Authoring the Past: History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia 9780226032320, 0226032329

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Authoring the Past

Authoring the Past History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia

jaume aurell

The University of Chicago Press  y  Chicago and London

jaume aurell is associate professor in the Department of History and dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Navarra, Spain.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2012 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2012. Printed in the United States of America 21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12   1  2  3  4  5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-03232-0 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-03232-9 (cloth) The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aurell i Cardona, Jaume.   Authoring the past : history, autobiography, and politics in medieval Catalonia / Jaume Aurell.     p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn-13: 978-0-226-03232-0 (cloth : alkaline paper)   isbn-10: 0-226-03232-9 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Historiography—Spain—Catalonia—To 1500.  2. Catalonia (Spain)—Historiography.  3. Catalonia (Spain)—Kings and rulers—Biography—History and criticism.  4. Catalan prose literature—To 1500—History and criticism.  5. Gesta comitum Barcinonensium.  6. James I, King of Aragon, 1208–1276. Llibre dels fets.  7. Desclot, Bernat. Llibre del rei en Pere.  8. Muntaner, Ramón, d. 1336. Crònica.  9. Pedro IV, King of Aragon, 1319?–1387. Cronica de Sant Joan de la Penya.  I. Title.   dp302.c619a87 2012   946.702—dc23 2011032942 a This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents Acknowledgments  vii Introduction  1 part 1: historical writings and historical authors  19 1

Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium as Genealogy  21

2

King James I and His Chivalric Autobiography  39

3

Bernat Desclot: The Historian and His Chronicle  55

4

Ramon Muntaner: Ruler, Knight, and Chronicler  71

5

King Peter’s Llibre and Royal Self-Representation  91 part 2: theories and interpretations  109

6

The Shift in Historical Genres  111

7

The Dawn of Catalan Autobiography as Chronicle  133

8

The Authorial Logic of the Historical Text  155

9 Catalan Chroniclers and Poetic License: History, Epic, Fiction  177 10

The Emergence of Political Realism  199

Conclusion  221 Notes  229 Index of Names  311

Acknowledgments During its long itinerary, this book has benefited from the generous help of many colleagues and friends. The book’s origin dates from about 1998, when I moved from the University of Barcelona to the University of Navarra and, simultaneously, from the study of Mediterranean merchant culture to medieval historiography. Gabrielle M. Spiegel enthusiastically supported this shift in my research field, and she has always been generous in her advice as she revised my drafts, always giving me insightful comments and suggestions. I can only hope that my gratitude might somehow be equal to the extent of her kindness. Much of my understanding of the nature and possibilities of the interdisciplinary work between historians and scholars of literature comes from my participation in interdisciplinary research projects on the connections between history and autobiography, directed by Rocío G. Davis at the University of Navarra from 2003. I am aware that the problems raised by a study that attempts to cross the boundaries of several disciplines are never easy to solve. Yet this experience gave me the tools to deal with the methodological and critical issues involved. In addition, she knows that I will never forget her generous, exigent, and meticulous revisions of my drafts, which have made this book possible.

viii

Acknowledgments

This book has benefited from my long periods of research in the library of the University of California, Berkeley, where I studied modern historiography and learned much from the advice of Anthony Adamthwaite and Martin Jay. During two research visits to the University of California, Los Angeles, I also enjoyed and learned from my conversations with Patrick Geary, Zrinka Stahuljak, and Lynn Hunt. I remember those summers at UCLA with joy, particularly because of Teófilo Ruiz and Robert Rosenstone, whose warm friendship and intense conversations made the place feel like home. Thomas Bisson, Paul Freedman, and Adam Kosto epitomize three different generations of American scholars devoted to the study of medieval Catalonia. Their brilliant work has contributed to the better knowledge of medieval Catalonia in a larger context. I have always thought that the best way to approach medieval European local subjects is to combine the erudition of local scholars with the broader theoretical and methodological range offered by American and other foreign academics. These three historians embody this very fruitful approach. I thank them for their always generous support and advice and for welcoming me to Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, respectively. I only regret not treating Paul’s cats with the care they deserve. During the last part of the writing of the book, and particularly for the chapter devoted to the political theory and the practice of royal coronations, I have benefited from the advice of some political philosophers, such as Montserrat Herrero, and early modern historians such as Peter Burke and particularly Pablo Vázquez Gestal. Medieval Catalan historiography has been practiced by Catalan scholars who, during the twentieth century, firmly settled the foundations of the field. Researchers of the next generations will always appreciate the amazing work of Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer, Ramon d’Abadal, Ferran Soldevila, Miquel Coll i Alentorn, and Martí de Riquer. Though I never met these scholars, I perceive the echo and continuity of this invaluable tradition during my frequent conversations with José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, Martin Aurell, Alfons Puigarnau, and Stefano Cingolani.

Acknowledgments

Most of my research was conducted at the library of the University of Navarra, in Pamplona, Spain. The amazing quality and number of its resources and the professional excellence of its personnel have provided the best context for my work. At the same time, I have benefited from conversations with my colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Navarra, particularly Ignacio Olábarri, Julia Pavón, and Álvaro Fernández de Córdova, and the philosopher Alejandro Llano. To work with the University of Chicago Press is to encounter an exigent but unforgettable example of professionalism. My deepest thanks go to Randy Petilos: he knows better than anyone the difficulties of this project, and for that reason I will always appreciate his commitment to the project from the beginning. I also want to thank the anonymous readers’ incisive criticism, practical comments, and sharp suggestions. Finally, I greatly appreciate the unflagging support of my parents during the long process of writing this book. I have always believed that their love for culture, books, history, and tradition was their best legacy to us, one that my brother, Martin, and I have taken to heart as medievalists. To them, and to my sister Raquel, I dedicate this book.

›››‹‹‹ Earlier versions of portions of chapter 3, 6, and 7 appeared as “From Genealogies to Chronicles: The Power of the Form in Medieval Catalan Historiography,” Viator 36 (2005): 235–64; “Autobiography as Unconventional History: Constructing the Author,” Rethinking History 10 (2006): 433–49; “La Chronique de Jacques Ier, une fiction autobiographique. Auteur, auctorialité et auctorité au Moyen Âge,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 63 (2008): 301–18; and “Medieval Historiography and Mediation: Bernat Desclot’s Representations of History,” in Representing History, 1000–1300: Art, Music, History, ed. Robert Maxwell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 91–108.

ix

To my brother Rafa

Introduction Interest in medieval historiography among historians and literary critics has increased considerably since the 1970s, heightening the interdisciplinary nature of the field through the blending of critical methodologies. On the one hand, since historians have never been more inclined to reflect upon the nature of their discipline, the analysis of medieval historical writing has offered them a rich area of experimentation for the theory and practice of their own activity. On the other, literary scholars have been fascinated by the analysis and interpretation of historical genres, which has given them the opportunity to deal with crucial aspects of their discipline, such as the relation between reality and fiction, the transmission and reception of legends, the evolution from Latin to vernacular languages, and the analysis of the concepts of authority and authorship. The paradigms of the New Medievalism and the New Philology evidence this shared interest in medieval historiography. They have succeeded, in particular, in privileging interdisciplinary fields in their analyses; in engaging the material context of authorship, scribal practice, and readership; in examining medieval manuscripts in their context; and in renewing ways of thinking about the differences between oral and written discourses. They have also emphasized the opposition of popular to learned



Introduction

practice and the forms within which these modes allow an individual or a community to shape memory, history, and biography and to engage diverse literary and historical genres, from annals to genealogies, hagiographies to personal stories, autobiographies to chronicles.1 The “newness” in this medievalism lies in its insistence that the language of texts must be studied not simply as a discursive phenomenon but also as a part of the dynamic of textual language within the manuscript matrix. Importantly, this approach calls our attention to both language and manuscript within the social context and networks they inscribe—a proclivity that connects these medievalist trends to the parallel early modernist practice of the New Historicism.2 Considering the renewed interest in medieval historiography in current scholarship—created in part by the hegemony of cultural over social and economic studies since the 1980s—and aware of the richness of Catalan literature, I began to explore medieval historical writings, after having spent a few years analyzing the merchant culture of medieval Barcelona. I was drawn to the continued interrelations between historical and fictional Catalan writing, which seemed incompatible in the Middle Ages. When Catalan historical literature rose in popularity, fictional writing seemed to decline, and vice versa: we consider the golden age of historiography as the period from the mid-twelfth to the end of the fourteenth century, while the rise of fiction occurred from the mid-fourteenth to the fifteenth century. In effect, the rise of Catalan historiography, the focus of this book, begins with the Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium (1180–84) and ends with King Peter the Ceremonious’s (Pere el Cerimoniós) autobiography (1375–83). During this period, the power of historical discourse in Catalonia was strong enough to stifle the emergence of the kind of imaginative/fictional writing popular in neighboring countries such as France and England. There is, for instance, no Catalan version of texts such as the many legendary narratives connected to the Arthurian cycle that appeared in France and England. Indeed, fictional writing began to attain popularity in Catalonia only when fifteenth-century accounts

Introduction

such as Tirant lo Blanc or Curial e Güelfa assumed the place occupied by historical texts—the Cròniques—until that time. As a consequence, at the end of the Middle Ages, historical texts were used in Catalonia as models by writers of fictional prose. Characters and stories from the chronicles of Ramon Muntaner and Bernat Desclot, among others, were creatively revised centuries after their publication. For example, the fictional protagonist of Tirant lo Blanc, Joanot Martorell, follows the same path as Roger de Flor, the historical chevalier Almugavar of Ramon Muntaner’s chronicle, and dies in Adrianopolis, the same town where Roger de Flor was killed.3 Thus, historical and imaginative heroes share the same destiny: they cannot enjoy the glory of military triumph or the satisfaction of the love of the princess. The legends recounted by Desclot at the beginning of his chronicle—particularly that of the “Good Count of Barcelona”—were appropriated by the author of the Curial e Güelfa. Apart from using specific historical passages, Tirant and Curial reveal the imprints of Muntaner’s and Desclot’s accounts in their structures. The historical accounts of James I the Conqueror ( Jaume el Conqueridor), Desclot, and Muntaner become imaginative narrations in Tirant and Curial. Indeed, just as thirteenthcentury Catalan chroniclers “prosified” the heroic and poetic models of the Provençal jongleurs, fifteenth-century fictional authors borrowed historical models from Catalan chroniclers. 4 In this discussion, I distinguish historical from fictional texts, not because I believe that they are different in form (they are not), but rather because their authors’ distinct purposes—to narrate the reality of the past in the historical, and to recreate imaginative stories in the fictional—shape the content. Further, this distinction is perfectly compatible, as we see in Catalan historiography, with the presence of certain invented characters or episodes in the chronicles, or the use of oral legends and epic poems as historical sources. In spite of this blend of historical and fictional stories, which I deal with specifically in chapter 9, the truth claimed by the chroniclers marks their difference from fictional genres such as epic and romance, even those whose





Introduction

content is dependent upon extratextual facts. The assertions of truthfulness and accuracy that abound in the prologues of the Catalan chronicles signal a desire for a new form of historical discourse, distinct in content, style, and oral and fictional sources from the epic and romance. In the Catalan chronicles’ prologues, history defines itself as a discourse distinguished by its commitment to historical fact. This process of the fusion of narrative strategies by historical and fictional writers made me consider the enormous rhetorical and cultural power of historical texts in medieval Catalonia and encouraged me to engage the connection between the genres. I realized that some contextualization was required in order to understand the emergence of Catalan historiography and its use as a model by later medieval Catalan fictional literature. To be sure, the political configuration of medieval Catalonia underwent a radical transformation in the mid-twelfth century, at the time of the first expansion of Catalan historiography by way of narrative genealogies. As a result of their bold dynastic policy, the counts of Barcelona inherited the Crown of Aragon. This strategy transformed the counts of Barcelona into kings of Aragon beginning with Alfonse the Chaste (Alfons el Cast) in 1162. These kings inherited two important political centers—Catalonia and Aragon. After stabilizing their territory, they initiated a Mediterranean expansion that soon gave them other territories such as the kingdoms of Valencia and Majorca. Seeking to legitimate their new position, their growing political power, and their aggressive policy of expansion, the new count-kings deployed the strategy of writing historical texts in the form of genealogies and chronicles. The need for a recontextualization of historical texts has been emphasized by scholars of the New Historicism since the 1980s. This led me to search for the moment of inscription of the historical texts. I have always tried to use the earliest version of each historical text analyzed—the one closest to the moment of inscription. I hope that this approach has protected me from the perils of anachronism in the analysis of the texts, well denounced

Introduction Area of Detail

Catalonia

PORTU

GAL

Barcelona

S P A I N

Lisbon

PERAPERTUSES FENOLLEDA DONASA CONFLENT CAPCIR PALLARS SOBIRA

ROSSELLO

VALLESPIR CERDANYA

REGNE D'ARAGO

EMPURIES BESALU

Ripoll

PALLARS JUSSA

RIPOLL

URGELL BERGA

Cardona MARCA DE CAMARASA

GIRONA

OSONA

Manresa

MARCA D'OSONA TAIFES DE LLEIDA I TORTOSA

Girona Vic

MARCA DE BARCELONA

BARCELONA

Barcelona

0

20

40

miles

map 1. Catalonia in the twelfth century. Courtesy of Dick Gilbreath, University of Kentucky Cartography Lab.

by new medievalists and new philologists. To focus on the moment of inscription has also allowed me to think about the ways in which the historical world is internalized in the text and its meaning fixed. This process of “inscription” (or the fixing of meaning) is not to be confused with “written” in the traditional sense of “recorded.” Rather, it represents the moment of choice, decision, and action that creates the social reality of the text, a reality that exists both “inside” and “outside” the particular performance of the work, through the latter’s inclusions, exclusions, distortions, and stresses.5 Fortunately, in the case of medieval Catalan historiography, we can often precisely fix not only the



miles

250

500

(1324)

(1282)

Sicily

Sardinia

Medit er ra ne an

Majorca

(1229-1235)

Corsica

Sea

(1442)

Naples (1380)

Constantinople Gallipoli

Sea

map 2. Catalonian and Aragonese expansion into the Mediterranean in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Courtesy Dick Gilbreath, University of Kentucky Cartography Lab.

0

Valencia

Barcelona

B l ack

Introduction

chronology of the first version of the historical text but also the period of its formation and even, in some exceptional cases, such as King Peter’s autobiography, the stages of its production. In addition to these points, my interest in the moment of inscription of historical texts develops from my concern with the function of their authors, located at a crucial position between the texts and their contexts. I believe that authors play an active and, importantly, a conscious role. Clearly, I do not agree completely with the notion of the “death of the author” posited by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. I appreciate the work of the new philologists, who stress the active role of the audience in the creation of literary conventions and in the shaping of literary genres, and also the rich debates around the rules of the transmission of manuscripts.6 Nevertheless, without denying the validity of these other approaches, my interpretation of Catalan medieval historiography privileges the author rather than the reader or listener, authorship rather than audience, the emergence of historical genres rather than their reception.

›››‹‹‹ On the basis of these theoretical paradigms—the deployment of the methodologies of both historiography and literary criticism, the differences between historical and fictional texts and the recognition of their interaction, the necessary contextualization of historical texts, the focus on the moment of inscription rather than on the later versions of the texts, and the emphasis on the creative role of the authors rather than on audience reception—I will focus on five of the most representative texts of Catalan medieval historiography: the Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium, its first version written between 1180 and 1184; the Llibre dels fets (Book of Deeds) or Crònica de Jaume I, written between 1244 and 1276; Crònica de Bernat Desclot, written between 1283 and 1288; Crònica de Ramon Muntaner, written between 1325 and 1328; and the Llibre (Book) or Crònica de Pere el Cerimoniós, written between 1375 and 1383. In my process of selection, I have considered the exemplary





Introduction

status of these texts for the interpretation of key concepts in medieval historiography and literature, concepts I will focus on in the second part of the book. I will examine the evolution of historical genres, the practice of autobiography in the Middle Ages, questions of authority and authorship, the relationship between history and fiction, and the links between history and politics as reflected in the historical texts. In addition, the five chronicles I analyze have traditionally been included in the canon of medieval Catalan literature. Although I posit that they have specific characteristics that differentiate them from fictional texts, it is useful to read these historical texts in their general context in order to perceive the thematic links and formal interrelations between fictional and historical writing of the period, as I do in chapter 9. My approach is based on the reading of the earliest extant versions of the primary sources as established by the scholarly work of Catalan scholars such as Ferran Soldevila, Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer, Manuel de Montoliu, Miquel Coll i Alentorn, and Martí de Riquer, who published their major studies on Catalan medieval historiography in the middle of the twentieth century, establishing a solid foundation for the field.7 In addition, in the 1970s and 1980s, American scholars such as Thomas Bisson, J. N. Hillgarth and Robert Burns completed the editing and interpretation of the corpus of classical works of Catalan chronicles, providing the field with an international perspective that encouraged scholars to give a more comprehensive theoretical scope to their research on Catalan historiography.8 Later scholarship by Catalan and Italian historians and literary critics such as Josep Maria Salrach, Joan-Pau Rubiés, Martin Aurell, Josep M. Pujol, Stefano Cingolani, Stefano Asperti, and the critical edition published by Jordi Bruguera expanded the valuable work of earlier historians.9 After examining the paradigms established by these scholars, I realized that certain aspects of Catalan medieval historiography needed further consideration, particularly those that promoted a comparative analysis with other European historical traditions and engagement with more recent methodological approaches to

Introduction

medieval historiography. These approaches allow us to deal more comprehensively with issues such as the evolution of historical genres, the place of autobiography in the medieval approach to the past, the balance between authority and authorship, the interaction between history and fiction, and the relation between history and politics. My interest in these theoretical issues also developed from my awareness of the limited reception and dissemination of the corpus of medieval Catalan historiography in the international academic community. This might be explained in part because of the Catalan language; while many of these texts are now available online, only a few have been translated into English.10 This is particularly unfortunate if we compare this reception to that of other medieval European traditions, such as the French, En­glish, Italian, German, or even the peninsular Castilian.11 Another benefit of a broader reading of medieval Catalan historiography derives from the richness of its texts, which include a narrative genealogy, two autobiographies (one by a knight-king and the other by a precocious Renaissance prince), and two testimonial chronicles (one by an official of the Royal Chancellery and the other by a citizen-solder-ruler). Apart from the variety of genres, there is also a variety of languages (from the Latin of the annals and genealogies to the Catalan of the chronicles), contexts of production (from the monastic annals and genealogies to courtly chronicles), and strategies and objectives (from the genealogical Gesta’s desire to legitimize the dynasty of the counts of Barcelona to the chronicles’ function of justification of political and military expansion of Aragonese kings). Although I cannot shake off my training as a historian, this variety in content and form demanded an approach that blends the methodologies associated with both history and literary criticism. This is particularly notable in the case of medieval autobiographical texts and their unique literary constructions. Not only were Kings James and Peter autobiographical chroniclers, but the chronicler-knight Ramon Muntaner also wrote autobiographically. The paradigms of autobiography and authorship



10

Introduction

theory support my integrated approach to historiography and literature. In this context, it is interesting to note that the field of medieval Catalan historiography was monopolized by historians during the first half of the twentieth century—Nicolau d’Olwer, Soldevila, Coll i Alentorn—whose prominence was surpassed by literary scholars in the 1970s, including Riquer, Cingolani, Asperti, Bruguera, Pujol, and Lola Badia. All of these scholars have done fine work, but the crucial paradigm shift from history to literary criticism in the interpretation of Catalan historiography suggests that we have reached a point at which the strict boundaries between historical and literary approaches should give way to a more organically unified perspective, not only methodologically but also institutionally. Much recent scholarship has applied the methodologies associated with the so-called New Medievalism and postmodernism to medieval historiography. Gabrielle Spiegel, Lee Patterson, Nancy Partner, Howard Bloch, Zrinka Stahuljak, Virginie Greene, Sophie Marnette, Suzanne Fleischman, Peter Ainsworth, David Pattison, and Georges Martin, among others, proposed new approaches that have now become established paradigms for a critical reading of historical texts.12 In general, these scholars have focused on French, Flemish, German, and En­ glish historiography, while Castilian literature and historiography have been analyzed by the new philologists, as in the intense debate around manuscript transmission—a subject particularly important to the New Philology—based on medieval Castilian literature.13 My reading shows that the medieval Catalan historical texts are also susceptible to the paradigms that modern and postmodern scholars have developed. Using these perspectives, we understand the ways chroniclers used autobiographical texts to promote personal or collective identity—a subject currently at the core of many historical debates. Reading these texts gives us valuable insight into the development and use of history not only in medieval Catalonia but also in Castile, England, France, and Flanders, because their mutual influences are evident in both the genealogical phase in the sec-

Introduction

ond half of the twelfth century and that of the chronicles of the thirteenth and fourteenth. The connections among these different historiographical traditions seem obvious, but Catalan historians tend to consider “their” historiography unique and marvelous. Nevertheless, although we cannot deny the excellence and originality of many of these texts, this tendency toward isolation on the part of scholars devoted to the study of Catalan historiography should be overcome.

›››‹‹‹ The first part of the book describes and contextualizes each of the historical texts: the narrative genealogy Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium, the autobiographical Llibre dels fets of King James, the narrative chronicle of Bernat Desclot, the testimonial chronicle of Ramon Muntaner, and the autobiographical Llibre of King Peter. The five chapters of the first part are similarly structured. First, I give a brief introduction to the context within which the historical text was produced, based on the date of composition, using the first known version of the text. Second, I discuss the authorship of the texts, which ranges from the Gesta’s collective authorship to Peter’s and James’s autobiographies, to the more classical chronicles by Desclot and Muntaner. This information introduces one of the main concerns of this book: the question of authorship in Catalan medieval historiography and the ways different authors approached historical data. And, third, I summarize the content of each text, to facilitate the understanding of the more theoretical analysis of the second part of the book. The first chapter centers on the genealogical text known as the Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium. In 1162, Alfonse the Chaste inherited both the county of Barcelona and the kingdom of Aragon, which transformed him from the count of Barcelona into the king of Aragon. Around 1180, the Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium, one of the founding texts of medieval Catalan historiography, took definitive shape. This text constructed the genealogy of the new kings of Aragon, linking them to the heroic stories of how Catalan counts drove out the Muslims and won

11

12

Introduction table 1  Chronology of kings and historical writing in medieval Catalonia King

Historical text

Alfonse II the Chaste Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium Peter II the Catholic James I the Conqueror Llibre dels fets of James I Peter III the Great Crònica of Bernat Desclot Alfonse III the Liberal James II the Fair Alfonse IV the Benign Crònica of Ramon Muntaner Peter IV the Ceremonious Llibre of King Peter

Dates 1162–96 1180–84 1196–1213 1213–76 1244–76 1276–85 1283–88 1285–91 1291–1327 1327–36 1325–28 1336–87 1375–83

independence from the Franks under the leadership of the legendary count of Barcelona, Wilfred the Hairy (Guifré el Pelós), providing the new dynasty with an invaluable tool for the political legitimization of its new status. Different circumstances surround the writing of King James I’s chronicle, the subject of the second chapter, which inaugurates the tradition of Catalan historical chronicles. The first half of the thirteenth century was crucial to the political and social history of medieval Catalonia. The bases for territorial and commercial expansion in the Mediterranean were laid as a result of the collapse of the expansion to the north, into southern France, after the defeat at the battle of Muret during the Albigensian crusade. If the expansion into Provence had been based to a large extent on an effective marriage policy (a strategy well explained in the Gesta Comitum), the monarchs now found themselves obliged to bring other political and cultural mechanisms into play in order to continue their Mediterranean expansion. In this context, new models of historical writing emerged. The Llibre dels fets, written during the second half of the thirteenth century, was a response to these new political aspirations and needs. Autobiography becomes history as King James I narrates in great detail his territorial conquests and military deeds, as well as those of his knights.

Introduction

The chronicle of the royal chancellor Bernat Desclot is analyzed in chapter 3. The Llibre del Rey En Pere de Aragó e dels seus antecessors passats (Book of King Peter of Aragon and of His Ancestors) was written from 1283 to 1288, after the great Catalan victory in Sicily in 1282. It narrates the history of the county of Barcelona and the principality of Catalonia from the first conquest of Majorca at the beginning of the twelfth century to the death of King Peter the Great (Pere el Gran) in 1285, focusing on the deeds of this king, one of the most celebrated of the Aragonese dynasty because of his victory against the French army and the conquest of Sicily. Desclot’s Crònica may be considered a model of renewed historiography because of its author’s professed objectivity. Desclot describes the story of the Aragonese kings realistically, giving the impression of equanimity and truth. The fourth chapter discusses the chronicle of Ramon Muntaner. The interest of this chronicle is primarily due to the intensity of the life and the multifaceted personality of its author. Muntaner was a citizen of Valencia, a knight and politician, and a writer and soldier of the Catalan campaign to Constantinople. He wrote his chronicle late in his life, between 1325 and 1328, half a century after Bernat Desclot’s account. Muntaner’s narrative centers on the extraordinary expansion of Catalonia to Greece at the beginning of the fourteenth century. He tells us this story from the perspective of his personal experience as both royal minister and soldier. Muntaner also served as the administrator of Gallipoli, one of the Greek cities conquered by the Catalans. As a soldier, he fought in the Catalan Company, an army of light infantry under the leadership of Roger de Flor, made up of Aragonese and Catalan mercenaries—known as Almugavars—who were sent to Constantinople to help the Greeks fight against the Turks and, finally, to conquer most of Greece. The autobiographical form gives his account its dramatic and emotional style and the credibility accorded to personal experience. Finally, a very different chronicle brings the classical moment of medieval Catalan historiography to an end, as described in chapter 5: the Llibre of Peter the Ceremonious, whose long reign

13

14

Introduction

(1336–87) was marked by controversy and complication. The final version of the Llibre was written between 1375 and 1386 and differs substantially from the four earlier historical texts analyzed in this book. This chronicle is the autobiography of a tormented king, encircled by military threats, troubled by the lack of internal unity in his kingdom, threatened by an important economic crisis, shocked by the epidemic of the Black Death, and, paradoxically, convinced of his providential function as the leader of an emergent modern state. The text thus reflects an era in which the old medieval structures, based on territorial and feudal conceptions of the monarchy, had to confront new political tendencies, specifically the consolidation of monarchical authority. A new historical context demanded a revised form of representing the past. Peter the Ceremonious’s autobiography is thus an example of a political treatise written by a late medieval king with the mindset of a Renaissance prince. The second part of the book engages the theoretical and practical questions associated with the production, consolidation, and spread of these five historical texts. Based on contemporary theories of literary genre, chapter 6 analyzes the evolution of the historical genres in Catalan historiography. First, I highlight the contrast between the schematic and chronological annals and the genealogical Gesta Comitum. Specifically, I discuss the enormous potential of genealogies as a historical genre, their active role in legitimizing social and political aspirations, their ability to consolidate values in the tradition, and their presence in very different cultures and times. I also analyze how the Gesta Comitum functions as the creative model that inspired the histories of Catalonia from the thirteenth to the twentieth century. To conclude, I focus on the shift enacted from the end of the twelfth century—a critical period that required a reinterpretation of the Catalonian past in order to direct the future—until the mid-thirteenth century, during which Catalonia witnessed a substantial transformation in historiographical practice, as noted in the shift from genealogies to chronicles as the prime historical genre.

Introduction

Based on the originality of the autobiographical form used by Kings James and Peter, and the exceptionality of these kingchroniclers in medieval Europe, chapter 7 examines the processes that governed the personal involvement of these medieval kings in the writing of their narratives, the degree of the personal or collective authorship of these chronicles, the subjectiveobjective interpretation of the past, the context of the European chronicler-memorialist-crusader within which James’s chronicle must be read, and, finally, the function of self-narration in medieval historiography. Taking into account contemporary theories of the relation between autobiography and history, I read these medieval life-writing exercises with a longue durée and global understanding. Chapter 8 explores the varied methodological possibilities and interpretations of authorship that the new interdisciplinary theoretical practices and tendencies offer. I accept the concept of authorial intention that modern critics deploy to determine, if possible, the extent to which an author intervenes in producing the definitive text. Starting from the correspondence wherein King Peter instructs his scribes on the writing of his memories, I focus on the process of inscribing medieval historiography and the literary implications of emphasizing the historicalautobiographical author. In the distinction between an “author’s” and a “reader’s” text, I side with the former, highlighting the power of the authorial interventions by the medieval chroniclers rather than the ethics of their reception or the reactions of their audience. Chapter 9 examines the connection between reality and fiction characteristic of medieval historiography, crucial to the interpretation of Catalan historical texts. Catalan chroniclers harness diverse sources to build their texts, including historical legends in ancient epic poems, popular tales, personal memory, and chancellery records, such as royal orders, diplomatic treaties, and chancellery letters. Some of these sources contain fictional sections, but, more interestingly, the chroniclers incorporate characters and stories clearly borrowed from fictional literature

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into their historical accounts. Based on this data, this chapter also deals with the notion of historical accuracy in the work of medieval historians, their ability to blend different sources, and their tendency to fictionalize the remote past and to historicize the recent past. Noting the mythologizing power of historical texts, the decontextualization of the past to construct new perspectives on the present, these historians’ consciousness of their role as mediators between the past and the present, the connection between personal experience and historical discourse, and the forms of historical manipulation inspired by passionate patriotism, I use Muntaner’s text to consider the ways history was inscribed in that period. This approach helps us to reappraise the boundaries between “truth” and “fiction” in medieval representations of history, through the concept of poetic license. Medieval historiography, like other historical writing, foregrounds the problem of representations of reality—the relation between text and referent— through its deployment of a realistic style. Catalan chroniclers, like other medieval chroniclers, make their realistic style compatible with a vast range of material systematically excluded from the paradigms of modern historical realism and historicism, such as miracles, dreams, myths, legends, and visions. Our flawed tendency to underestimate the value of medieval historiography as a historical artifact stems from an excessively simplistic way of considering the limits of the “real” and the “imaginary.” Finally, a more properly historical study of the relation between history and politics is developed in chapter 10. King Peter’s Llibre superlatively enacts a refined and subtle manipulation of history for political purposes. His meticulous, Machiavellian use of personal memory and collective chancellery documentation best exhibits his ambition. Peter’s chronicle thus becomes a singular historical document because of its author’s ability to harness historical writing as a platform for political self-representation. He created, through this chronicle, the new image of the monarchy that the troubled times required, one represented symbolically though his dramatic gesture of self-coronation, which he nar-

Introduction

rates in detail. Taking advantage of the political implications of this chronicle, this chapter engages the political function of medieval historiography, its role as a source of political theory and as a foundation of political practice, the use of the historical text as a weapon for justifying and legitimizing politics, the selfrepresentation of medieval kingship, the symbolic and factual power of the gesture of self-coronation, and the use of the historical text as a political treatise, foreshadowing the coming Renaissance.

›››‹‹‹ Authoring the Past seeks to contribute to the reception and dissemination of the corpus of medieval Catalan historiography in the international academic community. Owing to limited access to the languages in which they were written, these historical texts have been long neglected or, at least, confined to Catalan or Spanish academia. By reading these texts from a critical perspective, we may gain valuable insight into the ways history was developed, transmitted, and used, not only in Catalonia but also in other traditions of European medieval historiography. My examination of medieval Catalan historiography led to me to an unexpected field: the debate on contemporary historiography. Thus, in this book I also examine, among other things, the value of the historical text as a document, the relationship between historical and literary texts, the role of historical imagination in the writing of history, the sense and the scope of “truth,” the intersection between invention and referentiality, the function of the narration in historical texts, the power of the historian (the medieval chronicler) as an author, the adaptation of the historical text to different literary genres, and, finally, the extent to which certain mutations in literary genres result from or reflect changes in historical contexts, and how they contribute to modifying their milieu. These are some of the issues I discuss in this examination of medieval Catalan historiography, and I use them as a frame that helps reveal the texts’ constitutive identity. Finally, I analyze the medieval Catalan chronicles to better

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understand the problems of the writing of history, questions that have plagued historians of all times and in all places. This study, it is hoped, will not only contribute to a broader knowledge of the Catalan historical tradition and its key texts but also deepen our understanding of the wider European tradition in which it developed.

part 1 Historical Writings and Historical Authors

1 Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium as Genealogy Iste liber ostendit veritatem primi comitis Barchinonae. This book shows the truth of the first count of Barcelona. « Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium »

The Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium, one of the founding historical texts of Catalan medieval historiography, was originally written in Latin at the monastery of Ripoll at the end of the twelfth century. Quickly translated into Catalan, it was then reproduced in many different versions during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.1 Conceived as a genealogy of the Catalan counts—mainly those of Barcelona, Urgell, Besalú, and Cerdanya—it aimed to illustrate the long, glorious, and legitimate history of the counts of Barcelona, who had received the title of kings by the time the text was written. The Gesta Comitum, the first Catalan genealogical text, foreshadows many of the future trends in Catalan medieval historiography. The place of its composition, the monastery of Ripoll, at that time the pantheon of the Catalan counts, served as a center for the preservation of their written history. In spite of its evident negotiation with legend in some passages, the Gesta Comitum was regarded from the

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beginning as a reliable historical source, and most of the Catalan chronicles and historians drew on it for their historical writings until the nineteenth century. Thus, considering its chronological precociousness, textual originality, and contextual significance, the Gesta Comitum deserves particular attention. The Gesta Comitum unveils the historical context within which it was constructed. Catalonia experienced important transformations in the twelfth century. One of the most significant was access by the counts of Barcelona to the title of king, when they inherited the Crown of Aragon, the neighboring kingdom, as a result of their bold dynastic policy. Ramon Berenguer IV, count of Barcelona, acceded to the throne when he married the daughter of Ramiro the Monk, king of Aragon, in 1136 and Ramiro retired to a monastery. This union between the Aragonese and Catalans formed what is known generally as the Crown of Aragon. The Aragonese and the Catalans were two very different peoples in their geographies (the first, land-locked; the second, with access to the Mediterranean), laws, customs, institutions, economic activities, and political ambitions. Nevertheless, they managed to form a political union. Ramon Berenguer, who never took the title of king for himself, was careful to preserve that union, strategically balancing Aragonese and Catalonian interests, a policy that his successors adopted. After Ramon Berenguer’s death in 1162, his son Alfonse the Chaste (1162–96) inherited both the county of Barcelona—which at that time included the other counties of Catalonia and was the primus inter pares over them—and the kingdom of Aragon. Further, twelfth-century Catalan society witnessed the aggressive expansion and conquests of both Ramon Berenguer III and Ramon Berenguer IV. With increasingly efficient powers of fiscal collection, the spread of the Usatges as a unified juridical code,2 and the establishment of the Peace and Truce of God as a guarantee of social and economic stability, the court of Barcelona become an important political and cultural center.3 As a result of generations of consolidation of power, the counts of Barcelona began to consider their lineage exceptional.

Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium as Genealogy

This renewed consciousness inspired them to construct a historical genealogy that would support and explain their position, legitimize their dynasty, and justify their aggressive policy of expansion into Provence. This was done without taking the trouble of scrutinizing the historical truth. On occasion, facts were manipulated. The counts of Barcelona sought to strengthen their power by devising a narrative of beginnings that would validate their position as kings. In the twelfth century, vernacular genealogies emerged in Europe as a way for noble families to maintain their authority in the face of the establishment of the new royal families. Genealogy intersects with historical narrative when noble families begin to perceive the vertical structures that organize them into lineages. The appearance of the genealogy as a literary genre in the twelfth century illustrates the noble families’ growing historical self-consciousness, displaying their aim to affirm and extend their place in political life. When raised to the royal level, as in the case of the Gesta Comitum, genealogies took on the overtones of a dynastic myth. But whether aristocratic or royal, genealogies were expressions of social memory that strove to consolidate current social and political status and preserve it for future generations.4 In this context, the Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium took definitive shape in genealogical form. The first Latin version of the text was written between 1180 and 1184.5 Its basic structure (a single story followed by a schematic succession of genealogies) seems to have been inspired by the beginning of the biblical Genesis. After recounting in detail the odyssey of the dynasty’s founder, the text continues with a summary, selection, and description of the more outstanding deeds of the counts of Barcelona and of the other counts of Catalonia, from the time of Wilfred the Hairy at the end of the ninth century to the crucial marriage of the count of Barcelona, Ramon Berenguer IV, to the daughter of King Ramiro of Aragon, through which the counts of Barcelona also became kings. Subsequently, the Gesta highlights the patrimonial and hereditary configuration of the

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dynasty of the counts of Barcelona, stressing the gradual assimilation of the counties into a single principality, mentioning women only in relation to the men who were their fathers or husbands.6 With the Gesta’s creation and dissemination, narrative genealogies effectively replaced the schematic and diagrammatic early medieval annals (such as those written in the monasteries of Cuixà and Ripoll) in Catalonia and heralded the emergence of the multiple narrative chronicles of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, such as the autobiographies of Kings James and Peter and chronicles by Ramon Muntaner and Bernat Desclot, all of them analyzed in this book. Thus, the political experiments of the new times generated innovative historical genres in tune with the transformed political and social context, for which the genealogical Gesta Comitum functions both as representative historical writing and textual image.

