in some cases, the opposite, in the form of horrible people? Well, this is another of the latter. Let me introduce you to Bonhom son of Guisad.

We have three bits of data on Bonhom, all of which show him moving in eminent circles in the years just before 1000 in Barcelona. As is usually the case when playing with this evidence, we only actually see him at the crystallised moments which were presumably the completion of a lot of networking within those circles, when rights to land changed hands, but as is also usually the case, those are revealing when you read them right.² I should also say, c. 1000 Barcelona was a busy social place. You see big groups touching via various "nodes", not just but often the counts and the bishops, and it would be great fun to try and work out who those nodes were and what their particular thing was.³ There is a book to be written there, and if I didn’t have so many other books I wanted to write I’d say I was the boy to write it, but hey, who knows, never say never.^3bis But it would run into the same kind of problem as this blog post, which is all the million little things which could sidetrack one and which, for space reasons, can’t. There is some of that going on here, so it seems easiest to present the data on Bonhom and let it itself do the big reveal as it did for me.

Recto of Arxiu Capitular de Barcelona, pergamin 1-2-1296, linked through from the CatCar site where it is CC7 1240

So first up, 6th April 994, we come in late on a deal which had already partly happened. Bishop Vives of Barcelona and the canons of the cathedral had already passed over to Bonhom two bits of land belonging to Sant Miquel de Barcelona, which if I remember rightly was not a church as such but an altar within the cathedral, which is how they could do that.⁴ Still uncanonical, but let’s move on as they clearly did. We hear about all this because now Bonhom was paying for it, with two bits of land in Magòria, which he got from, "the voice of my parents [i. e. he inherited their claim on it] or through my purchase or through any other voices", let’s not worry about specifics right now eh. I have elsewhere suggested that such formulae were meant to make sure all bases were covered even if they might not be important—I imagine some aunt saying, "Well she can’t have the left-hand side of the yard, that was pledged to us that year the well didn’t work, and I know you paid us back but we’ve always seen it as belonging to us all," or similar, let’s make sure no-one can pull that stuff—but here it’s possible there was more deliberate obfuscation going on, as we shall see.⁵ But, so far, above board at least for Bonhom. Let’s go on.

We next pick the man up on 3rd March 1000, when he was buying more land in Magòria. Again, from Bonhom’s side this looks above board: he was someone who could apparently find nine ounces and two mancuses (Arabic dinars) of tested gold, but basically he was buying land and that was all fine and legal.⁶ The seller had a bit more to explain: he was none other than Ramon Borrell, Count-Marquis of Barcelona, and the land in question was principally stuff he held because the Jews who had previously held it had been deemed not to have had any heirs to inherit after they died in the Muslim sack of Barcelona in 985. (Later on, the Jews would be blamed for this sack, so it’s always salutary to come across a bit of the plentiful evidence that not only did they suffer as badly or worse as anyone else in the city that day, but their community had much less recourse afterwards as well.⁷) That explains some of the land, specifically a small but precisely measured and presumably quite fiddly bit of village housing where one Jew, Mosse—represented in the witness list by a Christian, who was "conscious of" him—still remained as a neighbour, but which was otherwise colonised by Barcelona priests, because the bishop also got some of those uninherited lands, and eight modiatas of vines, which is actually a decent bit of land, probably about four hectares? And that had been Jewish-owned before 985, which is interesting in itself.⁸

In fact, one tiny sidetrack. I wish I did have an image of this document to show you, because Mosse’s involvement provoked a very unusual diplomatic resort. The reverse of the document has four Hebrew endorsements on it, which turn out to be Mosse, firstly saying that he has indeed sold some of the land in question to Bonhom—which the Latin, please note, does not say—and then in the remaining three noting that he had walked out the bounds between this and his own property with Bonhom so that they were mutually agreed. Mosse was obviously at a disadvantage here, but he was recognised to have rights. I wonder if he knew any of the people who had been on the land before 985, or if he himself was an heir that someone there did have who was able to inherit? We will never, unfortunately, know. But it is pretty cool to be able to see it.

Snapshot of two pages from an edition of a Catalan charter, showing transliterated Hebrew characters

Since I can’t show you a picture of the actual document, here’s at least my basis for what I’m saying, the relevant pages of the edition of the comital archive, Gaspar Feliu & Josep Marí Salrach (edd.), Els pergamins de l’arxiu comtal de Barcelona de Ramon Borrell a Ramon Berenguer I: estudi i edició, Diplomataris 18-20 (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, vol. I, pp. 319-321 (no. 46), showing pp. 320-321 and p. 321 is obviously where you want to be looking

However, the land was under development: some of the rights transferred are over the "precarialists who co-planted and and built those vineyards", which might mean that rights the Jewish owners had held to receive back some of the properties now developed by others on their behalf (which is what co-planting or complantatio means, usually half given back and half kept as payment for the work) now fell to Bonhom.⁹ It would be interesting to know if the developers were themselves Jews or if this was actually Jewish landlordship over Christians; or, I suppose, it’s possible that in a rare fit of attention Ramon Borrell or his more careful father had actually put in clients after taking the lands over. A confusing bit of Latin follows which seems to read more or less as, "and of course I know about the charters that my father Count Borrell and Bishop Vives made for these lands and have them", which given Ramon Borrell’s repeatedly terrible control over his own archive, I suspect is protesting too much, but that might be the answer to the previous question.¹⁰ So. A bit unsavoury on the part of the counts and bishop but hard to point at Bonhom himself doing anything wrong here, and Countess Ermessenda signed off on the rights she had over a given tenth of Ramon Borrell’s property and the super-scribe Bonsom wrote the whole thing up, with, it must be said, seven separate additions, so it was obviously either a bad day for him or it was a confusing gathering (and to be fair to Bonhom, he often tells us when he was having bad days, so I favour the latter).¹¹ Even then it wasn’t enough, as someone else added that Bishop Vives was also present in the margin, which I think Bonhom would have felt was unfair as he didn’t witness so why did it matter? And the answer to that may well have been: complicity…

