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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12. Bonnassie did that, of course, in La Catalogne du milieu du 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 & 25 (Toulouse 1975), 2 vols.

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

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

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

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