The Gesta Comitum’s Collective Authorship: Creation and Manuscript Transmission Though the precise authorship of the Gesta Comitum remains uncertain, we can locate the place of its composition and attend to its collective authorship. As noted earlier, all the evidence points to the text’s having been written by the monks of the monastery of Ripoll, an influential Catalan religious and cultural center.7 By the end of the tenth century, Ripoll had replaced Sant Miquel de Cuixà as the central repository of the Catalan counts’ historiographical documents. Ripoll amassed an astounding collection of historical annals. During the first half of the eleventh century, the abbot-bishop Oliba organized the historiographical activity of Ripoll, regulated the scriptorium, and founded a poetic and historical center that preserved the memory of the counts until the emergence of the other Catalan royal pantheon, the Cistercian Abbey of Poblet, at the beginning of the thirteenth century. As a consequence, Ripoll preserved the counts’ corporal and historical vestiges for many years, giving this monastery its

Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium as Genealogy

status as a historical guarantor. Moreover, Ripoll was the necropolis where the counts of Barcelona had been buried for centuries. The epitaphs in honor of the counts’ ancestors had been written since time immemorial by the monks of Ripoll, so it follows that they were the best equipped to write their genealogies. The Aragonese monarchs turned to the monks of Ripoll to harness their historical authority as guardians of tradition.8 The Gesta appears as a compilation of historical records rather than as a new historiographical text. The monks reproduced the historical material available in the abbey. Their predecessors had patiently recorded the gesta (events, facts, deeds) of the different Catalan counts upon their deaths. In time, these records constituted an important historical patrimony, which took written form as a serious, chronological enumeration of those events (annals). In the twelfth century, when the monks of Ripoll prepared to establish, more or less officially, the origins of the dynasty of the counts of Barcelona, the genealogical method proved to be the most effective in achieving that aim, replacing the traditional annals.9 Though the monks of Ripoll had long experience in compiling chronologies in the annals, their decision to deploy another genre became crucial for Catalan historiography. The Gesta’s more detailed—though still schematic—description of each count replaced the unadorned chronological register of the annals, whose only coordinates were time and space, a static world with no room for deeds and personalities.10 The Gesta also illustrates the shift from a central focus on the two universal authorities (the Carolingian empire and the Papacy) to the emergence of local power—the counties of Barcelona, Urgell, Besalú, and Cerdanya. Although the superior power of the Carolingian empire is still noted in the new historical texts, this step from the universal and schematic to the local and more narrative explanation demonstrates an important shift in the self-representation of Catalan authorities, who fought at the time to win autonomy from the neighboring Frankish kingdom. The political focus stressed the succession of the local counts rather than the Frankish

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kings, who at that time acknowledged the legitimate power of the counts of Barcelona. Significantly, the date of the writing of the first manuscripts of the Gesta—the second half of the twelfth century—corresponds to the moment when the monks believed that the declaration of the obiit of the count (the annals) no longer sufficed and that the full story demanded the recounting of his gesta as well. The original twelfth-century version of the Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium was revised and expanded in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Scholars have identified three different versions of the text: the original (Gesta I), written in Latin between 1180 and 1184; the intermediary (Gesta II), written in Catalan from 1268 to 1269, probably an adaptation of a previous Latin version; and the definitive (Gesta III), in Latin and completed about 1303.11 Some scholars mention a fourth version of the Gesta, but it has recently been concluded that it should be considered a different historical text (El llibre dels reis—the Book of the Kings).12 All of these manuscripts are, essentially, additions to Gesta I that take up the narration where Gesta I leaves off. For the purposes of this book, I will center on the first version of the text, Gesta I, because I want to acknowledge the first real moment of the Gesta’s inscription, the moment of transformation of the counts of Barcelona into kings. Gesta I was composed in four stages. The first part, which may be considered the primary text, was written between 1180 and 1184. The second, third, and fourth sections are, in fact, no more than successive additions to the primary text: the first written between 1200 and 1208, the second between 1214 and 1218, and the third completed in 1276. Since only one manuscript copy of the original version has survived (Paris, BN lat 5132, ff. 23v–25v), we can easily trace the process of its inscription by observing the different handwriting of each of the seven scribes who transcribed it.13 The three first scribes wrote the prime narrative (chapters 1 through 8), which tell the story of the counts of Barcelona from Wilfred the Hairy to Ramon Berenguer IV. The chronological range of the story extends from 878, with Wilfred

Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium as Genealogy

becoming a count of Barcelona, to the death of Ramon Berenguer IV in 1162. Although we can identify several scribes by differences in the handwriting and spelling of the text, this primary manuscript seems to have been authored by only one monk. Chapter 8 opens with: “ut me superius scripsisse memini, Borrellus Barchinonensis comes genuit duos filios” (as I recall having written above, Count Borrell of Barcelona begot two sons).14 The author clearly refers to a part of chapter 3, written by himself, in which he employs almost identical expressions to describe Borrell’s two sons, Ermengol of Urgell and Ramon Borrell of Barcelona.15 In addition, at the end of chapter 3, he outlines the structure of the text, from chapter 4 to chapter 8: “Sinamus autem loqui . . . et exponamus primitus . . .” (Let us not yet speak of . . . and let us first set forth . . .).16 The only break in the authorial unity of the text until chapter 8 would be chapters 1 and 2, which recount the legend of Wilfred the Hairy, because they are clearly composed from a different source at an earlier time.17 Yet all the evidence shows that the author of the primary Gesta text deliberately included the legend of Wilfred in the first narrative genealogy of the Catalan counts. Further, the succeeding chapters (9 to 11) were clearly written later, as demonstrated by their distinct grammatical and narrative style. The copyists are also different: the fourth scribe (chapter 9) wrote down the section on Alfonse the Chaste, the first countking of Aragon. The fifth and sixth scribes (chapters 10 and 11) recorded the story of King Peter the Catholic (Pere el Catòlic) and the childhood of his son James I (1196–1213). Finally, the seventh scribe (chapter 11) copied out the historical narration of the reign of James I (1213–76).18 We lack more specific information about the date of composition of each version, but we can infer it by considering the period of the last king written about. In any case, these three additions, in spite of their evident historical and historiographical importance, do not offer the narrative coherence of the primary text. Owing to its effectiveness as genealogical compilation, the

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Gesta Comitum was considered from the end of the twelfth century as the official, legitimate, and trustworthy historical account of the counts of Barcelona. Medieval chroniclers and modern historians used it as a source of historical knowledge, and the copyists frequently blended it with other historical texts in the same volume, especially in vernacular versions. To be sure, there are clear differences between the Gesta’s manuscript transmission in Latin and in Catalan. The Latin manuscripts are usually isolated, while the Catalan versions usually combine the Gesta with other juridical and historical texts. A manuscript from 1335, signed by Ramon Ferrer, presents the Gesta together with the Usatges, a manuscript practice that has been interpreted by some historians as evidence of the juridical use and dimension of historical texts. In a 1345 document, also signed by Ramon Ferrer, the Gesta is published with the Llibre vert, which also includes an abstract of the four Gospels, a biblical genealogy from Adam to Jesus Christ, a chronicle of the Roman emperors, a chronicle of the Roman pontiffs, and, finally, a Cronica regum Francie. The only text in Catalan of this compilation is the Gesta Comitum. Another copy, from the fourteenth century, blends the Catalan text of the Gesta with part of Bernat Desclot’s chronicle and continues with a section of Ramon Muntaner’s.19 These medieval copyists used the same title, which eloquently evidences the status of the Gesta as the earliest historical text on the Catalan counts and counties: “Genealogy of the Counts of Barcelona, Urgell, and other Counts, taken from the very old parchment of the archive of the monastery of Ripoll.” 20

Wilfred’s Story: The Role of the Hero-Founder The two first chapters of Gesta I’s text center on the legend of the count-founder Wilfred the Hairy (878–97), represented as the typical medieval hero-founder of a dynasty. This story begins in this way: We know by old accounts that there was once a certain knight named Wilfred from the village called Ria, which is located in the Conflent

Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium as Genealogy

region on the river Tet, not far from the monastery of Sant Miquel de Cuixà. And this knight, renowned for his wealth, prowess, and prudence, by virtue of his probity obtained the county of Barcelona from the king of the Franks. But on one occasion, when he had gone to Narbonne in order to see the king’s legates together with his son named Wilfred who is surnamed “the Hairy,” and he [Wilfred] had been grabbed by the beard in a soldiers’ brawl by a certain Frank, he drew his sword and killed the man who had done this. Accordingly, he was seized on the spot and led before the king in France; but on the way a new sedition broke out when he tried to avenge his own capture, with the result, according to the story, that he was killed not far from Le Puy-Saint-Marie by those who were conducting him. Then his son the aforesaid Wilfred, who was being led with him, was brought to the king of the Franks, to whom the story of what happened to his father on the way was told. Troubled by this, the king lamented the event, and because of what had happened, he predicted that Wilfred’s honor might in the future be the ruin of the Frankish king. Having received the boy, he [the king] is said to have entrusted him most attentively to a certain count of Flanders to be raised. When the daughter of this count reached adolescence, she became pregnant by the boy [Wilfred the Hairy].21

Wilfred’s story highlights the connection and continuity between the ninth-century founder of the dynasty and the monarchs of the twelfth century.22 This section functions as myth, an archetype of the genealogy usually followed by a detailed list of the generations of the major lineages.23 Modern critics have perceived an enormous contrast between the beginning and the end of Wilfred’s story. There is in fact a long gap between the time the story was written, at the end of the twelfth century, and the time narrated, the end of the ninth. However, the text’s effectiveness might actually be due, among other reasons, to its lack of a fixed chronology. There is a similar case in neighboring Castile, with overwhelming attention paid to the first Asturian king in the Alfonse III of Castile cycle, in a deliberate attempt to link the kingdom of Castile with the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo.24 The French Grandes Chroniques are equally effective in uncovering the Merovingian, Carolingian, and Capetian roots of its monarchy. The desire for continuity and a harmonization

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of dynastic history characterizes French historiography in the central medieval period, in an effort to conceal the discontinuities in the history of the Frankish, West Frankish, and French kingdoms of the eighth to eleventh centuries. This genealogical project originated in the spiritual centers of the court-controlled regions of France, particularly Saint-Denis.25 Wilfred the Hairy’s story is a dramatically conceived tale. While at the Flemish court, Wilfred had a love affair with the count’s daughter. The countess, in an attempt to avoid the perverse effects of a union outside marriage, made Wilfred swear on the four Gospels that should he inherit the county of Barcelona, he would take her daughter as his wife. In order to see if he could regain the county, the countess sent him to Barcelona in disguise. Wilfred’s mother recognized him because of the abundant growth of hair along his spine (hence his nickname, “the Hairy”), an inherited trait among the men of their line. She then presented him to the barons of Barcelona, who, perceiving his likeness to his father, set the stage for Wilfred’s revenge on Salomon, the usurper of the county. Thus Wilfred the Hairy claimed the counties of Barcelona and Narbonne. As agreed, he married the daughter of the count and countess of Flanders in a solemn ceremony. When he received the news, sent by the count of Flanders himself, the Frankish king confirmed Wilfred as count of Barcelona. The most significant event in Wilfred’s reign occurred shortly afterward, with the threat of a Muslim invasion. As the Frankish king could not offer him any military aid at the time, he was promised that if he singlehandedly defeated the Muslims, his descendants would have the right to inherit the county of Barcelona in perpetuity. After a heroic campaign, Wilfred vanquished the Muslims and claimed the county of Barcelona for his lineage. Wilfred’s heroism, purposefully recounted in the Gesta, bestows on the future Catalan counts not only the legitimacy of lineage but also the guarantee of political prestige. The last phrase of the tale is dedicated, significantly, to the foundation by the count of Barcelona, Wilfred the Hairy, of the monastery of Ripoll, where

Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium as Genealogy

the chronicle was written: “and Raoul, bishop of Urgell, first a monk of the monastery of Ripoll, which Wilfred undertook to construct.”26 The narrative of the legendary deeds in the Gesta has some claim to historical accuracy: the father of Wilfred the Hairy, erroneously called Wilfred in the Gesta, was actually Sunifred I, who had received Prades, in Conflent, as a gift from Charles the Bald (Charles le Chauve).27 Sunifred had had dealings with Salomon, a Frank who succeeded him as count of Urgell and Cerdanya in 848. In 870, Wilfred succeeded Salomon as count of Cerdanya and expelled the Muslims from the county of Vic.28 But the author of the text appears to be much more interested in the present in which he is deeply involved, the second half of the twelfth century, than in a remote past—the ninth century—that he knows about more from tradition than from extant documents.29 The anti-Frankish attitude that pervades the text corresponds to the twelfth-century context of King Alfonse the Chaste—who was obsessed with maintaining his independence from the Capetians and the counts of Toulouse—rather than to that of the ninth century. For that reason, Wilfred’s murderers are Frankish legates, the intruder Salomon is French, and the king of France is incapable of defeating the Muslims. This detail makes a crucial point at a moment when victories over the Muslims legitimized the annexation of their territories. At the same time, the whole text seems influenced by a desire to validate the independence of the counts of Barcelona from the French crown, as shown by the moral of the story: “This is how the honor of Barcelona passed from the royal power into the hands of our counts of Barcelona.”30 The Barcelona dynasty’s collective identity arises from a rejection of the Capetians. The details of Wilfred’s narrative reveal the reasons why the Gesta was written. As the first text designed to exalt the Barcelona dynasty, the Gesta strives to ensure the legitimacy of the founder of the lineage. The recurrence of verbs such as genuit (engendered) and successit (succeeded) attests to this, and the text alludes to deeds of arms that validate the desired political

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intention.31 The Gesta was written when Alfonse the Chaste had just come to the throne, united Catalonia, recovered Provence, annexed Roussillon, and organized the “Reconquista” against the Muslims. All that sovereign power had to be celebrated and its continuity assured. At the same time, the spread of the legal compilation called Usatges, though of limited impact, formed part of this strategy.32 In addition, the counts of Flanders play a central role in the Gesta. The founding marriage of the dynasty was made between Wilfred of Barcelona and the daughter of the count of Flanders. Protected by the count of Flanders and linked forever to his family, the count of Barcelona ensured his independence from the Franks while preserving a valuable link with the Carolingian monarchy, from whom the Flemish had received the crown. The connection with the Flemish genealogies of the second half of the twelfth century crops up again. In 1194, Lambert of Ardres, chaplain of the counts of Guines, completed his genealogy of that family.33 The founder of the Guines dynasty was Siegfried, a Scandinavian adventurer who seduced the daughter of the count of Flanders. She bore his illegitimate child, who was adopted by his brother-in-law, the boy’s maternal uncle.34 This is only one of several stories of Scandinavian warriors who seduced the count of Flanders’s daughter and were enemies of the king of France. The stories spread all over Europe by word of mouth.35 The most important aspect of their reception in Catalonia concerns the role played by the Flemish women. The Annales de Saint-Bertin, copies of which probably soon reached the Pyrenean monasteries, tell the story of the founder of the lineage of the counts of Flanders, Baudouin I Bras-de-Fer, who had married Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald. The union had been made without the king’s consent but had ensured the Carolingian descent of the house of Flanders through its women. This privileged descent makes everything possible, since the counts of Barcelona too had seduced a daughter of the count of Flanders.36 Both the counts of Guines and the counts of Barcelona followed the example of Baudouin I, who had abducted the daughter of Charles the Bald to produce, through her, de-

Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium as Genealogy

scendants who carried the prestigious Carolingian blood in their veins.37 The French chronicles and Flemish genealogies, having reached the libraries of the Catalan monasteries, became valuable material in the hands of the monks who wrote the historical texts prescribed by the monarchs. Those histories met with a particularly enthusiastic reception in the territories that emerged on the boundaries of the Carolingian empire in the far northwestern part of the empire. The Catalan Gesta was probably created in the same context, also on the borders of the empire, this time in the far southwestern part.38

The Genealogical Succession of the Counts of Barcelona Wilfred’s story, in the first and second chapters of the Gesta, contrasts with the rest of the text. They seem to be two different texts, especially if we consider form and style: the first is a narrative; the second, a schematic genealogy. After recounting Wilfred’s story, the narration becomes more and more diagrammatic and synthetic, showing the early stage in the writing of genealogical historiography within which we locate the Gesta, in comparison with other European genealogical narratives of the twelfth century such as those relating to the counts of Anjou. The third chapter focuses on the genealogical succession of the counts of Barcelona in the tenth century, one of the lesser known periods in the history of Catalonia.39 In fact, the compiler of this part of the Gesta seems to suffer from a lack of collective memory, because this chapter is the least reliable from the point of view of its historicity. The author omits Wilfred the Hairy’s first successor, his son Guifré Borrell (897–911), who was count in a time of both internal and external difficulties: the dominance of the Franks and the menace of the Muslims, respectively.40 Instead, the compiler mentions another of Wilfred’s sons, Miró, as a guarantor of the dynasty, who genuit Sunifred, the next count of Barcelona, “de quo proles nulla remansit” (Sunifred left no posterity).41 Thus, Sunifred’s brother Sunyer (911–47) inherited the title of count of Barcelona and passed it on to his son Borrell

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(947–92), who suffered the devastation of Barcelona by the ruler of the caliphate of Cordoba, Al-Mansuˆr (985). This date, notably, is the only chronological fact in the whole historical text. This chapter ends by highlighting the character of Borrell, because he engendered both the new count of Barcelona (Ramon Borrell, 992–1017) and the new count of Urgell, Ermengol. The repetition of the verb genuit is the grammatical and semantic key to this historical text and highlights its internal coherence and structure: Accordingly the Count Miró begot Sunifred, count of Barcelona, and Oliba, called “Cabreta,” count of Besalu and Cerdanya together, and Miró, bishop of Girona; but Miró died before his sons attained adulthood. His brother Sunyer ruled the counties until the latter’s nephew Sunifred grew up, but Sunifred left no posterity. Sunyer the brother of Miró begot Borrell and Ermengol, and Miró. Borrell, accordingly, succeeded his cousin Sunifred in the county of Barcelona; in the time of this Count Borrell the city of Barcelona was captured and devastated by the Muslims in the year of the Lord’s incarnation 985. And his brother Ermengol, killed in battle at Baltarga, died without a son. Likewise his brother Miró died without a son. Consequently, it was Borrell who begot the first Count Ermengol of Urgell, who died at Cordoba, as well as Ramon Borrell, count of Barcelona.42

All the facts narrated emphasize the notion of genealogical succession, and the counts are remembered for their capacity to render honor to their sons, rather than for their military deeds or political domination. The author ignores Wilfred the Hairy’s sons who did not have children, such as Guifré Borrell of Barcelona and Sunifred II of Urgell. Genealogical succession also determines the text’s internal structure as the compiler concludes this chapter and announces the configuration of the next chapters by following the different lineage branches of the family: But let us not yet speak of the generation of the counts of Besalú and Urgell, of which the start of the first was Oliba Cabreta and of the other was Ermengol of Cordoba; and let us first set forth the

Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium as Genealogy

generation of the counts of Barcelona, whose worthier and longer posterity still survives.43

The third chapter’s concluding paragraph marks the structure of the subsequent sections of the text: the fourth and fifth chapters center on the genealogical succession of the counts of Barcelona (eleventh and twelfth centuries); the sixth focuses on the count of Besalú (“Bisillunensem”); the seventh on the count of Cerdanya (“Cerritaniensem”); and the eighth on the count of Urgell (“Urgellensem”). In addition, the writer stresses the count of Barcelona’s superiority by explicitly mentioning his greater dignity and durability. This sentence also expresses the interest of the Gesta in the count-founders, Oliba Cabreta for the count of Besalú, and Ermengol for the count of Urgell. Only rarely does the Gesta disrupt the narrative of genealogical succession to highlight the role of certain characters. Oliba and Ermengol significantly open chapters 6, 7, and 8. The fourth chapter focuses on the eleventh century and opens with Count Berenguer, who was actually Berenguer Ramon I (1017–35), and who seems to have damaged the reputation of the lineage (“who of all his lineage thus far is said to have been the least worthy”).44 Berenguer genuit Ramon Berenguer I (1035–76), who consolidated the county of Barcelona by conquering the Muslims and engendering the next two counts: Ramon Berenguer II (1076–82) and Berenguer Ramon II (1082–97). The narration of the Gesta refers concisely to the dynastic turbulence of this period, its numerous murders and betrayals, characteristic of a period of intense feudal violence, and notes the remarkable presence of noble women in public life.45 Thus, stepson kills stepmother, and brother kills brother: “Pere Ramon murdered his stepmother Almodis, with the result that he died a penitent in Spain without a son; . . . Berenguer Ramon treacherously killed his brother Ramon Berenguer in the place called Perxa.”46 The difficult times are overcome by the next count, Ramon Berenguer III (1097–1131), whose marriage with Dolça leads to Catalan domination in Provence and inaugurates the complex policy of

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marriages and aggressive military strategy that will enable the remarkable expansion of Catalonia in the Mediterranean from the twelfth to the fifteenth century.47 The fifth chapter expands the narrative in relation to the earlier, strictly genealogical and schematic account. It narrates the story of Ramon Berenguer IV (1131–62), particularly his amazing success against the Moors. Differing in structure from the other chapters, it opens with praise for the count’s virtues: “This Ramon Berenguer the fourth, mighty in his admirable probity, wisdom, intellect, and counsel, achieved very great fame throughout the world.”48 The chronicler also praises him for his founding marriage, which finally provided the counts of Barcelona with the title of king: “For while still young he obtained the Aragonese kingdom with Urraca, the daughter of King Ranimir.”49 Ramon Berenguer IV appears here as the climax of the family story, and a significant number of details about his life and con­ quests support his critical position. He also conquered the towns of Tortosa, Lleida, and Fraga, among others, and for the first time the Gesta provides details of some of these conquests. In the battle for Tortosa, for instance, Ramon Berenguer defeated two hundred thousand soldiers. He also achieved an amazing victory in Almeria: “with marvelous vigor and audacity he invaded this town with only fifty-two armed knights against almost twenty thousand Muslims.”50 Yet more important for the chronicler is the marriage of Ramon Berenguer IV with Urraca, the daughter of Ramiro, the king of Aragon (1137), which opened the doors of the kingdom of Aragon to Ramon Berenguer’s successors. This is the last chapter specifically devoted to the county of Barcelona, and the author feels obliged to write a small conclusion to this section, which consists of a celebration of the addition of the title of king of Aragon to those already possessed by the counts of Barcelona: “His son Alfonse, who was called king, undertook to rule the kingdom of Aragon and the county of Barcelona.”51 Leaving aside the county of Barcelona, the next chapters center on the other three counties present in the Gesta: Besalú (chapter 6), Cerdanya (chapter 7), and Urgell (chapter 8). The

Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium as Genealogy

narration returns to the concise and schematic style of the third and fourth chapters, mentioning only the genealogical transmission of honor and the deeds strictly connected with this succession. Interestingly, the verb genuit, used until this passage of the text for the counts of Barcelona’s hereditary transmission, is replaced by the verb successit. Transmission becomes more passive, and emphasis is placed on the successor rather than on the antecessor: “As for the county of Cerdanya, Oliba Cabreta’s successor there was his son Wilfred, the brother of Bernat Tallaferro . . . Then to Wilfred succeeded his son Count Ramon Wilfred . . . Ramon Wilfred was succeeded by his two sons . . . To Guillem Ramon, then, succeeded his two sons.”52 The text ends with a conclusion parallel to the one in chapter 5, highlighting the figure of Ramon Berenguer IV as the claimant to the title of king of Aragon: “So to Ermengol of Castile succeeded his son Ermengol, who married the niece of the aforesaid Ramon Berenguer, count of Barcelona and prince of Aragon, who [Ermengol] lived even to our own days, most distinguished and famous.”53 Thus, the story of Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona and Ermengol of Urgell closes the narrative of the first version of the Gesta, completing the history of these ancient counties, one of which became the kingdom of Aragon in the next generation under King Alfonse the Chaste. The Gesta Comitum showcases the enormous potential of genealogy as historical genre, its active role in legitimizing social and political aspirations, and its ability to consolidate values in a tradition. Nevertheless, the hegemony of the genealogy as a historical genre in Catalonia will persist only two or three generations, replaced by autobiographies and chronicles by the end of the thirteenth century. The first step in this evolution was James I’s autobiography, a masterpiece of self-inscription into and as history.

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2 King James I and His Chivalric Autobiography E per tal que.ls hòmens coneguessen e sabessen, quan hauríem passada aquesta vida mortal, ço que nós hauríem feyt ajudan-nos lo Senyor poderós, leixam aquest libre per memòria. (And so that men may recognize and know, when we have passed this mortal life, the deeds that we have done with the help of the powerful Lord, we leave this book as a record.) « Llibre dels fets del rei en Jaume »

As with the Gesta Comitum, the context of the Llibre dels fets allows us to understand and interpret it adequately. James I the Conqueror came to the throne in 1213, at the age of five, after his father, Peter the Catholic (1196–1213), died at the battle of Muret at the hands of Simon de Montfort’s crusaders. His grandfather, Alfonse the Chaste, the first count-king of Aragon, had commissioned the writing of the Gesta Comitum and sponsored the activity of the troubadours in his Provençal court. James’s long reign (1213–76) was marked by an ambitious policy that laid the

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basis for the expansion of the Crown of Aragon, both in the peninsula against the Muslims and toward the sea along the western Mediterranean. Shortly after James’s death, around 1280, one of the fundamental texts of medieval Catalan historiography appeared: the autobiographical account titled El Llibre dels fets del rei en Jaume (The Book of the Deeds of King James).1 This was the first of the cycle of the Quatre Grans Cròniques (Four Great Chronicles) that the counts of Barcelona and kings of Aragon drafted over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to celebrate the deeds of their reigns. Deploying dramatic language to narrate James’s military conquests and gesta, the book’s interest lies not only in the obvious exceptionality of the genre chosen—rarely practiced in the Middle Ages, and unique among the kings—but also in its quality as a literary artifact, due to its exquisite literary Catalan. Questions of authorship, authority, and autobiography naturally rise in a text signed by a king, the book’s protagonist, narrator, and source of authority. We need to consider the possibility of collective authorship and examine whether we can classify James I as its author, considering that he probably dictated the book to his scribes. Other questions that arise include: Did the king himself design the text’s structure? Did he choose to write an autobiography? The circumstances around the writing of the Llibre dels fets explain James I’s decision to write an autobiography rather than a genealogy. The first half of the thirteenth century was a critical moment in the political and social history of medieval Catalonia. The political bases for territorial and commercial expansion in the Mediterranean were established with the collapse of the expansion in the south of France after the Catalan defeat at Muret.2 If the expansion into Provence had been based to a large extent on an effective marriage policy, the monarchs were now obliged to bring other mechanisms into play, some of them in the intellectual sphere, to achieve their ends.3 At the same time, the feudal model of the rural world was being abandoned and the court was established as the political and cultural cen-

King James I and His Chivalric Autobiography

ter;4 chivalric values were spreading;5 an urban patrician class increasingly committed to expansion was on the rise;6 cities were growing physically and demographically,7 strengthening their juridical and fiscal autonomy;8 and, last, the monarchy was being definitively consolidated as the political backbone of Catalan society.9 We can distinguish a clear parallel between Philip Augustus of France, the powerful conqueror of Bouvines, and James I, conqueror of Valencia and Majorca. Both monarchs imposed a style of government that attended to the new circumstances and had a clear expansive aim, which would affect all spheres of the societies they ruled over.10 Catalan literary scholars, such Jordi Bruguera, Josep M. Pujol, and Stefano Cingolani, have generally considered James I’s text a work of fiction that basically requires literary rather than historical analysis. But historians like Nicolau d’Olwer, Ferran Soldevila, and Robert Burns have always approached it as one of the foundational texts of Catalan historiography, reading it both as a historical document and a historiographical landmark. Yet they all agree that the Llibre dels fets, written at a time when autobiography was not an established genre, has remarkable literary value and invites us to consider the ways writing a life may support both personal legacies and political aims. The existence of this historical text in the collective memory of the Catalans through the ages, its historical quality and originality, and the remarkable nature of this autobiographical record oblige us to reexamine the text using contemporary critical approaches, in particular those that blend historiography with autobiography. To be sure, the Llibre dels fets differs radically in content, form, and narrative style from the two historical genres that existed previously in Catalonia (the eleventh-century annals and twelfthcentury genealogies). This chronicle should be analyzed from the perspective of autobiography, to engage the problem of authorship, applying a methodology that links historiography and literary criticism.11 Privileging the specifically autobiographical nature of the chronicle restores James I’s narrative to its rightful historical and literary place. As will become clear later in this

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chapter, James I’s chronicle should be read not in the context of the cycle of the contemporary French Grandes Chroniques, or as a continuation of the Catalan Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium, but rather as an account of the Crusades, a genre that became popular in Europe at the start of the thirteenth century.

The Personality of the Author: The King-Chronicler King James’s personal and public life was a series of successes and setbacks. It is difficult to know which of the “two Jameses” (the historical or the historiographical one) is more susceptible to romanticization as myth and hero. Indeed, the image we have of James I comes from the combination of information from his Llibre dels fets and the analysis of other documents of the time. Fortunately, much information about this king has been preserved, which allows us to compare the image of the “historical James” with the self-portrait that emerges from his autobiography. One of the most valuable complementary texts is Bernat Desclot’s enthusiastic (even idealized) and detailed description of James’s appearance and personality: This King of Aragon, James, was the most comely of all men and was greater in stature by a handbreadth than any other. And he was well favored and sound in all his limbs. And his countenance was broad and of a ruddy color and his nose was long and straight and his mouth large and well shaped. And he had large teeth, exceeding white, which seemed like pearls. And his eyes were black and his hair was bright as strands of gold. And he had broad shoulders and a tall and shapely body. And his arms were of goodly length and well formed and his hands were fair and his fingers slender. And he had strongly sinewed thighs and legs of great length and straightness and of large girth. And his feet were of goodly size and form and richly shod. And he was exceeding valiant and of mighty prowess in arms and bountiful in giving. And he was gentle towards all men and of great mercy. And his heart and soul were set on warfare with the Muslims.12

King James I and His Chivalric Autobiography

Extratextual proof supports the veracity of Desclot’s description. The king’s skull and skeleton, preserved in the Aragonese necropolis of Poblet, bear out some of the physical details provided by Desclot. In addition, a remarkable contemporary miniature of James has survived, showing him at about the age of sixty. This portrait depicts him as erect and still slender, his beard fashionably cropped and his relatively short hair now white.13 Modern historians agree with the medieval chronicler’s praises for King James. Robert Burns describes James I as “truly stupor mundi: a formidable administrator; a central figure in the evolution of Europe’s universities, public finance, and the legal renaissance; a brilliant winner in the endless military debate on land and sea with Islam (when the crusaders elsewhere were declining from bad to ever worse); and in his own way an imposing literary presence.”14 Ruler, knight, and scholar, he had a hazardous but cosmopolitan education, as reflected in his autobiography. Interestingly, if we did not have the historical documents to support his claims, we would likely consider many details of his narrative legends or self-aggrandizing inventions. Born at Montpellier, James I was Provençal in both language and temperament. The urban atmosphere of Barcelona, the political center of his kingdom, influenced his manner of governance, based on his pact with the rapidly-developing Catalan city and prosperous merchants. His kingdom was one of contrasts: on the one hand, he oversaw the commercial activity in the Catalan areas dominated by merchants and urban patricians; on the other, he supported the life in the pastoral uplands of Aragon with its rural nobles. His dramatic childhood prepared him for a long, hard, and brave life as a king. Separated from his parents at the age of three to become the political pawn of Simon de Montfort at Carcassonne, he was traumatically orphaned at six with his pious mother’s death in Rome, his father having died in battle a year earlier. Raised by the Knights Templar at their castle headquarters of Monzón in Upper Aragon, he learned from them a military and ascetic lifestyle. The boy-king’s

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poverty-stricken kingdom was split among factions, and he was the object of assassination plots and bore the pressure of a wicked uncle who coveted the throne. These early experiences gave James the strength and determination that he would need later in his reign to impose his authority on the Aragonese and Catalan nobles; to establish order in his realm; to conquer Majorca in a brilliant amphibious campaign; to lead a crusade to subjugate the Islamic Valencia; to subdue Murcia for Castile; and to reform urban institutions and administer his territories efficiently. The years of James’s youth were marked by constant squabbles between the higher nobles who jockeyed for position and influence. Humiliated in his first campaign against the Muslims at Peníscola in 1225, he turned against the nobles in Aragon, with whom he came to terms in 1227, and the count of Urgell, whose power he diminished in 1228. The conquest of Majorca in 1229 gave James the necessary reputation in and outside his kingdom to impose his authority over the nobles and cities. In the next decade, James focused on the conquest of Valencia, which finally fell in 1238. The forties, fifties, and sixties witnessed the consolidation of the former conquests, especially those of the Balearic islands and the region of Valencia, the failure to halt the advance of Capetian influence in the south of France (with the treaty of Corbeil in 1258), and the conquest of Murcia in 1266. But things went badly for James I after Murcia. His expedition to the Holy Land in 1269 was a failure. In the 1270s, he overcame the revolts of several of his barons. James I died in July 1276, in the middle of a campaign for a new pacification of Valencia, which he had labored so long to conquer and which was now as insecure as ever. James I’s reign is remembered in Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia for advances in administrative practice, development of the juridical status of the cities, reestablishment of Roman law, an increasing sophistication in methods of taxation, the political use of parliament and courts, the expansion of Mediterranean trade and shipbuilding, social stabilization, and the beginnings and first consolidation of Dominicans, Franciscans, and Merce-

King James I and His Chivalric Autobiography

darians. In addition, in what might perhaps be considered the most original and durable of his contributions, he left a unique literary treasure, his own autobiography, the Llibre dels fets.

The Content of the Chronicle: A Chivalresque Autobiography At some point in his eventful reign, James decided to write an account of his experiences. The extended time of composition of the narrative (it was written between 1244 and 1274) did not, however, impair the chronicle’s unity, guaranteed by the presence of a single author/character, the coherence of his literary style, and the continuity of the central themes.15 In elegant and grandiloquent Catalan, the king states at the beginning of the book his reasons for writing his memoir: And so that men may recognize and know when we have passed this mortal life, the deeds that we have done with the help of the powerful Lord, in whom is the true Trinity, we leave this book as a record for those who might wish to hear of the mercies that our Lord has shown us and to give an example to all the other men of this world, so that they should do as we have done: to place their faith in this Lord Who is so powerful.16

Traditionally, the Llibre dels fets has been read through a prism of moral and religious motivation based on the tone of the introduction, which, nonetheless, was almost certainly incorporated into the text by a court official after the monarch’s death.17 James does reveal his moral imperative when he quotes his patron, the Saint James the Apostle, who affirms in his epistle that “faith, without works, is dead” ( James 2:17). James I sought to illustrate with his narrative the central purpose of his life: to affirm his Christian faith with deeds.18 In the text, the king strives to justify his actions and, at the same time, leave a permanent record of his heroic, chivalric nature. For that reason, James I writes about how he devoted his entire life to making his God-given talents bear fruit through the exercise of his power. However, the epic tone that dominates the narrative indicates that there is more

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than a moralizing motivation to this text. Medieval historiography was a powerful instrument in the service of political objectives, and King James took advantage of this potential.19 The autobiography consists of 566 chapters that cover James I’s life and reign, from the time of his conception to his death. The opening chapters focus on the king’s recent dynastic predecessors, in particular on the betrothal of his parents, Peter the Catholic and Maria (the daughter of Count William of Montpellier), and give an account of his conception, birth, childhood, adolescence, and marriage. The description of the king’s conception is one of the most memorable stories in the autobiography. This account contains all the characteristics of legend and in fact functions as the basis for the multiple interpretations and recreations in future Catalan historical narration. In contrast to the more elaborate, later versions of the story, James I tells it with remarkable simplicity: Our father, King Don Peter, did not wish to see the queen, our mother. And it happened that one time the King, our father, was at Lattes, and the queen, our mother, was at Mireval. But a noble by the name of Guillem of Alcalá came to the King and besought him so insistently that he persuaded him to go to Mireval, where the queen, our mother, was staying. That night when they were both at Mireval, Our Lord willed that we should be conceived.20

There is nothing here of the dramatic mythification that we find in Desclot’s and Muntaner’s more elaborate versions of this conception story (which will be discussed in later chapters), but at the same time the narrator does not hesitate to highlight the providential nature of the fact of his conception. But James harnesses more literary and legendary symbolism in the explanation of the choice of his name by his mother, shortly after his birth: “And she ordered twelve candles to be made, all of equal size and measure, and had them all lit at the same time. On each one she placed the name of an apostle, and she promised Our Lord that whichever candle burned longest would be the name we would receive. And that of Saint James lasted a full three

King James I and His Chivalric Autobiography

fingers breadth longer than the others. Thus, for this reason, and through the grace of God, we have the name James.”21 We might ask whether this charming story might have been included because the author felt the need to explain the choice of a rather non-traditional Catalan or Aragonese king’s name. Also, in any case, this incident supports the king’s lifelong devotion to Saint James and provides a deep Catholic perspective for his decisions and actions throughout his life. The artlessness of these stories of James’s childhood vanishes when the author recounts his father’s death during the battle of Muret at the height of the Albigensian crusade. The narrative introduces an epic atmosphere and tone that characterize the remainder of the Llibre dels fets, beginning with this passage: “And our father died there, since it has always been the custom of our line, in the battles they have fought and in which we shall fight, that either we must win or die.”22 After his father’s death, James was retained at the court of Carcassonne until the age of six, there receiving his first education. Soon after, he was taken to Monzón (Aragon), where he trained during his teenage years under the Knights Templar. Then the king describes the difficult early years of his reign, when the Catalan and Aragonese nobles took advantage of his youth to seize more power. As was customary at that time, he participated in the double ceremony of knighthood and marriage to Leonor, daughter of the king of Castile, at the age of thirteen.23 James guilelessly observes then that because of his youth, “we were a full year with her without being able to do what men should do with their wives, because we were not old enough.”24 This type of commentary illustrates one of the specific characteristics of the Llibre dels fets, as the king unpretentiously blends the description of epic events with the revelation of private thoughts or matters. The chronicle becomes more dramatic as James participates more actively in court life and decisions, and it continues with the passionate report of the tensions and agreements between the king and the nobles of the kingdom. James’s superiority and authority over the nobles are best demonstrated in the accounts

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of battles. For example, the king reports that he once forced a knight to dismount from his horse because of his cowardice in battle and disloyalty toward his lord, who was abandoned and taken prisoner by the Muslims. The king makes a quick decision in the heat of the battle: Now we said to him: “and were you with the commander?” And he said: “Aye, lord.” “And how is it that you have dared to come here, if your lord has been taken? And with your crossbow armed against us you come to us? It would have been better if you had fired at the Muslims than against us.” And we said to him: “You foul-smelling villain, how could you abandon your lord? If you had been taken, you could have got out of prison for one hundred and fifty or two hundred sous. Yet you have abandoned him and the field! By Christ, you can never have done a worse thing! Dismount from your horse.” And he said: “Lord, why must I dismount?” And we said to him: “Because of what you have done. Then we took away his horse, his purpoint, his iron cap, and his crossbow, and we left him with nothing but a gonella [the tunic worn under the hauberk], and he followed behind us on foot.25

After dealing with the contentious Catalan and Aragonese nobles, the king embarked upon the conquests of Majorca and Valencia, events that remain fixed in Catalan tradition as James I’s most glorious deeds. The epic language increases in this section as descriptions of battles are interspersed with accounts of internal politics and personal or domestic affairs. The author juxtaposes scenes of cruelty with those of tenderness. For example, the king who placed a Muslim knight’s head in a catapult and launched it into the enemy’s camp26 later tends to a Catalan knight injured in the leg by an arrow, swiftly pulling the arrow out of the wound and immediately seeking to stem the flow of blood.27 The king is also moved by the swallow that built her nest on the pole of his tent,28 shows signs of fatigue,29 and uses the cheerful effects of wine as an aid to political negotiations when meeting with the Muslims.30 The king writes in detail about his injuries, perhaps in an attempt to heighten the sense of historical veracity, heroic action,

King James I and His Chivalric Autobiography

and dramatic realism. His description of a head wound caused by the Muslims is especially moving: As we returned from there with the men, we turned our head to the town to keep an eye on the Muslims, as there was a great company outside; and a crossbowman fired at us, and running through the brim of the helmet and the hood of mail, the arrow hit us, near our forehead. By the will of God, the arrow did not go right through our head, but the point drove halfway into my forehead. And we, because of the anger that we felt, gave such a blow to the arrow that we broke it; and the blood was running down our face. Yet we wiped the blood off, with the silk cloak that we were wearing.31

The account closes with the king’s heroic reaction: “And we went along laughing so that the army would not be alarmed.”32 The injury caused him the loss of his sight for some days (“Our entire face and our eyes swelled up so much that we could not see out of the eye on the wounded side of our face for four of five days”), and he bore a scar for the rest of his life. Indeed, this skull wound would help investigators identify James I’s remains in 1835, after the monastery of Poblet, the king’s Aragonese necropolis, was sacked and the royal tombs despoiled. Though they are not the central concern of the chronicle, James speaks in significant detail about political strategy and diplomatic negotiations. The description of the meeting with his nobles in Tarragona to prepare the conquest of Majorca (chapter 47) and his address to the Cort (Parliament) in Barcelona in 1228 (chapter 48) gives us valuable information about the system of pactisme, the basis for the political and military program of Mediterranean Catalan expansion.33 The conquest was propelled by the nobles and merchants, who tried to convince the king of the value of this investment for two reasons: the first, because you and we will increase our worth [economic benefits]; the second, because it will seem a marvelous thing to all who hear about this conquest, for you will have taken a land and Kingdom in the sea [military and political benefits].34