Because, wait for it, only two months later, 8th May 1000, Bonhom (son of Guisad) was back at court. And when I say at court, I mean in court, and he was in court before Ermessenda and two of the judges present two months before, and the countess was angry.¹² Bonhom (super-scribe) wrote this one as well, and really takes his Latin up beyond where he could get it to express this, so it’s quite hard to follow, but if I have it right, the story was this…

Recto of a Catalan charter of a dispute record, much wider than it is deep

Here again is the relevant charter, Arxiu Capitular de Barcelona, pergamin 1-2-138, obviously not to scale with the previous one but also linked through from the CatCar site where it is CC7 1520

We already know that the sack of Barcelona in 985 was bad for numerous Jews. It turns out it was also bad for Bonhom’s sister, Madrona, who was captured in it and carried off to Córdoba. Not only that, when her man (I don’t want to say "husband", because the text doesn’t and could have; a man, by whom she had a child) Ennegó died, their daughter was sent off to Córdoba to join her!¹³ And it is only clear that Madrona returned, so it’s possible the daughter was actually used to ransom her mother, presumably so that Mum could come home and make better arrangements. One thing is sure: Bonhom had not done much to bring this all about, and we know this because the judges hearing this case for Ermessenda, Bonhom super-scribe, Guifré the Osonan and Oruç, sometimes but not here called a Greek, had apparently compared notes and cottoned on to the fact that quite a lot of Bonhom’s property had previously been his sister’s.¹⁴ They must have realised this quite recently, given that two of them had been signing off on him buying ex-Jewish property just two months before. I guess that tells us roughly when she came back, in which case she had by then been a prisoner in the Muslim capital for fifteen years. And since she had been taken captive, "by sales and by exchanges and various tricky documents he [Bonhom] transmuted and transformed all those things into his own domain, desiring to make the aforesaid Matrona a foreigner to them".¹⁵ But when she got back, the judges worked this out and reported it to Ermessenda. It’s interesting, that choice: did they choose her because they knew what the result would be, or just because Ramon Borrell was up-country giving someone a castle he’d forgotten about? I can’t see him in any other documents around this date, so it’s possible he was off hunting or something.

Either way, this worked out badly for Bonhom. If he was resident on any of these properties he must have been quite surprised to find men, "suitable men" no less, by which I assume we mean large and unswayable, there to sequester it on the viscount’s orders for the countess.¹⁶ But this did not for some reason work out: although they found:

"very many things partly transmuted or usurped by the trickery of cunning and the custom of contrariety, from then till now the previously listed inheritances had remained alienated from the right of the aforesaid Madrona, so that she was able neither to hit upon any any repetition from them thereafter nor to assume them [again herself]."¹⁷

This is hard to parse: I take it to mean that she had been attempting, from Córdoba, to raise ransom money from what she expected to be her property, and found that it did not answer either then or when she came back to take it over in person. I guess Bonhom also had some suitable men, which is why the viscount had to send in his own heavies.

Anyway, Ermessenda wasn’t having this and hauled him into court before her, and her alone, no count, no bishop, no backers. No law is invoked, Bonhom was not made to confess his guilt or quit his claim. It seems to have been too complicated to reverse his transactions or to disentangle what had been Madrona’s from what had been his, I guess because as siblings they had maybe been joint inheritors from Guisad? But as a first step, protimus, Bonhom was made to hand over five modiatas of vineyard in Goma and some tiny bits of land in Magòria—not any of those mentioned in our other documents above as the bounds are different—to his sister so that she had something from which to live. It is diplomatically framed as a donation, but around it the wording is punitive, so that the men involved acknowledge Bonhom’s actions were wrong (and it’s viri, not homines; we really do mean the men, and apparently the judges, here), and pro compescenda ad futura iurgia ac calumpnia, "for the discouragement of future quarrels or slanders".¹⁸ When Ermessenda, or Bonhom (the scribe) gets to the sanction clause, it is about three times as long as usual about how this transaction is effectively one of the countess’s and may not be infringed in any way whatever by anyone ever. It’s hard not to see some gendered solidarity and the fury of a countess scorned here.¹⁹

Now, it is possible that there was more after this, since this was only supposed to be protimus, but if so we don’t have it. In fact, I don’t even know why we have these documents. The first and third come from the cathedral archive of Barcelona, and the middle one from the comital archive, but on a cursory check, neither Bonhom (son of Guisad) nor Madrona ever turn up in those archives again.²⁰ If this land went to either cathedral or counts in the end, it did so through later owners I can’t identify. But failing that link, this seems to be where things were left, even though Bonhom (scribe) stressed that it was pro magna hereditate parva quamvis portione, "a somewhat paltry portion of a great inheritance".²¹ All who were in power agreed that Bonhom had done wrong: the document drips with words like unjustly, fraudulently, and so on; but apparently it was beyond them to reverse it properly, which may have been why Ermessenda was so furious (or why Bonhom wrote her in such a way). So in that sense Bonhom did pretty well out of this; he clearly ended up with more land than he had begun with, and some of it was apparently his sister’s. I don’t know if Madrona’s and Ennegó’s daughter ever got home; perhaps her missing name is the one I would need to explain how these charters came to the archives, but perhaps not.