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They persuaded the king, who recognized that the initiative was not of his own doing (“we are very happy at this idea of yours”), but who was going to give all of his support and energy (“as we are moved to do it, it shall not remain unaccomplished”).35 The king consistently presents himself as a leader of his troops who earns his authority in battle rather than in the negotiations and conspiracies in the court. The scene that takes place at dawn on the day fixed for the assault on Majorca exemplifies this self-representational strategy. Mass had been celebrated in the early hours and all the commanders and soldiers had received the Body of Christ in communion. The knights and barons were ready with their weapons as dawn was breaking. The king then approached the foot soldiers standing in front of the knights and, exercising his royal authority but expressing his humanity at the same time, exhorted them in his powerful voice thus: “Let us go, barons, forward we march in the name of our Lord.” Despite this urgent order, the king notes, no one moved, not a single knight or a single baron. James was extremely disturbed: for the first time in his life, his orders were not followed. He then appealed to the Virgin: the sole reason they were there was to take the land from the Muslims so that the sacrifice of her Son could be celebrated in the Mass; hence she would have to intercede before her Son so that He would grant them the glory of victory. Then he exhorted the barons and knights once again:36 “Come, barons, in the name of God, why hesitate?” He repeated this incitement three times, and it was not until the third time that the barons began to advance “step by step.” The soldiers began to shout “Holy Mary! Holy Mary!” louder and louder as they repeated the invocation. It was not until the knights began to move forward that the soldiers ceased their cries. Five hundred foot soldiers entered the city and were cruelly challenged by the Muslims. The appalled king recounts that the soldiers were attacked so violently that they would all have been killed had the knights not arrived in the city. It was then that the Muslims—so they told the king after the battle—saw a white horse in armor at the head of the Catalan and Aragonese cavalry. The king ex-

King James I and His Chivalric Autobiography

plains that “according to his belief ” this was Saint George, since he had heard numerous stories in which Christians and Muslims had seen the saint in battle. The king does not dwell on this episode, however, but continues by reporting that the Christians conquered the city not because of mystical visions but through their valor in combat against the Muslims, who fled from them in fear.37 In order to stress the king’s auctoritas and consolidate his reputation as a knight, the Llibre dels fets carefully describes all those military actions in which the king emerges strengthened. Of the three main concerns in the chronicle—military prowess, religious feeling, and everyday scenes—the first undoubtedly is the most prevalent. James I is engaged in what he considers a divinely required mission and thus uses all the means at his disposal to accomplish it.38 Reading the chronicle closely, we observe the growth of his talent as a strategist and his maturity as a knight. But the narrative’s greatest dramatic action lies in the numerous accounts of the king’s role in battle, the storming of castles, and conquests of strongholds. In the heat of the fight, James does not exempt even his closest friends from heroic behavior. In one of the skirmishes in the Majorca campaign, the king recounts how he encountered Guillem de Mediona, of whom it was said that there was no finer knight in the whole of Catalonia. Guillem was bleeding pro­ fusely from the mouth, and the king asked him why he was leaving the battlefield. The knight replied that he had been wounded by a stone, to which James answered angrily that any good knight, after receiving a blow, must not retreat but become even more enraged and take up the combat with renewed force. The king emphasized his vehement point by seizing the reins of Guillem’s horse, an action that undoubtedly heightens the expressiveness of the scene.39 With that simple but dramatic story, the king places the value of his prestige above that of the life of the “best knight in Catalonia.” However, the rhythm of the narrative is so fast and furious that the encounter ends with a laconic phrase that shows both the ferocity of the action and the knight’s

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obedience to his lord: “and in a moment, as we have seen, he had disappeared.”40 The king participates actively in the battlefield, organizing (and occasionally berating) his knights. When the need arises, he intervenes personally in the battle, incurring the reproof of his finest knights for his rashness. Ramon de Montcada respectfully reproaches him for having placed not only his own life in jeopardy but the lives of all his knights; but the noble Guillem de Montcada intervenes, in an aristocratic and unforgettable dialogue, to defend the king’s action because, despite having committed an act of madness, he has shown that for such a great lord it is worth losing one’s life.41 James I did not need to justify his conquests of Valencia and Majorca, because they came under the general program of the war of the Universitas Christiana against Islam. However, it was clear that consolidating his public image would strengthen his later projects of expansion in the Mediterranean. At the same time, James could not forget that the Aragonese world had become one of the fronts opened by the aggressive policy of the Capetians, who were confronting the Plantagenets in the west, the Holy Roman Empire in the east, and the Catalan-Aragonese monarchy in the south through the Albigensian crusade. The Capetians’ ambition involved a greater political aspiration: to connect themselves to the emperor Charlemagne. The Aragonese dynasty was, in its turn, trying to confirm the monarchic identity that it had acquired only recently. All these circumstances point to the power of the text to mythologize the past and forge traditions that provide the most effective weapon for the consolidation of political constructions. Also included in the Llibre dels fets are the king’s addresses to the Corts in Barcelona, Lleida, and Zaragoza, his secret meetings with Catalan and Aragonese nobles, the pacts with the nobility and the clergy, the behavior of the king and his troops before and after a battle, the king’s reactions to the death of his knights in battle, his chivalric treatment of the knights who accompanied him into battle, the evening he spent with his wife

King James I and His Chivalric Autobiography

before a battle, the frequent moving words of praise addressed to his troops honoring their courage, the pacts he signed with the Muslims after his various conquests, his confessions made to the Dominican Arnau of Segarra, the long Murcia campaign, the preparations with the king of Castile, the Master of the Knights Hospitaller, and the pope for a crusade to the Holy Land (which was ultimately canceled), and the storm that raged during a voyage he made to Majorca and his miraculous rescue. Love for Catalonia, similar to that expressed by Muntaner and King Peter in the later Catalan chronicles, underscores James’s autobiography but appears most explicitly when the king has to face the Aragonese nobles who do not want to collaborate with his projects: And by the faith that we owe to God, since those of Catalonia, which is the best Kingdom of Spain, the most honored and the most noble, because there are four Counts there . . . and there are nobles, and for every one there may be here [in Aragon] there are four in Catalonia, and for every knight here, five in Catalonia, and for every cleric here there are ten in Catalonia, and for every honored Citizen here there are five in Catalonia, and since those of the most noble land of Spain . . .42

The closing chapters of the Llibre des fets record James’s terminal illness, his advice to his son Peter the Great, his final instructions to his court, and his renunciation of all his possessions when he took holy orders at Cîteaux. The last four lines, the only ones in the chronicle written in the third person, briefly recount his death: And some days afterwards, when we intended to go to Poblet and to serve the mother of God in that place, and we had already left Alzira, and were in Valencia, our illness became worse. And it pleased Our Lord that we should not complete the said journey that we wished to make. And here in Valencia, in the year 1276, on the sixth of the kalends of August, the noble James, by the grace of God, King of Aragon, and of Majorca, and of Valencia, Count of Barcelona and

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of Urgell, passed from this world: Cuius anima, per misericordiam Dei, sine fine requiescant in pace. Amen.43

The change of grammatical person in the last sentence of the chronicle is a rhetorical device that heightens the historical legitimacy of James I as an author, who had to cede the account of his death to another. Among James’s many talents, perhaps the greatest was his ability to tell a compelling story. His vivid images make his autobiography a dynamic and dramatic document. He edits, colors, and structures the narrative of his own deeds, transforming them from experience into literary legend. To his fame as king and soldier, we also add his remarkable narrative vision. As Burns concludes, highlighting the way the author’s articulation of his extraordinary life was organized into a coherent text, “only an artist could have conceived James’s disordered life as a singleminded service to almighty God.”44

3 Bernat Desclot: The Historian and His Chronicle Lo comte de Barcelona, lo mellor cavaller, e del pus alt llinyatge qui sia e al món. (The count of Barcelona, the most excellent knight and of the highest lineage in all the world.) « b e r n a t d e s c l o t , Crònica »

Bernat Desclot’s Crònica (Chronicle), officially titled Llibre del rey en Pere de Aragó e dels seus antecessors passats (Book of King Peter of Aragon and of His Ancestors), was written in Catalan from 1283 to 1288, shortly after the Catalan victory of the Sicilian Vespers in 1282. Composed of 168 chapters, it opens with a description of the circumstances that led to the union of the county of Barcelona and the kingdom of Aragon and continues with legendary stories from the time of the counts of Barcelona, Ramon Berenguer III and Ramon Berenguer IV, and the kings of Aragon, Alfonse the Chaste and Peter the Catholic. Desclot centers the narrative on the reign of James I the Conqueror, from chapter 11 to chapter 73: beginning with a physical description of

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the king and an account of his moral qualities, he chronicles the king’s struggles against the Aragonese nobility; the conquest of Peniscola, Majorca, and Valencia; the conflict with Castile for the domination of Navarre; the problems with Sicily and the battles between Charles of Anjou and the Hohenstaufen; the Murcia campaign; and, finally, the king’s death. Desclot then continues with the account of the magnificent deeds of his central character, Peter the Great (1274–85), particularly his expeditions to Tunisia and Sicily, from chapter 74 to chapter 168. This detailed account transformed Peter the Great into a medieval celebrity whose reputation extended beyond Iberia: Dante praises him in his Purgatorio, and he appears in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing. Just as the Gesta Comitum was produced in the context of the growing power of the count-kings of Barcelona during the second half of the twelfth century, and the Llibre dels fets promoted and justified James I’s political and military expansion in the second half of the thirteenth century, Desclot’s chronicle must be located in one of the rising moments of the Crown of Aragon at the end of the thirteenth century, during the reign of Peter the Great. King Peter was thirty-six when he became king in 1274. The length of his father’s reign allowed him an extended training in political, military, and diplomatic affairs, as Desclot describes at length. The succession from King James I to Peter marks a transition from the peninsular expansion of Catalonia (culminating in the conquest of Valencia) to the Mediterranean. This intentional shift is evident not only on the battlefield but also in diplomatic and marriage strategies. James I prepared the first step of the Mediterranean expansion by arranging the marriage between his son, Crown Prince Peter, with Constance, the daughter of Manfred, the king of Sicily. This union provoked suspicion and reticence on the part of both Louis IX of France and Charles of Anjou, the count of Provence. Charles viewed this strategy as a threat to the possessions of the house of Anjou in the south of Italy and as a hindrance to his desire for expansion to Sicily. The rivalry between the houses of Barcelona and Anjou

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is one of the chronicle’s pivotal themes, and Desclot engages this epic event (the Catalan conquest of Sicily in 1282), of enormous resonance in Catalan history, memory, and tradition, in detail. Desclot’s chronicle comprises three central narratives: first, stories connected with the history of the count-kings of Barcelona in the twelfth century, specifically of Ramon Berenguer IV (chapters 1–10); second, tales that describe the reign of James I the Conqueror (chapters 11–73); and third, accounts of the reign of Peter the Great (chapters 74–168). Each of these three parts has, significantly, a predominant source. The section on the first count-kings of Barcelona is based on four tales, with primarily legendary sources: the tale of Guillem Ramon de Montcada and his decisive intervention in the foundation of the Catalan-Aragonese dynasty; the story of the events that led the conception of James I, the king labeled “Con­queror” because of his repeated victories against the Moors (1207); the description of the important battle of Ubeda or Navas de Tolosa (1212); and, finally, the story of the “bon comte” (good count) of Barcelona, Ramon Berenguer IV, and the empress of Ger­many, that confirmed the right of the count of Barcelona to claim Provence. The second part, the section on James I, utilizes primarily historiographical sources: oral epic poems that relate the conquest of Majorca, popular tales, and other historical chronicles of the time. Most of these historical texts have been lost, and though remnants have been found, there is insufficient evidence to develop a comprehensive evaluative comparison of this part of the chronicle. Apart from these historiographical sources, Desclot also used, exceptionally, the legendary tale of the first conquest of Majorca (1114) and some archival records. Finally, the third part, on the reign of Peter the Great, builds upon an eclectic combination of personal memories, oral narrative, and, more specifically, chancellery records—royal orders, diplomatic treaties, chancellery letters. Some critics maintain that Desclot had access to the latter source because of his position in the king’s court.1

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In 2006, Stefano Cingolani published the results of his exhaustive research on Desclot’s chronicle, analyzing it chapter by chapter, and, interestingly, comparing the final version of the text with a draft he had discovered.2 Cingolani’s study provides us with new ways to engage Desclot’s chronicle. His serendipitous discovery of Desclot’s first draft—which precedes the version Miquel Coll i Alentorn used for his edition of the Crònica—has altered our historiographical perception of this text and its author’s role as a historiographer. Comparing the versions allows us to better understand the rules of historical writing at that time: the approach to sources and how these were sought and employed, the processes of selection and distribution of historical information, and the very act of historiographical creation, from the first draft to its revision, transformation, and rewriting, owing to changing literary criteria or ideological positions.3

The Author: The Chronicler of the Royal Chancellery Little is known of Bernat Desclot’s life apart from the fact that he wrote one of the central chronicles of medieval Catalan history. He refers to himself only twice in the chronicle: at the beginning, in the first sentence of the book, when he declares himself the author (“Here begins the book that Bernat Desclot has dictated and written”),4 and in chapter 159, where he testifies as a witness to one of the most dramatic events in the text, when the king is wounded by an arrow in battle (“This is a testimony of him who is telling this in this book, who saw the king’s saddle and the iron that stayed there”).5 The dearth of information about the chronicle’s author has led to much critical speculation. For instance, Desclot may or may not have been someone called Bernat Escrivà, a member of the Royal Chancellery.6 It is indeed ironic that one of the greatest medieval historians, primarily responsible for our knowledge and understanding of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Catalan and western Mediterranean history, has himself  been erased from history. His name has not been found in any of the records of

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the time, in contrast to those of other Catalan historians and chroniclers of the period such as Ramon Muntaner, James I, and Peter IV, about whom we have abundant information. This speaks eloquently of Desclot’s desire to disappear as an author, leaving the chronicle’s characters to take center stage in the narration. Paradoxically, then, though Desclot the man is almost wholly concealed in the narrative, his authorial intentions clearly shape the plot, particularly in his emphasis on the deeds of the Aragonese kings. Desclot succeeds as a historian who carefully collates his information with the available documentation. He had access to the Royal Chancellery archives and quotes extensively from diplomatic letters. This suggests that he was a servant of the court rather than a soldier or monk, a detail that sets him apart from the other authors analyzed here—the monks of the Gesta, Ramon Muntaner the knight, or James the Conqueror and Peter the Ceremonious. In fact, Bernat Escrivà, the man Coll i Alentorn believes is the author of the chronicle, served in James I’s and Peter’s courts as royal treasurer, among other high positions, and died in 1289.7 In any case, whatever his identity, the author proves himself a worthy historian, capable of writing a long, linear, and coherent narrative of historical and literary interest.

The Historicization of Legendary Tales Desclot’s purpose in writing history, as he explains at the beginning of the book, is to narrate the “mighty battles and great deeds of arms and wondrous conquests against the Muslims and divers other peoples of the noble kings of Aragon who were of the high lineage of the count of Barcelona.”8 He wants to tell us the great feyts—fets, the facts, the events, the deeds—and conquests of the kings of Aragon and counts of Barcelona. He bases his account on three sources: legends, historical texts, and chancellery records. Interestingly, he deploys legends in the same manner in which he engages the two other sources, as though they were reliable documents that he can use uncritically. Desclot refers to

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his sources generically, at the beginning of some chapters, with expressions such as “tells the story” (“diu lo comde”),9 but there is no other attempt to verify the information he uses.10 His deployment of these sources depends not on coherent criteria but on the needs of his narrative. In the first ten chapters of his chronicle, he harnesses legends to support the claim of the grandeur of Catalonia. He recounts three tales that reveal his special talent in historicizing legendary sources: Guillem Ramon de Montcada’s story (chapters 1–3), the conception of James I (chapter 4), and the legend of the “bon comte de Barcelona” (chapters 7–10).11 The first story centers on Guillem Ramon de Montcada. This knight played a decisive role in the marriage of the count of Barcelona, Ramon Berenguer IV, and the princess of Aragon, Petronella, by convincing Aragonese nobles of the suitability of the count as their new king. The marriage in 1137 granted the counts of Barcelona the title of kings of Aragon, and this turning point lives on in the Catalan collective memory as one of the founding events of Catalan history. The significance of this marriage for the history of Catalonia must not be underestimated: the counts of Barcelona, who were the primus inter pares among the other Catalan counts, now also became kings of the neighboring kingdom of Aragon. They continued to live in Barcelona, promoting and boosting the military and commercial Mediterranean expansion of Catalonia. The title of king justified their aggressive expansion policy. The important chronicles spread in Catalonia between the end of the thirteenth century to the midfourteenth century—James I’s autobiography, Desclot’s chronicle, Muntaner’s testimony, and Peter the IV’s autobiography— provided theoretical support and narrative justification for this policy, enacted in a competitive European imperialist context in which other lineages such as the Plantagenet, the Capetian, the Angevin, and the Hohenstaufen were emerging.12 Guillem Ramon de Montcada’s prominent lineage gives Desclot an excuse for including the story of the founding marriage between the count of Barcelona and the princess of Aragon.13 Yet “Guillem Ramon de Montcada” was not a single person but a composite of two knights of the same name, unified in popular

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imagination through, on the one hand, a legend preserved by the troubadours and, on the other, information provided by the archives of the monks of the monastery of Santes Creus.14 The rhetorical strategy of transforming two historical figures into one epic character is well known in other cultural traditions.15 The legend was in all probability created by a monk of Santes Creus—where a certain “Guillem Ramon” was buried—and spread by poets in a versified form that was adapted by Desclot as the opening story of his chronicle. The text’s assonant rhymes, Ferran Soldevila points out, suggest that Desclot rewrote epic poetry into historical prose, to celebrate Catalonia’s glory.16 Literary scholars today are generally skeptical about the existence of Catalan cançons de gesta (epic songs) and have reexamined the function of this legend in the entire chronicle.17 Comparing the first and the second version of Desclot’s chronicle, Cingolani concludes that the Montcada story was probably based on the Castilian “Crónica latina de los reyes de Castilla” (Latin Chronicle of the Kings of Castile), noting, at the same time, its strong political and ideological dimension. To generate an account of military conquest and lineage, Desclot harnessed this legend as an effective frame for the story of the foundation of the Catalan-Aragonese dynasty.18 As proof of the power of historians in thirteenth-century Catalonia, we note that Desclot actually established the legend, as his version of the Guillem Ramon story became the official source for this account until the fifteenth century in both literary verse and historical prose: Flos Mundi by Bernat Mallol (c. 1407) and the Llibre de les nobleses dels reis by Francesc (c. 1450).19 Desclot therefore not only appropriated a legend but also recreated it.20 This original historicization of the founding marriage creating the Catalan-Aragonese alliance granted authority and power to future and more elaborate versions. Once more, a concise historical narration opens the door to imaginative recreations of the same event, as Vivian Galbraith posits about the English historical tradition.21 Anthropologists have noted the mythical dimension of founding marriages. Medieval Catalan historiography has an outstanding example in the figure of the first count of Barcelona,

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Wilfred the Hairy, narrated in the Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium, as I explained in chapter 1. The choice and manipulation of the Montcada story gives Desclot the same tool that the writer of the Gesta Comitum employed a hundred years earlier: the parallels between the founding figure of Wilfred the Hairy, the first count of Barcelona, and Ramon Berenguer IV, the first count-king of Barcelona and Aragon, are evident. In a radical transformation, the knight Guillem Ramon de Montcada shifts from a murderer—by some accounts—to the central character in the foundation of the Catalan and Aragonese kingdom.22 His claim to fame lies in managing to convince Aragonese nobles of the advantages of a marriage between their princess and Ramon Berenguer IV: “I counsel you to give her to him, because he is the count of Barcelona, the most excellent knight and the most virtuous and of the highest lineage in all the world.”23 The fictional story of Guillem Ramon’s exile to the Aragonese court and his contribution to the marriage illustrates the supremacy of the Catalan nobility over the Aragonese. This justifies the count of Barcelona’s claim to the title of king before the Aragonese nobles, in the same manner that the Catalan barons accepted Wilfred as a count after determining his identity.24 When Guillem Ramon asks Ramon Berenguer to accept the marriage with the Aragonese princess, the count responds that he prefers to retain the title of count and will not claim the title of king but will pass it on to his son: “I accept the damsel, albeit I wish not to be called king as long as I live. For now am I one of the greatest counts of the earth, and if I were to be called king, then would I not be among the greatest but rather the least of them.”25 This detail reveals Desclot’s purpose: to emphasize the magnificence and nobility of the count of Barcelona and, by extension, the superiority of Catalonia over Aragon. The story of the founding marriage between Ramon Berenguer IV and Petronella is not the only story embellished by Desclot that led to further legends. The second tale, the narrative of the conception of James I, produced even more versions.26 This episode had been narrated for the first time by James I himself,

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in his Llibre dels fets, with remarkable sobriety. James I probably adapted this tale from the Arthurian or Carolingian cycle, where the story of conjugal substitution typically heightened the mythical dimension of a king’s or count’s birth. This is the case of the poem Berte aus grans pies, which tells the story of Charlemagne’s birth; the legend of Tristan that includes the substitution of Isolda for Brangiana; the conception of Galeas in Lancelot; and the tale of Merlin in connection with King Arthur’s birth.27 Desclot builds freely on James I’s straightforward narrative to construct a story where the king’s conception becomes a key to the survival of the Catalan-Aragonese dynasty. Briefly, Desclot’s version runs as follows: Peter the Catholic refused to see his wife, Maria, as he was involved with another woman in Montpellier. Maria, aware that she needed to conceive a son to preserve the dynasty, plotted with a butler to be in the king’s bed one night, when he was actually expecting his mistress. That evening, after a splendid banquet with his knights, Peter retired to his chamber. Maria did not speak much during the night, fearful she would be discovered.28 At dawn, she revealed her identity and ordered Peter to write down the day and the hour of their meeting, because nine months later their son would be born.29 Out of these bare facts, Desclot harnesses historical imagination and narrative eloquence to exalt a national hero. Desclot’s version of James I’s conception became a foundational story in Catalonian literary and historical tradition. Some poets wrote verse versions of the account, making it accessible to more people; Lombard’s jongleurs sang about it.30 Historical texts of the fourteenth century also recreated the scene. Thirty years after Desclot’s chronicle, Ramon Muntaner produced a more complex version of the story. In that account, the entire community of Montpellier participated in the event. The people prayed during an entire week for the success of Peter’s deception; Masses were celebrated in honor of the Virgin Mary; the Saturday before the encounter between Maria and Peter was declared a day of fasting. In Muntaner’s version, the role of the butler is played by that of the barons of the city, who organize

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the replacement of the mistress by Maria and pray outside the bedroom door with lighted candles. They enter the room in the morning and inscribe a notarized act of witness to the event. Afterward, the people of Montpellier protect Maria until the baby’s birth, a custom of the time, to safeguard her child from the accusation of illegitimacy.31 Martin Aurell notes that the story’s success stems from its potential to be read on three levels: it is, at once, exciting folklore, a portrait of urban life, and a testimony to religious faith. The story’s folkloric character arises from the incorporation of numerous signs with mythical resonances: the extraordinary circumstances around the hero’s birth, the deception at the conjugal substitution, and the memories of seasonal rituals (the action is set on May 1, the traditional date for fictional marriages). Its urban appeal lies in the activities of the people of Montpellier, especially its consuls, citizens, and representatives. In this version, the principal character is not a single person, like the butler in Desclot’s account, but an entire community that schemes and prays. The narrative’s religious component lies in the supernatural dimension conferred on the birth and on the crucial effectiveness of prayer and fasting.32 The third tale of this section of the chronicle is Desclot’s version of the legend of the “bon comte de Barcelona” and the empress of Germany. This story has historical roots in the story of Bernard of Septimania, count of Tolosa, and Judith, the second wife of Louis the Good (el Bondadós), and in the legend of Gundeberga, wife of the Langobard king Carolaldus.33 Desclot provides us with the most important Catalan version of this legend, confirming the logical and chronological precedence of the historical narration over the literary version. This rendering narrates the accusation of adultery against the empress of Germany by two envious members of her court. Condemned to the stake, she waits for a courageous knight willing to engage in a duel to save her. But nobody dares challenge the accusers. A troubadour friend of the empress travels to other European courts in search of a volunteer. Finally, the troubadour reaches Barcelona, where the count resolves to accept the challenge and heads to Cologne

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with Bertrand of Roquebrune, a Provençal knight. Once there, the empress reiterates her innocence. Abandoned by his Provençal companion the night before the duel, the count of Barcelona fights the two accusers alone. The first is run through with a lance and dies instantly; the second panics and refuses to fight. He then acknowledges their deception and takes the place of the empress at the stake. She forgives him graciously, and the count of Barcelona receives honors from the emperor, who invites him to his table. Afterward, the count leaves the court in secret by night, to return to Barcelona. The empress reveals to her husband her defender’s identity, searches for him, and brings him again to the emperor, who grants him one of his possessions, Provence, where he is appointed marquis. The people of Provence welcome their new marquis with enthusiasm. The story’s objective is clear: just as the intervention of Guillem Ramon de Montcada confirmed the royal title of the counts of Barcelona and the mythical conception of James I signaled the providential dimension of the peninsular expansion against the Moors, this story gives the Catalan presence in the south of France imperial validation. Catalonia’s principal enemies at that time—the Moors in the south, the French in the north, and the German empire in the east—are thus overcome, and the chronicle dramatically ratifies Catalan supremacy. And, more precisely, by telling this story, the chronicler confirms the loss of the rights of the emperor in Provence, by replacing the romantic focus of the earlier versions of the tale with the political emphasis of this historical account. Desclot does not reveal the name of the “good count,” but the character appears to be an amalgam of Ramon Berenguer III and Ramon Berenguer IV.34 This chronicler’s remarkable ability to create composite characters based on one or more historical figures helps confirm the feudal rights of Catalonia over Provence. To create a new character, the chronicler exploits the tale of the adulterous empress, disseminated in the Carolingian empire at the beginning of the ninth century. In the hierarchical Carolingian world, if the empress was accused of infidelity, only divine intervention could restore the lost order.35 Several scholars have

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pointed out the close links between the story of the adultery of the wife of Louis the Pious, Judith of Bavaria, with Bernard of Septimania, and the story of the good count of Barcelona and the empress.36 Bernard of Septimania, who figures in the remote origins of the genealogy of the counts of Barcelona, gives the legend its historical referentiality. We can also connect the good count’s story with the general tradition of the false accusation of adultery against the innocent wife, a common motif in Merovingian and Carolingian annals.37 Historical references to the legend of the good count of Barcelona are also found in Catalonia. The legal rules in the Usatges de Barcelona (1149–51) contained three types of ordeals, trials applied to women under the suspicion of adultery: the wife of the knight would be defended though a judicial duel, as in Desclot’s story of the good count; the bourgeois wife had to walk on embers; peasant wives had to sit in a cauldron of boiling water.38 Jordi Rubió links the story with the local cycle representing the “bon comte de Barcelona,” Ramon Berenguer IV, who promoted the union of Catalonia and Aragon and was the champion in the conquest of New Catalonia from the Moors. In the Chancellery of the counts of Barcelona, Desclot acquired firsthand evidence of German emperor Frederick Barbarossa’s donation of the county of Provence to the count of Barcelona in 1162. Desclot mentions these documents explicitly at the end of his narrative and even describes their golden seal: “Thereafter the charters were drawn up and confirmed and duly sealed with the golden seal of the emperor.”39 This documentary reference gives the story additional veracity. In addition, an earlier historical text that certified the domination of Ramon Berenguer in Provence (related in the genealogical Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium) provided Desclot with a textual precedent for this story.40 Desclot could choose among these traditions that were well entrenched in the Catalan collective imagination and, more important, contained solid historical foundation. As a historian, he sought to reinforce the link between the count of Barcelona and the most powerful ruler at the time, the German emperor, to legitimize territorial expansion; one century earlier, the au-

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thor of the Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium had emphasized the Carolingian blood that flowed through the veins of the Catalan counts to sanction the royal dynasty. The nostalgic remembrance of the (past) southern French expansion is probably a strategic recourse that supports the (present) aggressive Mediterranean expansion. Catalan military action was at a crucial point when Desclot wrote his chronicle, a few years after the conquest of Sicily by Peter the Great against Charles of Anjou and the pope of Rome (1282), and the narrative supports the current project.

Presenting Historical Narration: The Recontextualization of the Past The three legends in the first part do not heed chronology and are structured by logic. Thus fiction takes over realism, legend supplants history, and the story’s meaning is more important than temporal progression. After recounting these historicallegendary tales, Desclot’s narrative shifts radically from legend to fact. A transitional sentence, at the end of chapter 10, alerts the reader: “And now we shall cease to speak of the good count of Barcelona and shall tell of Prince James, the son of King Pedro of Aragon.”41 A specific name, “James,” familiar to the readers, replaces a generic designation, “good count of Barcelona.” After recounting a number of military episodes that occurred during King James I’s reign, in which the young Prince Peter played an important role, the narration centers on the details of the rivalry between the house of Barcelona, the kingdom of France, and the house of Anjou, supported by the roman pontiff. This tension originated in the conquest of Sicily by Charles of Anjou in 1265, with financial backing from Rome. The SicilianHohenstaufen King Manfred was beaten and killed, as was his nephew Conradus, who was decapitated in Naples. The Sicilian princess Constance, who had married Prince Peter three years earlier, became the kingdom’s only heiress. As a consequence, she took the title of queen, with the consent of her father-inlaw, James I. Some Sicilian nobles, especially the knight Roger de Llúria, decided to support Constance. Organized opposition

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to Charles of Anjou began to grow, both inside and outside the island. On Easter Monday, March 30, 1282, the Sicilians revolted against the Angevins in an insurrection known as the “Sicilian Vespers.” Desclot narrates these events theatrically in a language that foregrounds the historicity of the events. The chronicler consistently links the houses of Anjou and France, aware that both kings—Charles of Anjou and Louis IX—were brothers. The enemies of the Catalans are always called generically “the French,” and their behavior presented as cruel and merciless, in opposition to the values of chivalry, honesty, and loyalty attributed to the Catalans. Desclot explains that the revolt broke out because of the violent and predatory manners of French soldiers who harassed some Sicilian woman by “putting their hands on the women’s breasts.”42 The conflict exploded after this single unpleasant incident, which led to the massacre of four thousand Frenchmen over the course of six weeks. Diplomatic negotiations, described by Desclot with the same detail as the military events, followed the expulsion of the Angevins and French from Sicily. Desclot, who seems to function as a notary rather than a chronicler in the next chapters, quotes from some of these letters.43 As a consequence of the negotiations among the Sicilian communes, they turned to King Peter to deliver them from French dominion. They offered the crown to Peter and Constance, and the couple entered Palermo on the fourth of September 1282. In this manner, Sicily was incorporated into the Crown of Aragon and, importantly, constituted the second step of the “route of the islands,” after the conquest of Majorca. Yet events turned problematic for King Peter when Pope Martin, a natural ally of the Angevins and the French, excommunicated the Aragonese king and deprived him of his kingdom in November 1282. During the spring of 1283, Peter took possession of most of the Calabrian coastline, and Charles found himself obliged— perhaps as a last recourse—to write to him, asking him to resolve their conflict by chivalrous personal combat. The duel was

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scheduled for the first of June at Bordeaux. Desclot narrates the preliminaries of the battle in an epic tone. Peter is clearly in a better situation than Charles, because he had already occupied Sicily, but he accepted the challenge because he was a knight. In spite of the evidence of the influence of both epic literature and the values of chivalry in the account of this episode, the duel is historical. Peter acted as a chevalier, in the manner of the best epic characters from stories he had heard or read. As Martí de Riquer concludes, rather than signaling a chronicler influenced by literature, the episode reveals a historical character who acts according to the values of the literature.44 In any case, Charles withdrew his challenge and the duel was canceled. Peter returned to Catalonia. The last part of the chronicle (chapters 105–58) recounts the great menace of the “Aragonese crusade,” which consisted of the invasion of Catalonia by the king of France, leading to an open war between the kingdoms of Aragon and France. Desclot highlights the bravery of King Peter and his knights in these chapters, especially of his admiral Roger de Llúria. In 1284, Pope Martin granted the kingdom of Aragon to Charles, count of Valois, the brother of the French king and great-nephew of Charles of Sicily. Papal sanction was given to a crusade in which the Capetian monarchy would fight against the Aragonese kingdom. The French prepared the invasion of Catalonia, with the valuable support of King Peter’s brother, King James II of Majorca, who recognized French sovereignty over Montpellier and gave them free passage through the Balearic islands and Roussillon. Philip of France and Charles of Anjou entered Catalonia via Roussillon with thousands of cavalry, crossbowmen, and infantry and one hundred ships ready in southern French ports. The zenith of the military campaign narrated by Desclot is the siege of Girona, in northern Catalonia. The French managed to enter the city, but this was the beginning of the end for them: they were attacked by Roger de Llúria, back from the Italian theater. The French fleet was destroyed at the battle of Les Formigues, and the French camp was hit hard by an epidemic

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of dysentery—a setback Desclot describes as providential. The withdrawal of the French army was even more dramatic: they were massacred at the battle of the Col de Panissars, and the king himself died at Perpignan. Some months after these events (November 1285), Peter would die, having achieved the glory of victory against the kingdom of France but requesting deathbed absolution because he believed that he had fought in the name of his family rather than for the glory of the church. The last sentence of the chronicle expresses well Desclot’s historical aims: “In this way finishes the book of King Peter, of the good deeds of arms that he performed against Muslims and other people, and how he died.”45 Desclot concludes his account in the simple manner that characterizes the whole chronicle, which gives him the natural authority demanded of all historians. In spite of the legendary features of the first chapters, Desclot’s style gives his text historical credibility. As a result, Desclot’s chronicle has traditionally been read as a historical, rather than literary, artifact. Located between James I’s autobiography and Muntaner’s patriotic enthusiasm, Desclot’s account succeeds as the work of a chroniclerhistorian who writes dispassionately of the Catalan Mediterranean expansion and military heroic deeds in Sicily. Muntaner will take this form of historical narration a step further, through his dramatic account of Catalonia’s conquests in Greece and Constantinople.

4 Ramon Muntaner: Ruler, Knight, and Chronicler Muntaner, lleva sus e pensa de fer un llibre de les grans meravelles que has vistes que Déus ha fetes en les guerres on tu és estat. (Muntaner, get up and think about writing a book about the great wonders that you have seen that God has done in the battles in which you have been.) « r a m o n m u n t a n e r , Crònica »

Ramon Muntaner’s Crònica centers on the history of the Crown of Aragon from the conception of King James I (1207) to the cor­ onation of King Alfonse the Benign in Zaragoza (1328).1 Writ­ ten in Valencia between 1325 and 1328, this historical text was conceived autobiographically, but the author sets, as the center of the narrative, the story of the kings of Aragon, rather than his own life.

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The chronicle is divided into two parts: the first covers nearly the entire thirteenth century, from the story of James I’s concep­ tion to the beginning of the campaign of the Catalan army in the eastern Mediterranean (chapters 1–192); the second, more prop­ erly autobiographical part begins with the campaign in Greece and Constantinople in 1302 and ends with King Alfonse’s coro­ nation (chapters 193–298). The style differs significantly in each part. In the first one, Muntaner solemnly narrates the deeds of James the Conqueror, Peter the Great, and Alfonse the Liberal, manifesting his enthusiasm, loyalty, devotion, and commitment to his kings. In the second, he shifts to a passionate autobio­ graphical account of the heroic deeds of the Catalan Company, where he serves as a knight and ruler. Muntaner states the chronicle’s purpose at the beginning of the text and reiterates this idea in other passages. He declares that he wants to tell his readers the truth of the battles and “feats of arms” of Catalonia, and to show how divine providence fa­ vored his country in these victories: “that all victories depend solely on the might and will of God and not on the might and will of men.”2 Yet halfway through the book, in one of the most brilliant passages of the text, he admits that the principal reason he wrote the chronicle was to narrate his joyful experience of the military expansion of Catalonia to Greece and Byzantium (Romania) and to immortalize his leader, Roger de Flor.3

A Multifaceted Author: Knight, Ruler, and Chronicler Ramon Muntaner (1265–1336), citizen of Valencia, was a multi­ faceted character—knight and politician, writer and soldier— who wrote his chronicle late in his life, half a century after Bernat Desclot’s text was produced.4 This chronology sets him some decades after the French and Italian chronicler-memorialistcrusaders such as Robert of Clari (c. 1170–c. 1216), Geoffrey of Villehardouin (1160–c. 1212), Philippe of Novare (c. 1195–c. 1265), and Jean of Joinville (1225–1317), who produced similar forms of historical writing.5 Muntaner also foreshadows the “na­­tional”

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chronicler, such as Jean Froissart (c. 1337–c. 1405). This descrip­ tion locates Muntaner in a European context; as I argue, in contrast to general studies on Muntaner that set him primar­ ily within the tradition of Catalan historiography, his chronicle’s true character and significance can be fully understood and ap­ preciated only in the wider context of European historiographi­ cal practice of that time. Muntaner’s account centers on the extraordinary expansion of Catalonia into Greece at the beginning of the fourteenth century. He tells this story from the perspective of his personal experience as both a royal minister and a soldier. As a minister, Muntaner served as the administrator of Gallipoli, one of the Greek cities conquered by the Catalans. As a soldier, he fought in the Catalan Company, an army of light infantry under the leadership of Roger de Flor and the Almugavars that was sent to Constantinople to help the Greeks against the Turks and, finally, to conquer most of Greece. The autobiographical form gives his account its dramatic and emotional style and the credibility— similar to that of other texts of his time—accorded to personal experience: “And I at once began this book and pray all who hear it to believe me (for, assuredly, all is truth which they will hear) and to doubt nothing.”6 Ramon Muntaner served his beloved kings of Aragon as knight, ruler, and chronicler. The main events of his active and intense life that included living in several cities and traveling from one to another over land and by sea can be inferred from both his own account and archival documents.7 The chronicle shows him to be a learned and cosmopolitan man involved in diverse mili­ tary and political activities, one who dealt with many kings over time. His erudite prose deploys critical concepts with precise accuracy.8 Moreover, Muntaner’s fluency in several languages— Catalan, Latin, Sicilian, French, Provençal, Greek, and Arabic— aided him in his dealings with persons from the different places he traveled to.9 He puts praise for his own cosmopolitanism on Frederick of Sicily’s lips, when the king asks him to take com­ mand of the city of Jerba:

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We have reflected that we have no one in our Kingdom who, with the help of God, could give us better counsel in this than you, for many reasons. And especially because you have seen and heard more in wars than any men in our Country; and besides, you have com­ manded men of arms for a long time and know how to manage them. And besides, you know the Muslim language; wherefore, you can do your business in the island of Jerba without interpreters, about spies as well as in other ways; and there are many other good reasons in your favor.10

This “citizen of the world” was born in Peralada, a village in northern Catalonia, in 1265, although he was later given citizen­ ship in Valencia. Though his family was economically stable, their social origins were relatively humble, as he reveals when he explains his embarrassment at the Aragonese kings’ largesse.11 This sense of social inferiority, which accompanied him all his life, conditions the narrative and makes him highly appreciative of the gifts he believes that he has received from God and from his superiors. He emphasizes that the chronicle was meant to celebrate his lord’s merits, rather than his own: “I do not wish to recount to you anything about many events which happened to me in Barbary, because no one should speak of himself, un­ less they are matters which concern a lord; wherefore I shall say nothing of events which happened to me, except when they are events concerning a lord.”12 Muntaner’s devotion to his sovereigns shapes the narrative. He served five kings of Aragon in his lifetime ( James the Con­ queror, Peter the Great, Alfonse the Liberal, James the Just, and Alfonse the Benign) and met three Majorcan kings and three other kings from Sicily, France, and England. When he was nine, he met the two king-historians of the thirteenth-century Iberian peninsula, James the Conqueror and Alfonse X of Cas­ tile, when they were guests at his father’s house. Muntaner was so impressed by these experiences that, sixty years after the fact, he was able to narrate these stories in exquisite detail. His de­ scription of meeting King Alfonse and the queen at his father’s house reads as follows:

Ramon Muntaner: Ruler, Knight, and Chronicler 75

And afterwards, leaving Gerona, they went to Basquera and to Pon­ tons; and then the King and Queen together, with all their retinue, came to lodge at Peralada. And this I know for I was then a youth and the said Lord King of Castile and the Queen lay, that night, in the chamber of my father’s house in which, as I have already told you, the said Lord King James of Aragon had lodged. As the King of Castile and the Queen spent that night together, one opening was made in the house of Bernat Rossinyol which adjoined my father’s and through these the King passed to the chamber of the Queen. And so, from having seen it, and not otherwise, I can tell you this for certain.13

A year later, in 1275, as a confirmation of the enthusiasm for royalty that would characterize Muntaner’s life, he participated in the meeting of the Aragonese and French kings—Peter the Great and Philip III—in Paris, as one of the members of the royal entourage. Muntaner describes this scene in detail, repeat­ edly using the verb “see” to affirm his presence at the event, and gives us interesting minutiae like the diagram of both kings’ coat of arms—the four red Aragonese bars and the fleur de lis.14 In other passages of the chronicle, as proof of his knowledge of the kings’ everyday habits, he recounts intimate details, such as when he writes of Peter the Great: “When the Lord King got up (for he always rose at dawn, winter and summer) he heard the noise and said, ‘What is this? What is the shouting in the city?’ ”15 His childhood home, Peralada, was destroyed by French sol­ diers in 1285, when Muntaner was twenty. Though Desclot also narrates this event, Muntaner’s version is laden with deep emo­ tional insight as he remembers the loss of his idealized home as a turning point of his life: “I and others, who lost a great part of what they had in that town, had not been able to return since; rather we have gone about the world seeking our fortune, amidst much hard work and many perils we have passed through. Most of us have died in these wars of the house of Aragon.”16 As though to highlight the trauma he experienced, the years between the demolition of his birthplace and his enlistment in the Catalan Company (1301) are the least documented of

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Muntaner’s life. During that period, he served a third Aragonese king, Alfonse the Liberal, and he may have taken part in the conquest of Minorca (1286–87), as a soldier for one of the major figures of his chronicle: Admiral Roger de Llúria.17 From 1287 to 1300 Muntaner reappears in the text as a “ciutadà de Mallorques” (citizen of Majorca), and so he presumably lived on the island at that time. From the summer of 1302, he participated in the campaign in the eastern Mediterranean (“l’expedició d’Orient”) under the command of the Almugavar Roger de Flor, the other “Roger” hero of Muntaner’s chronicle. Although his function is primarily administrative, Muntaner frequently emerges in the chronicle as a brave, experienced, and wise soldier, capable of negotiating the more difficult missions and creating imagina­ tive solutions to problems, such as his epic defense of Gallipoli, where he successfully involved the women of the town in the battle.18 In 1309 he was appointed by the king as commander of Jerba island in northern Africa. He married Valençona in Valencia in 1311, and the family lived in Jerba until 1314. Muntaner then de­ scribes an important assignment he received from the king of Majorca: to escort the king’s infant grandson from Sicily to Ros­ selló, where the child’s grandparents lived. This demonstrates the king’s trust in him and reveals Muntaner’s commitment to the three branches of the house of Barcelona—Aragon, Majorca, and Sicily.19 Less eventful is the period between 1315 and 1325. He provides us with the exact date of the beginning of the chronicle: May 15, 1325. Sixty years old at the time, he appears now as a “ciutadà de València” (citizen of Valencia). Having concluded the writing of his chronicle about 1328, he moved to Majorca in 1332 to serve King James III of Majorca, the baby he had safeguarded along the Mediterranean years before. He was knighted by the king and died in Ibiza in 1336.