However, I think that archival silence is telling us that Bonhom (son of Guisad) did lose something important. In his previous appearances he shows up dealing with the bishop and the count, and at one remove the countess, and this being endorsed by the principality’s most experienced judges. And then they all found out he was a crook! And a better one than they could successfully punish, as well! And I think they dropped him like a stone, so that he was no longer able to cut the kind of deals which got him into our record in the first place. I think he went from being a slightly dodgy but important man to being a no-mark, because these were basically reasonable people who all agreed that failing to ransom your captive sister because you were too busy grabbing her property and hoping to make it permanent was not OK and now they didn’t want to know him. At least, I hope so. This is one argument from silence that I’m happy, emotionally that is, to make.

1. Ignasi J. Baiges i Jardí and Pere Puig i Ustrell (edd.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum VII: el comtat de Barcelona, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica 110 (Barcelona 2019), 3 vols.

2. We do, of course, through this evidence only see situations as someone was out to change them, which is a problem for getting a stable view. On that see Gaspar Feliu, "La pagesia catalana abans de la feudalització" in Anuario de Estudios Medievales Vol. 26 (Barcelona 1996), pp. 19–41, DOI: 10.3989/aem.1996.v26.i1.686, but on what we can do with that anyway, apart from, you know, this post, see also Cullen J. Chandler, "Land and Social Networks in the Carolingian Spanish March" in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History Vol. 6 (Tempe, AZ, 2009), pp. 1–33.

3. A start was made on this sort of work in Pierre Bonnassie, "Une famille de la campagne barcelonaise et ses activités économiques aux alentours de l’an Mil" in Annales du Midi Vol. 76 (Toulouse 1964), pp. 261–303, DOI: 10.3406/anami.1964.4503, partly transl. Sylvia L. Thrupp as Pierre Bonnassie, "A Family of the Barcelona Countryside and its Economic Activities around the Year 1000" in Thrupp (ed.), Early Medieval Society (New York City, NY, 1967), pp. 103–123. That gets where it does by conflating at least three people called Vives, however, and I’m not sure anyone else has tried it to that depth.

4. Baiges and Jardí, Catalunya Carolíngia VII, doc. no. [hereafter CC7] 1240. On Barcelona church arrangements, see Gaspar Feliu, "La canònica de Barcelona fins a la consagració de la catedral romànica" in Gerardo Boto Varela and Marc Sureda Jubany (edd.), La catedral romànica de Barcelona: Protagonistes, context urbà i edificacions monumentals (Girona 2021), pp. 49–71; on Bishop Vives, see Feliu, "El bisbe Vives de Barcelona i el patrimoni de la catedral (974-995)" in Miquel Coll i Alentorn: Miscel·lània d’homenatge en el seu vuitanté aniversari (Barcelona 1984), pp. 167–191.

5. CC7 1240: "per voce parentum meorum vel per mea comparatione et per omnesque voces"; that earlier work is Jonathan Jarrett, "A Likely Story: Purpose in Narratives from Charters of the Early Medieval Pyrenees" in Simon Barton† and Robert Portass (edd.), Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085). In Honour of Simon Barton, The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World 76 (Leiden 2020), pp. 123–142.

6. CC7 1510; and on mancuses, see for long Miquel Crusafont, Anna M. Balaguer, and Philip Grierson, Medieval European Coinage, with a catalogue of the coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 6: The Iberian Peninsula (Cambridge 2013), pp. 66-108 (it’s less than that, but I can’t check the exact section just now), or for short Jonathan Jarrett, "Currency Change in Pre-Millennial Catalonia: Coinage, Counts and Economics" in Numismatic Chronicle Vol. 169 (London 2009), pp. 217–243 at pp. 232–237.

7. On the 985 sack, the definitive starting point is 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), online here, and if whatever you’re using doesn’t at least cite that, it’s missing stuff. On Barcelona’s Jewish community at this time, meanwhile, see David Romano, "Les juifs de Catalogne aux alentours de l’an Mil", in Xavier Barral i Altet, Dominique Iogna-Prat, Anscari Manuel Mundó, Josep M. Salrach & Michel Zimmermann (edd.), Catalunya i França meridional a l’entorn de l’any mil. La Catalogne et la France meridionale autour de l’an mil (Barcelona 1991), pp. 317–331.

8. CC7 1510: "Sig+num Eldefred, qui conscius sum de Mosse."

9. For complantatio and similar mechanisms see Josep M. Salrach, Catalunya a la fi del primer mil·lenni, Biblioteca de Història de Catalunya 4 (Lleida 2005), pp. 86-91, esp. 89-90.

10. CC7 1510: "Ego scilicet et condam pater meus, Borrellus comes, cui veniam sicut in suas kartas et de Vuiane episcopo resonant, quę evidenter conditas patent abeo in tuo nomine factas, est manifestum." Had Bonhom (son of Guisad) come to him brandishing a bunch of grants that had never actually been carried out?