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The Content of the Chronicle: The Adventure of the Catalan Mediterranean Expansion Muntaner describes in his chronicle the most significant milestones of the history of thirteenth-century Catalonia, familiar to all from the historical accounts of James I and Bernat Desclot: the peninsu­ lar expansion achieved through the conquest of Majorca, Minorca, Ibiza, Valencia, and Murcia against the Muslims; the marriage of Peter the Great; the strained relations between the houses of Bar­ celona and Anjou; the growing association between the Crown of Aragon and the kingdom of England; the siege of Girona by the Angevins; the conquest of Sicily in 1282; the defiance of Sancho of Castile; the treaty of Anagni and Admiral Roger de Llúria’s early conquests; and, finally, the conquests of the Catalan Company, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, on the way to Greece and Constantinople, which open up an unexpected expansive front in the eastern Mediterranean.20 Thus, the Almugavar Roger de Flor—Muntaner’s hero and the chronicle’s protagonist—enters the scene, leading to a turning point in the story. Muntaner’s ad­ miration for this soldier transforms the tone of the chronicle into that of a novel rather than a historical account: I must turn to speak to you of a valiant man of poor condition who, by his valor, rose in a short time to be greater than any man yet born. And I wish to tell you about it in this place, because his deeds, which follow, were most marvelous and important and are all counted, as they should be, to the glory of the house of Aragon. And what has partly moved me to make this book are the great marvels which have happened through him and the great Catalan and Aragonese victories there have been in Romania, which were begun by him. Of these marvels no one can recount the truth so well as I who was in Sicily in the time of his prosperity as his procurator-general and took part in all his affairs, in the most important he undertook by sea and by land. Wherefore you should all the more believe me.21

In what might be seen as a second prologue to the book, Munta­ ner wants to clarify from the beginning of  this second section—in

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which the most original and remarkable narration lies—that he tells the truth, and no more than the truth. In fact, some of Muntaner’s passages in this second section are the only sources we have for certain episodes of thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury Catalan history, especially those related to the Greek campaigns and the military activities of the Catalan Company. Ferran Soldevila rightly notes the rise in the quality of Muntaner’s literary style from this point onward.22 The most dramatic action begins when Muntaner explains the terrible revenge taken by the Almugavars for the treacherous killing of their leader, Roger de Flor, and his companions at the palace of Constantinople in April 1305. A skilled narrator, Muntaner knew that there is no story without a hero.23 Indeed, for this rea­ son, narrative tension weakens after the death of Roger de Flor, because neither Bernat de Rocafort, Berenguer d’Entença, nor Bernat d’Estanyol manages to fill the gap left by the Almugavar hero.24 The conquest of Athens and other Byzantine possessions in Greece and north Africa is completed, and the Catalan do­ minion in Corsica and Sardinia is consolidated. When Munta­ ner ends his chronicle in 1328, at the beginning of the reign of Alfonse the Benign, the Crown of Aragon emerges as one of the first modern European states, and the king’s domain is the larg­ est in its history, with dominion over the western Mediterranean and presence in parts of the eastern Mediterranean.25 Muntaner’s patriotism and his devotion to the royal house lie at the center of the Crònica: “And from now onwards, I shall speak on the matter about which this book is being written; namely, the honor and favor God has granted and grants to the house of Aragon.”26 In this manner, Muntaner instructs readers about how a true citizen must live and labors to inspire loyalty to the crown. The comments at the end of the account of the conquest of Minorca summarize his frame of mind and priorities. The Muslims were defeated by the Catalans after a cruel battle, and the survivors were sent off the isle in a ship that was destroyed during a storm off the coast of Barbary, “and not one person es­ caped.” Muntaner draws attention to Alfonse the Liberal’s gra­

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ciousness in giving the prisoners of war the opportunity to leave Minorca alive and notes that, in an act of divine justice, the sea took their lives. He concludes thus: “And so you see when Our Lord wishes to destroy a nation how easily He does it; wherefore everyone should beware of His wrath, for you see how the wheel of fortune turned suddenly against the almojarife and his race who had ruled that island for over a thousand years.”27 Muntaner also reads the kingdom’s apparent setbacks as prov­ identially ordained. Alfonse the Liberal, “bolder in feats of arms than anyone in the world,” was finally defeated by an unfortu­ nate illness, a tumor in his groin. Muntaner considers Alfonse’s untimely death as God’s will, a sign that He protects the Ara­ gonese kingdom even at its worst moments: [God] wished to give another turn to all that had been arranged at Tarascon. But everyone can understand that Our Lord the true God is all righteousness and truth, wherefore no one knows nor can understand His secrets. And where man fears, in his feeble under­ standing, that something God does ends in harm, it turns to great good. Wherefore no one should be troubled by anything God does. And so it is needful that, in this matter, we all take comfort in this and praise and thank God for all He gives us. 28

According to Muntaner, the Aragonese kings were always loved and respected by their Catalan and Aragonese subjects because these “have more at heart than any other people in the world, for they are full of natural love for their sovereigns.”29 If the sovereigns made mistakes, it was owing to imprudent ad­ visors, who “will suffer punishment for it in the next world.”30 They won their subjects’ affection, because good masters help much to make good vassals. Above all other lords those of the house of Aragon have this quality. I would not say to you of them that they are the lords of their vassals, but rather their companions. He who considers well the others Kings of the world, how hard and rough they are to their vassals, and considers the lords of the house of Aragon, and what privileges they grant to their sub­ jects, should kiss the ground which these lords tread.31

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For him, Peter the Great was a “second Alexander,” “the wisest prince and the bravest born since Alexander,” “another Alexan­ der born in the world,” and only his premature death prevented him from being “another Alexander if he had only lived ten years longer.”32 Muntaner’s patriotism is based on the idea of the medieval Catalan empire, an idea that lies at the center of a current histo­ riographical debate with interesting presentist implications.33 He believes that the Catalans, who “have won the entire world,”34 are called by God for the highest missions. Muntaner repeatedly asserts Catalan superiority over other territories: he argues, for instance, that if the conquest of the kingdom of Granada had been assigned to the Catalans rather than to the Castilians, it would have been Christian much sooner.35 He notes that their adversaries, full of admiration, wonder “what are the Pope and the cardinals doing that they do not make the King of Aragon and his sons lords of the entire world.”36 Muntaner’s image of the three indissoluble branches of the Crown of Aragon and sev­ eral commentaries on the superiority of Catalonia over the other kingdoms have been interpreted by nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Catalan historians as a reflection of current aspirations to consolidate a Catalan empire in the Mediterranean. At the time Muntaner wrote his chronicle, Catalonia was one of the most extensive territorial powers in the Mediterranean.37 The author’s claims for unity in language, religion, geography, and politics unambiguously reflect the Catalans’ aspirations to be a second Roman Empire. His undisguised joy when recounting Roger the Flor’s marriage to the niece of the Emperor Androni­ cus Paleologus is one of many demonstrations of this ambition.38 The chronicler’s journeys—to Peralada in Catalonia, Sicily, Greece, Majorca, Jerba in North Africa, Rosselló in the south of France, València, and, finally, Zaragoza for the coronation of the king—become a geophysical introduction to Catalan terri­ torial aspirations.39 Further, the clear naming of enemies—the French, the Castilians, the Muslim infidels, and heretical Byz­

Ramon Muntaner: Ruler, Knight, and Chronicler 81

antines—strengthens the notion of Catalan identity as it marks the difference between “us” and “them.” Scholars such as Antoni Rovira i Virgili and Ferran Soldev­ ila have offered new interpretations of the problem of the me­ dieval Catalan empire, shifting the identity of the rivals of the Catalans. Thus, according to them, the enemies of the Catalans were not the French, Muslims or Byzantines but exclusively the kingdom of Castile. This interpretation obviously reflects a more contemporary consideration of the rivalry between the “early modern Atlantic Spanish empire,” or the “Castilian empire,” and Catalonia, because there is no explicit reference to the empire in Muntaner’s chronicle.40 In any case, this debate centers on the notion of “tradition” rather than on the “invention of tradition,” which refers more specifically to the reconstruction of modern nations in the nineteenth century than to medieval political com­ munities.41 This idea of empire attributed to Muntaner by some modern Catalan historians connects, obviously, and may owe its genesis to his title as the “national writer par excellence.”42 In fact, many readers consider Muntaner’s appeal to Catalan identity extraordinary, and he must certainly have inspired his nineteenth-century readers to believe that nationalism could precede the state.43 Muntaner firmly believed that the three branches of the house of Barcelona—the kingdoms of Aragon, Majorca, and Sicily, which began to separate precisely during that time—should re­ main united because all of them descend from the same trunk, King James the Conqueror.44 In the final chapters of the chroni­ cle, Muntaner, already an old man, offers the reader his testimony on the past and his prophecy for the future. He shows singular historical vision as he fears for the unity of the house of Barce­ lona. He uses the poetic image of rushes to explain his vision: “if you tie all the rushes tightly with a rope and want to tear them out all together, I tell you that ten men, however well they pull, cannot tear them out in any way they may try; but if you take off the rope, a boy of eight can pull out the rush, rush by rush, so

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that not one remains. And so it would be with those three Kings; if there were any differences or discord between them, which God forbid, you can reckon upon it that they have such neigh­ bors that they will destroy first one and then the other.”45 These words reflect his concerns about the present and his fear for the future, rather than the reality of the past. Muntaner, a patriot par excellence, writes here as a prophet rather than a historian. The passage of time will confirm Muntaner’s worst fears.

Muntaner’s Patriotic Legacy Muntaner believed patriotism was a natural virtue because “ev­ ery man and every creature should love the Country and place in which he was born.”46 He describes himself as a “Catalan” and he praises his land openly. He distinguishes between “Catalans” and “Aragonese,” but he always considered the lands and people that made up the “house of Aragon” (Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Majorca, Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia) intrinsic parts of a whole. Even the mercenary Almugavars are considered real Catalans in order to increase Catalonia’s grandeur, and he calls them “our Almugavars,” despite their Islamic origin.47 He also enjoys the (apocryphal) sentence that he attributes to the great enemy of Catalonia, King Charles of Anjou: “Ah, God, what gentle blood is that of the house of Aragon!”48 Nonetheless, his most fervent praises are for Catalonia and for its capital, Barcelona: And let no one imagine that Catalonia is a small province; rather do I wish everyone to know that Catalonia has, in general, a richer population than I have seen in any other province, though most people in the world imagine it to be poor. It is true that Catalonia has not those large fortunes in money made by certain particular men, as there are in other countries; but the commonality of the people is more prosperous than any other in the world, and they live better in Catalonia and in a more orderly manner in their houses with their wives and their sons, than any other people there is in the world.49

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According to him, Barcelona “is the noblest city and the no­ blest that the King Lord of Aragon has.”50 Love for the land of one’s birth leads to affection for one’s native language. Muntaner defines the Catalan spoken by people from Murcia and Valencia and by Roger de Llúria as: “el pus bell catalanesc del món” (the most beautiful Catalan in the world).51 In a paragraph that pro­ motes understanding of the languages, kingdoms, and countries at that time, he rejoices over the unity of Catalan: Besides, you will wonder at a thing I will tell you, though, if you ex­ amine it well, you will find it is so, namely, that of people of the same language there are none so numerous as the Catalans. If you speak of Castilians, the true Castile is of small extent and importance; for Castile has many provinces, each with his own language, as different from each other as Catalan from Aragonese. For though Catalans and Aragonese are under one lord, their languages are very differ­ ent. And so likewise will you find it in France, and in England, and in Germany and in all Romania, as the Greeks, who are subjects of the Emperor of Constantinople from many provinces, such as the Morea, and the Kingdoms of Arta and of Vlachia, and in the King­ dom of Salonika, and in Macedonia, and in Anatolia and in many other provinces, amongst which there is as much difference in the language as there is between Catalan and Aragonese.52

Indeed, Muntaner’s monarchical providentialism conditions a chronicle that contains numerous passages that recount events and moral explanations that all express his love for Catalonia and loyalty to the crown.53 His narrative reinforces the Catalan collective belief in divine intervention in favor of King James the Conqueror, to strengthen the unity of his kingdom: Now, in order that everyone should know the great favors God be­ stowed on the Lord King James of Aragon throughout his life, I wish to tell you a part of them briefly. . . . There never was born a King to whom God showed greater favors throughout his life than He did to the lord King James, and of these I will tell you a part. Firstly, his birth was a great miracle, as I have told and related to you already;

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and next, he was acknowledged to be the greatest prince of the world, and the most wise, and the most generous, and the most upright, and one more beloved by all, as well by his subjects as by others, strangers and intimates, than any other King there ever was.54

Muntaner’s Literary Style and Rhetorical Choices Muntaner’s outstanding talent as a storyteller produced a text that could pass for a chivalric novel, if not for the author’s recurring voice that reminds the reader of the veracity of his story. Some passages seem inspired by the best medieval French epic tradi­ tion, such as his narratives of the battles and the feats of bravery of the Aragonese kings.55 The vivid description of a tournament between two knights exemplifies this dynamic style: And En Berenguer Arnau hit the admiral [Roger de Llúria] so great a blow on the front quarter of the shield that the stave came to pieces, and the admiral so hit him on the visor that the helmet flew off his head to a distance greater than the length of two lances staves, and the lance broke into more than a hundred pieces. And as the vi­ sor was hit the helmet came down so hard on the face of the said En Berenguer Arnau, that it crushed his nose, so that it has never been straight since, and the blood was flowing down the middle of his face and between his eyebrows so that every one thought he was killed. However he was so good a knight that, though he received so great a blow, he was nothing daunted. Both Kings [ James II of Ara­ gon and Sancho IV of Castile], who loved him much, ran to him, fearing he was killed when they saw him all covered with blood and his nose all cut and crushed. And they asked him how he felt, and he said that he felt well, that he was not hurt . . . that he was one of the most accomplished knights of the world.56

This story places Muntaner squarely within the code of chi­ valric morality. Although this old world perished with the decline of feudalism, the narrative attests to its literary durability and pro­ vides the author with a strong and expressive literary weapon. He also uses diverse rhetorical methods to maintain his reader’s at­ tention. When he feels the narrative is becoming tedious, he in­

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troduces one of his distinctive formulas: “What shall I tell you?” (“Què us diré?”). This form of direct address interrupts the nar­ rative but serves to reconnect with the reader who Muntaner fears might be losing concentration. This strategy effectively draws the reader back into the story and stresses the personal nature of the narrative—its autobiographic performance. At other times, he anticipates his reader’s rhetorical questions, giving the narrative the feel of a lively dialogue: “And if they ask me: En Muntaner, what are the privileges you know the lords of the house of Ara­ gon grant to their subjects more than other lords? I will tell you: the first privilege . . .”57 He also poses indirect questions to his readers, heightening the feeling that they are “listeners” rather than “readers,” making the narrative more vivid: “And if you ask me what they were, and of what nation, I will tell you: they were Sicilians”;58 “And if you ask me how many galleys there were from each place, I will tell you”; “And you need not ask me if all the people were joyous.”59 On other occasions, he seems to write introspectively, in an attempt to understand his own life and the events he experienced, employing rhetorical questions in the transition between the passages: “Now we might say, how could it be that the Lord King knew this not, when all prayed so openly for this event and everyone had been ordered to fast? I answer and say that . . .”60 This narrative style produces brilliant passages, most of which describe the landmarks of the Catalan Mediterranean expansion. The conquest of Sicily is narrated in a remarkably sophisticated manner, one closer to that of modern literary adventure stories than to the (supposedly) simple and rigid archaic techniques of the medieval chronicle. Muntaner progressively introduces ac­ tions and characters (the Sicilians, the Angevins, the king of Aragon) until he reaches the definitive act of the drama: the con­ quest of Sicily. His tendency to focus more on characters than on events gives his chronicle a high degree of human interest. For example, he describes one of the farewell scenes between Alfonse the Liberal and his wife and sons in a passage laden with inten­ sity and tenderness:

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And when all were embarked, my Lady the Queen took leave of the Lord King in his chamber; and everyone can imagine what a parting between husband and wife as there was between them, and always had been. And when my Lady the Queen had taken leave of the Lord King, both Infants entered the chamber of the Lord King and threw themselves at his feet. And the Lord King made the sign of the Cross over them and blessed them many times and gave them his grace and his blessing, and he kissed them on the mouth and spoke many good words.61

Muntaner also takes evident pleasure in detailing his charac­ ters’ emotional reactions, without worrying about the suspicion of a lack of historical credibility that these passages might inspire in readers. For instance, he describes Roger de Llúria as a man who feels “cheerful and content for many reasons. No man could have been more cheerful than he was, were it not for the death of the Lord King en Pedro which grieved him much.”62 He rec­ ollects moving scenes, such as one wherein a knight bursts into tears: “And so the Count wept and turned to the notables of Castellon and commanded and told them as the Lord King had bidden him. And if you have ever seen weeping and mourning it was there. And it was no wonder, for the parting was hard.”63 Muntaner himself shows great pity at the farewell of Prince Fer­ nando: he departs from him with so much sorrow that “my heart almost broke with grief.”64 This focus on his characters’ psychol­ ogy reveals Muntaner’s concern with recounting, not only his experiences, but, perhaps more importantly, the kings’ feelings and personal lives, in an attempt to breach the distance between the monarchs and their people and, indeed, between the current monarchs and those who would come after them. Further, this engagement with the characters’ feelings and thoughts simulta­ neously portrays Muntaner as one who was privy to them. The strategy therefore allows him to authorize himself as narrator because of his knowledge of his kings’ private lives, demonstrat­ ing his access to them not only as monarchs but also as persons. Roger de Flor’s story further exemplifies this technique of highlighting the personal. Muntaner introduces Roger de Flor

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by providing details of his childhood, producing a creative psy­ chological and personal portrait of the man.65 This protagonist receives one the most expressive metaphors of the chronicle: Roger de Flor travels to Sicily, where all the soldiers, cavalry and infantry, “were awaiting him as the Jews do the Messiah.”66 Similarly, Muntaner celebrates the emperor of Constanti­nople’s appointment of Roger de Flor as “Caesar” of the empire. The chronicler is so moved by the event that he writes the same sen­ tence twice in the same paragraph: the Caesar is so close to the emperor that he “sits in a chair near that of the Emperor, only half a palm lower.”67 Muntaner’s particular delight in this appointment stems from its significance in the context of the enormous power of the Catalans in the Mediterranean at that moment. Symptomatically, frare Roger is simply called Caesar in the chronicle from this point, until the narration of his dramatic death. Muntaner also harnessed expressive images and metaphors. He compares the castle of Malta, where some Catalan knights had organized a feast, with a diamond in a ring—because it is at the top of the island.68 He associates the good soldiers’ resistance to dying with what “a wild boar does amongst those who wish to kill him, when he sees himself at the point of death.”69 With sarcasm and wit, he links the red of the Aragonese shield’s four bars to the enemy’s blood and wounds: “there were few who were not carrying a royal device on their bodies.”70 Finally, much of Muntaner’s style comes from his deployment of popular wisdom to think through issues or describe events. He incorporates proverbs and aphorisms—many invented by himself—applying them freely to the situation he describes: “No man can be accomplished in arms who has not a proud spirit”;71 “He toils in vain who wishes to oppose this work of God”;72 “The thorn which has to prick is pointed from the beginning”;73 “If he told a deaf man, he did not tell a lazy one”;74 “The work exalts the master”;75 “When God is angry with a man, the first way in which He punishes him, is that He takes his reason from him”;76 “Give pleasure and do not look to whom you are giving

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it”;77 “The evil a man does never leaves him”;78 “The higher in rank a man is, the more forbearing and upright he should be”;79 “Not everyone is a man’s friend who smiles in his face.”80 Muntaner frequently blends erudition with popular expressions, giving a contemporary air to his historical narration. He writes elegantly, producing graceful prose and eschewing the colloquial tone that one imagines he would have considered inappropriate for someone of his position. For example, he seems to reject the typical Catalan article used in the dialect of his Empordà region (es instead of el ) that might appear, to the cultivated reader, as a provincial manner of speaking.81 The portrait of Muntaner that emerges from his text reveals a complex man: a loyal patriot, a brave knight, a wise administra­ tor, and a learned chronicler. As a historian, he provides us with a solid argument in favor of the utility of history and tradition: With only half the learning, an old man will know how to give bet­ ter advice than the young in all matters of war, because he will have seen many more deeds of arms and heard more than a young man. And so, from the things of the past, a man can foresee the things of the present and the future.82

In the last passages of the chronicle, he presents himself as a captain who combines bravery with prudence, especially when he manages a battle.83 His vivid descriptions of the contests and his appreciation of courageous chivalric gestures provide us with the best image of Muntaner as a knight. This prudence is some­ times accompanied by clever strategy, such as his decision to in­ clude women in the defense of Gallipoli,84 or the gracious way he treats his subjects to achieve political and diplomatic aims.85 He acknowledges that his authority is confirmed by the fact that his people “trusted me more than any other man in the Christian host.”86 Of the Catalan chronicles, the Gesta served to legitimize a dynasty by narrating its origins; James I’s and Desclot’s writings justified political and territorial expansion in a context of con­ solidation; Muntaner’s chronicle operates to validate the Catalan

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collective project. The final text, the chronicle of King Peter the Ceremonious, is a political treatise in the context of crisis and turbulence. Muntaner’s chronicle was the last chivalric medieval Catalan historical text; Peter the Ceremonious continues with the autobiographical tradition but introduces the new form of the memoir of a man of state.

5 King Peter’s Llibre and Royal Self-Representation Mas emperò nós responguem que nós mateix nos volíem posar la corona. (We answered that we ourselves wanted to place the crown.) « k i n g p e t e r , Llibre »

The reign of Peter the Ceremonious (1336–87) is the second longest of the Crown of Aragon, after James I’s rule. The context within which Peter writes his Llibre (Book), which dates from between 1375 and 1386, differs substantially from those of the four previous chronicles. This Llibre is the autobiography of a tormented king surrounded by external military menaces, troubled by the lack of internal unity in his kingdom, threatened by an important economic crisis, shocked by the epidemic of the Black Death, yet, paradoxically, convinced of his divinely mandated role as leader of an emerging state. The exhausting war against neighboring Castile, economic difficulties (beginning with a lo

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mal any —bad farming year—in 1333), political instability, inter­ nal rebellions, and demographic weakening due to epidemics mark the years of Peter’s reign. When Alfonse the Benign died in 1336, Peter the Ceremonious inherited a large kingdom that included several critical territories—Catalonia, Valencia, Aragon, Sardinia, and Corsica. The kingdoms of Sicily and Majorca were ruled by two junior branches of “the house of Barcelona”—that confederation whose unity had been exultantly praised by Muntaner—and the memory of this recent unity colors Peter’s policy. The vassalage of  Majorca gave Peter the opportunity to assert his claims. Belonging—or the sense of belonging—to such a large territory made Peter determined to prevent the alienation of royal patrimony, one of the central concerns of his reign, which explains his tendency to caesarism, as opposed to the traditional Catalan pactisme. In fact, he conquered the island of Majorca and the Pyrenean counties of Roussillon and Cerdagne in 1343–44, significantly increasing the territory of his kingdom. Yet as it was expanding externally, the kingdom was collapsing internally. The division that Muntaner feared and predicted happened during Peter’s reign. The king had to face the aristocratic and popular revolts of Aragon and Valencia, known as “Unions” (1347–48), and his subjects’ misunderstanding of his policies. Peter had barely contained the Unions before he was confronted with rebellion in Sardinia. This was one of the chronic troubles of Peter’s reign, which he never managed to overcome. Genoese support of Sardinia only worsened the situation. In addition, a bloody war broke out against Castile—from 1356 to 1366, continuing with scattered rebellions till 1375—exhausting the richest of his territories within the generally prosperous Catalonia. The war was so disastrous for Aragon that the Llibre takes particular pains to justify it, reproducing the correspondence between Peter I of Castile and Peter the Ceremonious. Interestingly, this is the only occasion in the Llibre where documents are directly transcribed, a practice common to the other Catalan chroniclers.1

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In short, this was a period during which the old structures, based on a territorial and feudal conception of the monarchy, faced new challenges, especially with regard to the consolidation of monarchical authority. A new era—the new historical context—demanded a revised historical text, a refashioned form of representing the past. In this context, King Peter’s autobiography becomes an outstanding model of a political treatise written by a late-medieval king with the worldview of a Renaissance prince. It exemplifies the refined and subtle manipulation of history in favor of political ideology. Peter’s meticulous use of personal memory and official documents clearly demonstrates his ambition to rule over every aspect of his subjects’ lives.2 As a result, his account is a unique historical construction for its time and a radical break with the existing historiographical tradition. The Llibre privileges a series of ideas, concepts, and values over the narration of stories—although these frame the account. It describes numerous symbolic practices, political gestures, and ritual ceremonies, using strategic linguistic expressions that reflect not only the king’s political aspirations but also the cultural context in which they were developed. What really sets the Llibre apart from earlier Catalan historical texts is the heightened sense of symbolism in the presentation of singular facts, gestures, and decisions. Interestingly, the Llibre’s episodic structure directs readers to focus on thematic sections, whereas the other Catalan chronicles are structured chronologically. Its originality lies not in its autobiographical nature—both James I and Muntaner in the Catalan tradition and Robert of Clari and Jean of Joinville in the French tradition also wrote in the first person—but rather in Peter’s ability to harness the historical text as a platform for political self-representation and as a strategic weapon . In sum, Peter’s Llibre is conceptual rather than narrative, which no doubt makes it less dynamic to read than the other Catalan chronicles. But it provides us with an exceptional source of political theory and practice in the Middle Ages. Considering this generic context, this chapter focuses on the political

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dimensions of the Llibre and its ability to create a new image of the monarchy, one adapted to the troubled times.

The Author: King Peter, Historian and Autobiographer Peter the Ceremonious was a learned king who, as he himself proclaimed as proof of his cultural skill, could write a letter without anyone’s advice.3 He combined intense dedication to the governance of his kingdom with being a poet, public orator, legislator, builder, patron, and, crucially for us, a historian: he both wrote history and commissioned the writing of history. This historical patronage evinces his cultural concerns and his desire to use the narrative of the past as a tool for royal propaganda. Every act he performed and every decision he made appeared to be governed by a deep consciousness of royal identity, the dignity of his political function, and an awareness of being linked to the secular and prestigious history of the Aragonese dynasty. Peter revered history, mostly because he recognized that he had a place in it. Specifically, he commissioned a new genealogical history of the Aragonese kingdom, The Chronicle of Sant Joan de la Penya, and designed his own autobiography. The first was composed by his collaborators in the court, based, among other models, on Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada’s De Rebus Hispaniae and the French Grandes Chroniques.4 The second is, in fact, an autobiography written by a collective author, as I will explain. In the thirteenth century, prose gave a text historical validation, as opposed to verse, more commonly associated with legend and imaginative accounts. Yet, since prose was no longer sufficient to legitimize historical authority in the fourteenth century, Peter felt the need to commission historical texts based on what would appear to be a more accurate reflection of the truth. Interestingly, a handwritten note by Peter has been found on a margin of a copy of the Crònica de Sant Joan de la Penya. It reads: “Aquesta Crònica es comprovada ab cartes públiques del nostre archiu et és vera” (This chronicle has been reviewed according to the public charters from our archive and it is true). This historian-

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king clearly prefers to rely on verifiable authority beyond that conferred by his rank or by his condition as witness of events. Peter the Ceremonious introduces into the historical texts not only external references to the royal archive and his authority as king but also legal documents that give the late medieval Catalan chronicles valuable external validation and referentiality.5 Peter’s Llibre is a chancellery record presented in autobiographical form rather than the kind of chivalric account typical of the other Catalan chronicles. It privileges the public character over the private and political events over the description of a knight’s deeds. Peter is not a knight-king who extends the territories of his kingdom with his conquests and orders someone to chronicle these events; he is an administrator who plans the campaign and organizes the team of royal scribes who will preserve that history. As a consequence, his Llibre is the result of a meticulously designed process of composition rather than a spontaneous narration of a military campaign. Significantly, for the first time in medieval Catalonia, historiographical sources reveal the coexistence of processes of recording the recent and remote past, which best confirms the complexity of developing historical and cultural self-representation at the time. As Gabrielle Spiegel argues, “the very complexity of contemporary history served to redefine and reinterpret both past and present as inherently complex structures of meaning over which it was difficult, if not impossible, to establish control.”6 The second half of the fourteenth century was a time of serious political and cultural crises, which forced Peter to retrieve and deploy all the previous historical forms: genealogies and universal chronicles (cròniques universals) to approach the remote past and chronicles (llibres) to control the recent past.7 The existence of these diverse historical genres within the same period confirms how complex fourteenth-century Catalonia became and how difficult it was to connect the present with tradition. For this reason, King Peter struggled to legitimize himself through authorship of the Llibre and by personally promoting diverse historical texts. And, crucially, he not only

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used historical texts to preserve tradition and strengthen collective identity but also harnessed historical memory through art and ornamentation. Notably, he asked the sculptor Mestre Aloy to make nineteen statues of his ancestors (the eight kings of Aragon and eleven counts of Barcelona) to be placed in the royal palace of Barcelona;8 he commissioned the silversmith Pere Bernes to forge nineteen figures of enamel to decorate the royal coronation sword;9 he completed the royal mausoleum in the Benedictine abbey of Poblet;10 he solemnly moved the body of Iñigo Arista, the first king of Pamplona, to the monastery of Saint Victor;11 he organized the royal archives and libraries;12 he gave detailed instructions for the construction of the royal library at Poblet;13 he attempted to revive troubadour poetry, both with his own compositions and by promoting the Consistory at Toulouse in 1323;14 and he ordered that scribes record and present a collection of his speeches to the Corts.15 By his continued attention to these projects, Peter the Ceremonious managed to generate a mythic present: the need to replace the old values forced him to look for creative solutions for rebuilding cultural consensus.16 Through these diverse artworks and archives, Peter created a monumental visual counterpart to the royal genealogical texts that were proliferating again at that time.17 Peter has always been remembered as a “historian king,” a title that has never been bestowed on James I, who did not manage to develop a systematic manner of preserving the historical tradition of the house of Barcelona. The seventeenth-century scholar Manel Marian Rivera made an interesting discovery of a letter that attests to Peter’s donation of his library to the monastery of Poblet—a document that Rivera consulted at the time but was later lost. In that letter, Peter makes a passionate defense of history, which explains his enthusiasm for preserving the memory of his kingdom. Referring to the ideas of Cicero and Herodotus, he posits the usefulness of history, arguing that it combats idleness, instructs readers, and tells us what must be retained and what disregarded. According to classical historiography, historical writing prevents our forgetting the glorious and heroic deeds

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of great men, as history praises virtues and censures vices. Peter asks chroniclers to immortalize his deeds, the good and the bad, right and wrong, laudable and despicable, in the same way he ordered Bernat Descoll, one of the chronicle’s scribes, in 1375, to write everything in the Llibre. Interestingly for our understanding of his notion of historical writing, Peter states that men’s deeds are less important that the way those deeds are recorded: “O would that when our body is consumed, after heavenly glory we might deserve to have a historian [scriptor] of such clear genius that he should extol our good deeds with due praise, reprehending our errors without malevolence.”18 Yet time has shown that his efforts were unsuccessful. Catalan tradition certainly regards Peter as a learned king who tirelessly sought new cultural resources in a troubled society.19 Yet this image of the scholar-king has weakened Peter’s image as a knightking. All of his predecessors possessed a title that demonstrated their quality as knight-kings: Alfonse the Chaste is the sovereign of Provence; Peter the Catholic sacrificed his life for his kingdom in the battle of Muret; James I is “the Conqueror” of Majorca and Valencia; the first Peter is the “Great” knight who won Sicily and expelled the French king from Catalonia; and James the Just dominated Greece. King Peter, who reconquered Sicily, recovered the kingdom of Majorca, and amassed more territorial power than any of his ancestors, is paradoxically relegated to a second level as a knight-king and given the political, rather than military, nickname of “Ceremonious” rather than “Great,” “Conqueror,” or “Defender.” The reason is clear: Peter has traditionally been associated with the beginning of the decline of the medieval Catalan empire, by scholars such as Ramon d’Abadal and Jaume Vicens Vives.20 Peter the Ceremonious focused on preserving the traditions inherited from his predecessors, and he deployed historical texts—minus legendary accounts and supernatural events—to this purpose. Consequently, he tends to deploy older models of authority, to preserve the tradition.21 In a celebrated passage of his Llibre, Peter admits that he has read James I’s chronicle,

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which probably inspired him to write his own: “That Sunday, at the first hour of night, We had not gone to rest and were reading the book or Chronicle of the Lord King En Jacme ( James), Our great-great-grandfather.”22 Nevertheless, although there are certain similarities—both are written in the first person plural—it is clear that James I’s autobiography functions only as a formal inspiration for Peter’s Llibre. They share literary form and genre but differ substantially in their authorial intention. Peter certainly chooses the form of autobiography to uphold the historiographical tradition inaugurated by King James and continued by Muntaner, reflecting the spirit of the memorialistcrusaders. Yet Peter had to face a double difficulty in his task as chronicler, because the historical context of fourteenth-century Catalonia was unfavorable to the king’s personal involvement in military expeditions and battles. This would explain why Peter’s text does not contain the contextual scope of other contemporary chroniclers such as Giovanni Villani and Jean Froissart; it focuses more on the account of Peter’s person than on the history of the kingdom—a subject matter more specifically developed in the Crònica de Sant Joan de la Penya, the other historical text commissioned by the king.