11. On Bonhom (the scribe and judge), see Anscari M. Mundó, "El jutge Bonsom" in Jesús Alturo i Perucho, Joan Bellès, Josep M. Font Rius, Yolanda García, & Mundó (edd.), Liber iudicum popularis, ordenat pel jutge Bonsom de Barcelona, Textos Jurídicis Catalans: Lleis i costums 1/1 (Barcelona 2003), online here, pp. 101‒118.

12. CC7 1520.

13. Ibid.: "… condam viri sui Ennegoni, de quo genuerat filiam; et post suum obitum superstem remanserat cum ea in predicta captivitate."

14. We are clear that it was the judges who put it all together: CC7 1520 says, Cum enim iudices creati hoc advertissent per eorum discussa insistentia, et hec narratio fuit intimata in auribus prelibata comitissa, apparuit prefatus Bonushomo de prenotatis rebus culpabilis et veritate contrarius ("For when the appointed judges realised this from their insistent discussion, and this story was intimated to the ears of the aforementioned countess, the aforesaid Bonhom appeared to be culpable in the aforenoted matters and contrary to truth"). I picture one of them saying, "that Bonhom was up before me yesterday with another bit of land in Magòria," and another going, "you as well? He’s had two past me as well, where’s it all coming from?" and Oruç, who had himself been a captive in Barcelona after 985 and was older, saying, "I heard from his sister the other day, actually. Apparently she couldn’t get the people in her lands to send the ransom but she’s on her way at last" and then them all going, "Wait, where actually are her lands… ?" For Oruç, about to be introduced, see Philip Banks, "’Greeks’ in early medieval Barcelona?" in Faventia Vol. 2 (Barcelona 1980), pp. 73–92, online here, and J. M. Font i Rius, "L’escola jurídica de Barcelona" in Alturo & al., Liber iudicum popularis, pp. 67‒100 at pp. 78‒82.

15. CC7 1520: "per vinditiones et per commutationes et per varia scripturarum ingenia transmutavit et transformavit ea omnia ad suum proprium dominium, cupiens prefatam Matronam inde extraneam efficere."

16. Ibid.: "Tunc misit prelibata comitissa prenotatos iudices et prenominatum vicecomitem Hudalardum, et stationem vel accessionem fecerunt cum aliis idoneis hominibus super ipsas hereditates quas prefatus Bonushomo per multorum scripturarum ingenia ad opus suum transformaverat."

17. Ibid.: "plura pro modica transmutata vel usurpata sub calliditatis ingenio ac contrarietatis modo, inde actenus hereditates pretaxatas a iure prefate Matrone alienate permansissent, ut nec postmodum exinde aliquam repetitionem potuisset inicere nec assummere."

18. Ibid., inc. "protimus ut talia agnovissent viri prelati…"

19. See Jeffrey A. Bowman, "Countesses in Court: elite women, creativity, and power in northern Iberia, 900–1200" in Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies Vol. 6 (Abingdon 2014), pp. 54–70, DOI: 10.1080/17546559.2014.883084.

20. Them being from these archives means that they are Àngel Fàbrega i Grau (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Barcelona: documents dels anys 844-1260, Fonts documentals 1 (Barcelona 1995), 1 vol, doc. nos 251 and 345, and Gaspar Feliu i Montfort and J. M. Salrach (edd.), Els pergamins de l’arxiu comtal de Barcelona de Ramon Borrell a Ramon Berenguer I: estudi i edició, Diplomataris 18–20 (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, vol. 1, pp. 319–321 (doc. no. 46). That edition itself allows tracking up to 1076, and for the Barcelona chapter archive there’s Josep Baucells i Reig, Àngel Fàbrega i Grau, Manuel Riu i Riu, Josep Hernando i Delgado & Carme Batlle i Gallart (edd.), Diplomatari de l’Arxiu Capitular de la Catedral de Barcelona: segle XI, Diplomataris 37–41 (Barcelona 2006), 5 vols. Both their indices draw blanks at least for a Bonhom also identified as son of Guisad, or a Madrona who’s a person and not a place.

21. CC7 1520.

Wet Hillforts in Islay, or, Large-Scale Oblivion

Posted on 5 May 2026

Ordnance Survey map excerpt showing the broch of Dun Bhoraraig, Islay

This gallery contains 19 photos.

I intended a light post to follow the last one, and this is lighter, but a point got in my way while I was drafting it, so it develops weight towards the end. We begin in September of 2021, when … Continue reading →

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Deaths of the titans

Posted on 26 April 2026 | 2 comments

I almost wish I had never started writing obituaries on this blog. Obviously, there were good reasons to do so (as well as some bad ones) and people I felt I owed, but still. I should have realised that it would mean chronicling the passage of the generation where as a student and young academic I found my teachers and patrons, and as that generation reaches the kind of extent which can be expected, of course the bad news keeps coming. However, very rarely am I expecting it when it comes, and certainly in neither of these cases, the latter of them especially. On 24th January we lost Professor David Abulafia, long of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, and while I was still reacting to that news reached me that Professor Stephen Baxter, by then of St Peter’s College Oxford but in the time I knew him of King’s College London, had preceded him by three days on 21st January. They were born twenty years apart; David was 77 and Stephen only 57.

These are difficult men for me to write for, although that is not the reason this comes as late as it does (sorry; life, rather than death, to blame there). But still. David taught me as an undergraduate, but my contact with him after that was limited, I think, to one conversation after he gave a keynote address somewhere, and it must have been either before the blog began or in the mysterious backlog somewhere, I suspect the former. Stephen, on the other hand, was a regular at, indeed sometime convenor at the Institute of Historical Research Earlier Middle Ages seminar I went to for so long, and for a short while a senior colleague of mine when I taught a term at KCL. My lectures repeatedly overran into his classes, which he was polite but understandably cross about. I’m not sure I could say I got on with either of them, but I had a great deal of respect for them as scholars and teachers and I feel privileged that I knew them. And they were both titans in their fields, so I think I have to say something.

Professor David Abulafia presenting his work at the Holberg Prize Symposium on 8th June 2010, photo by Marit Hommedal, licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Flickr

David Abulafia was a historian of the Mediterranean Sea and its cultures, and it is hard to pin him down more than that.¹ He had strong interests in Italy, the Iberian Peninsula and especially Mallorca and in trading and Jewish communities (overlapping but not congruent sets), but also wrote a biography of Emperor Frederick II of Germany and got involved in Crusading scholarship now and then.² He also wrote about the Canary Islands and there really aren’t many medievalists in that group.³ Also, he was mostly always right; I haven’t necessarily been looking but I don’t remember ever seeing a piece where someone set out to correct or take down something David had written, at least about the Middle Ages. People didn’t always like it and he was quite capable of being very contrary, but he was clever enough to justify himself and always true to his evidence, even if others might have found different emphases.⁴ You can read his work and know it’s sound; in fact, I’d say that’s evident from it. And I tell you what, I know I cannot certainly say the same of myself and maybe not many of us can.

Furthermore, David is one of the long list of people without whom I wouldn’t be here doing what I’m doing. I was in the last cohorts for an undergraduate course on the Muslim Iberian Peninsula which I believe he convened; either way, he gave me my tutorials for it, and I have been relying on what he told me to read and what he just told me ever since then to some degree. It was my first non-Christian history and opened up a whole set of intellectual traditions to me I’d had no idea about, as well as sending me to read some very little-used stuff.⁵ And somewhere in there, he set me what was then very recent work by one of the new fires in the field, Eduardo Manzano Moreno, about the mysterious communities in the unrecorded zones of the Christian-Muslim frontier and I was super interested in that, so that when I needed a topic for an essay during my M.Phil. it came right back to me and started me, with the guidance of Professor Rosamond McKitterick and indeed as recounted here Professor Peter Linehan, looking into frontier Catalonia.⁶ But without David, I wouldn’t have known where to start.

Furthermore, and it may seem an odd thing to make a point of, but I believe David was a happy man. I quite often saw him in argumentative mode, which is kind of how tutorial teaching works but was also the flavour of more and more of his academic speaking as he grew more senior. But, in Cambridge one could also find him and his wife Professor Anna Abulafia, who also taught me and with whom my thoughts are as I write all this, out walking together wreathed in smiles as they talked. Especially in academia, we don’t always or all get to be happy and he was a salient reminder that it could, in fact, be done. I hope he was still so till the end, and I’m sorry it had to come.

Professor Stephen Baxter speaking to Dan Snow for the BBC

Stephen Baxter speaking to Dan Snow for the BBC 2 television programme 1066: A Year to Conquer England

With Stephen Baxter I’m still further in shock, not just because of his lesser age but because Stephen was so actively, almost aggressively, alive. The obituary remembrances on the St Peter’s College webpage are full of references to being beaten by Stephen at cricket, squash, or just in debate; winning was something he was good at and part of how he navigated life. The main reason he and I didn’t get on better was that there was one subject where I would hold my ground when I thought I knew better than him, and that didn’t endear either of us to the other. (Plus which, I used to make his students late, but that was only three times, come on. It was coinage where we really had differences.⁷) However, I absolutely wouldn’t have argued with him on anything else to do with early English or Norman social relations or government, especially Domesday Book where he was one of a few people in a really busy last fifty years of scholarship to genuinely move debate and understanding onwards.⁸ There I read and cited him and learned from his work. In his normal fields he was as unassailable as he apparently was on a squash court, and just as agile. And, I should say, while combative as heck, in the academic company where I encountered him he was always polite, able to put a question down if something more important or pleasant intervened, and in short, as the likewise late and lamented Jinty Nelson would have put it, he kept things comradely. He was even good on television! And his students clearly adored him, as the tributes on the St Peter’s page likewise testify. It makes no sense that he’s gone, and with him some important energy and drive to find out more has also left, leaving only the rest of us to try to make up the gap.

I have a sufficiently gloomy view of the state of UK academia that I have left it behind, obviously, and when I have to report the loss of figures like these, it is perhaps natural that I wonder if it’s still possible to be a scholar with enough time to become as knowledgeable as these and enough energy and brilliance actually single-handedly to drive the subject forwards. Twenty years ago I might already have been looking around at my contemporaries and myself and wondering which, if any of us, would reach David’s kind of importance. And there was Stephen, live and on the spot, defying those odds twenty years further into whatever UK academia has been going through and finishing up at the height of the profession as well. They were, and are, both reminders that what looks impossible is still within reach for some of us and that maybe one can be one of that group even yet.

1. Most obviously in David Abulafia, The Great Sea: a human history of the Mediterranean (London 2011), although he subsequently went big even from there, with The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans (London 2020).

2. David Abulafia, Frederick II: a medieval emperor (London 1988); and e. g. David Abulafia, "Trade and Crusade, 1050-1250", in Jace Stuckey (ed.), The Eastern Mediterranean Frontier of Latin Christendom (Farnham 2014), pp. 373–392.