The Llibre as a Political Treatise With his autobiography, Peter the Ceremonious provided late medieval Catalonia with the model of a political culture necessary for an emerging new state.23 This political, rather than military, dimension is evident from the beginning of the Llibre, which opens with a prologue in the form of a speech addressed to parliament, in which the king expresses his belief in the divine protection given to the Aragonese crown: “Therefore, as king, reigning over the kingdom of Aragon by His great and splendid clemency, We, who have received many and divers favors in Our life through the infinite goodness of the Creator, have thought and wished to leave a record of them in writing, and to make a book.” Thus, Peter declares his intention of writing the story of

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his reign, not to extol himself but to provide his successors with useful history: We wish this not for Our arrogance and glory, but so that the kings, Our successors, on reading this book and hearing that We, by firm hope and faith and patience, which We had in the great goodness and mercy of Our Creator, have passed through divers perils and many wars with powerful enemies, and have been delivered with great honor and victory, should take this as an example. In their tribulations they should hope and trust in their Creator from whom come all good things, victories and favors. They should support and suffer their tribulations with great patience, which works, as Mossèn [Sir] St. James in his Letter, a finished and perfect work.24

The quotation from the Letter of Saint James is probably a tribute both to the apostle and to James I. The act of submission to God the Creator also appears in the other Catalan medieval chronicles, linking this text with tradition. The Llibre contains six long chapters or “books.”25 The first opens with the story of Peter’s birth, where he narrates part of the reign of his father, Alfonse the Benign, about whom he basically tells two stories: his conquest of Sardinia and his coronation. The chronicler’s interest in political themes is evident from the beginning. As he describes his father’s reign, he focuses on issues such as the right of primogeniture, the ceremony of selfcoronation, and territorial possessions, rather than on military deeds or chivalrous gestures: “We will speak first of our father’s estate prior to the time he attained the rank of crown prince [lo dret de la primogenitura],”26 “earlier we have said that we would relate . . . how he gained his Kingdoms.”27 In this first chapter the king also recounts his father’s birth and childhood, until his accession to the throne in 1319. The chapter closes with Alfonse’s death in 1336. The second book centers on the early events of Peter’s reign, such as his early conflicts with his uncles and the representatives of Catalonia, the coronation, his first trips, and several political issues (1336–40). The detailed description of his self-coronation

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covers six sections (8–14) and will be examined in detail in the second part of this book. The account of the self-coronation is followed by the story of his journey to Lleida to observe the privileges of the Catalan nobles in connection with the king. Then he describes some of the political difficulties he experienced during the first phase of his reign: his unsuccessful campaign in the kingdom of Valencia against Pedro d’Ejérica, the conflict with James III of Majorca, and his journey to Avignon to render homage to Pope Benedict XII for the realms of Sardinia and Corsica. The third chapter, the most extensive of the Llibre, recounts the rebellion of the king of Majorca (which included the Balearics and the mainland Pyrenean counties of Roussillon and Cerdagne) and his submission to the Aragonese crown (1341–45). The justification for the king’s political aspirations appears in the first lines of the chapter: In this third chapter is related the way in which the king of Majorca, who was our vassal and our liegeman, attempted and endeavored to deny our free lordship and the fealty that was due to us for the kingdom of Majorca and the Counties and lands which he held from us in fief. Because of this attempt we proceeded against him and confiscated the said kingdom and counties and lands, and united them to our royal crown of Aragon.28

Thus, Peter’s political objectives and desires for legitimization are articulated in the form of historical argumentation: the king summarizes the history of the kingdom of Majorca up to his own time, emphasizing the attempts of successive kings of Aragon to end its alienation from their crown: “So that the reason should be made manifest why we proceeded to confiscate the realms, Counties and lands mentioned above, we have declared here the affairs of the Kingdom of Majorca, how it was given by the King en Jacme [ James], our great-great-grandfather, and the deeds of past Kings of Majorca until the time of the aforesaid confiscation.”29 The chapter ends with James’s refusal of the generous terms of peace offered by Peter, his unsuccessful attempt to regain

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Cerdagne by force, and Peter’s definitive entry into Perpignan and his stay there. The moral of the story is summarized at the end of the chapter: “Many other evil and traitorous schemes en James of Majorca later plotted against us which did not succeed. Blessed be our Lord God, who through His mercy preserved us in these perils and in others. . . . And thus end all the deeds of this third chapter, in which have been told at length the affairs of the Kingdom of Majorca and the Counties of Roussillon and of Cerdagne, and how by just process they were returned, united, and made one with the crown of Aragon.”30 Chapter 4 tells the dramatic story of the Unions’ rebellion (with leadership from several towns in Valencia and Aragon) against King Peter, which was subsequently defeated by the king (1345–51). He opens with a synthesis of the chapter, again disclosing his tendency to justify his political targets, strategies, and actions: In this fourth chapter it is explained in what way our peoples of Aragon and of Valencia, barons and knights, the seats of the military orders and most of the cities and towns made Unions against us. As appeared clearly in the end, these Unions proceeded with great injustice. With the help of our Lord God, who is the guide of all those who love justice and truth and have a firm hope in Him, we destroyed and entirely annulled these Unions, correcting and punishing in an ordinary and just way many of those who had begun them and were responsible.31

This chapter contains the most dramatic scenes of the Llibre, including the narration of the spread of the Black Death in Valencia and Zaragoza and the loss of his second wife, Leonor of Portugal. Peter’s third marriage, to Leonor of Sicily, and his peace settlement with Castile close the chapter. The transitional scene to the next chapter describes his journey to Perpignan and the negotiations with Venice and Genoa. The fifth chapter centers on the alliance between Aragon and Venice against Genoa, Catalonia’s traditional adversary for domination in the western Mediterranean, and the rebellion of

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Sardinia (1350–55). It reports the Catalan expedition to the Bosphorus and the battle between the Catalan-Venetian-Greek allied fleets and the Genoese in February 1352. The action then moves to Sardinia, to describe the victory of the Catalan fleet, commanded by Bernat de Cabrera, against Genoa (August 1353) and Peter’s own expedition to the island (1354–55). This chapter links the accounts of the rebellion of the Unions and the war against Castile. Greater narrative tension arises in chapter 6, centered on the cruel war against Castile, which would decide Iberian supremacy (1356–69). The author uses negative epithets in the opening of the chapter, demonstrating the Llibre’s political bias: In this sixth chapter is contained and declared the matter of the war which the king of Castile wickedly and maliciously insisted on starting against us, the king Peter and our subjects. This war lasted nine years, beginning in the year of our Lord God 1356, and ending in the year 1365, when the war came to an end through the great punishment God inflicted on the king of Castile, for having made an unjust war, against reason.32

The narrative becomes more irregular, since Peter combines moments of intense drama (such as the description of the Castilian naval attack on Barcelona in 1359, the murder of his half brother prince Ferran, or Bernat de Cabrera’s escape and death) with expository episodes based on chancellery documentation, such as the literal transcription of the correspondence between Peter I of Castile and Peter the Ceremonious in 1356, where discussions of political strategy and diplomatic plans replace the narration of military action. The chapter ends with a moral lesson, as the enemy is murdered by his own half brother King Henry of Castile in 1369. Peter’s conclusion flows naturally from this fact: Although divers deeds of arms and the deaths of persons and the occupation of places occurred, at the end of the war the king of Castile, by the judgment of God, who crushes pride and exalts humility,

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was condemned to lose his realms twice. And the last time that he lost his kingdoms, he lost life and was beheaded by the hand of his enemy, the king Henry, his brother, as he deserved, since the whole of his war was unjust and evil from the first day it began until the end, so many and so divers were the cruelties he committed and the deaths and dismemberments he inflicted on our people who did not wish to surrender to his power at once, killing and slaying them, for he did not pardon anyone of any sex or age.33

The “Appendix” to the Llibre does not appear to be part of the original text but to have been written between 1385 and 1425. It describes a series of events from 1370 (the death of the French princess betrothed to Peter’s heir, Joan) to 1385 (the defeat of the French mercenaries by Joan) and includes references to incidents that followed Peter’s death. This account clarifies the nature of Peter’s difficulties, which arose from powerful enemies from both inside (Unions, Majorca) and outside (Genoa, Castile) his kingdom.34 The entire text hinges on the tension between theory and practice, aspirations and realities, resolutions and actions, most probably as a result of the king’s growing difficulties. Peter’s account leaves almost no room for those fictionalized passages of chivalrous adventures based on legendary sources employed in prior Catalan historiography. The king now appears primarily as a ruler rather than as a knight, and stories of military action are replaced by theoretical ruminations on political strategy and ideological legitimization. This king hardly ever participates in battle, because he functions as a statesman rather than as a soldier. James I’s “book of deeds” has turned into King Peter’s “book of policies,” despite its title’s resonance with the Catalan historiographical tradition: “The book in which are contained all the great deeds that have occurred in our house [dynasty] during the time of our life, commencing with our birth.”35 Yet the Llibre is neither a panegyric nor mere royal selfaggrandizement. The king envisions a chronicle written with historical objectivity meant to intensify the text’s realism and validate him as a historian. In a 1375 letter to Bernat Descoll, one

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of the chronicle’s scribes, Peter orders him not to overlook any historical fact, though it may damage his reputation (“be mention made of everything, although some events have taken place to our great loss”).36 The scribe certainly obeys the order, and the Llibre reports on the king’s difficulties and his occasionally erroneous decisions: he started the fratricidal war with the king of Majorca that Muntaner had so vigorously warned against; he imprudently reopened the conflict with Catalonia’s neverending Mediterranean adversary, Genoa; his Sardinian policy was erratic and exhausting; and his confrontation with Castile led to the beginning of Catalan decline and Castilian domination in the Iberian peninsula. The Llibre also includes several stories that unambiguously demonstrate Peter’s cruelty. He writes of how he made rebels drink molten iron from bells; he ordered condemned men to be dragged by horses before being hanged; he pressured officials into executing several criminals before they could take advantage of the reprieve as a consequence of his marriage; he justifies the assassination of his stepbrother, Ferdinand, with cold indifference.37 The Llibre, therefore, in a sense, subverts the traditional heroic Catalan biographical and autobiographical portrait: James I depicts himself as the world’s bravest knight, Peter the Great was historicized by Desclot as an outstanding conqueror, and Muntaner describes the heroes of the Catalan Company as the soldiers that defeated the Byzantine empire. Peter’s Llibre inaugurates a new form of the historical text, one less romantic and more realistic, that reveals the king’s motives, cruelties, doubts, and uncertainties but also highlights military values and political inspirations. Thus, Peter’s narration becomes a precedent for the Dietaris (diaries, account books) that will dominate Catalan historiography in the next centuries.38 Peter reports events very carefully, generally in great detail. This feature often encumbers the narrative thread, but it gives the chronicle a style that prefigures historiographical tendencies of the Renaissance. As a historian, Peter meticulously describes the preparations, negotiations, decisions,

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strategies, logistics, aftermath, and political consequences of a battle rather than the action itself. Thus the Llibre is an analytical account rather than a chronicle or a genealogy.39 This gives the text a much larger thematic scope than the other Catalan chronicles have: it not only encompasses military and chivalric deeds but also focuses on political strategies, epidemics, economic difficulties, internal revolts, aristocratic opposition to the monarchy, and even popular revolts.40

Peter’s Historical and Historiographical Legacy: A King’s Tragedy Contradiction and conflict marked Peter’s life, because of his tendency to grandiosity and Caesarism, contrary to the new scenario that was evolving in fourteenth-century Europe. The challenges of the new context—economic crisis, epidemics, social conflicts, political instability, and monarchal troubles—demanded answers that Peter did not seem to possess. He remained too conditioned by the values of a lost world, although some historians have seen pre-Machiavellian symptoms in his tendency to cynicism: “As this prince was feeble and delicate in his body, his spirit was all the more daring; he was of an incredible promptness and ardor and of great vigor and execution in all he undertook, and had spirit and valor for any enterprise; he was extraordinarily ambitious and haughty and very ceremonious in preserving royal authority and pre-eminence.”41 This description of the king was written by the Aragonese scholar Jerónimo Zurita in the sixteenth century, two hundred years after Peter’s death, attesting to how the king’s memory remained alive among his subjects because of the difficulties he had faced during his reign. Perhaps Zurita was that historian desired by Peter: “O would that when our body is consumed, after heavenly glory we might deserve to have a historian [scriptor] of such clear genius that he should extol our good deeds with due praise, reprehending our errors without malevolence.”42 Historians gave Peter the glory that he did not attain in his time.

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Three centuries after Zurita wrote about Peter, in the nineteenth century, during the age of recuperation of the Catalan medieval tradition through the cultural movement of the Renaixença, Pròsper de Bofarull describes Peter the Ceremonious as “short, with a violent and choleric temper, but attentive, political, curious, and courageous, with chivalrous ideas and literary gifts, great astrologist and alchemist, and one of the best troubadours of the century.”43 This image highlights Peter’s dignity, cleverly juxtaposing his physical limitations with the magnanimity of his political objectives and the splendor of his culture. More accurately, Antoni Rubió i Lluch summarizes, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the king’s fundamental characteristics: strength, ambition, and cruelty. He had a clear political vision and struggled to reconcile Caesarism and consensualism through his negotiation with the Corts. He felt the weight of the responsibility of being one more link in the chain of the magnificent Aragonese lineage. His political objectives were ambitious: to strengthen royal authority, to unify the three branches of the house of Barcelona, and to realize imperialist territorial expansion into the western Mediterranean. His cultural interests were numerous and his projects among the most impressive of the European kingdoms of the Middle Ages: translations of literary texts, promotion of historical texts, oratory, poetry, legislation. He promoted science by commissioning almanacs and handbooks, astronomical treatises and tables, and books on eclipses. He also encouraged the practice of alchemy, the drawing of universal maps, the importation of agriculture techniques, and the translation of astrology and medical literature. And, finally, he tried to overcome religious and linguistic boundaries, translating into Catalan the Llibre moresc (Moorish Book), the Corà (Koran), the Drets hebraics (Hebraic Laws), the Proverbis aràbics (Arabic Proverbs).44 Peter sought to preserve both historical and historiographical traditions, by recourse to the founding texts of Catalan tradition and emphasis on autobiography, respectively. The contradiction of Peter’s reign surfaces when the form of the historical text he

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chose diverges from its particular political, economic, and cultural contexts. The choice of the autobiographical voice would be appropriate in a more stable period, such as that experienced by King James, rather than in a period in which the king’s own political authority was in question. Yet the desperate search for answers to new problems—primarily that of territorial expansion during a serious economic crisis—led Peter to harness all the rhetorical and political strategies available. This discordance between Peter’s ambitious political objectives and the difficult conditions of his reign might explain why twentieth-century Catalan historians have generally been severe in their judgment of Peter’s reign, echoing the claims of Western historiography, which tends to see the fourteenth century as a period of economic and political decline. Ramon d’Abadal describes it as “the beginning of the decline of Catalonia.”45 Soldevila also considers Peter’s reign as the first step along the fatal road that led to the enthronement of the Castilian dynasty in Catalonia in 1412 and the subsequent loss of the Catalan spirit and nature, overcome by Castilian values.46 Yet Catalonia never possessed before or since the territorial power it did under the long reigns of Peter the Ceremonious and Alfonse the Magnanimous (fifteenth century), the conqueror of Naples.47 This romantic, schematic, and organicist vision of both fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Catalan history and historiography, which may appear artificial, is nonetheless accurate. The long political, economic, and cultural decline of Catalonia that followed the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, continuing until the eighteenth century, relegated Peter’s and Alfonse the Magnanimous’s reigns to the dark side of Catalan history. Yet no one can deny that Peter’s reign promoted the modernization of the army, new forms of royal ceremony and display, and reorganization and specialization of the cultural and political dimensions of the court.48 His actions foreshadow those of the Renaissance princes, where the function of the king was both political and cultural. Perhaps Catalans need to preserve Peter’s imagined character

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rather than the historical one. The last Catalan king-chronicler lived a tormented life but succeeded in leaving as a legacy the image of an ambitious Renaissance king. The image of the king that emerges from the Llibre reflects his constant struggle against his enemies. No one can deny his persistence in following the epic paths of his ancestors, although the quantity and quality of the means were not always proportional to the goals obtained. There is no place in Peter’s Llibre for diversion or for the inconsequential: the entire narration focuses on the king’s dramatically tragic aim of salvaging the Catalan dynasty. Peter came close to grasping the glory of destiny, and his efforts never ceased. Though the prize was glimpsed, he never reached it. Though he ultimately failed, Peter, like the heroes of Greek tragedy, found his triumph in the struggle rather than in victory.

part 2 Theories and Interpretations

6 The Shift in Historical Genres To study genre is to explore the poetics of culture, because genre choice is never politically or culturally neutral.1 An author’s generic choice is simultaneously an ideological and rhetorical choice. The same applies to theories about a text’s reception, in tune with the current critical trends of the New Philology: when editors, readers, or critics classify a text as a specific genre, they respond to literary, cultural, social, and ideological conventions. Generic developments therefore illustrate their authors’ aesthetic and political choices and also reveal social and cultural changes in audiences.2 This idea carries particular resonance in traditional societies, where genre classification was based on content rather than on form, aiding the listener/reader in making logical connections and distinctions.3 Indeed, genre also always reflects its context, in one way or another, as literary genres are configured by their time and place. These ideas frame my discussion of medieval Catalan historiography, as I discuss how the historical genres selected by the authors (annals, genealogies, autobiographies, and chronicles) reflect the shifting circumstances in which they worked. Thus, the analysis of the evolution of historical genres demonstrates how rhetorical choices reflect political strategies. In addition, genres do not exist independently. Each genre must be understood in relation to others. Thus, a comparative analysis of the

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diverse Catalan historiographical genres illuminates the strategies employed in the individual texts. The operation of historicizing and contextualizing them requires a rhetorical operation, following Northrop Frye’s hypothesis that genres are rhetorical in the sense that they are determined by the conditions established between the poet and audience.4 Historians have generally been reluctant to acknowledge the existence of specific historiographical genres, preferring to use such categories for creative rather than historical literature. Others argue that because examples of the same genre do not share many characteristics, analysis on the basis of genres is a pointless operation.5 Nevertheless, I contend that genre theory provides useful frames for interpretation or, at least, valid expectations for interpretation.6 In addition, the specific conditions within which historical texts were produced in the Middle Ages made the emergence of certain clear distinctions in genre possible, notwithstanding the frequent crossings between established generic boundaries. Medieval historical authors’ genre choices reflect their aesthetic, ideological, social, political, and representational aims. Further, a variety of genres produce multiple forms of historical narrative, in an operation that affects not only the external appearance of historical text but also its content. Genres simultaneously mirror and create the historical conditions within which they exist. Historical texts tend to adapt to the conditions of the setting that shapes them, and they, in turn, influence this context. Consequently, historical genres are conditioned by changing historical circumstances and also determine and affect the social and political context.7 For this reason, historians and literary scholars repeatedly call our attention to the presence of context in the text (as the movement of the New Historicism has highlighted) or the independent internal evolution of texts (as poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories posited after the 1970s).8 In this chapter I move in the direction of the New Historicism rather than toward structuralist abstractions, to explore the meanings and motivations of the Catalan historical authors in their strategic choices of genre, from an-

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nals to genealogies, autobiographies, and chronicles, connecting these choices with the specific time of the texts’ inscription. Genre is a dynamic rather than static category, and it would be inaccurate or naive to fix texts within rigid categorizations with inflexible boundaries, especially in the Middle Ages.9 Classical theories of literary criticism have also stressed the relative nature of these categorizations. Some of them have shown their skepticism regarding the existence of “pure” genres: “Every text modifies ‘its’ genre: the generic component of a text is never (except in the rarest of cases) the mere reduplication of the generic model constituted by the (supposedly pre-established) class of texts in the lineage of which it can be situated.”10 Nevertheless, recognizing the fluidity of genres, we continue to explore their changing nature, particularly in those cases where we can pinpoint the moment of their emergence, as in medieval Catalan historiography. To be sure, recent theories have emphasized the importance of reading genres in their social contexts and attending to their historical specificity, noting, in particular, that genres are historical assumptions, that is, constructed from the outside (by the editors, readers, and critics) almost as much as by the authors themselves. Genre, ultimately, refers to a group of texts that possess similar characteristics that distinguish them from others.11 Medieval Catalan historiography is an excellent field for the analysis and interpretation of the changing nature of genre and its connection with shifting contexts. From the eleventh to the fourteenth century, different genres of historical writing—annals, genealogies, autobiographical chronicles, classical chronicles, and universal chronicles—emerged in Catalonia. Since genres are not autonomous and cannot be examined separately, my analysis will be primarily chronological and will make connections among the different genres. I argue that although each genre has its specificity, texts are interrelated, so that questions of contrast, complementarity, and comparison aid the study of the emergence, development, and transformation of the texts and their genres.

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Annals and the Origins of Historical Consciousness in Catalonia The tenth-century annals arguably inaugurate the evolution of historiographical genres in Catalonia. Written in Latin and structured as simple chronological entries, rather than narrative accounts of historical events, the first Catalan annals were written in the Pyrenean area, in the cloisters of the monastery of Ripoll and Santa Maria de Cuixà.12 The medieval Catalan annals have also been called “Cronicons” by some scholars, although this term is often confusing. Written in Catalonia at least from the tenth century, the form survived until the thirteenth century. The compilation of these texts, which have received the title “family Rivipullense,” consists of five key documents: Annals de Ripoll I, Annals de Ripoll II, Annals de Roda, Annals de Tortosa II, and Annals de Marsella. There are other series of annals in Catalonia, usually integrated in other manuscripts with different functions, such as the annals placed at the end of the volume entitled Memoria renovata comitum et episcoporum Ripacurcensium. The annals are, at their simplest, compilations of brief notes about the significant events of a single year.13 It is generally believed—and this also applies to Catalan historiography—that they developed from the notes written on the margins of Easter tables, the record of the astronomical data from which the date of Easter could be calculated for any given year. The tradition of these tables may have been introduced to the Frankish kingdom by Anglo-Saxon monks. The Easter tables were transformed during the eighth and ninth century into longer texts—such as the Royal Frankish annals and its continuations, the Anglo-Saxon chronicle and the so-called annals of St-Bertin and annals of Fuda. Yet this historiographical process must not be reduced to a lineal and progressive evolution toward a more perfect historical genre, from a schematic Easter table to more detailed annals. The annals were not merely narrated forms of the Easter tables but a new literary form. Reading the Catalan annals as literary artifacts allows us to understand how they not only fixed certain foundational data

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that helped shape the Catalan collective imagination (most notably, the conquest of Girona in 785 and the fall of Barcelona in 985) but also served as the impulse for the emergence and consolidation of Catalan historical consciousness. The annals forged Catalan historical identity by their reiteration of a selective chronology, made explicit by the recitation of a linear sequence of past time. The lack of narrativity in the Catalan annals is overshadowed by abundant chronological data, valuable (though sometimes imprecise) information that the genealogical Gesta Comitum and the other Catalan chronicles barely provide. The different versions of the Annals of Ripoll contain extensive chronological data, beginning from the time of the Roman Empire and ending with contemporary events, which were later used as reliable historical sources. One of the clearest manifestations of the annals’ historical power was their ability to create a starting point for Catalan collective memory—a kind of foundational date. At the end of the twelfth century, when the first version of the Gesta Comitum was composed, its lack of chronological references stood in open contrast with the earlier annals. The only chronological reference refers to the fall of Barcelona in 985: “huius Borrelli comitis temporibus civitas Barchinona a Sarracenis capta et devastata est, anno dominice incarnationis DCCCCLXXXV.”14 The defeat of Barcelona by Al-Mansûr, and the destruction of many historical records, demanded a renewed effort to write the history of the Catalan counts. In all probability, the compilers of the Gesta Comitum turned to the Annals of Ripoll I, which was probably found on the monastery’s shelves. The fall of Barcelona is noted in the Annals of Ripoll I as: “Anno 985. Capta fuit Barchinona a sarracenis [by Muslims].” It is not clear if those who compiled these chronological rec­ ords had conscious historical awareness or whether they merely observed liturgical seasons and astronomical changes.15 Scholars agree that annalistic compilation in general is marked by its lack of narrative and the absence of historical curiosity, its contents normally reduced to an enumeration of the deeds of the remote past. The rigid temporal framework of the annalistic form, a list

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of events of the years since Christ’s birth, inevitably limits authorial possibilities. Annals have been labeled the “one-event-afteranother” genre, as opposed to the “one-event-because-of-another” causal narrative more typical of “history.”16 Nevertheless, I argue that the operation of selecting specific dates and rejecting others, and the process of organizing the material into chronological sequence, may themselves be considered an authorial strategy that provides the future chronicles with an already selective source of information that shapes historical identity. To attest to the emergence of this limited but nonetheless vital authorial strategy, we should note that we generally consider the Catalan annals as the basis for Catalan collective identity, since they proceed, in their choice of events, from a general to a specific sense of political and cultural identification. They begin with dates from the Scriptures and move on to key events in the Roman, Roman-Hispanic, Islamic-Hispanic, and Carolingian empires (e.g., “Anno 767. Obitus Karoli imperatoris”). After this more general framing, the annals of Ripoll center on more local data, from the liberation of Girona and Barcelona from the Moors to the emergence of the first counts, particularly Wilfred the Hairy. The events recorded after Count Wilfred relate exclusively to the Catalan counts and bishops and the struggles against the Muslims.17 This strategy promotes a historical identity that goes from Christian origins to the story of the Catalan counts, passing through the events of the Roman Empire and its renovatio imperii via the Carolingian empire. In this evolution, the Muslims appear as foreign conquerors rather than as part of the autochthonous culture: they enact a break from tradition rather than serve as a landmark of Catalan historical evolution. Considering that the annals identify Count Wilfred as a turning point in Catalan history, we are not surprised to find him as the starting point of the narration of the genealogical Gesta Comitum, as I noted in chapter 1. Sarah Foot argues that the annals have to be read “not as discrete statements located only in time, but as unitary and coherent wholes [that] can be shown to constitute more sophisticated

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analyses of the past conveying a larger meaning. . . . If sets of annals are read entire, rather than as random assortments of variously collected (and unedited) notes, they convey significant narratives. Annals are not mere recitations of everything that happened within a given time-span, but the self-conscious construction (emplotment) of cogent stories, made meaningful by selection, omission and careful interpretation.”18 The future use of the Catalan annals as sources of history and identity demonstrates that they have to be read from this more organic, global perspective rather than reductively as nonnarrative historical texts.

The Emergence of Genealogies: The Legitimization of Political Power By the end of the twelfth century an important shift in the evolution of historiographical genres in Catalonia occurred: the emergence of the genealogies. Genealogies have always fascinated anthropologists as well as historians and literary scholars because of the ways they perform constitutive concepts such as tradition, identity, legitimization, validation, lineage, authority and power.19 The annals’ strict chronology was thus replaced by the genealogical narrative. Gesta I is the first Catalan genealogical text: its organization offers both a new vision of aristocratic society through a revised perception of lineage and a new conception of time. Time is now measured by the succession of generations rather than by the chronological progression of events. The sequence of generations links the past with the present and projects them into the future. As a consequence, chronological markers lose their significance. As mentioned earlier, the Gesta’s only chronological reference is to the fall of Barcelona in 985. The paucity of dates emphasizes the genealogical rather than chronological purpose of the Gesta’s compilers. As I explained chapter 1, Gesta I opens by introducing the figure of the founder of the lineage, as opposed to the annals, which begin with references to Scripture, the universal church,

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and the Roman Empire. There are other differences as well. The annals describe several lineages; Gesta focuses on only one. The annals record general histories; the Gesta’s concerns are local. The annals enumerate a list of events; the Gesta converges upon a crucial historical experience, the coronation of the counts of Barcelona as kings. The annals link Roman history with contemporary times in a prospective account; the Gesta connects the contemporary counts with their lineage’s hero-founder, in a carefully constructed retrospective account. Yet scholars do not doubt that the annals were well known and used as sources of information, and the monks of Ripoll would certainly have been familiar with the annals. The Gesta Comitum’s genealogical rather than chronological structure has fascinated historians and symbolic anthropologists, who examine the articulations of human experience by using spatial metaphors rather than the coordinates of time: “in the past they study, historians find worlds, structured differently from ours, worlds where people’s motives, senses of honor, daily tasks, and political calculations are based on unfamiliar assumptions about human society and the cosmic order.”20 Genealogies become an excellent field of information about the cultural values—especially those connected with historical convictions— that transcend space and time. The other fundamental reason for historians’ and anthropologists’ interest in genealogies lies in their systematic references to origins. The potential of narratives of origins such as historical records is harnessed by many cultures, as announced in Ecclesiasticus 44:1: “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” Political scientists have argued that the study of origins becomes the most powerful site for the discovery of human diversity.21 As Pierre Bourdieu posits: [There] is no more potent tool for rupture than the reconstruction of genesis: by bringing back into view the conflicts and confrontations of the early beginnings and therefore all the discarded possibles, it

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retrieves the possibility that things could have been (and still could be) otherwise. And, through such a practical utopia, it questions the possible which, among all others, was actualized.22

In effect, the search for origins connects profoundly with the function of myth, and the Gesta’s mythification of its founderhero, who continues to live in Catalan collective memory, attests to this. Briefly, we must distinguish between origins and beginnings, to adequately understand and interpret Catalan genealogies. Foucault establishes the distinction between mythical origins and historical beginnings in these terms: “The lofty origin is no more than a metaphysical extension which arises from the belief that things are most precious and essential at the moment of birth. We tend to think that this is the moment of their greatest perfection, when they emerged dazzling from the hands of a creator or in the shadowless light of a first morning”; on the contrary, “what is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity.”23 Thus, historians’ interest in mythical origins lies not in their hypothetical historicity but in their representation of a given culture’s self-image, manifested through its social assumptions and worldview. Through the invention and symbolic articulation of Wilfred’s story, the Gesta’s compiler draws on the inexhaustible possibilities of myth, while the other events recounted in the Gesta are limited by the coordinates of their own historicity. Considering the theoretical and practical possibilities of this genre, historians are reexamining medieval genealogies to focus on their political and social dimensions.24 Yet recent studies have highlighted the priority of the cultural over both the spatial and the political dimension of genealogies, calling for a more multidisciplinary approach to these texts. Anita GuerreauJalabert, for example, argues that kinship is above all a “cultural” phenomenon, which does not prevent a society from defining

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the whole or a part of its system as “natural.”25 Others, among them Howard Bloch, blend linguistic, literary, and anthropological criticism in their analyses of medieval genealogies and argue that they “represent a medieval mental structure” because of their durability and prevalence.26 Gabrielle Spiegel suggests that historical genealogy is an implicit “syntax” that transcends the disjunction of temporality and episodicity inherent in the historical narrative, as the continuity of the lineage serves to synthesize and unify.27 Finally, Zrinka Stahuljak recently proposed a new way of reading medieval genealogies, based on an expanded concept of the genre as representing not only “blood” ties but linguistic alliance. These diverse approaches to textual and visual genealogies unveil the multilayered reality of this genre.28 Some anthropologists further suggest that the different visual, performative, and textual genealogies—such as stained glass and manuscript illustrations, genealogical chants, or narrative genealogies—present succession as merely the realization of the rule of primogeniture. This reduces, for instance, the social history of kingship to natural history, to mere procreation, in order to make succession appear as something beyond human choice and intention, an unquestionable fact.29 This claim illustrates how readings of genealogy have evolved from the biological to the cultural and discursive. These approaches, together with the methodologies associated with the linguistic and cultural turns, invite us to reexamine Catalan genealogies from a wider epistemological perspective. As a record of social relations, genealogies focus on particular social groups, generally members of royal and aristocratic lineages who had access to political and social positions.30 When the counts of Barcelona became kings of Aragon, they decided that the annals were insufficient records of their new political status and therefore asked the monks of Ripoll, where the mausoleum of the royal family was established, to reconstruct their genealogy, giving it narrative form. Apart from legitimizing the exercise of power, these genealogies were linked to the concept

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of property, for the right to ownership or participation in property was established by affiliation. Thus, the founding moment of the lineage, situated in a time often beyond memory—three centuries earlier, in the case of the first count of Barcelona—became synonymous with an attachment to a conquered or inherited land, transmitted to the next generation via inheritance. Genealogies also gave the new Catalan royal lineage a sense of timelessness and duration. As R. Howard Bloch explains, consciousness of lineage implies an awareness of the family as a diachronic sequence of relations as opposed to the less temporized notion of a clan extended in a space.31 Time and space, history and geography, converge in Catalan genealogies, whose rhythms are based on generational succession and on the sense of belonging to (and possessing) a land. Other aspects recorded in genealogies make them a privileged system for recording social code, including the rules of succession, the office succeeded to, the relationships between the successive office holders, the selection process, and the duration of time in office, among others. The monks of the monasteries of the young medieval kingdoms—such as Ripoll in Catalonia or Saint-Denis in France— were aware of their role as custodians of the country’s memories and therefore conscious of their responsibility in the enhancement of political power.32 Yet, paradoxically, when genealogies were established as a genre, the historical narrative was structured by a dynastic rather than ecclesiastical paradigm. As ecclesiastical values were being introduced into the great aristocratic houses, the culture of the court was being secularized.33 This first secularization of time—dynastic time—became an eloquent precedent for the definitive laicization of time at the end of the Middle Ages.34 As a consequence, the legitimizing historical texts no longer needed to refer to biblical times: it was enough for them to foreground the dynasties’ heroic founders. The emergence of genealogical literature in that period was not conditioned by scriptural tradition because it connected more deeply to the growth of a sense of dynasty and the consolidation

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of the agnatic organization of the family from the tenth century onward. The genealogical literature of the monarchies and the great counties developed within a context that was still largely ecclesiastical and monastic. Yet they intention was political and courtly rather than religious—the counts and kings supervised the production of their own genealogies. The association between the political and the religious spheres developed generally in the context of an institution that needed to confirm its own legitimacy. Narrative genealogies are compiled when a dynasty or institution has established itself: the texts then serve as powerful external validation, verifying the dynasty’s claims to authority and legitimacy over political rivals. Historical writing thus becomes a vital instrument for the consolidation of a successful group and an effective tool for deflecting the threat of competitors. In this context, narrative genealogies recover tradition, claim antiquity, highlight continuity with earlier lineages, and stress legitimacy in the present.35 They became strategies for the establishment of power by emerging lineages with obscure or weak pasts. Promoters of this genre were perfectly aware of the texts’ powerful political potential. A discursive and textual construction was necessary in order to claim continuity for an illegitimate or legally suspect situation. Genealogies were deployed by emerging groups to legitimize their power and to claim connections with those who had been in power in the past. They became powerful political weapons in the growing monarchies of medieval Europe, who tried to reduce the distance separating them from the founding generation of their lineage for very specific political reasons.36 This reduction of historical distance brought the past closer, intensifying the emotional impact of an event. Thus, a historical text served to legitimize a present situation. The shortage of established chronological referents in the past made its manipulation in the present easier. Though the lack of chronological rigor in medieval historiography has often been criticized, we should instead ask whether that lack of rigor might not have been more a political strategy than a methodological lacuna.

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Catalan Genealogies’ Historical and Historiographical Heritage Though contemporary scholars’ interest in the discursive potential of genealogical narratives has produced important critical studies,37 the content of these narratives has been largely ignored by positivist historiographers, most probably because of their highly schematic nature. Nevertheless, the genealogy was considered by medieval chroniclers to be a privileged medium for establishing a rigorous, orderly succession of events, and they perceived them as the true foundation for the structure of history.38 At the same time, narrative genealogies confirmed the links established in the twelfth century between historical texts and legends. Genealogies became increasingly divorced from their scriptural, liturgical, and monastic origins, entering the realm of chivalric fiction, based on the tradition of the epic legends and privileging a courtly context. Legendary heroes became the protagonists of a supposedly historical genre, opening history up to legend and the imaginary. If anything characterizes the genealogical literature of the twelfth century, including the Catalan Gesta, it is the invention of legendary antecedents of the royal dynasties in the remote past to consolidate a present that requires validating. The Gesta’s compilers considered the genealogy the form that best suited their purposes. From the beginning of the Gesta, they strove to assemble an orderly list of all the counts of Barcelona, as well as of all the other counts of Catalonia. Throughout the narrative, they adhere strictly to that structure. Paradoxically, then, the Gesta Comitum’s structural credibility is compatible with its lack of historicity. Although we note the incorporation of legends in the text, which later critics have undertaken to locate, the text served as a template for the drafting of the successions of the Catalan counts and the kings of Aragon until well into the twentieth century. In this sense, the Gesta Comitum, together with the other texts of the Quatre Grans Cròniques, functions perfectly as the canon of

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Catalan historiography. Pierre Nora refers to three historical texts as the building blocks of France’s historical memory: the Grandes Chroniques, completed in 1274 by the monks of the abbey of Saint Denis, Etienne Pasquier’s debunking text Recherches de la France (1599), and the historiography of the Restoration, which created the modern concept of France as a nation-state.39 Similarly, the Gesta established a new structure for Catalan historical memory, the backbone for Catalan historiography, not only in the Middle Ages but well into the revision of historical studies in the mideighteenth century 40 and even into the nineteenth century, with the shift from the legendary phase of Catalan romantic historiography to the erudite phase.41 Jaume Vicens Vives’s ambitious project of writing a general history of Catalonia around 1950 was entitled Biografies Catalanes, proof of the validity of that type of historical narrative even in modern Catalan historiography.42 The parallels between the twentieth-century Biografies and the twelfth-century Gesta are clear enough. Lastly, Miquel Coll i Alentorn opens his 1990 article on the legend of Wilfred with the following: “The founder of our national dynasty enjoyed prestige and renown in his own lifetime.”43 Ramon d’Abadal describes the Gesta’s author as “our first general historian.”44 Abadal’s essay on Guifré Borrell, the second count of Barcelona, devotes about forty pages to correcting the Gesta author’s confusion between the historical Wilfred the Hairy and his son Guifré Borrell.45 These contemporary perspectives on the Gesta support the text’s historical authority, despite its uncertain historicity and evident historical inaccuracies. The Gesta’s enormous influence may lie in the fact that it condenses the dynastic and genealogical memory of Catalonia into an extraordinarily simple shape and in its capacity to graphically present the originary structure of Catalonia as an assembly of counties rather than as a monarchy. The text proposes a new way of asserting historical continuity for the emerging realm by focusing on the figure of the count of Barcelona and king of Aragon. It is not fortuitous that the text dates from the threshold of the thirteenth century, just as the counts’ policy of expansion in the Mediterranean was about to begin and expansion in the

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south of France had been discontinued. The remote past of the origins of the county of Barcelona is re-presented, enacted again in the service of a dynasty with bold expansionist ambitions.46 The genre’s vigor and scope explain the Gesta’s power to create and inspire historical and historiographical models in Catalonia from the thirteenth to the twentieth century. After acknowledging the Gesta’s influence, we cannot underestimate the power of narrative genealogies both in the formation of historiographical traditions and in the consolidation of national and cultural identities. The historical reasons for compiling genealogies are as significant as the actual pattern of the compilation.47 Narrative genealogy linked what was separated or even split, giving the new dominant lineage a boost in legitimacy via tradition. To achieve these aims, the new lineage often had to resort to historiographical disruptions. Yet no one seemed to lament or criticize these practices, because they served political aspirations and, more important, provided social stability. With the passage of time, these historiographical manipulations gained legitimacy as real historical narrations. Ultimately, then, versions of reality shaped reality. During the later Middle Ages, European monarchies not only appropriated these “old” historical texts but also recreated them. In thirteenth-century France, for example, in the light of the Capetian principles of dynastic succession, the ellipses of West Frankish rule were part of a history susceptible to correction.48 In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Germany, as in the kingdom of Portugal, the compilation of the most important noble houses and the development of a table of medieval kings and princes reflect the constantly changing construction of the dynastic or institutional past.49 In thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Catalonia, the royal family of Aragon ordered successive vernacular versions of the Gesta Comitum, updating the original Latin text. The vernacularization of the text became a valuable strategy to alter historical writing for political benefits.50 The choice of the genealogical form by the counts of Bar­ celona to construct their past emulated the increasingly widespread practice of European monarchs searching for their dynastic

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origins, regardless of the verifiability of the information. The remote past is easy to manipulate; the invention of the recent past becomes more complex. One of the paradigmatic examples of linking a legendary past to a hegemonic present was the French monarchy’s strategy to establish kinship with the Carolingian kings and, from there, to establish links with the Merovingians and even the kings of Troy, as in the preamble to the section devoted to the Capetians in the Grandes Chroniques.51 The chronological and thematic parallels between the Gesta Comitum and the Capetian genealogy of Foigny are clear.52 To rummage through one’s remote past can be a balm, as looking into one’s recent past may be more painful. Thus, the particular formal structure of the genealogy enabled emerging monarchs to create the necessary links to legitimize the hereditary principle of the monarchic succession. Yet changes in the context soon led to the emergence of another historiographical genre. When genealogies appeared to be consolidated as the historiographical genre—indeed, they continued to be practiced for two more centuries—they began to decline. As Derrida notes: “At the very moment that a genre or a literature is broached, at that very moment, degenerescence has begun, the end begins.”53 The rise of the chronicle led to the distortion of the genealogies. This shift demonstrates how the success of a particular genre might retrospectively influence an earlier genre and the reception of both those texts in a context that continues to change. The process of transformation of the Catalan genealogies may be observed through an internal analysis of the later versions of the Gesta Comitum, whose original twelfth-century version was expanded in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to recount the deeds of the monarchs who succeeded Alfonse the Chaste.54 If Gesta I ’s primary text was composed schematically, the following versions added more information and replaced the strict genealogical style of the original with a mixed mode: they incorporate more chronological references, give specific information about the duration of each reign, offer precise geographical

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indications for the kings’ graves, supply poetic funereal praise for some kings, recount the stories of the foundation and dedication of several monasteries, and narrate several tales, particularly those that refer to military deeds. Thus, the Latin text’s schema of genuit/genuit in the twelfth century was replaced by the tradidit/tenuit/fecit in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Latin and Catalan versions. Here, the narrative is structured by territorial heritage, geographical possession, and deeds of the counts or kings, rather than merely the sequence of the lineage. The form of the narrative shifts in each version because its function changes: the genealogical sections validate the historical durability and continuity of a particular lineage, while the narrative segments exalt the deeds of the members of this lineage. An analysis of the evolution of the entire corpus of the Gesta Comitum shows that each successive historical text offers new information as a result of the deployment of more sources, adapting genre to suit the requirements of the new context. As Spiegel explains, referring to similar contemporary European historical texts, “as genealogies were amplified in the course of the twelfth century, pushing out in every direction, filling in each sequence with more detail, adding names of younger sons, daughters, and ancestors not previously mentioned, the profile of the family tree became a skeleton of aristocratic society, revealing the multiple threads that crossed and recrossed, binding regional nobilities into ever more integrated congeries of family relations.”55 To be sure, the later versions of the Gesta Comitum were contemporaneous with a new genre in medieval Catalonia: narrative chronicles.

The Expansion of the Chronicles: The Political Power of Historical Narratives From the end of the twelfth century to the mid-thirteenth century, a substantial shift in historiographical practice in Catalonia was illustrated by the contrast in form and content between the genealogical Gesta Comitum and the chronicle Llibre dels fets.

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The latter text is contemporary with the Grandes Chroniques of France and other similar texts in England: these national historiographical traditions underwent transformations at that time.56 The new chronicles based their narratives on poems designed to commemorate the deeds of the monarchs. A comparison between the Gesta and the Llibre dels fets confirms this shift in genre. The Gesta Comitum was a response to a fledgling monarchy’s need to establish a genealogy, real or imaginary, that would allow it to connect with the mythical grounding of the dynasty and, in particular, with its founder, Count Wilfred the Hairy. The Llibre dels fets aims to reveal the greatness of a king in his full splendor, detailing his conquests in a heroic, chivalric style. The Gesta recounts the chronological succession of the counts of Barcelona and only incidentally and briefly their deeds and conquests, whereas James I’s Llibre dels fets emphasizes from the outset the military feats of his reign. The rhythm of the narration in the Gesta is cadenced and predictable, as it provides the list of Catalan counts; in the Llibre it is dramatic and full of temporal leaps, asides, and everyday details. The Gesta is written in a conventional literary style, in the serial form established by the generic paradigm; the Llibre bases its effectiveness on forcefulness and passionate narrative and is loaded with epic resonances and dramatic flourishes, largely because its sources include the earlier rhymed texts that sang the deeds of the kings. The grammatical complexity of the Llibre reveals the writer’s greater mastery of narrative techniques, which undoubtedly make it far more dynamic than the rigidly structured Gesta. The Gesta is in Latin, the Llibre in Catalan, a Romance language that, though only beginning to be written, was already consolidated in popular speech.57 All these features reflect the different factors and motivations that arise from a different context. The Gesta was written in the cloisters of the monastery of Ripoll during the second half of the twelfth century; the Llibre dels fets was drafted in the context of the Barcelona court of the monarchs of Aragon a century later. If at the end of the twelfth century the Aragonese monarchy

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was struggling to establish itself, by the end of the thirteenth events had confirmed its prestige and solidity, which enabled it to embark on a daring policy of political, military, and commercial expansion.58 The Llibre dels fets did not need to establish a genealogy, which had been necessary for the legitimization of the power of the counts of Barcelona. At the phase of consolidation of his prestige, the king no longer needed to validate a power legally founded on election and consecration. The Carolingian origins of the counts of Barcelona, told in the Gesta, had been very useful to guarantee successive inheritances, but the monarchs of Aragon, the Llibre dels fets’s principal characters, no longer needed to prove their origins. The text of the Gesta Comitum counts among the materials that consolidated the establishment of the counties that sprang from the dissolution of central power beginning in the eleventh century; the chronicle of the Llibre dels fets belongs to the context of the rebirth of the monarchic dynasties starting in the twelfth century. Finally, while the Gesta is fully integrated into the genealogical literature of Europe in the second half of the twelfth century—specially in Flanders—the Llibre dels fets is set in a context in which vernacular literature and narrative accounts predominate, giving it a far more epic tone and dramatic style than the earlier texts. The concept of “historical distance,” coined by Mark Phillips, explains the difference between Catalan genealogies and chronicles. This term indicates the combination of formal, affective, ideological, and cognitive elements that, in balance, shape the reader’s sense of engagement with the past. The construction of distance is a central function of all forms of historical representation and provides a signature of sorts for historiographical practice.59 The stories told in the Gesta span about three centuries. In contrast, the autobiographical narrative of King James looks back only two generations. The political function of the Gesta consists in reducing the chronological and conceptual distance between the first count of Barcelona (Wilfred I, ninth century) and the first successor who became king of Aragon (Alfonse

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the Chaste, twelfth century). With the dynasty’s legitimacy and prestige already established, the chronicle could then focus on the protagonist and his deeds: King James the Conqueror in the autobiographical Llibre dels fets, King Peter the Great in Bernat Desclot’s Crònica, King James the Just in Ramon Muntaner’s Crònica, and King Peter the Ceremonious in his own Llibre. So it is important that the chronicles of the kings of Aragon do not recall the counts of Barcelona, their ancestors. There is only one reference to the counts of Barcelona in the chronicles, the legend recounted by Bernat Desclot of the “bon comte de Barcelona,” Ramon Berenguer IV. His presence is vital, as he obtained the royal title for his successors with his marriage to the king of Aragon’s daughter.60 All this explains the abandonment of the genealogy in favor of the chronicles’ epic and narrative possibilities. What we learn from these comparisons is not exclusive to Catalan historiography. James I’s chronicle ushers in a new style of history making in Catalonia, in which the concern was not so much to legitimize the county or monarchy—that had been done by the Gesta—as to justify the expansion of the crown. From the Gesta on, Catalan chroniclers would follow that rule, more or less unconsciously, until the end of the fourteenth century. Notably, something similar occurred in France at the end of the thirteenth century, with the spread of the doctrine technically known as reditus regni ad stirpem Karoli Magni. French chroniclers deployed this principle not only because of the potential it gave them to legitimize the reigning dynasty but also because of its effectiveness in confirming political and military expansion from the reign of Philip Augustus at the beginning of the thirteenth century.61 The enthusiastic reception given to the reditus doctrine shows its close relation to the legitimizing aspirations of the Capetian dynasty. Their aim to establish direct ties with the Carolingian dynasty was a significant political phenomenon that aided the consolidation of government practices in tune with that association. Some miniatures in the early versions of the Grandes Chroniques express the desire of the French kings to assert their independence from the Holy Roman Emperor.62

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The application of the reditus to French historiography would thus influence the spheres of territorial conquest and intellectual convictions. The design of their respective national historiographies reflects the expansionist aspirations of thirteenth-century monarchs such as Philip Augustus and Saint Louis in France, Fernando III and Alfonse X in Castile, and James I and Peter the Great in Aragon. French, Castilian, and Catalan thirteenthcentury chronicles generated recognition for a whole dynasty. The chivalric narratives of the chronicle of King James I best illustrate this historical text’s legitimizing function. The monarch brings together all the forces of Catalonia to support this ambitious venture. One of the longest and most brilliant passages of the Llibre describes the king’s conquest of Majorca, with the collective participation of the monarch, knights, and burghers.63 This passage also unveils a fundamental characteristic of this Catalan policy of expansion: the connection between political and economic motives, between territorial aspirations and the search for new markets, between the “islands road” and the “spice road.”64 Literary genres rise, change, and decline for historical reasons, and the shifting of the Catalan historiographical genres from the twelfth to the thirteenth century confirms this process. The dynamic evolution from genealogies to chronicles can be summarized as the shift from compiled history to composed history, from unofficial to official history, from monastic to courtly history, from anonymous to authorial history, from schematic to descriptive history, from poetic to prose history, from Latin to vernacular history, from genealogical to narrated history.65

7 The Dawn of Catalan Autobiography as Chronicle King James’s Llibre dels fets inaugurated the practice of autobiography in Catalonia. Some time later, this genre would be adapted by Ramon Muntaner and Peter the Ceremonious for their historical accounts. The existence of this corpus of autobiographies leads us to examine to what extent personal, subjective, and intimate self-narration can be considered a historical artifact rather than a creative or fictional literary construction, taking into account the function of the “I” and its relationship with the narrator and the characters of autobiographical texts.1 This question has been analyzed in detail in literary studies but much less for writing in the Middle Ages.2 If tenth-century annals embodied historical awareness and twelfth-century genealogies displayed dynastic self-consciousness, the late medieval autobiographical accounts inaugurated the emergence of the historical-literary persona and authorial intention in medieval Catalonia. This “persona” is identified with an author able to construct a historical narration whose authority resides within the author-narrator character rather than in the customary medieval signaling of external “authorities.” This chapter analyzes how medieval Catalan chronicler-autobiographers develop these

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historical accounts based on the internal reliability of their personal testimony. We cannot take the existence of autobiographies in the Middle Ages for granted. Scholars from both history and literature have often expressed their skepticism regarding the existence of true autobiography in the Middle Ages.3 A certain consensus exists among scholars that autobiography was not a “natural genre” at that time because historical and imaginative stories appear together in medieval chronicles, whereas conventional autobiography technically excludes invention to foreground referentiality, and because medieval historical texts tend to include the distant past, whereas autobiography focuses primarily on the span of a person’s life. Another reason given is that autobiography is an “intimate” genre, and therefore too subjective, emotional, and personal for chroniclers to understand and practice. However, a comprehensive examination of these three Catalan autobiog­ raphies allows us to explore the idea of “fictionalizing the self ” or “inventing the self,” closely linked to the exercise of selfwriting, and to analyze how medieval autobiographers chose specific metaphors to explain themselves and give coherence to the self-portrait they wished to paint. Autobiography has been defined in nontemporal and abstract terms by Philippe Lejeune as “a retrospective prose account given by a real person of his own existence, with the emphasis on his individual life and in particular on the history of his personality.”4 Thus, one might conclude that we cannot truly speak of autobiography before the Enlightenment because no author had centered the account on his or her own “personality” apart from those who wrote “spiritual autobiographies,” a specific mode of life writing with clear didactic or inspirational intentions. True autobiographies would exist only in Latin, focus on the experience of conversion, and contain highly spiritual elements and symbols, the most characteristic examples being Saint Augustine’s Confessions and Peter Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum. Some scholars have ultimately based their skepticism regard-

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ing medieval autobiographies on the argument that conditions in the medieval world—such as the limited power of the authorial voice—were not propitious for this kind of personal writing.5 Yet this perception of the limitations of the authorial voice in the Middle Ages is contradicted by the existence of the Catalan chronicler-autobiographers. In this chapter, I will develop a more contextualized idea of medieval autobiography, challenging the atemporal, formalist, idealist, and prescriptive definitions of autobiography, deploying current critical frames that allow us to approach these texts in useful ways. My interest lies in understanding how subjects wrote about themselves before modern autobiography was culturally encoded, rather than in presenting medieval autobiographies as forerunners of contemporary life writing. It is important to engage arguments that support the existence of what I call “autobiographical voices in the Middle Ages,” arguments that link the autobiographical with the collective authorship of these narratives. Though the evident presence of collaborators marks King James’s and King Peter’s accounts as having “collective” rather than “individual” authors, the kings operate as authors whose status as kings or witnesses confers authority on the text. Further, this authority derives from the self-enclosed and self-sufficient courtly system itself. But they also function as authors in the modern sense of the word, as the source of personal authority. This is compatible with the fact that both king-chroniclers turned to collaborators to fill in gaps of information, to take models from literature, and, ultimately, to complete the books for them after their deaths. In the case of James I, the last paragraphs of his book narrate his death and funeral in third person; King Peter’s book contains an “appendix” written decades after his death.6 More specifically, I posit that Catalan chronicler-autobiographers are auctors, guarantors in the medieval sense of the term, and that collaboration strengthens their authorship: the collaborators assisted in the technical production of the text, but the kings remain the true centers of the narratives, as authors, narrators, and protagonists.7

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King James’s Llibre dels fets as Historical Autobiography James I’s chronicle has traditionally been analyzed from two points of view: the historical (as a retrospective narration of the deeds and acts of the king) and the literary (as an imaginative account in the style of chivalric literature). After the hegemony of the historical approach during the early decades of the twentieth century (Nicolau d’Olwer, Soldevila, Coll i Alentorn, Burns), the approaches that read the Llibre dels fets as a literary account seem to predominate today (Asperti, Cingolani, Bruguera, Badia, Pujol).8 Some critics even assert that the chronicle “is unrelated to historiography.”9 However, as Zink shows in his study on the emergence of subjectivity in French literature, “in choosing prose, thirteenth-century memorialist chroniclers were showing that they made no real claim to be writing literary works.”10 It is clear that the king strove to give his text “historical” form, as he recounts with every appearance of truthfulness the things that happened to him in the past. Indeed, it was shortly after the first copies were distributed that it was entitled Llibre dels fets (Book of the Deeds), connecting it with history rather than literature. Reading “autobiography” as a genre that straddles the conventions of history and literature, I argue that the Llibre dels fets should be read as both a historical account and a literary text— which nonetheless does not give it the attribute of “imaginative” or “fictional” literature—as its referentiality heightens its historical and literary value. Autobiography has always been read both as history and as literature: what distinguishes autobiography from fiction is referentiality, but what distinguishes autobiography from historical writings is the fact that the author functions subjectively, memorialistically, and emotionally. Some epistemological consequences arise in practice from the fact that autobiography hovers between history and literature. This pivotal position has been defined by Laura Marcus in the form of an image, the allegory of the “double agent” that reflects the hybrid and unstable nature of the genre of autobiography:

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“Autobiography is itself a major source of concern because it is very unstable in terms of the postulated opposites between self and world, literature and history, fact and fiction, subject and object”; thus, autobiography appears “as a dangerous double agent, moving between these oppositions, or as a magical instrument of reconciliation.”11 In analyzing James I’s and the other medieval Catalan autobiographical chronicles, we need to take into account the narrative techniques deployed, since every historical text contains a “rhetorical level,” evident in the structure (the form), and a “narrative level,” which foregrounds implications and causality (the content). In the Llibre dels fets, the narrative element is patent, since autobiographical accounts, even if they are historical, resemble literary accounts. Consequently, any study of this historical text necessarily combines the techniques of history and those of literary criticism. James I’s chronicle may thus be classified as “historical autobiography,” different from Augustine’s and Abelard’s spiritual autobiographies and Hermann the Jew’s autobiography of conversion. William C. Spengemann has argued that “historical autobiography was invented to demonstrate the consonance of an individual life with an absolute, eternal law already in force and known through some immediate source outside the life that illustrates it.”12 Without completely rejecting the broad perspective Spengemann applies to Dante’s, Bunyan’s, and Franklin’s life writing, I conceive historical autobiography as a retrospective account that stresses the author’s historical existence and meaning. This life-writing exercise often produces a new imagined character that may serve as a model for future generations. The literary image that emerges from this form of self-narration is produced by art but functions as historical narration generative of historical reality. This autobiographical-historical dimension is not directly linked to the notion of truthfulness in the text—although true stories form the basis of the narrative. We cannot consider the Llibre dels fets an official res gestae because the factual and imaginative dimensions of medieval autobiographies are inextricably

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linked. This thesis is supported not only by the ambiguous division between history and fiction before the modern period, but also because fiction has been one of the best vehicles for a negotiation with the nuances of life and society, in ways that have even transcended history. Such (autobiographical) fictions can be revealing even if they are not factual, and they can be useful for history for other reasons, as oral and cultural historians have recently shown.13 Though King James’s autobiography has a strong religious element, its chief concerns are secular, and in this sense I argue that it is “historical” rather than “spiritual.” The Llibre dels fets confirms that secular autobiography emerged slowly within the context of spiritual autobiography, just as autobiography itself developed from confessional practice.14 As he explains in the prologue, King James I set about recounting his life story to his subjects so that they might see the hand of God in the extraordinary expansion of his kingdom during the thirteenth century. The authors of spiritual autobiographies, in contrast, generally used their stories to educate readers or to offer themselves as models, as Hermann the Jew does by addressing the religious people of Cappenberg “to tell them his story.”15 From the strict point of view of genre, the Llibre dels fets should be regarded more as historical autobiography than as a confessional piece, a profane rather than a sacred work. We should thus reconsider the literary nature of King James’s chronicle, which has generally been considered a vital link in the chain of medieval Catalan historiography because of its logical and chronological connection with the preceding Gesta Comitum and the later chronicles by Desclot, Muntaner, and King Peter.16 While I do not deny that these links exist, I argue that James I’s chronicle may be more profitably read in the context of the European histories of the Crusades from the same period by knights such as Robert of Clari, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, Jean of Joinville, and Philippe of Novare. Significantly, they shift from the position of “chronicler-as-observer” to “chronicler-asparticipant.” Nevertheless, these knights recount only their expe-

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riences in the Crusades; unlike King James, they do not describe their entire lives. From this perspective, the texts are “memoirs” rather than autobiography. Yet certain parallels between the Llibre dels fets and these memoirs help us comprehend the histo­ riographical production of this period and read Catalan historio­g­ raphy within a larger context. The true medieval histories in the Latin tradition were written until the twelfth century by historians who collected and organized the documents they required. The illustrations of this period show historians working away at their desks, surrounded by the numerous books they used as sources. Compiling texts leaves little room for personality, subjectivity, or the personal views of the author.17 In contrast, new accounts that aspired to be historical arose over the course of the twelfth century in the Anglo-Norman region, in a fully vernacular court context. However, the form of these works, in verse and with significant fictional elements, meant that certain historical aspirations could not be fully achieved. This historical tendency was finally realized in the thirteenth century with the appearance of prose works—the Llibre dels fets among them—whose authors engaged events that they had personally witnessed and in which they had participated. While the traditional chroniclers’ work of compilation continued, the function of the “author” became considerably stronger with this new development, since in these new texts the authors serve as both witness and protagonist. Thus, through the multiple roles the historical authors played, the powerful autobiographical element characteristic of these texts and period began to emerge. The most eloquent examples are the writings of Robert of Clari, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, Jean of Joinville, and Philippe of Novare. Robert of Clari, for example, emphasized his position as the author and the fact that he had experienced everything in his account, establishing the veracity of his narrative: You have heard the truth about the conquest of Constantinople . . . for the knight Robert of Clari, who was there, who saw and

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heard what went on, bears witness to it; he had the conditions of its conquest set down in writing in a truthful fashion. And although he has not related this conquest as elegantly as many a clever story­ teller might, in any case he has told nothing but the truth, and there are many things he has left unsaid because he could not relate everything.18

Content takes precedence over form, because these chroniclers sought to tell the truth of the things they experienced rather than their aspirations or imaginings. Further, prose—with its simplicity and its illusion of unadorned truth—served to underpin historical referentiality. The author’s entitlement derives from his position as witness and participant, which would hardly have been accepted by the earlier tradition of historiography. All these authors are thirteenth-century French chroniclers and memorialists, as Zink rightly describes them.19 In their accounts, they tell of “what happened,” but solely from the point of view of “what happened to me”—the person who saw and experienced the events. This was King James’s model, as he broke with the Latin genealogical tradition of the Gesta Comitum and produced a vernacular prose narrative of his experiences. The text contains a strong testimonial element that distinguishes it from other Latin first-person accounts such as that of the chronicler Foulque Nerra, count of Anjou. For this reason also, James I refuses to describe battles he did not participate in, such as Portopí: he narrates the battle in the voice of one of his knights, who remains anonymous.20 In addition, James I’s chronicle was deliberately written in prose, and even passages taken as documentary references from popular epics were turned from verse into prose to make them seem more truthful. In all these historical and testimonial accounts, prose appears to guarantee referentiality and serves, moreover, to anticipate criticism that might be aimed at writers who were not strictly speaking “men of letters” but “men of arms,” knights. It is with good reason that the figure of the soldierwriter, knight-historian, and king-chronicler emerged from this

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generation of prose writers, a cultural type whose most successful representative in the fourteenth century was Ramon Muntaner. Writing prose histories justified their authors’ description as “chroniclers,” because these authors also provide chronological accounts of public events of historic value. What distinguishes them from other chroniclers of the time, however, is not just that they were firsthand witnesses to the events they recount but that they participated in them. The thirteenth century seems to have been a very apt moment for this kind of historical and autobiographical literature written by witnesses and protagonists. The evolution of Catalan literature in the fourteenth century demonstrates that chronicles gradually lost the spontaneity that arose from the articulation of solely personal memory. This is most evident, perhaps, in the narration of the episode of the conception of James I, as recorded in the chronicles of King James himself, in Ramon Muntaner, and in Bernat Desclot. James I’s simple but deliberately myth-making episode is later appropriated and complicated by Muntaner and Desclot, who blend in stories from oral tradition, turning it into a legendary event supported by unlikely details.21 Ironically, in spite of (or maybe even because of ) its simplicity and realism, King James’s chronicle became an inexhaustible font of legendary events for future writing. This would explain why he and Count Wilfred of Barcelona, the founder of the dynasty and protagonist of the Gesta Comitum, are two central figures of the Catalan historiographical “canon” and main characters of the collective memory of all Catalans.22 There are some notable differences between James I’s chronicle and French memorialistic chronicles. The protagonist of the Llibre dels fets is the king himself, who writes in first person. In Philippe of Novare’s chronicle, the author speaks of himself in the third person, as “he.” And, finally, Joinville focuses on Saint Louis. Thus, the author of the Llibre dels fets narrates the events of his life, while in the French memorialistic chronicles, the authors focus on experiences related to the Crusades and to their lords, a practice deployed by Muntaner in the first half of the fourteenth century. In conclusion, James I’s chronicle exemplifies

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the emergence of the Catalan historical literature of the “I,” a phenomenon that occurred at the same time as the emergence of literature in the vernacular. This first-person vernacular combination is evident in the French and Anglo-Norman literature of the early thirteenth century, particularly in the memoirs of the Crusades; it then spread into the Iberian peninsula via Catalonia. As Zink explains, “the change in the conception of the literary self was not a trait of the waning Middle Ages but contemporary with the spread of the most ancient works of French literature, or at least their spread as we know it, since practically no literary manuscripts in the vernacular exist before the thirteenth century.”23

Ramon Muntaner and Relational Autobiography Ramon Muntaner’s autobiographical chronicle, written half a century after King James I’s Llibre, reflects its particular context and deploys renewed rhetorical forms, allowing it to be classified as both “chronicle” and “autobiography.”24 As Muntaner focuses primarily on the events of his life connected to the deeds of the Aragonese kings and the conquests of their knights, he portrays himself as witness rather than character—in spite of his firsthand involvement with the events, particularly in the second part of the text. For this reason, Muntaner has to be studied in the context of other thirteenth- and fourteenth-century memoirists such as Clari, Villehardouin, or Philippe of Novare, who created a new form of dialogic monodic discourse. The author’s position as witness made the text a testimony of how events were experienced and their effect on the author.25 I would also suggest—using contemporary autobiographical criticism—that Muntaner’s account may be classified as “relational autobiography,” since his life story is articulated primarily through the prism of other people’s lives, stressing the importance of connections: in a well-known passage of the chronicle, he confesses that he does not want to talk about the events that happened to him, that he would rather talk about the facts that happened to him in relation with his lords.26

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Considering the subordination of Muntaner’s self-narration to important persons in his life—fundamentally, the Aragonese kings—the chronicle illustrates the role of “important proximate others” whose lives influenced the narrator’s. Contemporary theories of relational autobiography are increasingly being used to look back upon earlier autobiographical exercises, giving us renewed appreciation for them. Paul John Eakin defines the most common form of what he calls the “relational life” as those autobiographies “that feature the decisive impact on the autobiographer of either (1) an entire social environment (a particular kind of family, or a community and its social institutions—schools, churches, and so forth) or (2) key other individuals, usually family members, especially parents.”27 The author therefore inscribes individual stories from the web of intersecting lives. Susanna Egan argues that this process begins as the encounter of two lives in which the biographer is also an autobiographer. Very commonly, the (auto)biographer is the child or partner of the biographical subject, a relationship in which (auto)biographical identity is significantly shaped by the processes of “exploratory mirroring.”28 This second definition may be usefully deployed in our analysis of Muntaner’s project: his concern with writing about the monarchy evidently establishes his place in the world of the monarchy. Rocío G. Davis’s study of family memoirs as a form of historical mediation also highlights the operation of these relational lives: she argues that these memoirs serve important political aims, intervene in the inscription of history, and propose textual and cultural models for present and future communities.29 Although Muntaner was not literally a relative of any of the kings, the paternal role of the kings in medieval times made him more than merely a servant and aide. Muntaner also carefully emphasized his close connection to the royal family and his abiding loyalty and service to them over several generations. Muntaner deploys his own memory as his principal source of information. His personal commitment to the monarchy clearly leads him to remember and value all the details of his experience. His style, which privileges the personal and emotional, leads him to tell us all the dangers and contradictions he suffered:

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And therefore it is right that, amongst the rest of the men in the world, I, Ramon Muntaner, native of the town of Peralada and citizen of Valencia, give great thanks to Our Lord the true God and his blessed Mother, Our Lady Saint Mary, and to all the Heavenly Court, for the favor and grace He has shown me and for my escape from many perils I have been in. Such as thirty-two battles on sea and on land in which I have been, as well as in many prisons and torments inflicted on my person in wars in which I have taken part, and many persecutions I have suffered, as well in my fortune as in other ways, as you will understand from the events of my time. And assuredly, I would willingly refrain from recounting these things.30

Muntaner does not rely on a “historical workshop” that invalidates individual authorship, as King Peter does, nor does he exhibit the dependence on his sources of Desclot. This leads us to consider his work more as that of a historian in an essentialist sense, rather than as that of a storyteller of his own experience. Muntaner’s work resonates, further, with that of classical historiographers (Herodotus, Thucydides), whose testimony is the only real evidence, as well as with twentieth-century life writing, where personal memory serves as the basis for authoritative (and authorizing) narratives. Muntaner basically describes the events he experienced or heard directly, as the French chroniclers of his time, such as Joinville, did. This emphasis on the experiential separates Muntaner’s chronicle from other contemporary peninsular and European chroniclers. The Castilians, for example, generally chose a broader temporal scope in their writing, while English and Scottish chroniclers tended to include popular tales but focused more generally on clerical and monastic affairs rather than on secular or courtly narratives, or based their work on translations from the French (Brut) or the Latin (Polycronion).31 In fact, Muntaner declares that he will narrate only what he has seen and experienced: “And I recount these things in order that it should be known that I saw the Lord King [ James the Conqueror] and that I can tell what I saw of him and what I have part in, for I do not wish to meddle but with what was done in my time.”32

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This honesty is also patent in his selection of the events narrated. Faced with the occasional lack of sources, he prefers to discontinue a story rather than invent details and risk falling into error: “And from now on I am not going to focus on them [certain deeds related to the Catalan Company], because if I say something I could make a mistake.”33 The emphasis on his firsthand account was necessary in a shifting world whose trust in its solid feudal-epic foundations was beginning to falter. Munta­ ner’s society needed “real” stories to validate the truth that arises from reality as experience.34 Muntaner remains relatively faithful to this plan with one exception that, nonetheless, makes narratological sense. Though he writes in detail about the kings he served, he opens the narrative with the story of the conception of James I, which occurred sixty years before Muntaner’s birth and which he was obviously unable to experience. He includes this tale in his narration as a sign of continuity with the Catalan historiographical tradition, because Desclot also incorporated it in his Crònica. James I’s and Desclot’s chronicles transformed this apocryphal story into tradition. The story’s place in his worldview justifies its inclusion in Muntaner’s autobiographical account. Nonetheless, Muntaner’s multilayered version adds new imaginative details to the plot and consolidates this tale as one of the cores of Catalan tradition.35

The Function of the “I” in Muntaner’s Chronicle Michel Zumthor argues that “we can accept that autobiography comprises two elements: an ‘I’ and a narrative presented as nonfiction. These two elements are linked by a functional bond: the ‘I,’ which is both the voice that speaks and the subject spoken of, constituting the ‘theme,’ the successive actions of which engendered by the account function as the predicate.”36 Muntaner’s chronicle, which contains these two autobiographical elements and his particular use of the “I,” is anchored in the memorialistic tradition of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The earliest recorded instance of this tradition is a collection of chronicles

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written by the French knights who lived the Fourth Crusade, particularly Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s La Conquête de Constantinople (1207–8) and Robert of Clari’s La Conquête de Constantinople (c. 1205–16).37 In fact, Muntaner appears to adopt certain stylistic and rhetorical techniques from these texts.38 Yet although there is an clear connection between these French accounts of the Crusades and Catalan medieval historiography—I discussed how much King James owed to them—Muntaner’s use of the “I” connects more with the next generation of French memorialist chroniclers such as Jean of Joinville, whose Histoire de Saint Louis (1309) is undoubtedly the chronicle most similar to Muntaner’s, from the point of view of both content and form. The use of the first person was not a novelty for Muntaner or for the Catalan historiographical tradition. His chronicle was completed thirty-five years before Joinville’s, the first French chronicle written in the first person. Both chroniclers were king’s servants who narrated the king’s lives through the account of their own lives. The most important resemblance is that the two chronicles are relational autobiographies—self-narratives that focus equally, if not more, on the life of another—Joinville on Saint Louis, Muntaner on Aragonese kings. The chroniclers, thus, use biography to generate autobiography—or use autobiography to exalt biography—and their narratives shift continually from accounts of others’ lives to that of their own, using the grammatical “I” as the point of convergence for the whole narrative. Autobiographers writing in Latin such as Guibert of Nogent and Philippe of Novare “went from a discourse of the self on the self to a discourse of the self on something that was not the self but was chosen because of its effect on the self or the revelatory function it played in relationship to it. . . . Joinville combined autobiographical testimony, the self ’s retrospective view of the holy king, and the self ’s retrospective view of itself.”39 This explanation applies to Muntaner as well in the context of the Aragonese kings. Both Muntaner and Joinville were moved by respect, esteem, and reverence for their kings. Their autobiographies are not “confessions” in the Augustinian tradition carried

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on by medieval authors such as Guibert of Nogent or Philippe of Novare but rather texts by authors who cannot conceive of their lives (and, by extension, their accounts of their lives) independently of their attachment, admiration, and devotion to the kings they served. Zink concludes: “Conversely, the first French prose writer to talk about himself in the first person constructed his own image from elements outside himself—in this case the image of another through the distance of memory—in the same way that personal poetry, whose rise had begun during his youth, in the time of Saint Louis, presented the ‘I’ as a product of life’s circumstances and time’s traces 40 The difference between these autobiographical models is that Joinville focuses on his relationship with one king, while Muntaner describes his service to a series of Aragonese kings, whom he nonetheless tries to transform into one singular character to stress the unity of the dynasty. With this rhetorical strategy, Muntaner highlights the continuity of the Aragonese crown, in spite of the succession of kings and the division of the original kingdom into three branches. The centrality of Roger de Flor in Muntaner’s plot is also always subordinated to the king’s policies. In fact, one of Muntaner’s objectives consists of proving that the conquests of the condottieri Almugavars serve the greater glory of the Aragonese kingdom. Muntaner may be considered an autobiographer in a modern sense. His incorporation of details of his childhood at the beginning of the chronicle and his consistent use of the first person— unlike Villehardouin, for example, who employs the third person in an attempt to heighten the objective character of his narrative41—establish him as the author of his own life. This is clear as he opens his chronicle with “I” as the first word (“Jo, Ramon Muntaner, nadiu de la vila de Perelada” [I, Ramon Muntaner, born in the city of Perelada]), unlike Desclot, who begins with “he” (“Ací comença lo llibre que En Bernat Desclot dictà e escriví” [Here begins the book that Bernat Desclot dictated and wrote]).42 Muntaner’s use of “I” is even more subjective and personal than King James’s use of the first person, because the king used the plural (the royal “we”) to emphasize his role and majesty.

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Yet Muntaner’s chronicle is dialogic rather than monologic because of his awareness of an implied reader and his ability in merge personal memory with collective experience.43 Quantitative and qualitative analysis of grammatical person in a corpus of late medieval French memorialist chroniclers demonstrates a shift from the third person (Villehardouin, Clari) to the first person ( Joinville, Froissart, Commynes, and Monstrelet). This trend, however, is complicated by the numerous functions that the “I” can assume in historical narratives: author, narrator, witness, actor, character, and commentator. The choice of grammatical person establishes the position of the narrator with respect to the text and its truth. In her analysis of the representation of the self in medieval French chronicles, Sophie Marnette concludes that in later medieval chronicles the “I” representing the narrator coincides with the name and the function of author, that is, the “creative entity at the origin of the narrative” coincides with the “entity that tells the story.”44 Thus, a chameleonic “I” establishes a “rhetoric of truth” that, by the end of the thirteenth century, is no longer supported by the mere fact of a text in prose. The birth of prose romances in the thirteenth century meant that prose was no longer enough as a formal condition for historicity; the times now required more sophisticated formal strategies of narration. Since the I-narrator-author-witness produces the text’s coherence, the convergence of the experiencing self and the narrating self in fourteenth-century chronicles establishes a subjective truth comparable to the form of truth emerging in lyric poetry.45 Muntaner’s “I” in the text conditions his epistemological orientation or relation to truth. Marnette refers to Joinville, the chronicler closest in time and historiographical style to Munta­ ner, precisely in contrast to Clari and Villehardouin: With Joinville, the “I” staged in the text becomes both the one who recounts the story (narrating self  ) and the one who lived history as witness or even as participant (experiencing self  ). The two latter func­ tions occur in the third person in Clari and Villehardouin’s chron-

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icles. Not all chroniclers attended the events narrated, and even in Joinville’s text, some anecdotes are based on what he heard or read. At some point, however, all chroniclers insist that they witnessed a portion of the events or that they interviewed trustworthy eyewitnesses. . . . It is that strong link between the I-narrator, I-author and I-witness or participant that vouches for the historicity of these narratives, thus creating what I call the rhetoric of truth in the chronicles. It is important to note that I am not discussing whether the events presented in the chronicles are historically true in the modern sense of the term. What is of interest here is that they are presented as true by the narrative. In fact, we cannot even be sure that the chroniclers were experienced as true by the medieval audience since, as [ Jeanette] Beer shows, references to eye-witness or insistence on sincerity are rhetorical topoi borrowed from ancient Latin texts.46

The first person dominates the second half of the chronicle, as Muntaner recounts his experience of contemporary events, in the style of contemporary fictional accounts of his time. Like thirteenth-century French literature, Catalan historical literature created new forms and developed new characteristics. As Zink has argued, “the emergence, roughly at the beginning of the century, of works treating contemporaneous subjects, cannot be seen as a superficial or contingent phenomenon, for it attests to a significant evolution in the meaning and nature of literary production.”47 Newer writers, Muntaner among them, readily pretend to be direct witnesses of the adventure they recount, whereas the romancers and epic poets emphasized their written sources. In his particular enactment of the autobiographical voice, Muntaner also uses, eventually, the third person. Muntaner generally chooses to speak in the third person to establish his distance from events or situations, such as in his disapproval of some of the brutal practices of the Almugavar knights as they exact their revenge on the emperor. When the Almugavars kill all the men, women, and children of the town of Rodosto, Muntaner highlights the cruelty of this action, although he timidly justifies it because they (not “I” or “we” Catalans) wreaked this vengeance.48

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He knowingly wields the narrative effects of the shift in persons and grammatical tense. These variations of grammatical person stress his function as an author who is nonetheless deliberately located within the plot, unlike Desclot, for example, who maintains a careful distance from the stories he narrates. Muntaner needs to combine all the grammatical persons available to him— the first person singular and plural and the third person singular and plural. This polyphony supports the credibility of his narrative, as the multiplicity of voices speaking the same story collaborate to validate his testimony.

King Peter and the Political Function of Autobiography King Peter’s autobiography breaks from the tradition of James I’s chivalresque autobiography and Muntaner’s relational autobiography. Peter’s life-writing exercise is essentially political rather than aristocratic or patriotic. He narrates his own life to enhance the dignity of his munus and validate his political options, decisions, and acts. Thus, he turns to collaborators in the Chancellery to design his autobiography, as if it were simply another political act. The outcome of this collaboration becomes a form of “political memoir,” a genre practiced by contemporary politicians but nonexistent in the Middle Ages in Catalonia. We have proof that the Llibre dels fets inspired the original idea and later development of Peter’s autobiographical project. The inception of Peter’s book can probably be dated to September 2, 1343, when the king asked Pons de Copons, the abbot of the monastery of Poblet, to send him a copy of the book of the “deeds and memories” of his great-great-grandfather James I.49 This information, apart from Peter’s noting that he was reading the Llibre dels fets when the news was brought to him of James III of Majorca’s seizure of Puigerdà, strongly suggests that Peter was inspired by James I to write his own account. King James’s most important influence on Peter’s book arguably lies in its form. Both chronicles use the royal “we,” which provides them with a majestic tone. Nevertheless, each uses it

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very differently. The political function of Peter’s chronicle overshadows, in some ways, James’s chivalric aims. As a consequence, Peter’s style is more realistic than that of the three chronicles that preceded his. Significantly, for example, he deliberately eschews using legendary accounts or fictional models as sources. Perhaps because he used Royal Chancellery documents as sources, the chronicle’s tone is more impersonal, especially in the way he narrates historical events. Yet, paradoxically, this impersonality does not subtract subjectivity from Peter’s chronicle because the king is always the center of the narration; all the events revolve around him, make sense only in connection with him, and are conditioned by the king’s plans, strategies, policies, projects, and decisions. As we will see in the chapter on authorship, Peter’s book was written in the context of the collective work of an organized Chancellery, and I argue that this is how the chronicle must be interpreted, unlike the more personal projects by James I, Desclot, and Muntaner. Indeed, Peter’s book resembles the Gesta Comitum in its method of composition. The king directed his collaborators to use royal accounts to establish the book’s chronological frame and chancellery documents to provide evi­ dence for the historicity of the events. In this sense, Peter’s book can be considered an extension of the Royal Chancellery, a kind of “political autobiography” in which the principal sources are the political events as much as the autobiographer’s life and thoughts. Like the royal correspondence, this political autobio­ graphy would be the result of collaboration between diverse officials—Bernat Descoll, Arnau de Torreles, and Bernat Ramon Descavall among them—working under the king’s supervision. The book is also based on oral sources (“we have heard it said” [3.195]), on individual witnesses quoted by name (Ot de Montcada on Peter’s baptism [1.40]), and, above all, on King Peter’s experiences. Despite the clear deployment of bureau­ cratic methods, documents, and collaborators, and the collective air of the composition, Peter’s personality marks the entire chronicle. The letters he exchanged with his officials show that he

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obsessively controlled the work’s progress. The prologue closely resembles the speeches he made. Other sections narrate very personal experiences. For example, his description of his family in chapter 1—the details that surround his birth, including the room, the astonishment of the midwives at his weakness at birth, the hurried baptism—gives the reader the impression that he is retelling a story he has been told by his family. The descriptions of the flight of his troops (2.26), his trip to Burriana (2.30), his unhappy reception at Avignon, with its concluding sneer at Pope Benedict XII (2.37), the stories of his love for fruit, specially figs (3.33, 52, 76), his melancholy when leaving Majorca, descriptions of his intentions and moods signal the author’s participation in the project (3.13, 84, and 4.12). Other long dialogues in the text have the same personal and intimate mark. King Peter’s personal involvement is compatible with the collaboration of chancellery officials in the process of writing. The idea, the plan, the order, the obsession with the chronology, and the structure were entirely the king’s. He directed the book’s entire production, down to its smallest detail. Abadal concludes that the chronicle “may be considered an autobiography. . . . There is no doubt that many fragments were dictated by Peter and that he controlled the text, both in what was included and what was excluded.”50 From the point of view of narrative, Peter’s text does not contain the epic tone of its predecessors, and his inclusion of personal thoughts, intentions, and judgments connects the text to contemporary notions of autobiography. There are passages in the chronicle, for example, that convey the king’s tormented psychology. The character that emerges from the chronicle is that of an authoritarian king, firmly convinced of the juridical legitimacy of his despotic actions. In the end, Peter’s autobiographical voice produces the same “effect of the real” as King James’s and Muntaner’s do, because the imagination it portrays may be richer in significance than the apparently objective material.51 Each of three chroniclers in different autobiographical forms—historical, relational, political—uses the “I” to reshape history through personal stories. In

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the end, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Catalan historicalautobiographical accounts convey the consolidation of what has been called the “discovery of the self ” in twelfth-century Europe: “first, the twelfth century ‘discovered the self ’ in the sense that interest in the inner landscape of the human being increases after 1050 in comparison to the immediately preceding period; second, the twelfth century ‘discovered the self ’ in the sense that knowing the inner core of human nature within one’s own self is an explicit theme and preoccupation in literature of the period.”52 Yet this consolidation of the self is inherent to the emergence of the writers’ authority, summarized in the concept of “authorship.”