3. David Abulafia, "Neolithic meets Medieval: First Encounters in the Canary Islands" in Abulafia and Nora Berend (edd.), Medieval Frontiers: concepts and practices (Aldershot 2002), pp. 255-278.

4. Alternative views on Frederick II, especially, can be found in Wolfgang Stürner, Friedrich II. (Darmstadt 1992), 2 vols; Klaus van Eickels and Tania Brüsch, Friedrich II. Leben und Persönlichkeit in Quellen des Mittelalters (Düsseldorf 2000). I have to say I haven’t checked them, though.

5. I still remember fondly the look of mild thrill that passed over the face of the duty librarian in what was the Faculty of Oriental Studies Library whenever I went in that term to look at Ahmed ibn Mohammed al-Makkarí, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, Extracted from the Nafhu-t-Tíb Min Ghosni-l-Andalusi-r-Rattíb Wa Táríkh Lisánu-d-Dín Ibni-l-Khattíb, by Ahmed Ibn Mohammed al-Makkarí, a Native of Telemsán, Translated from the Copies in the Library of the British Museum, and Illustrated with Critical Notes on the History, Geography, and Antiquities of Spain, trans. Pascual de Gayangos (London 1843), 2 vols, because it had to be fetched from the reserve stacks, which I guess didn’t happen a lot…

6. The reading in question was Eduardo Manzano Moreno, "Christian-Muslim Frontier in al-Andalus: Idea and Reality", in Dionisius Agius and Richard Hitchcock (edd.), Arab Influence upon Medieval Europe (Reading, IL, 1994), pp. 83–96, which I still recommend.

7. These arose largely because Stephen was then supervising the work that concluded as Henry Fairbairn "The Nature and Limits of the Money Economy in Late Anglo-Saxon and Early Norman England" (Ph.D. thesis, Kings College London, August 2013).

8. I mainly mean Stephen Baxter, "The Domesday Controversy: A Review and a New Interpretation", Haskins Society Journal Vol. 29 (Woodbridge 2017), pp. 225–293, which I read and thought was brilliant, but I think now we should be mentioning Stephen Baxter, Julia Crick and C. P. Lewis, Making Domesday: Intelligent Power in Conquered England (Oxford 2025), which can only just have preceded his death. Julia Smith has a write-up and memorial focused on the book here.

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Posted in England, General medieval, Institutions

Tagged Cambridge, David Abulafia, obituaries, Stephen Baxter, The Academy

Gallery

In and on an abbey

Posted on 7 February 2026

Interior of the east end of Lilleshall Abbey church, from the south transept

This gallery contains 22 photos.

There is more spare time in my new life than there was but somehow it keeps being taken up… I haven’t yet worked out where blogging fits into the new régime, either. I should, really, be able to post more … Continue reading →

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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 X^e à la fin du XI^e 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 X^e-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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Posted in Catalonia, Charters, Currently reading..., Islamic Crescent, Now working on...

Tagged diplomatic, Islamic conquest, palaces, place-names, Ramon Martí, villas

A post for Josep María Salrach

Posted on 29 December 2025 | 13 comments

This is very old news now, partly because I didn’t hear it when it was new, but also because I’m afraid I left it until I’d got some of my own news out of the way, as the subject wasn’t going to mind the delay. Because yes, alas, this is another post of passing: one of the great contributors to my field is no more.

The late Josep María Salrach

If you read this blog, and also read my footnotes, then you’ve heard of Josep María Salrach i Marès, who was Professor Emeritus of History at the Universitat Pompeu Fabrà, where he had been Professor since 1993. But if you read my blog and don’t read my notes, you might have missed his name, and otherwise, while his name would probably be familiar to anyone who studies Catalan history, if you’re not one of those I’d be surprised if you’d heard of him. I did a little bit to try to change that in 2014 when I reviewed one of his books, in English, but even then I had to make the case that it would be worthwhile people trying to read it in Catalan, because as far as I know he never wrote in any non-Iberian language. Maybe some French? But nothing further north-east than that, for sure. And one might say that, since he was first and foremost a historian of early medieval Catalonia, no matter how important he was, did he need to write in any other languages? His readership could meet him on his own ground.

Now, let’s be clear, as a historian of early medieval Catalonia he was pretty important. I still cite a little pair of books he published in 1978, El procés de formació nacional de Catalunya (segles VIII – IX), because since he wrote them we’ve known who succeeded whom in charge of the Catalan counties in the eighth to tenth centuries, at least as well as we’re ever likely to (some work still to do in the ninth, some might say…).¹ But that was a set of problems historians had been wrestling with since the early nineteenth century, which he just solved. His work on social change in the area, which was very much in the vein of Pierre Bonnassie’s masterwork on the subject but more explicitly informed by Marx, seemed to go through slight changes every time he wrote about it and I found it quite hard to keep up with exactly what his views now were; but they were always the thing which needed citing on that topic.² And on the way into his retirement he did a huge amount on dispute settlement in the Catalan counties, some of which is what I was reviewing and which is all really good.³ And he was a critical driver of the monumental Catalunya Carolíngia project, as well as being part of the team which got the first decent slice of the comital archive of Barcelona into print since 1951, so as well as actually doing the history of the area he enabled many others to do it as well.⁴ But yes, it might be argued that if you don’t read Catalan you can’t really play in that park, so if you needed that stuff you had already made sure you could read it. And if you were in that park, you know Salrach’s work.

But there was more to it, all the same. He wrote a really useful book in Spanish on the social situation of the medieval peasantry, not just in Catalonia but in Europe more widely, and there actually aren’t many of those (and really none in English except, kinda sorta, the work of Paul Freedman, who also started by working on Catalonia).⁵ And he wrote a short global history of famine in deep perspective which is, as far as I know, the only such thing, and no-one’s heard of it because it’s in Catalan.⁶ And as I said in that review, even his Catalan-focused work still often has things to tell scholars of other areas, because when you have the kind of breadth and depth of evidence that that Catalan charter corpus gives you, you can just see more of what’s going on sometimes. I often found it quite frustrating that I couldn’t share what I was learning from his work directly. I would submit that Catalan is not a difficult language to learn to read, even, for European medievalists at least. I never had any training in it, or even in Castilian; I just went at it with French and Latin and managed. But few people put themselves in the position where they have to try, and so Salrach’s wider-ranging work was as little known outside Catalonia as his more locally-focused stuff. It seemed quite unjust.

However, these were choices he made and it obviously didn’t bother him very much. We had some very limited correspondence over the book that I reviewed in 2013; he had cited me in it and so sent me a copy, with a handwritten apology for having there called me an American. (It was a fair enough assumption; it’s not as if anyone else, other than Roger Collins, has ever got into this stuff from the UK except Susan Reynolds and Chris Wickham, both always in comparison with other areas, whereas the US has quite a respectable array of medieval Catalanists.⁷) That brought us into contact, and while it would be safe to say that he did not agree with much of what I have written, when we finally met at my second Catalan doctoral examination, we talked pretty much non-stop for some time despite barely sharing a language. He was horrified to find I had intended to pay for the final volumes of the Catalunya Carolíngia, and rang the shop the next day so that when I went in myself, they were already instructed to let me walk off with pretty much anything I wanted. I tried not to take the mickey, but it was difficult… And subsequently he did me an even greater favour, which was to secure me my second Catalan publication by asking me to write a short biographical article on Count-Marquis Borrell II for a volume on famous Catalans where he was dealing with the medieval stuff. I had to do it, he said, because I was “el màxim especialista”, and as you can tell I’ve always treasured that compliment. So he was an extremely kind and courteous man and I owe him a lot in person as well as the masses I owe to his work, both in print and behind editorial scenes; he was one of those people without whom what I have done and what I have become would just not have been possible. Joan Vilaseca also wrote him a touching and much more immediate obituary which also stresses Josep María’s kindness and courtesy, so I think we can assume this was a general trait, and it’s the one without which the whole academic business can’t survive so really, there are a great many reasons to be thankful for him and his work. I just wish there was still going to be more of them.

He was 80 when he died, which surprised me. Although I knew vaguely when he had retired, meeting him in 2019 I would have put him closer to 64 than the 74 he apparently was; he was fit, energetic and clear of mind, and I understand from this obituary that even a couple of weeks before he died he’d just got another book launched. Someone had told me he was ill some months before that; I heard no more and hoped it had been recoverable. But it was evidently not. I can’t claim to have known him well; but I would give something to be able to have a few more arguments with him about who killed Archbishop Ató of Osona or what was behind the closure of Sant Joan de les Abadesses.⁷ I’m struggling to find an end to this that’s deeper than that, because in some sense I’m still not really convinced the chance, the man, has gone. But, it is. I wish I’d sent a few more e-mails, got to Barcelona a few more times… But I got a lot of good from Josep María Salrach anyway, a lot of people did and it is a great shame that he had to leave before he was finished.

1. Josep M. Salrach i Marés, El procés de formació nacional de Catalunya (segles VIII – IX), Llibres a l’Abast 137 & 137 (Barcelona 1978), 2 vols. For 9th-century modifications, try Joan Vilaseca Corbera, Recerques sobre l’Alta Edat Mitjana Catalana (Terrassa 2010).

2. The last one I actually read was Josep M. Salrach, Catalunya a la fi del primer mil·lenni, Biblioteca de Història de Catalunya 4 (Lleida 2005), which was definitely related to the first, Josep Maria Salrach, El procés de feudalització (segles III-XII), Historia de Catalunya 2 (Barcelona 1987), but not the same. I’m almost sure there must have been an update, as well, even if not a book-length one.

3. The core of this was the work I did review, Josep M. Salrach, Justícia i poder a Catalunya abans de l’any mil, Referències 55 (Vic 2013). There was also a massive edition of all relevant documents, Josep M. Salrach i Marès & Tomas Montagut i Estragués (eds), Justícia i resolució de conflictes a la Catalunya medieval: col·lecció diplomàtica, segles IX-XI, Textos jurídics catalans: documents 2 (Barcelona 2018), and one of his only two works in English known to me, Josep M. Salrach, "Documentary production and dispute records in Catalonia before the year 1100", in Isabel Alfonso, José Maria Andrade Cernadas & Andre Evangelista Marques (eds), Records and Processes of Dispute Settlement in Early Medieval Societies: Iberia and Beyond, Medieval Law and its Practice 41 (Leiden 2024), pp. 153–180.

4. On that project, see Gaspar Feliu, "La Catalunya carolíngia", Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Històrics Vol. 31 (Barcelona 2020), pp. 79–93, online here.