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8 The Authorial Logic of the Historical Text Questions of authorship and authority have become an important concern in literary and historical criticism of the last few decades. They have been studied broadly by scholars who examine these notions not merely to identify the material author of a text but also to engage the author’s authority and intention, the extent of his or her authorship, and the relationship between author, authorship, and authority.1 This interest has paradoxically emerged in the context of modern and postmodern criticism’s rebellion against the tradition of considering the text an author’s creation. Roland Barthes’s claim regarding the death of the author posits, among other things, that the author is a contextual creation rather than a creative and original source of the text.2 The Russian formalists promoted the operation of “decentering” the author, stressing the importance of the reader over the writer. Similarly, according to semiotics, the literary work is not an autonomous expression of a centered, speaking subject but a coded text and the multiple readings to which it is susceptible. All this lessened the perceived function of the author, a tendency consolidated by the New Philology in recent decades.3

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Such a view of authorship has radically disturbed traditional notions of the author as a centered subject, in conscious control and responsible for his or her own utterances. Emphasis is placed on the reader rather than on the writer. Although no one can deny that this shift has produced many interesting renovations in critical studies, it has also raised profound reservations among scholars: More fatal for the historical consideration of literature than even this fracturing of the literary work into multiple and conflicting codes was the way in which semiotics inevitably dehistoricized literature by denying the importance of a historically situated authorial consciousness, a dehistoricization of the literary text that was tantamount to the denial of history. If authors are seen as bound by preexisting language codes rather than by social processes to which they give voice, and if those very social processes are themselves understood as linguistically constituted (are, in that sense, little more than alternative sign systems), then social life is essentially a play of discursive behavior, the interaction and combination of artificial, disembodied signs in unstable relationships with one another, cut off from any purchase on a world exterior to language and hence, in all senses of the word, immaterial.4

Thus, some current scholars are reluctant to recognize the poststructural idea of the author’s death. As a consequence, without denying the validity of historicized readings of literary works as products of their transmission rather than of their creation, I aim to emphasize and recover a more active role for the author, focusing on his or her specific generative act, aware of the crucial function of the “authorial intention” for our understanding of a text’s meanings.5 The fundamental question I ask, therefore, is what the chroniclers could in practice have intended to communicate with their texts, as they wrote what they wrote in precisely those circumstances to a specific audience. Herein lies my approach to the Catalan chronicles, texts that were produced by prominent men and whose dates of publication are clear. I want to argue that, for these authors, who introduce themselves into the discourse and function as narrators, authority derives

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from their own literary persona rather than from an anonymous authorial community, and their authorship contrasts with the imagined authors of other European medieval traditions.6

The King as Author: Authority from Inside King James I’s autobiography foregrounds the autonomy of his authorial authority.7 James is self-sufficient as an author, as he had no need to call on other “authorities”—real or in the form of dreams or visions—to render his discourse credible. And, in fact, the choice of genre supports this, because external authority is technically unnecessary in an autobiography. The Llibre dels fets exemplifies a particular kind of distancing from the type of “authority”—in the oral or written tradition—that was essential in historical literature in Latin. As a proof of his self-sufficiency, in the Llibre dels fets the author is explicitly identified ( James I), as are his sources (his memory), the narrator (himself in the first person), and the main character ( James I, as king). James I thus sets himself up as the chronicle’s authority and eschews validation by external elements, since he considers recording his memories in writing sufficient. Unlike Hermann the Jew in his autobiography, James I does not quote other authorities. It is easy to understand the spread of the autobiographical, firsthand account of events. Schmitt explains: the medieval “author” is one who used “authorities” [in his quotations] and possesses the “authority” required in order to assert something. His work will never be strictly individual: as a result of the passages from the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers that are interspersed in it and that give it its legitimacy, as well as the voices of a “textual community” to which the person or persons writing belong, the work is profoundly collective in its genesis and in its nature.8

The Llibre dels fets is entirely personal and not a collective autobiography in the way Hermann’s is. Medieval writers tended to use external validation—quotations from the Bible, passages

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from saints’ lives or writings, appeals to tradition—to heighten the text’s credibility. James I, however, turns solely to himself for the necessary authority. His autobiography is thus creative and original, not only because there are virtually no precedents that he could have used as a model—certainly none for the autobiography of a king—but also because it generated models that would later be imitated, as demonstrated by Muntaner and King Peter. In fact, only one other autobiographical chronicle by a king in medieval Europe exists, that of Charles IV of Bohemia. However, this text does not seem to possess all the specific characteristics of an autobiography.9 Another factor enhances James I’s authority: he needs no champions to praise his account. The king’s position itself validates the story he tells, and he needs no patron to intervene between author and reader, as was the case in the Middle Ages for every artistic and literary text of any quality. Patrons served as intermediaries between the author and reader. Located literally between the author and the readers, they intervened as protectors or promoters of persons who were their social or financial inferiors. In James I’s chronicle there is no intermediary patron, or what Peter Damian-Grint terms “authorising interjections,” such as the names of authorities cited by medieval writers, quotations that have the same status as footnotes used in modern academic criticism.10 This is not to say that the Llibre dels fets does not have recourse to these sources, such as the chansons de geste and the Bible.11 Some Catalan scholars have argued—in a debate that still rages—that the chansons de geste are present in several passages of the Llibre dels fets in which poetry is turned into a prose. Regarding the biblical passages, these demonstrate the king’s sincere religious convictions, as he incorporated them into the most intense parts of his text.12 The chronicle opens with the passage in which Saint James the Apostle exhorts others to live their faith through works ( James 2:17–26); later, reference is made to the wisdom of Solomon, who advises that a father should discipline his children (Proverbs 13:24), and to the phrase from the Gospel that speaks of the self-denial required to follow Christ

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(Matthew 16:24). Yet this does not diminish the fact that the king himself possesses sufficient legitimacy not to need external authority in the text. Indeed, the biblical references function as rhetorical support rather than authorial validation. In the final analysis, his own memory and his act of writing legitimize his entire account. The contrast with the Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium is extremely significant. To achieve its objectives, the Gesta turned to the oral tradition in legends and the written one in documents and books.13 With regard to the oral tradition, the chronicler openly declares that he has based himself on the “account of the Ancients” in drawing up his text: “Antiquorum nobis relatione compertum est quod miles quidam fuerit nomine Guifredus.”14 The written tradition emerged naturally from the monastery at Ripoll, where the monks were familiar with the techniques required to compile documents.15 King James had no need of these “authorities” of written and oral tradition. He justifies his own account by relying simply on his memory and signing the text. James I’s authorship is enhanced by the personality that radiates from the powerful personal narrative. Some scholars have contrasted King James’s chronicle with the somewhat impersonal portrait of the contemporary king of Castile that emerges from Estoria de Espanna (History of Spain). The difference between the two accounts lies in the fact that “the autobiographical text of James I evinces a strong sense of the individual, a personification of the portrait that dilutes the ideal norm in a naturalism that is much more dependent on the realism of the account.”16 Indeed, the portrait of the king that emerges from his often introspective account proves that the degree of realism—which does not necessarily entail “truthfulness”—far surpasses any idealism in the chronicle. The Llibre dels fets reveals clear and intense authorial intention. One of the most distinctive indicators of this authorial intention is the use of the first person, the royal “we,” except in a few instances where he uses “I,” notably in recorded conversations. The text’s complex grammatical structure has led to speculation about its process of inscription: the long sentences

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recall the rhythms of oral tales, though the result is an elegant and graceful Catalan. The grammatical form used by the king makes the text highly expressive and establishes its generic definition as autobiography but poses the problem of direct authorship. Who really wrote the text? How was it produced? Only one thing is almost certain: we cannot attribute the material authorship of the text to King James as there is no evidence that he was a literary man—unlike Peter the Ceremonious, of whom we have preserved handwritten documents. Indeed, James’s life did not leave him much time for writing, unlike the more tranquil existence of the fourteenthand fifteenth-century kings, Peter the Ceremonious among them. The most likely explanation for the book’s production is that during quiet interludes in his eventful reign, he dictated his memoirs to his scribes, and they rewrote them following the models of both the Christian and Islamic historical chronicles of the time.17 This would account for the numerous traces of the participation of other people in the drafting of the text. Yet the “autobiographical act” of the chronicle is King James’s sole responsibility, despite the involvement of amanuenses. Historical texts in the Middle Ages were commonly drawn up by a group of people, especially chronicles written in monasteries and courts. Consequently, I see no difficulty in accepting that collective participation in the material production of a chronicle is compatible with the fact of a single author. We can also dismiss the idea that one of James I’s knights, who had been present at most of his adventures, wrote the chronicle in first person and then attributed its authorship to the king. Fifty years after the publication of the Llibre dels fets, Muntaner, a soldier in the king’s service, a knight and a literary man, would do just this by recounting the events of the reigns of James’s successors. Muntaner combined his role as protagonist of the events with that of literary observer. Yet the exhaustiveness of the Llibre dels fets and the abundant details of the king’s personal life make us appreciate James’s primary role in the inscription of his

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chronicle. The explanation of the nature of this kind of authorship may well come from James’s son-in-law, King Alfonse the Wise (Alfonso X el Sabio of Castile), who explains: We often say: the king makes a book, not because he writes it with his own hands but because he composes the subjects, corrects them and adds a new nuance and rectifies them and shows the way they should be done, and they are written thus under his instructions and we say then that the king makes the book. Similarly when we say the king builds a palace or does some other work, it is not because he does so with his own hands but because he orders it to be built and he provides everything required to make it so.18

The comparison between the dictation of a historical text and the commissioning of an architectural work is illustrative. Nonetheless, whoever the actual writer of the chronicle was, the king’s personal stamp is evident on every page, confirming his authorial intention. At one point, the king mentions Guillem de Puyo, “who was with us when we were making this book,” evidence of James’s real proximity to the drafting of the text and his express intention to complete it in his lifetime.19 The style of the Catalan, full of Aragonese and Provençal expressions, betrays the influence of the dialects he had spoken during his childhood in those regions.20 In some passages, the king bases his information on the eyewitness testimony of the nobles, “e altres qui ho viren per sos uyls” (“with others, who saw it with their own eyes”).21 He also deliberately imposes the criteria in the selection of the events to be narrated: Now, because this book is of such a nature that one should not put trifling matters into it, we leave off telling of many things that happened, and wish only to speak of the most important matters so that the book will not be too greatly lengthened; nevertheless, we do wish to treat and speak of those matters which were great and good.22

The use of the first person also emphasizes the mark left on the text by the king. An experienced court official, used to drafting royal documents, would never have used the “I.” The king is

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thus the real author of the text, even if it was physically written by scribes at his court, who gave the text its definitive literary form. The chronicle is King James I’s personal project, though it was written collectively.23 Numerous details confirm this, including the facts recounted as well as the point of view in certain passages, especially when referring to particulars about his personal and domestic life that could be known only by him. For example, James speaks of the day when he ordered that the striking of the camp should be delayed until the swallow nesting in his tent had left with its chicks: the king treated these birds as if they too were his vassals.24 A further example is the scene of him eating in the company of his wife during the campaign to take the castle of Almenara.25 The personality of the author also comes through in his comments on his private spiritual life: “As our Lord Jesus Christ, who knows all things, knew that our life would be this long, that we would do so many good works with the faith that is ours, by grace and by favor, despite the sins we have committed, both mortal and venial, He does not want us to be ashamed of it.”26 Moreover, no one but the king himself would have been able to write so accurately and in so much detail of that freezing night in January when he nevertheless sweated “as if we were in a bath,” when he woke up more than a hundred times, becoming exhausted by the “fatigue of wakefulness,” waking up once again “between midnight and dawn.”27 All of these authorial signs evince the king’s involvement in the text’s composition. Nonetheless, certain scholars argue that “the autobiography of King James I is so unusual a document for medieval times that doubts as to its authenticity naturally arise.”28 It is clear that the king dictated much of it to a trusted individual, who then presented it in a more carefully written form. Scholarship has always highlighted the role of orality in much of the oldest medieval literature, as in the case of epic poetry. The Llibre dels fets transmits a strong sense of oral prose. Oral transmission of the content of the chronicle was largely encouraged by the scarcity in it of events from remote history,

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because recent events can always be told using personal memory, while the remote need written records. In the reverse operation, the work was also written with the idea that it would be transmitted orally. Orality, which had been frozen in writing, reemerged triumphant when the work was read aloud.29 The text of the Llibre dels fets focuses on words and events as much as on the gestures that accompany them, making the narrative more expressive, susceptible to being heard as much as to being read. Indeed, on several occasions, the king explicitly addresses the people who will be hearing his book.30 The syntax is variable and spontaneous, sentences are long, and the work passes from direct to indirect style easily, with no preset rules. The memoir flows so spontaneously that accounts are at times abruptly interrupted because the writer realizes that the episode has already been narrated in another passage. Striking linguistic shifts in a single sentence—one, in particular, begins in Catalan and includes phrases in Castilian and Provençal31—illustrate the king’s multilingual education and desire to give the appearance of historical realism: he had been brought up by women from Languedoc until he was three, educated at the French court of Simon de Montfort from three to six, lived with Aragonese Templars in Monzón from six to thirteen, married a Castilian at thirteen, a Hungarian at twenty-seven, a woman of Navarre at the age of forty-eight, and was constantly surrounded at court by Aragonese, Catalans, and people from Montpellier in the south of France. The presence of Aragonese turns of phrase attests to this variety of places, languages, and peoples.32 The scene of the conversation between James I and Pope Gregory incorporates phrases in Latin, French, and an Italian dialect, heightening the spontaneity of the discourse.33 This scene, vital from a strategic point of view, also stresses the comic dimension of the text in the account of the amusing complaint of a Templar (Guillem de Corcelles) who seems more concerned with not being portrayed as older than he is than with the decisive events under discussion.34 The text reads like an oral narrative, moving in twists and turns, with no predetermined pattern or disposition. Though

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there is a clear central plotline, the variations, digressions, and asides become the most interesting part of the text. Some dramatic flashbacks are notable: while he recounts the taking of Liçana, the king looks back to conjure up the grotesque figure of a conquered knight, don Pedro Gomes, sunk in the mud of the battlefield.35 When he recalls his first wedding, he describes the opposing destinies of the four daughters and two sons of his father-in-law, Alfonse VIII of Castile.36 When he returns to the Puig to help the defenders of the square, he relives the touching tenderness shown to him by the knight don Fortuny Lopes de Sàdaba.37 Shortly before the dramatic siege of the Muslims at Morvedre, he gently mocks the precarious armor don Fortuny wears at such a critical moment, because only the helmet is of decent quality and he rides a coarse mule rather than a stallion: “And don Fortuny Lópes had nothing but a chinpiece [barbuda] to put on his head, and a tunic to wear, and a mule to ride, and the lance that he held.”38 James-the-historical-author cannot be disassociated from James-the-knight-king, and this connection structures the authorship of the Llibre dels fets. Authority blends with authorship in this text, achieving the difficult balance that all authors seek: on the one hand, individual authority or creative autonomy, and on the other, the authoritative sanction that external sources provide.39 Crucially, King James also succeeds in establishing literary authority in the vernacular, something that was not taken for granted in the thirteenth century.40 The dignity of the munus and creative autonomy gave him the authority and authorship needed to generate authentic historical narration.

Desclot’s Polyphonic Authorial Voices In contrast with King James, whose authorial strategies were based on his political position (auctoritas), Bernat Desclot deployed polyphony to heighten authorial legitimacy.41 Having harnessed legends at the beginning of his narrative, Desclot turns from chapter 11 onward to sources such as oral tradition,

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historical texts, written records, and personal memory. The author employs the same epic style in his retelling of the legends as in the recounting of contemporary deeds in the second part of the chronicle, such as Peter the Great’s challenge of the French king in Bordeaux, the stories of the Company of the Almugavars, the Catalan campaigns in North Africa and Sicily, and the heroic resistance of the Catalan knights against the French invaders. I argue that the form of the narration and the narrative style grant coherence and unity to the whole chronicle. Consistent emplotment and a variety of tropes give Desclot’s historical text its credibility. This narrative unity prevails over the different identities Desclot inhabits as an author: he functions as a historian (specially when he tells the history of James I and Peter the Great), as a notary public (when he reproduces legal and diplomatic documentation, as in the challenge of Bordeaux), as a teller of legends (particularly in the four legends at the beginning), and as an eyewitness, as the meticulousness of his accounts of the battles reveals.42 When he recounts the battles, his narrative style recalls that of other Catalan and European chroniclers of his time. Yet he reveals precise knowledge of archival documents—perhaps as a fruit of his work in the Chancellery—that no other Catalan and few European chronicles seem to have. In several passages, he seems to have transcribed literally from a chancellery record, as in the chapter on the duel between Peter the Great and Charles of Anjou in Bordeaux.43 The Desclot projected in his historical text is more an intellectual than a knight, but his patriotism gives his historical narration strong epic proportions. Performing as four different kinds of authors (legend teller, historian, notary, witness) and using four different kinds of sources (legends, historical texts, records, memory), Desclot constructs his coherent and unique historical text by decontextualizing past stories and recreating them in the present. By liberating the stories of the past from their original space and time, Desclot reinvents them and gives them a new context, one shaped to satisfy the demands of the present. This is how Desclot represents

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the past and how most medieval and modern historiography must be interpreted. To be sure, after the spread of nineteenthcentury historicism, the figure of the historian-as-scientist has been more popular than the notion of the historian-as-author. But it has not always been this way, and it will not necessarily be this way in the future. Medieval chroniclers like Desclot offer us the clearest examples of this method because historians always have to deal with the past—facts and stories that exist in an indeterminate place between reality and fiction, a limbo between history and literature. Desclot’s method of decontextualizing the past hinges on his use of a very specific narrative form, what Catalan scholars call “chancelleresc prose.” The solemn, epic style characterizes the entire text, despite the differing nature of the sources used and deeds narrated, from the legendary tales of the first chapters to the specific descriptions of the deeds of King Peter the Great at end of the chronicle.44 The narrative’s unifying strategy grants Desclot more freedom as an author than King James had as an autobiographer or Muntaner had as “national” chronicler. He uses shifting points of view to establish his position in relation to his story. Historical facts are usually narrated in third person, but he also turns to the first person when he wants to portray himself as a history teller— “Ara lexarem a parlar,” “Ara parlarem del rey,” “Ara lexarem a parlar del bon chomte” (“And now we shall speak of ,” etc.).45 The shifting points of view clarify the distinction he establishes between historical facts and his role as a historian who narrates. This strategy may be viewed as that of a historian who puts into practice the formal procedures that make historical narration credible. Historians perform as authors when they write history. From the point of view of form, the distinction between novelists and historians would arguably be an artificial one. Both create imaginative or historical texts after a careful selection process that includes the choice of words, tone, register, and the links between the episodes. What distinguishes a simple “chronicle” from (his-

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torical or fictional) “narrative” are the causal links between words, more than the words themselves.46 These causal links offer the clues to the historians’ metahistorical assumptions, because they materialize narrative emplotment. Desclot’s unveils his narrative choices more perceptibly than other medieval (and even modern) historians, when he inserts expressions that demonstrate his role as historical mediator. For example, he makes it clear that he willfully chooses not to tell the reader, though he patently knows, the causes of Guillem Ramon de Montcada’s exile: “And it came about for a certain reason, which I do not want now to relate, that the count of Barcelona expelled him out from his land and drove him into exile.”47 In this case, he speaks in the first person, emphasizing his position as the narrator of the story and thus the one authorized to recount it as he sees fit. At the end of the chapter on the battle of Ubeda, Desclot introduces the tale of the “bon comte,” useful to the reader who wants to know the reason for the legitimization of Peter the Catholic as marquis of Provence and how his ancestor the good count of Barcelona won his realm “because of his heroic deed.”48 Desclot explains his political reason for choosing this particular story: the legitimization of Catalonia’s domination of Provence and the rights of the descendants of Peter the Catholic. On other occasions, Desclot turns to the authority of others to support his narrative, frequently employing the expression “diu lo conte” (the story says), generally at the beginning of chapters.49 Hayden White has distinguished three levels of conceptualization in the historical work: chronicle, story, and plot. Desclot’s historical text appears at first to be a chronicle. Yet his negotiation of the past does not only recover historical data to render it more comprehensive to a particular audience, nor is it a simple arrangement of events in chronological order. Desclot organizes the events in his account in order to explain historical reality rather than merely to expose it. He “dictated and wrote” the deeds of the kings of Aragon and then explains them. The original chronicle and the potential story finally become history (plot) when Desclot systematically privileges particular events as

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inaugural motifs, others as terminating motifs, and yet others as transitional motifs.50 Northrop Frye and Hayden White connect the notion of emplotment to Aristotelian mythos or “plot.”51 Emplotment structures the underlying shape of the text, whereas narrative relates to the surface of the text. The way Desclot narrates the duel between Peter the Great and Charles of Anjou in Bordeaux (chapter 100), for instance, illustrates how the historian organizes the elements of the story—the two kings, the reason for the duel, and the rules of the duel—to give them multiple meanings while linking them in logical and chronological order.52 Thus, the simple chronicle of events narrated in the Gesta Comitum and the univocal authorial dimension of the Llibre dels fets are abandoned in favor of a more complex process in Desclot’s chronicle. The plot emerges from this increased complexity of the historical account. Desclot the historian negotiates with the fictional elements of his formally historical text. He not only “finds” his stories but also “invents” them when data are incomplete—the clue to the distinction between history and fiction, as literary critics claim. This is especially observable in the first part of the chronicle, where he constructs his stories based on legends and oral traditions.

Peter’s Llibre and Collective Authorship Apart from its value as a source of information about the fourteenth century, King Peter’s chronicle contributes to our knowledge of medieval historiography and the possibilities of medieval authorship through the documents that describe how his collaborators worked under the king’s orders during the long process of the chronicle’s inscription. We are thus given a vivid picture of how an official chronicle, patronized by a medieval king, was composed.53 Between 1343 and 1349 the king would have designed the first draft of his memoirs and sent it to his scribes for development and improvement. The first explicit evidence of Peter’s author-

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ship comes from a letter of 1349, in which the king asks one of his scribes, Bernat de Torre, to send him the original draft, which he calls “the book of our deeds” (gestorum nostrorum), so that “we can continue it.”54 The king had just crushed the rebellion of the Unions and could then focus on this task. Two decades later, in 1371, the king wrote to Bernat Descoll from Tortosa, asking him at what point the chronicle was interrupted in the notebooks that he kept, because he wanted to continue it.55 Descoll had been appointed assistant to the mestre racional of the Chancellery, one of the most important functions in the court. He would have acted as both a custodian and a secondary author of the chronicle.56 In 1373, the king revealed in a letter to his cousin James, bishop of Valencia, that he had not “put [his deeds] in writing” but had entrusted this task to “certain persons,” Arnau de Torrelles among them.57 This suggests that, at that time, Peter was giving his secretaries numerous and specific instructions on the project. In the long years between the king’s first request (1349) and the letter of 1375, the court secretaries would have completed the three first chapters, some notes on the others, and sent drafts to the king. Since the chronicle covers the events from 1319 to 1366, much of the actual writing might conceivably have occurred between 1369 and 1375, when the kingdom entered a period of relative calm after the war against Castile and the king could focus on this project, which would have been completed between 1377 and 1385. In the interim periods, one of the chancellery secretaries would have stored the manuscript, awaiting further instructions, before taking up the task of writing again. The document that most vividly describes this process is the letter the king wrote his scribes in 1375, which also offers valuable information on how official and courtly chronicles were constructed in medieval Catalonia.58 At the beginning of the letter, the king mentions a missive from Bernat Descoll, a document that has unfortunately been lost. It probably contained a detailed draft of the Llibre that Descoll sent to the king, asking him for his observations and instructions. The king opens the 1375 letter

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by giving his approval for the three first chapters of the draft and asks Descoll to “put in as much detail as you can.” Regarding the fourth chapter, for example, he writes: “speaking of the Unions, you can do as far as it has been revised by us, and then, when you arrive at that point, you will find what happened later, putting it down day by day and specifically and at length, and making mention of all we did in the aforesaid Unions.” Further, the king advises Descoll to use the reports of the royal household as a source. If Descoll had any doubts about certain events, he should leave a space on the page, which would later be filled in, probably by the king himself. It would have been very interesting to see this draft, with Descoll’s and Peter’s—and perhaps other collaborators’—texts combined, and with the blanks filled in the king’s own hand. The king concludes his instructions for this chapter by asking the scribe to “write down, as best you can, how they [the Unions] began and how they continued and what we did, and to what end they came, and thus it can be set out at length.” The king notes his approval of the fifth chapter, “which speaks of the alliance with Venice and of other things.” Yet he asks Descoll to emphasize some deeds he wants recorded in detail, day by day, as best he can, what persons and how many passed with us to Sardinia, after En Bernat de Cabrera had vanquished the Genoese fleet and taken Alghero, and then the rebellion of Alghero, as you sketched it out for us. And also make mention of where we reembarked and where we landed and afterwards what happened to us, day by day, and of who died there and with whom we returned, as clearly as you can, and in detail.

The longest and most detailed instructions are given for the sixth chapter, which describes the war with Castile: “since the matter was great, it will have to be long.” The king again asks Descoll to narrate “day by day, and in as much detail as you can, and recount all the great and notable deeds.” In this section, the Llibre adopts the form of the Dietari, a historical genre typi-

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cal of early modern Catalan historiography, written by learned people rather than chroniclers. Thus, the king specifies all the deeds he wants to emphasize: the entry into Magallón, Terrer, and Fariza, the battle at La Losa and the Grau of Valencia, the siege of Murviedro, and, at the end, the entry of the Companies, the execution of King Peter of Castile, the coronation of King Henry of Castile, and the deaths of Prince don Fernando and Bernat de Cabrera. All of these deeds had to be told “day by day and in detail.” There are other events, at which the king was not present, that he orders Descoll to recount not in detail but in summary, “setting out what happened as is contained in your chapter”—further evidence of the existence of an earlier draft. Descoll and the others court scribes clearly obeyed Peter’s instructions, because the sixth chapter is the most detailed chapter of the chronicle but also, perhaps, the least imaginative, the most conventional and predictable. Then the king gives his instructions for a seventh chapter, which does not appear in the final extant version. This is arguably the most interesting paragraph in the king’s letter to Descoll, because he begs the scribe to “make mention of everything, although some events have taken place to our great loss, for it is right that the provisions we ordained should be stated there, and if God wished to harm us and assist the judge, that did not mean the we were not to be diligent in our deeds, and our successors will be able to behold our diligence.” Thus, Peter refers to the future: “And then we hope, with God’s aid, shortly to conquer the whole island, which will be the conclusion of all the past deeds. And so leave enough space, so that the conquest we will make of the island can be continued here.” The last piece of advice for the writing of this chapter gives the scribes more freedom and flexibility, leaving to their own judgment the choice and length of the deeds narrated: “And put down all the events which have occurred which are worthy of memory, well and specifically, day by day, and as specifically as you can.” Finally, the king refers to the events of 1375, specifically the last military campaign on which he does not give more details and which he thinks should

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not be mentioned, “for no good has followed nor can follow from it, as it is a deed which cannot recur.” The king’s final request is so tenderly expressed that it reveals Peter’s great desire to create a valuable historical text: “So therefore we beg you to put your hand to the work and labor there with efficacy, for you could not do us a greater service.” This 1375 document might be exactly what a contemporary politician would give a secretary or ghost writer as an outline, frame, or draft for his memoirs. The process of writing the Llibre reflects Alfonse X’s analogy between the king’s authorship of the chronicle and the work of an architect, a person who creates and supervises the design rather than enacting the material process of construction.59 Mary Hillgarth, translator of the Llibre, adds another interesting testimony, which helps us understand the process of creation of these texts and the writers’ method. In 1364, the notary who recorded the juridical process against the king’s advisor Bernat de Cabrera found himself unable to take down all the speeches at once. He describes how, over several days, not confiding in my memory I often asked questions of the lord king, in the presence of some of those who were at the session. I drew up the text, with many corrections which the lord inserted, and read it to the lord king word by word and when it was read the king said that it was correct and corresponded to what the lord king had said in his speech.60

This also shows the king’s meticulous attention to his tasks of government in the developed court and confirms the theory of his individual authorship in the conception and design of the Llibre despite the need for collaboration in the actual production. In 1382, the king conceded a donation of a thousand sous to a certain Bernat Ramon Descavall, civil servant of the Chancellery, who served the mestre racional, for his services “in scribendo cronicas nostras” (in writing our chronicles).61 This further confirms the fact of the chronicle’s collective authorship even if, by “cronicas nostras,” the king also refers to other historical texts he promoted.

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We cannot be certain whether the verb scribere functions in this case only as the material action of “transcribing” or refers to creative authorial activity. Medieval Latin had other verbs (dictare and composere) that denote more authorial and creative activity, but it seems evident that, according to the king’s dignity, scribere here refers to authoring rather than to mere transcription. In 1385, in response to Descoll’s reminder that the king should continue “the book of his life,” the king asks him to take the chronicle up again, perhaps after a period of interruption. Peter declares that he himself began the chronicle and that all of its content had to be approved by him.62 The book was not yet completed when Peter died, because in a record of the Chancellery of 1388 Bernat Descoll appears as a civil servant “who has continued the book in which are written the great deeds that happened during the whole time in which King Peter reigned.”63 Finally, in 1391, four years after Peter’s death, his son, King John the Hunter ( Joan el Caçador), writes to his brother Martí and mentions that Bernat Descoll has passed away. Descoll is remem­­­­­­­ bered  because he “did part of the Chronicle of the king our father.” This kind remembrance proves that Descoll was not the only scribe or secondary author of the Llibre and that he followed Peter’s instructions.64 Existing records show at least four civil servants (Bernat Descoll, Arnau de Torrelles, Ramon de Vilanova, and Bernat Ramon Descavall), may have taken part in the writing of the Llibre, at least at the level of scribes or collaborative authors.65 Nevertheless, the king must be considered its principal author, because he gives unity to the historical text, both as the source of the memories written and as the text’s protagonist. The text could be described, in G. Thomas Couser’s words, as a “symmetrical collaborative autobiography,” where the celebrity’s power to vet the manuscript suggests that in a crucial sense authority resides with the subject (King Peter) rather than with the actual writers of the texts (the scribes).66 To be sure, besides his authority to revise, as shown in Peter’s correspondence with the secretaries, several personal commentaries illustrate the king’s

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direct intervention in his Llibre, such as the sentence “segons que havem oït recomptar a persones dignes de fe” (“according to what we have heard recounted from persons worthy of faith”).67 Knowing Peter’s personal involvement in all the details of his activities (he gave meticulous instructions for the most insignificant issues, from the care of his garden and his saddle horse to the design of a sculpture), we may assume his direct participation in the chronicle’s inscription. It is difficult to imagine the king delegating the construction of his (autobiographical) chronicle, in the light of his personal involvement in the cultural activities of his court, his convictions regarding the effectiveness of historical writing as a political weapon, and his personal engagement in the preparation of his speeches.68 Thus, we know for certain that although Peter did not literally write his autobiography, he designed its structure and wrote several parts, gave detailed instructions for the other sections, and revised the entire text. Strictly speaking, Peter’s Llibre is the Royal Chancellery’s collective work rather than the king’s individual work.69 Nonetheless, his collaborators, civil servants working for the Chancellery, serve at a level superior to that of a simple “amanuensis.”70 For this reason, we speak of individual authorship in the text’s conception but collective composition in the articulation of the chronicle.71 This collective authorship reflects the political dimension of the Llibre. If Peter considered his autobiography a “state affair,” the act of collaboration mirrors the king’s reliance on the civil servants of the court. King James’s personal authority, Desclot’s polyphonic authorial voices, and King Peter’s collaborative authorship are three sources of authority that give the “effect of the real.” Historical narration must give readers internal and external signs of authority. After the nineteenth-century historicist revolution, this “historical authority” is provided by external signs—e.g., the choice of schematic rather than narrative language, quotations from other authorized historians, the liberal use of footnotes, or the guarantee of the author’s academic position. During the Middle Ages internal authority was more powerful than external factors,

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and authors of histories devised rhetorical strategies to win credibility.72 Authors such as James, Desclot, and Peter, through their varied manifestations of individual agency and involvement in the creation of their texts, generated diverse procedures for the establishment of authorial authority. From this analysis, we understand that historical authority and credibility in the Middle Ages emerge from internal authorial coherence rather than from the mere rejection of fictional and imaginative stories—an indispensable practice in modern historiography.

9 Catalan Chroniclers and Poetic License: History, Epic, Fiction The study of the interrelation between realism and fiction in medieval literature has never been easy. On the one hand, the texts’ collective testimony clearly indicates the existence of a concept of history linked to a particular notion of truth, distinct from fiction. On the other hand, historical truth did not imply, as it does for us today, accuracy of facts and events.1 When medieval chroniclers wrote “histories,” they turned naturally to oral tradition, myth, and legend. Historical “fact” was thus inextricably intertwined with fictions of various kinds.2 Modern critics have observed that only in the early nineteenth century did it become conventional among historians to identify truth with fact and to regard fiction as the opposite of truth, and thus as a hindrance to understanding reality rather than as a way of apprehending it.3 While the interpretation of modern literary production depends to a large extent upon the accepted dichotomy between history and fiction, this was certainly not the case for medieval vernacular literature. Literary evolution in Catalonia was marked by the acknowledged use of fictional sources and characters by historical authors. This may help to explain why Catalan historical discourse was powerful enough to curb the emergence

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of vernacular fictional writing until the second half of the fourteenth century. Only the epic chants of the troubadours, Ramon Llull’s writings, Francesc Eiximenis’s political treatises, and Arnau de Vilanova’s medical essays coexisted with historical literature. Not until the end of the Middle Ages did texts like Bernat Metge’s allegorical work Lo Somni (The Dream), Jordi de Sant Jordi’s and Ausiàs March’s poetry, and two well-known chivalric imaginative accounts, the anonymous Curial e Güelfa and Joanot Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc, emerge to challenge the hegemony of historical writing. Fictional texts did not begin to attain popularity in Catalonia until the fifteenth century, when they replaced historical writing. Significantly, these new authors appropriated the characters and stories of the historical texts and stories as models for their writing: elements from the chronicles of Ramon Muntaner and Bernat Desclot continued to appear in other texts centuries after their creation.4 Both Tirant and Curial take passages from Muntaner’s and Desclot’s texts; episodes from the chronicles are transformed into marvelous dreams in Tirant and Curial. Just as thirteenth-century Catalan chroniclers had “prosified” the heroic and poetic models of the Provençal jongleurs, and Muntaner included fictional French heroes in his chronicle, so fifteenthcentury authors appropriated the historical models of the Catalan chroniclers. This process of shifting models between historical and fictional accounts—which actually began with the creation of the historical-legendary figure of Wilfred in the Gesta Comitum—demonstrates the power of the “literature of the historical event” in medieval Catalonia and urges us to examine the relationship between referential and fictional narration in that time. The Catalan chroniclers analyzed in this book use different forms to treat fictional elements in their texts. This chapter centers on the ways they merged historical reality with occasional fictions. The authors of the Gesta Comitum emphasized the figure of the founder-hero of the dynasty of the counts of Barcelona, creating a half-historical/half-fictional character; King James used the technique of the recuperation of earlier epic po-

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ems in his narration, heightening chivalric feeling and heroic action; Desclot’s dynamic attitude toward invention allowed him to freely engage the facts of history and fiction, demonstrating his ability to create legends; finally, Muntaner, perhaps the most sophisticated of all, incorporated fictional characters from Arthurian and French cycles into his historical narrative and exaggerated and mythified the conquests of the Catalan soldiers.

The Gesta’s Hero Founder: Between History and Fiction Scholars believe that the epic stories that accompanied the genealogies functioned as guarantees of continuity and provided new groups with valuable religious and social legitimization and paradigmatic founder-heroes.5 The reinvention of ancestral heroes, figures who were partly historical, partly invented—such as Wilfred the Hairy in the Gesta Comitum—increased the lineage’s prestige and created a new genealogical consciousness, which might be articulated in the form of a tree rooted in the person of the founding ancestor.6 The foundational legends of medieval monasteries, most of them presented in genealogical form, are not inert fictions but texts that illuminate the ways these communities constructed both their identity and the nexus of social relations within which they were implicated.7 These foundational accounts invoke origins and establish three different models: the link with Carolingian blood, the link with Frankish and Roman lineages, and the story of the founderhero.8 The legend of Wilfred the Hairy, for example, connects with two of these models of the accounts of origins: the link with Carolingian blood and the story of the founder-hero.9 The adventures of the founder of the dynasty consolidated his function and prestige as the holder of a historic county. The parallels with other legendary heroes, originators of the great Western lineages through a journey fraught with perils, are clear. They are the heroes of a large part of the genealogical literature written in the second half of the twelfth century. Many of them are of Scandinavian origin, such as Gero, the Norman chieftain, grandfather

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of the Blois; Achard, founder of the dynasty of the counts of Bar-sur-Aube; and Raoul Barbeta, at the origins of the Roucy family. Even the counts of Anjou have a founder of modest but heroic extraction, Tertulle le Forestier. Of similar origin are the viscounts of Comborn and Lastours, descended from Archambaud and Gouffier, and the Robertien dynasty, descended from Witikind, the Saxon rebel vanquished by Charlemagne.10 The attribute required of the founder of the dynasty was chivalric valor rather than princely ascendancy, which could be acquired through an exogamic marriage.11 The figure of the founder-hero of a dynasty is characteristic of medieval historiography. Accounts of that time demonstrate that the epic is essentially a literary crystallization of the heroic ideal.12 These stories, like those of Wilfred, are to be taken not as factual evidence but as the representation of an ideal. European societies were at that time convinced that duration was the definitive proof of the validity of a custom because it demonstrated its power to successfully resist the challenges of history, enabling society to survive and prosper. Duration validates also because it implicitly multiplies the number of believers in the rule, and “so many people could not be wrong.”13 Some of these people, like Wilfred the Hairy and the other founders of European dynasties, were glorious heroes, whose actions further support the rule of their successors by showing that it is based on exceptional success. This is the real sense of the founder-hero stories. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas elucidate the place of Wilfred’s story in the context of twelfth-century Catalan society: When a myth narrates the adventures, exploits, the good deeds, the death and resurrection of a civilizing hero, it is not the fact that he has given the tribe the idea of fire-making, or cultivating corn, which, in itself, especially interests and moves the audience. What occurs is rather that, as in sacred history, the group is able to participate in its own past, that it feels itself living, in a sort of mystical communion, with what made it what it is. In short, myths are, for the primitive mentality, both an expression of the solidarity of the social group with itself in time and with other beings in its environ-

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ment, and a way of perpetuating and rekindling the feeling of this solidarity.14

The preservation of the mythical power of origins is one of the aims of any society. As Mircea Eliade argues, myths and legends reflect nostalgia for the origins of human society and evoke a return to a creative era.15 The central event described in the Gesta Comitum (ninth-century Wilfred’s deeds) was historical, but the epic language and feudal context correspond to the twelfth century. Thus, historical fact and epic narration were assumed to be linked by an unbroken oral and poetic tradition, fixed by the text of the Gesta. Furthermore, the myth of the founder-hero is reinforced by the chronological distance from the facts of the remote past. The more distant the events, the more prestigious and more malleable—and more easily typified—they are. The narration of the distant past may carry a heavier ideological load than that of the recent past. 16 Thus, historiographical efficacy lies as much in the mythical power of the legend as in the actual distance between the past and the present.17 For this reason, some anthropologists have claimed that the distinction between mythical and historical modes of operation depends on the ability of the present to be homogeneous with the past, rather than the degree of “realism” of the stories. The more exemplary the past is for the present (i.e., homogeneous), the more “historical” it becomes, irrespective of its degree of legend; further, the more impossible to replicate the past is for the present (heterogeneous), the more “mythical” it appears.18 Thus, Wilfred is a “historical” figure for Catalans because of the exemplary nature of his deeds, in the same way that don Pelayo functions for Castile—and after the sixteenth century, for all of Spain—and Lidéric for Flanders.19 When myths are transformed into intermediary representations, which may or may not take the form of narrative, they function as historical models. In this epistemological context, genealogies transform myths into history. The legend of Wilfred the Hairy, deeply influenced by these

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conditioning factors, through the intrinsic force of the historical narrative in the opening of the Gesta, becomes definitively linked to the legendary origins of the house of Barcelona. The tale of Wilfred’s rise to the county of Barcelona is certainly based on the narrative of the ancients. The opening of the original version of the Gesta is critical and eloquent: “Antiquorum nobis relatione compertum est quod miles quidam fuerit nomine Guifredus” (We know by old accounts that there was once a certain knight named Wilfred).20 The writer based his account on writings probably kept in the monastery of Ripoll.21 As epic literature, this story becomes part of the sources compiled and organized from remote traditions and enriched with subsequent additions.22 The author of the Gesta may well have received the legend of Count Wilfred in writing, incorporating details that allowed him to add contemporary significance to the original version. It is difficult to substantiate the process of historical manipulation that culminated with the final version of the legend of Wilfred the Hairy. Nonetheless, in spite of its complicated process of composition, the story’s enormous effectiveness in consolidating the Catalan tradition and identity is indisputable. Wilfred’s fictional story benefits from the legitimization of true accounts. Indeed, Wilfred’s story is constitutive of the great récit of the history of Catalonia, even as its legendary and fictional dimensions remain intact. As Romila Thapar suggests, “what is of significance to the historian are the assumptions made about the past in the epic and about the changes which earlier socie­ ties have undergone, assumptions which eventually will lead us to understand the historical function of the epic rather than to limit our exploration to its historicity.”23 Wilfred’s story must be analyzed not only for its contextual meaning but also for its symbolic connotations. Significantly, Wilfred has been regarded as the “founder of the Catalan nation.”24 The Gesta’s characters reflect historical conditions, despite their fictional elements. The legendary narrative section of the Gesta concludes with Wilfred taking possession of the county of Barcelona and, interestingly, with the foundation of the monastery of Ripoll, in which the

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Gesta was written.25 From this point, the narration moves to the more properly historical succession of the counts of Barcelona.