5. José María Salrach, La formación del campesinado en el occidente antiguo y medieval: análisis de los cambios en las condiciones de trabajo desde la Roma clásica al feudalismo, Historia Universal Medieval 5 (Madrid 1997). A lot of the books that look as if they will be about the life of peasants actually turn out to be about the organisation of labour by lords, which even Salrach’s didn’t really aim to escape; one exception to my remark here is Werner Rósener, Peasants in the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1996), but even that began in German and isn’t, I have to say, easy going. For Freedman’s work see Paul Freedman, "Sainteté et sauvagerie : Deux images du paysan au Moyen Age" in Annales : Économies, sociétés, civilisations Vol. 47 no. 3 (Paris 1992), pp. 539–560, DOI: 10.3406/ahess.1992.279062 and idem, "Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe: Approaches to the Question of Peasant Resistance" in Filozofski vestnik Vol. 18 no. 2 (Ljubljana 1997), pp. 179–211, online here; both of these seem to have come out of his work for idem, The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia, Cambridge Iberian and Latin American Studies (Cambridge 1991), itself given an updated summary in idem, "Peasant Servitude in Mediaeval Catalonia" in Catalan Historical Review Vol. 6 (Barcelona 2013), pp. 33–43, DOI: 10.2436/20.1000.01.84.

6. Josep Maria Salrach i Marès, La fam al món: passat i present, Referècies 50 (Vic 2009).

7. Him: Josep Maria Salrach i Marès, L’assassinat de l’arquebisbe Ató (971) i les lluites pel poder en els orígens de Catalunya. Discurs de recepció de Josep Maria Salrach i Marès com a membre numerari de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica, llegit el dia 30 de maig de 2018 (Barcelona 2018), on Academia.edu here; idem, "Política i moral: els comtes de Cerdanya-Besalú i la comunitat de monges benedictines de Sant Joan (segles IX-XI)", in Irene Brugués, Xavier Costa & Coloma Boada (edd.), El monestir de Sant Joan: Primer cenobi femení dels comtats catalans (887-1017) (Barcelona 2019), pp. 225–257. Me: Jonathan Jarrett, "Archbishop Ató of Osona: False Metropolitans on the Marca Hispanica" in Archiv für Diplomatik Vol. 56 (München 2010), pp. 1–42; idem, "Nuns, Signatures, and Literacy in late-Carolingian Catalonia" in Traditio Vol. 74 (Cambridge 2019), pp. 125–152, DOI: 10.1017/tdo.2019.7.

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Posted in Catalonia

Tagged Catalan, Josep María Salrach, obituaries

Bigger on the inside

Posted on 29 October 2025 | 3 comments

The very helpful discussion on blog alternatives a few posts back, still bubbling on, seems for now to be pointing to trying to regrow an audience here. I think that means I need to start posting more than once every few months, don’t you? And things are sufficiently exciting just now that I am starting to stub bloig posts again, for the first time in ages. But I have left it late for today, so let me just bounce some medievalist photography off you once again, if I may?

This is the view you see, or at least that we saw in August 2021, on approaching the remains of White Ladies Priory in Shifnal, Shropshire. I know very little about White Ladies, no more than English Heritage’s website will tell me: it was built as St Leonards Brewood for a group of Augustinian canonesses, the eponymous white ladies; it is first recorded in 1186 and architecturally is probably not much older; it was never wealthy; it just about survived till the Dissolution and then became private property; the owners built a mostly-wooden mansion house into the ruins of the church; the house is gone, the ruins are still here. It’s open access and well worth the look. Admittedly, it doesn’t look like much as seen above. But as the subject header suggests, somehow it is bigger inside…

View eastwards down the south aisle of White Ladies Priory — This view down the south from the west end has some humans for scale… And here are some other features, which you can click on to get full-sized and uncluttered.

West end of the south aisle of White Ladies Priory, Shifnal — This is the end where the previous photograph was taken, facing west now

Altar setting and east end of the north nave wall of White Ladies Priory church, Shifnal — This is the end where the previous photograph was taken, facing west now

But for me the best bits are the smaller flourishes. The priory doesn’t seem ever to be have been highly ornamented or anything, but I think every time one passed through these one would have been comforted by both their solidity and their excellence of craftsmanship. And they make a lovely pair to photograph together.

South door into the west end of White Ladies Priory church, from outside — This is the south door into the west end, looking at the north one

North door into the west end of White Ladies Priory church, seen from outside — This is the south door into the west end, looking at the north one

It’s interesting that the north door is a bit fancier. That may be because it was actually the entrance; a 1670s drawing suggests that the south door gave onto a cloister and was presumably for the canonesses and their staff only. Someone coming to the church from outside got the lobed archway. But that’s all!

With so little left, especially of the buildings where the canonesses actually lived and worked, rather than just the one where they worshipped, it’s hard to imagine what life here was like for a small number of medieval women except by analogy with other, preserved places. The documentation English Heritage chooses to mention on its website suggests that the prioresses, at least, sometimes favoured wine and hunting dogs as part of their lifestyle, which is all very Chaucerian. Presumably the normal canonesses didn’t enjoy quite such comfortable conditions, not least because by the end of things they apparently weren’t getting their salaries! But still: the community here lasted four centuries or so, longer than most modern institutions, and in that time a lot of women must have known this as home and the communal religious life as the one they lived. I have no bigger point than that, and I wish on visiting that I’d known some of their names or seen some of the documents, just to give some sense of connection. But worth looking at all the same!

3 Comments

Posted in England

Tagged Augustinians, English Heritage, Medieval tourism pictures, nuns, White Ladies

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Bigger on the inside

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