King James and the Hypothesis of “Prosification”: From Epic to History James I and his collaborators’ principal sources for the composition of the Llibre dels fets were the monarch’s own memory, perhaps some documents of the Royal Chancellery, and, importantly for the content of this chapter, earlier epic accounts of Catalan history. The most important of these sources is the king’s own recollections, as demonstrated by the fact that if we are able to date the writing of the chronicle with some certainty (a long period between 1244 and 1274), it is precisely because the events that take place just before these dates (1228–40 and 1265–74) are the most detailed in the account and are narrated with great precision. The descriptions of earlier events are somewhat vague. As for the rest, James himself truthfully admits on occasions that he “does not remember” particular details and so cannot record them in the chronicle: he forgets, for example, the name of the father of Agnes, wife of William of Montpellier, and also other knights’ names.26 Accounts in verse are perhaps the least-used source, but their use sheds light on both the inspiration of the troubadours and the influence of legend in Catalan medieval historical writing. Manuel de Montoliu and Ferran Soldevila posit that certain passages of the chronicle were perhaps originally composed in rhyme and were then transformed into prose, which increases the epic tone of the text, since certain parts would have come from legendary accounts from the oral tradition.27 This theory has been recently challenged by some literary critics,28 but the arguments put forth by older scholars deserve to be considered as hypotheses, at least until we discover new and definitive documentary evidence that contradicts these theories. Indeed, it was not uncommon in for rhyming chronicles and epic accounts, teeming with legends and fiction, to be adapted in historical texts in the vernacular in

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the first half of the thirteenth century. Prose was much more in keeping with the demands of the new historical context and the new political and cultural interests, in a phenomenon that William H. Sewell Jr. has defined as the “semiotic coherence of the culture.”29 The earlier rhymed chronicles and the epic lays, containing many passages of legends and fictions, were then adapted to historical texts in vernacular prose. The chivalric tone of the Llibre dels Fets is a perfect catalyst for the prosification of earlier epic poems. In a process of generic sedimentation from epic to genealogy to chronicle, each genre shows elements from the forms that preceded it, confirming their coexistence in the Middle Ages.30 Fragments of repeated assonance and intact verses have been found in the four great chronicles of medieval Catalonia, confirming their rhymed origins. In the Llibre dels fets, the conquests of Majorca and Valencia are narrated largely on the basis of prosification of earlier songs.31 The epic overtones of the abundant warlike events in James I’s chronicle are heightened by the rhymed origins of the text. This phenomenon supports Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s suggestion that the epic was born of the need to keep the populace informed of important contemporary events. It also confirms that discourse in medieval literature is a complex structure filled with what Walter Benjamin calls “the presence of the now”—“now” suggesting that epic and romance genres are a combination of cultural time and space rather than purely temporal articulations.32 Some scholars (Montoliu, Soldevila, Coll i Alentorn) argue that medieval Catalonia produced an epic literature that has partly disappeared owing to its orality. The same idea has been traditionally applied to Castilian literature, where the sole poetic text to survive nearly in its entirety is the Cantar de Mio Cid.33 The minstrels’ oral narrative was recorded by the chroniclers in their historical texts. That does not rule out that some lays were written down and conserved in manuscripts that were then taken up by chroniclers, as may well have been the case of the compiler of the Llibre dels fets. Thus, the historical narrative was formed as a sequence of separate, juxtaposed events in chronological or-

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der, a narrative pattern inherited from the epic and shared with romance.34

The Mythicizing Power of Historical Texts in Desclot’s Chronicle Bernat Desclot’s chronicle may be defined as a historical writing inspired by its writer’s dynamic attitude toward invention. Desclot negotiates the facts of history and fiction in varied ways: by creating legends, by taking diverse approaches to the past, by privileging some sources over others depending on the circumstances of the event he presents, by choosing which events to narrate or even inventing particular events, by shaping his narrative according to a particular ideology, and, finally, by using particular forms of historical narration. As a result, we can better understand the narrative and historical strategies employed by late-medieval chroniclers, in particular their ability to represent the past by decontextualizing those events, giving them new life in the present through the form of historical texts. The invention of Guillem Ramon de Montcada’s story and the recreation of the tale of James I’s conception reveal the mythicizing power of historical texts.35 Specifically, at the end of thirteenth century historical imagination emerged in Catalonia as a legitimate way to articulate historical narratives. The chronicler-compilers of the genealogies in the twelfth century (Gesta Comitum) and the chronicler-witnesses of the autobiographical accounts in the mid-thirteenth century (Llibre dels fets) were replaced by creative chroniclers such as Desclot or Muntaner. These chroniclers harnessed the power of troubadour poems to generate their own versions of legends. Historical tradition overshadows literary perspectives in medieval Catalonia. This is paradoxical if we consider how epic literature generally documents a period prior to that of recorded history.36 Yet Catalan literature developed inversely as it moved from historical to epic literature. As we saw, the growing force of the counts of Barcelona from the tenth to the fifteenth century

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obliged them to legitimize their power and justify their expansion policies. In addition, the influence of French epic poetry in Catalonia constrained local literature, forcing it to confine itself to history, though “contaminating” it with legends. As a result, the function of historical narration in Catalonia recalls that of epic poems in other European traditions.37 But historical narratives in Catalonia embodied the authority of “real,” authentic narrations, presented through a wholly credible genre. In the first part of his chronicle, Desclot challenges an established “modern” and rational rule by using legends on the same epistemological level as factual sources like chancellery records or historiography. Consciously or not, he faced the problem of presentism, because, as Clifford Geertz asserts in his intellectual autobiography, “myth, it has been said, I think by Northop Frye, describes not what happened but what happens.”38 Desclot and other Catalan chroniclers’ presentist approach lead us to reconsider the function of the medieval chronicler as a mediator between (his) past and present. The manner through which historians represent the past becomes the content of that past. The idealized portraits of the kings James the Conqueror and Peter the Great that emerge from Desclot’s chronicle reflect the past (the deeds of the kings) in the present (the historical text via narration). As we know from the practice of the new cultural history, “realism” is always culturally determined and varies substantially from culture to culture, and we cannot fully understand medieval historiography without attending to this contextual coherence. This leads us to read medieval historiography as a realistic historical artifact (from the point of view of style), even when the sources are not factual. When Desclot employs diverse sources to construct his historical account, he seeks the most vivid and telling information for each period that he wants to engage. He requires legends and myths for the remote past and uses historiographical sources and chancellery records for the recent past. This strategy, based on formal credibility and chronological proportionality rather than on truthfulness, diverges radically from

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what academics and professional historians consider valid today. We have more sophisticated practices: we receive specific training as historians, we learn methodologies and techniques that we apply to our historical research, we find sources in established archives, and an academic community validates the results of our inquiry. Yet, for a deeper understanding of medieval historiography, we should take into account the circumstances of the medieval historians’ work.

Muntaner’s Dream: The Chronicler’s Justification At the beginning of his book, Muntaner recounts that one night, sleeping at his farm in Xiluella, close to Valencia, he had a vision of a nobleman dressed in white who urged him to get up and write a book on “the great marvels that you have seen, which God has worked in the wars in which you have been involved. For it is God’s pleasure that by you they should be manifested.”39 This vision recalls other notable angelic instructions from biblical tradition. Thus, the promise of success is certified by the personal election that Muntaner receives from God, who asks him to manifest the marvels of the history of the Crown of Aragon. The text’s credibility will be assured by the fact that the author has “seen” and “experienced” the events he transcribes. The apparition declares that these are the reasons that God has prolonged his life, given him a prosperous position, and will bring him to a good end. In short, God wants him to “recount these adventures and marvels for there is not another alive today in the world who could relate them as truly.”40 Only he, of all his companions, has survived the battles, travels, and tasks and is therefore responsible for constructing the true narrative of all those historical events. The man in white continues to instruct Muntaner to write his book so that the people will “go from well to better,” and he urges him to rise from his bed and “begin your book and your history [història, in the Catalan original] in the best way God has granted you.”41 The apparition then vanishes, leaving Muntaner confused and reluctant to obey the charge.

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Indeed, “some days pass without [my] wishing to make any beginning of this.” The vision reappears, energetically imploring him to write the book: “Oh, man, what are you doing? Why despise you my command? Arise and do what I bid!” Then, and only after the angel’s insistence, does he begin to work.42 This introduction serves as a rather contrived captatio benevolentia: Muntaner’s intentional reiteration of his lack of enthusiasm in writing the book accentuates the task’s divine nature and, also, his own humble obedience. In a sense, he portrays himself as an amanuensis, a mediator between God and readers of the future (again, another parallel with the writers of the Scriptures). Muntaner uses the technique of the dream to reveal the objectives of his narration and to legitimize his task. Medieval dream visions were often used to justify an authorial stance that seeks to elide traditionally accepted sources of order and truth. In a theological culture, the dream occurrence suggests a communion with the divine, inasmuch as the dream is not manifestly a product of the dreamer’s conscious thoughts, and in this way the product of dreaming is distinguished from that of pure invention or imagination.43 Since Muntaner is not a king as James was, he has to, as it were, use an episode of divine intervention to assert his worthiness for the task of writing a chronicle of this nature. The scene of the apparition is a literary model taken from the biblical and classical world; it was used frequently during the Middle Ages. We have examples in James I’s autobiography, which tells of the appearance of an angel in white.44 More original, perhaps, is the use of the dream as the opening of a historical rather than religious, spiritual, or philosophical text. None of the other Catalan chroniclers use this technique, most likely because they saw no need to justify their writing of a chronicle: James the Conqueror’s and Peter the Ceremonious’s natural authority as kings supported their writings and the credibility of their accounts; Desclot’s reputation as a storyteller had previously been established. Muntaner, despite his years of service to the crown, did not have any natural authority, based on the canons of the time, to justify his authorship of a chronicle. He thus turns to the

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ultimate authorizing force: a divine command that, ultimately, allowed him to be named as one of the four Evangelists of the kingdom of Aragon, by the Catalan poet Angel Guimerà.45

Fictionalizing Remote Legends and Historicizing the Recent Past Yet the initial dream is not Muntaner’s only flirtation with fiction. His persistent employment of epic language for the account of the Catalan Mediterranean adventure generates doubts about his historical accuracy. Certainly, he deploys the genre of historical writing as a guarantor of the factual content (“as you will understand from the events of my time”),46 but his use of epic language associates his text with the form of legend. He has an unquestionable reputation as a “historian” and “chronicler,” but modern critics have discovered faulty accuracy in many passages of the chronicle. As a consequence, our increasing knowledge of the sources for the text and manner of the author’s manipulation of data makes us not only reconsider the process of the writing of the chronicle but also speculate on Muntaner’s intentions—his possibly deliberate misinformation and fictionalization. His manner of self-representation also invites questions. Indeed, Muntaner’s text becomes a privileged site for a detailed examination of the ways historical data and invention intersect to contribute to the creation of collective cultural memory. From soldier to knight, from subject to ruler, from villager to citizen, from illiterate villager to learned aide, Muntaner’s own itinerary is an adventure transformed into epic narration, half reality/half invention. He knew the possibilities of literary techniques and forms and appropriated them for his own account. Yet the boundaries between reality and imagination blur, particularly when a literary form is harnessed for historical purposes. The analysis of the ways Muntaner approached the past becomes a point of departure for an examination of the nature of historical truth in the Middle Ages. Perhaps the most remarkable of his choices is his preference for subjective rather than

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objective historical sources—primarily, personal observation and experience—and for legendary sources, specifically those from the Carolingian and Arthurian cycles and from Provençal and French epic literature. Muntaner draws on diverse written and oral sources, but the memories of his experiences remain his most important source of information.47 What hampers the work of historians who try to separate “reality” from “fiction” in the chronicle is the fact that Muntaner places himself firmly as the principal source and the author of his own story. As a character of the story he is telling, Muntaner exploits all means available to validate his double condition of “historian” and “historical character.” The “history as experience” model, created in a more knightly and secular context, replaces the history of the monastic chronicler clerk, who works in his monastery surrounded by a rich library of records. Memory and experience replace books and records as sources. For instance, Muntaner describes his duties as administrator of towns such as Jerba, because he wants to emphasize his position as qualified eyewitness to events he is relating. Thus, he selects the facts he narrates based whether they were experienced by him, rather than on their objective significance. This is evident in the wealth of detail provided about the island of Jerba, which he knew very well because of his appointment as a captain of the town. When the Catalan company arrives on that island, Muntaner extensively describes the geographical position and physical conditions. This account allows the reader to understand better the military actions experienced there.48 And, on the contrary, he narrates with less accuracy the events he has not experienced, such as the battles of Roses and Perelada.49 As a second rhetorical tool, Muntaner incorporates literary and legendary models into his description of personal experience. This is not innovative in the Catalan historiographical tradition—Bernat Desclot, for instance, bases his praise of King James the Conqueror on the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle.50 Yet Muntaner establishes the use of literary sources as a norm. Perhaps the most striking example is his comparison of the heroic

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deeds of the Aragonese kings and Catalan soldiers with those of well-known characters taken from romances, such as King Arthur. Muntaner asserts that Peter the Great “was the most accomplished knight in the world and who was bringing with him more expert knights from his dominion than King Arthur ever had at the Round Table.”51 Describing how King Alfonse the Liberal organized a tournament with four hundred knights in Figueres, Muntaner writes: “The most beautiful feast was made and the finest feats of arms done that have ever been done in a tournament since the time of King Arthur.”52 With this transposition, he highlights the significance of his kings and connects them to one of the most important and celebrated—albeit legendary—king of all times, Arthur. Muntaner manipulates the ambiguity of the epic characters to exalt his beloved Catalan protagonists. Muntaner carefully selects quotations from three sources: Provençal troubadour poetry, the Carolingian literary cycle, and the Arthurian cycle via French chivalric literature.53 Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Catalan historiography is nourished from this mélange of literary sources because of the southern French orientation of Catalonia’s first expansion.54 The earliest poetic Catalan tradition developed, in fact, from Provençal tradition, complemented by the Carolingian and Arthurian cycles imported from France and England.55 Only the chronicle of Peter the Ceremonious did not develop from this literary tradition, since it was planned as a spaeculum principis rather than as historical and chivalric narration. James I, Desclot, and Muntaner wrote within the lively context of the Carolingian and Arthurian tradition, borrowing its powerful legendary formal potential to complement the content of their chronicles.56 Even the most formal details are drawn from these literary models. The recurring phrase “què us diré,” for instance, is taken by Muntaner from the Provençal chanson de geste.57 These legendary poetic forms influence the content as well as the shape and style of the chronicle. Tristan, Jaufre, Alexander, and Roland, among others, appear in Muntaner’s chronicle

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as though they were historical personages.58 This practice is not unique to Muntaner, because we can find epic used as a historical source by learned authors in the thirteenth century such as Godfrey of Viterbo, Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, Philippe Mousket, Girart d’Amiens, Jean d’Outremeuse, David Aubert, and Alfonse the Wise of Castile.59 But Muntaner did it a century later. Muntaner does not necessarily introduce fictional heroes as historical figures, or use ancient legendary accounts as historical sources, but he uses both as realistic models for his own historical heroes such as Roger de Llúria, James the Just, or Roger de Flor. In one passage, for instance, Muntaner compares the prince (“Infant”) James the Just’s entourage with the chivalric virtues of Jaufre: “There were a hundred rich men and Catalan and Aragonese knights in his retinue, of whose prowess and knightly deeds a greater roman could be made than that of Jaufre.”60 Further, he quotes verses from the Provençal troubadour Guilhem Montanhagol, giving them political connotations,61 and there are also traces of the sirventés, the French and Provençal genre with a strong political dimension.62 These examples show how Muntaner blends history with legendary accounts and characters. Everyone knew what Arthur, Tristan, Jaufre, and Alexander meant for their respective kingdoms, so Muntaner harnesses them as legendary metaphors to exalt his Catalan kings. Muntaner’s familiarity with the Carolingian cycle inspires him to evoke Roland in the chronicle. One of Peter the Great’s young knights, Palerm Abat, “did as much as Roland would have done, had he been alive.”63 Muntaner appears to believe firmly in the historical existence of the French hero. In another passage, he affirms that “the Lord Infant En Fernando had performed as many feats of arms as Roland could have done, had he been there.”64 Even when he has to recount the destruction of his adored Peralada, he writes that the ancient town “since the time of Charlemagne and Roland had never belonged to the Muslims, but rather it is the truth that Charlemagne built the monastery of San Quirico and endowed it at Peralada, although it is in another territory than Peralada and belongs to the County

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of Ampurias.”65 Muntaner uses literary sources to guarantee (or promote) historical truth. The chronicle exhibits other examples of chivalric French and Anglo-Norman literature.66 Some details reveal this traditions’ resonances, such as Roger de Llúria’s gesture of setting up the Aragonese flag by the table and writing down on the senyera the names of the knights who were to accompany him on the campaign of Naples.67 As Muntaner enthusiastically describes Peter the Great’s deeds, he compares him with most famous epic heroes of that time: For what the Lord King did was not knight’s work but truly the work of God. For not Galahad, nor Tristan, nor Lancelot, nor Galvany, nor Boors, nor Palamides, nor Perceval lo Galois, nor the Chevalier de la Cote Mal Taillé [Brunor le Noir], nor Estor de Mares, nor Morant de Gaunes [Lamorat of Wales] if they had been with as few followers as the Lord King, could have done as much in one day as the Lord King and those with him did against four hundred knights as expert as these were, who were the flower of the French host.68

And again of his hero Peter the Great: But do not think that either Roland, nor Oliver, nor Tristan, nor Lancelot, nor Galeas, nor Perceval, nor Palamides, nor Boors, nor Estors de Mares, nor Morat de Gaunes, nor any other man could do what the Lord King was doing every day and, after him, all the others, the good men and knights, and Almugavars and seamen who were there.69

Apart from those of the Carolingian cycle—Roland and Oliver—other characters come from the Livre de Lancelot de Lac and Tristan, and Muntaner was probably also directly or indirectly familiar with the Roman d’Alexandre and Roman de Troie.70 Muntaner’s ability to deploy literary sources is illustrated by his obvious pleasure as he describes all kinds of tournaments, weddings, feasts, plays, kings’ funerals, and, more usefully for political theory, royal coronations.71 The detailed description and explanation of Alfonse the Benign’s coronation becomes a

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treatise on political symbolism in the Middle Ages that merits a more specific analysis, which I will provide in the next chapter as I discuss Peter’s self-coronation.72 The wedding between Alfonse the Liberal and King Edward of England’s daughter was celebrated with a month of festivities and games.73 James the Just was buried “with great solemnity.”74 The tournament organized by Alfonse the Liberal culminated with “every day round tables and tourneys and martial exercises and jousts and other diversions and sports, so that all in the country went from amusement to amusement and from dance to dance.”75 Muntaner even provides us with a notice of “bulls killed,” one of the earliest references to bullfighting as a sport in the old dominions of the Crown of Aragon.76 Muntaner also privileges the ideals and forms of chivalry and elegance so typical of this kind of literature, noting gallant gestures, particularly in military contexts. When Roger de Llúria managed to free Beatrice, Queen Constance’s sister and King Peter the Great’s sister-in-law, who was being held captive in the castle of l’Uovo (Sicily), together with four other women and two widowed ladies, he “received them with great joy and with great gladness and knelt down and kissed the hand of my Lady the Infanta.”77 After the murder of Roger de Flor and his companions by the son of the emperor, Skyr Miqueli, three Almugavars managed to escape because they “were attacked in the bell tower and defended themselves so well that the son of the emperor said it would be a sin if they were killed; and so gave them a safe-conduct.”78 After this event, the Catalans determined to avenge the emperor’s treason by impeaching him to save innocent people. Muntaner clearly applauds this refined gesture. Yet the emperor responds by killing the Catalans and Aragonese in Constantinople, including the twenty-seven knights who were sent as an embassy. Muntaner concludes this episode by stating that the blood shed by the innocent messengers remained fresh on the ground and that sailors piously gathered up this blood, and carried it with them as a relic from one end of the earth to the other. He even claims that he has gathered some up with

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his own hands.79 The principled conclusion thus states that this crime must be avenged, “so it is better to die in honor that to live in dishonor.”80 Muntaner offers two details that display his empathy with the world of chivalry. First, he tells of his wounds in battle, counting a total of thirteen between his horse and himself (eight for the horse, five for himself ). This epic recourse shows Muntaner more concerned about his horse (“but I had lost that horse”) than for his five wounds, one of them by sword.81 Muntaner seems to take this brilliant epic recourse from the Catalan popular song Don Joan i don Ramon.82 Second, he narrates the dramatic story of Alan, a soldier of the emperor, who cut his wife’s head off in order to deliver her from the hands of the Catalan Company. He rode a good horse, and his wife another, and three horsemen of ours went after them. . . . The lady’s horse was getting tired and the knight was hitting him with the flat of his sword, but in the end our horsemen overtook the knight. And when he saw they were overtaking him and that he would lose the lady, he pushed on a little ahead, and the lady gave a great cry and he returned towards her and embraced and kissed her. And when he had done this, he struck her on the neck with his sword so that her head was cut off at one blow. And when he had done this, he turned toward our horsemen, who were already seizing the lady’s horse, and gave a cut with his sword to one of them who was called Guillem de Bellveer, which cut off his left arm at one stroke and he fell dead to the ground. And the other two, seeing this, rushed upon him, and he upon them. . . . He has killed Guillem de Bellveer and badly wounded the two others.83

Alan lost his wife and his own life but won a place in history with this chivalric gesture. Interestingly, Muntaner restricts his legendary sources to French, Provençal, and English texts, leading scholars to wonder about the lack of Catalan influences. One reason might be that because of the defeat of Muret (1213), when Catalonia ceased to expand into Provence, it also lost its literary and epic inspiration, in favor of historiographical practice. In fact, the golden age of

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Catalan historiography coincides with the decline of Catalan literature, which would reemerge vigorously only in the fifteenth century, replacing historiography. After this, Catalan historiography slumbered, so to speak, until the nineteenth century, but then awoke to become crucial for the reinvention of shared identity.84 This cyclical relationship between history and literature marks the Catalan medieval narrative tradition. Catalonia has a long tradition of using epic and historical accounts interchangeably to reinforce collective identity. And, interestingly, Catalan historical events, in their turn, nourished popular and legendary poems and chansons. Soldevila remarks, for instance, that the relations between Alfonse the Liberal and Edward of England, narrated as historical facts by Catalan chroniclers, continue in a cycle of popular songs with the king and princes of England as the main characters.85 Muntaner deploys another literary resource taken from poetic sources: the incorporation of quotations and images from classical mythology. He does not use these texts as sources of information but appropriates the images and themes to promote his own purposes. In chapter 214, for example, he narrates a new version of the siege of Troy.86 The reference is isolated—taking advantage of an action that happens close to this mythological place—but very illustrative of Muntaner’s learning and his ability to engage diverse sources.87 This classical reference increases the legitimacy of Muntaner’s historical narration, since the story of Troy was a recurring theme for all medieval historiography, crucial for the French historiographical tradition such as the Grandes Chroniques de France.88 Another obvious influence of legendary literature is the memorable “Sermon,” a long verse chant inserted into the chronicle by Muntaner as advice to King James the Just in the campaign of Sardinia and Corsica.89 This episode must be located in the context of the increasing political use of Provençal literature at the time, noted by scholars, especially by Jordi Rubió and Martí de Riquer, in their studies on the genre of sirventés.90 Muntaner couches his sermon “in the meter of Guy de Nanteuil,” a French poem by Hugo de Villeneuve, but the content differs from the

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original Provençal version. Muntaner asked the Catalan jongleur En Comí to adapt one of the melodies of Guy de Naneuil for the music of the “Sermó” that would be sung to King James and Prince Alfonse.91 The jongleurs Comí, Ramasset, and Novellet appear singing poems at the festivities for the coronation of Alfonse the Benign in the closing chapter of the chronicle. They sing the sirventés, one of them with a deep political content and symbolism and another with seven hundred rhymed verses: And when he had sung it, he was silent and En Novellet, a juglar [jongleur], rose and spoke seven hundred rhymed verses which the Lord infante En Pedro had newly composed; and the theme and the moral were all about the rule the Lord King should exercise over the ordaining of his court and all his officials, as well in his court as in all his provinces. And all this the Lord King heard favorably, as the wisest lord there is in the world and, therefore, if it be God’s pleasure, he will thus carry it out.92

Muntaner places both historical and fictional characters on the same level of actuality, as he constructs an “epic of historical reality.”93 Muntaner’s practice suggests not only that medieval historical texts are based on literary works but also that literary texts are based on historical works. In medieval Catalonia, therefore, history becomes legend and legend develops into history: history is “contaminated” by invention, and invention by history. Readers appreciate both without distinction.94 Chroniclers such as King James and troubadours such as Cerverí de Girona interpret the same historical events, using different literary formulas.95 History transforms epic-formal verse into historicalcontent prose as literature adapts historical prose to epic narration. As Monica Otter notes, Fictionality, then, enters medieval historiography quite easily, taking advantage of the fluid genre conventions. While the different truth claims of history and fictional narrative were certainly understood, crossovers and hybrids are possible and often useful. The functions of fiction vary widely, from ancestral legends for families, cities, monasteries or nations, with a quasi-truth claim that substituted for the real thing, to fictional elements in historiography that underscore

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the textuality and literariness of the narrative and playfully probe its truth claims. Each separate instance requires a careful reading, sensitive to its surroundings, its language, its literary techniques. In other words, it is important to take seriously the textuality of all historical narrative and read it with an eye to its literary structures as well as its documentary value.96

To conclude, then, “prosification” in medieval Catalan chronicles must be understood in the context of other historicalfictional transactions. Muntaner’s chronicle is the culmination of a process initiated in Catalonia during the second half of the twelfth century, when history replaced literature as the principal manner of generating knowledge of a shared past.97 For this reason, several critics have classified the Catalan historiographical cycle of the twelfth to fourteenth century as “heroic epic texts.” Catalan-Provençal epic literature was historical, as Catalan historiography was epic. In medieval Catalonia, both lyric and epic literature were absorbed into the Provençal and French traditions, from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, while historical texts naturally emerged as the strongest local genre, with the credibility that it gave the chroniclers and their patrons. After this discussion, one may conclude that medieval Catalan readers did not heed the radical distinction between reality and fiction that we do today—at least, not on a discursive level. These examples show that they read historical and literary texts interchangeably, as their interest lay in the content, rather than the form, of the texts. The authors deliberately manipulated genre to achieve their historical, social, or political purposes. The process began in the thirteenth century with King James and ended in the fifteenth century with Martorell and the anonymous author of Curial, whose chivalric invented accounts transformed the poetic history of glory of their ancestors into marvelous novelistic discourses.98 Curial and Tirant represent the literature that history makes rather than the history that literature makes.99 In medieval Catalonia, historical texts produced varied fictional versions.

10 The Emergence of Political Realism King Peter’s Llibre disrupts the trend of blurring boundaries between models of fiction and history in Catalan historiography and literature until the fourteenth century. His historical narrative barely shows traces of fictionalization or the incorporation of imaginative or mythical literature. King Peter’s commitment to historical narrative is so strong that his historical account excludes mention of nonreferential places, characters, or events. Conversely, there are no marks of the Llibre in Catalan nonhistorical accounts of that time. This interesting contrast, this rupture with the historiographical tradition, invites us to consider the emergence of political realism in medieval Catalonia, a prelude to the political-historical literature so typical of the European Renaissance.

Rupture with Fiction: Political Realism against Legendary Idealization The letters exchanged between the king and his officials clearly reveal the king’s reluctance to introduce legendary accounts or imag­ inative passages into the text, even when the realism he sought

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might have weakened his reputation. Peter knew full well the possible consequences of a radical shift in narrative approach in a milieu that appreciated the poetic style of his predecessors. Notably, for example, his simple description of his premature birth contrasts sharply with the legendary accounts of King James’s conception. He writes that he was born two months early, so weak that the midwives thought he was going to die: “We were born seven months after Our conception. We were so feeble and rickety that neither the midwives nor those who were at Our birth thought that We could live.”1 Peter does not portray himself as the typical hero as proof of his providential function in this world. Thus, in opposition to James’s account, he emphasizes the ordinariness of his birth, his baptism, and the choice of his name—selected in honor of Peter the Apostle and his ancestor Peter the Great. In contrast with the spare narration of his birth but with the same interest in historical realism, he emphasizes the majesty and splendor of his first appearance as king. In a speech pronounced in the Corts of Monzón (Aragon) in 1363, he declares that God did not make him physically powerful but that he has more strength in his heart than any other knight in the world.2 When he enters Majorca after conquering the realm, his physical limitations are offset by the splendor of his vestments, the majesty of his gestures, and the rigor of protocol: That Sunday in the morning We went out of the sacristy of the cathedral, dressed and appareled in sede Majestatis, that is, with a long Roman shirt of thin green silk, only adorned with leaves, and over this a dalmatic of scarlet cloth embroidered with gold work and foliage but without pearls or other work, as it had been made rapidly. A stole of the same material started on the left shoulder and crossed to the right side and then went round the waist and the ends hung down equally, as is customary for kings to wear on such occasions. We also wore a maniple, and hose of the same cloth, without shoes, and Our crown of gold, with precious stones and pearls at the head. We bore a golden scepter with a ruby on the top in the right hand and a golden

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orb with a cross of pearls and precious stones in the left, and We had a sword covered with pearls and precious stones belted on.3

Peter juxtaposes in the same narration these apparently contrasting qualities: the fragility of a premature baby (thus justifying his physical debility), the majesty of a king with his royal attributes, and the cruelty of a king-judge. He thus proves his conviction that the dignity of his position—the potestas that derives from his kingship—is compatible with his human limitations. Yet Peter stresses this contrast because the appearance of loss of personal power as a king (the deficit of auctoritas) nonetheless permits him to preserve the dignity of the munus (the potestas). In Roman political tradition, potestas refers to the power to impose decisions, while auctoritas implies the reputation needed to maintain one’s position.4 Peter’s awareness of monarchal crises leads him to highlight and multiply the discourses, images, ceremonies, gestures, and spaces that would increase his auctoritas and drives him to the dramatic practice of self-coronation.5 The king’s ideal of historical accuracy and his practice of including literal copies of some chancellery documents heighten the text’s credibility and realism. Peter’s Llibre becomes historical record per se in some passages, such as in the letters exchanged between Castilian and Aragonese kings, the dialogues with James of Majorca, and the agreements with the cities of Argilers and Coplliure.6 Accounts of such episodes as the conquest of Sardinia have been used as accurate historical data by twentieth-century scholars.7 The absence of legends is compensated for by the different sources Peter uses such as chancellery records. He also refuses to introduce supernatural elements, such as miracles or dreams. Typically for his time, he secularizes his account by confining his narrative to historical events, rather than sacred ones.8 The writers of the chronicle primarily employ royal correspondence, juridical records, oral information, and treasury accounts.9 Peter is realistic even when he admits to his limitations as a chronicler, for instance when he finds himself repeating specific

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details in his narration: “In this book there are some things already mentioned in detail that will be touched on there. This repetition should not be blamed. It is not due to the love of writing but has been done deliberately, to link events together, each one of which is described with truth.”10 The Llibre’s realistic tone benefits from the increasing maturity of medieval Catalan prose, with the emergence of outstanding essayists such as Ramon Llull and Francesc Eiximenis, who in the fourteenth century were more ready to separate history from legend, referential from imaginative accounts. In addition, Peter’s Llibre illustrates that the measure of realism depends not upon one’s degree of personal and emotional involvement in the matters recounted but on the author’s intention to produce an account of what happened. Peter understood this better than other Catalan chroniclers and ordered his secretaries to write another book—the Crònica de Sant Joan de la Penya—also a “historical” text, but a biography rather than an autobiography.11 In this way, he leaves for the future two historical accounts in different form—the autobiographical chronicle of the Llibre and the objective genealogy in the Crònica—but analogous in their concern with what happened. This tendency to realism contrasts with works in the Catalan historiographical tradition such as the Gesta Comitum, King James’s, Desclot’s, and Muntaner’s work, and even contemporary texts such as Ayala’s Crónica de Pedro I in Castile12 and even Peter’s own Crònica de Sant Joan de la Penya. In Peter’s autobiography, scholars have found only one imaginative passage, and it is related to another person—a celestial vision of Fernando IV, king of Castile.13 The tendency to realism is reinforced by the telling of several intimate stories. For instance, Peter speaks of his great love of dancing, such as in this description of a December night in Perpignan: After Vespers, the dancers came up onto the patio of the castle and danced many different dances, and it gave Us great pleasure. We went down and danced the dança mesclada with them, which gave them a very great deal of joy and pleasure. By the time We had

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danced with them it was evening and We had wine and sweetmeats brought and drank and ate with the dancers.14

He also tells us how much he liked cherries and figs (“nos sabien mellors que no altra fruita”), although on some occasions, when he was at sea, they made him nauseous.15 In the new historiographical context of the fourteenth century, where the chronicles treat recent events rather than those in the remote past and chroniclers were more skeptical about the inclusion of legends, the historical narration functions as a privileged platform for the manipulation of truth. Peter’s distinction between fact and invention is compatible with the fact that he assiduously read French epic literature, as James I and Muntaner did, and he possessed copies of Arthurian literature like Lancelot, Tristan, and the Queste del Saint Graal.16 Yet there is no room for these imaginative accounts in the Llibre, which stands out precisely because of its dearth of elements from traditional epics.17 The Llibre provides a great deal of valuable documentation drawn from the records of the royal chancellery, to the point that Antoni Rubió i Lluch even argues that the Llibre could be considered an extension of it.18 The text, like royal correspondence, is the result of collaboration between different officials written under the supervision and direction of the Chancellery. Peter’s system of historical writing was to be continued by his son, King Martin the Humane (Martí l’Humà), who wrote a parallel chronicle of his reign that, unfortunately, has been lost.19 Thus, there is a tradition of autobiographical accounts of the kings of Aragon, begun by James I and continued by Peter the Ceremonious and his son Martin. They seem to be texts that are written over long periods of time, as we also saw in the case of James I; that are the fruit of a collective effort in which the king always had the last word; and whose periods of writing were conditioned by his diverse activities and duties. Rejection of fictional sources and the significant presence of the Chancellery in the process of making of Peter’s Llibre heighten its political dimension.

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Textual and Gestural Justification of Royal Authority Peter’s continuing efforts to textually justify his political agenda contradict the ideas of modern revolutionaries, who believe that tyrants, “content to abuse their power, occupied themselves little with establishing its legitimacy.”20 All political authority requires what Clifford Geertz calls a “cultural frame” or “master fiction” within which to define itself and make its claims. The legitimacy of political authority depends on its cultural resonance, for political life is “enfolded” in general conceptions of how reality is configured.21 Many anthropologists and sociologists insist, in addition, that every cultural frame has a “center” with sacred status. The sacred center authorizes a kind of social and political mapping and gives the members of a society their sense of place. It is the heart of things, the place where culture, society, and politics come together.22 Medieval political authority was guaranteed by the legitimacy of the monarchy, with the king as the sacred center, and the cultural frame of his authority was firmly fixed in a long-standing notion of hierarchical order.23 Kings stood between mere mortals and God in the great chain of being, and kingship was therefore mystical and quasi-divine.24 Nevertheless, Spanish kings have the distinction of being distinctly nonsacral, not only because they did not cure by the touch and produce relics but also because they tended to be free of ecclesiastical influence. They seem to be, quite on the contrary, secular corporate figures ruling over a patchwork of principalities assembled by opportunity rather than providence and governed on the secular principle of pactisme. This general idea may be connected with King Peter’s need to legitimize his power and justify his policies. To this end, he enacted the ceremony of his legendary self-coronation, foreshadowing the rules that Machiavelli assigned to “traditional states,” based on tradition and the principle of legitimacy.25 Peter’s drama lies in his increasing perception of the loss of his central position in society and his inability to recover it, in spite of his grandeur as king. Internal insurrections and external resistance were slowly challenging his

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control. He had to create new cultural weapons to conserve his central position in the kingdom of Aragon and in Catalan society. One of them was, undoubtedly, political language inserted in his historical texts and deployed as a political weapon. Political language is not merely an expression of an ideological position determined by underlying social or political interests. The language itself helps shape the perception of interests and hence the development of ideologies. Political discourse is rhetorical; it is a means of persuasion, a way of reconstituting the social and political world.26 This explains why scholars have argued that the Llibre is self-justification rather than self-exaltation.27 The writing of history and the recuperation of genealogies were perhaps the most important, though not the only, means he employed. He also drew upon the magnificence of public constructions, the visual power of sculpture, and the symbolic attraction of royal ceremonies. He knew well that power and ceremonies were deeply connected: “Power is like the wind: we cannot see it, but we feel its force. Ceremonial is like the snow: an insubstantial pageant soon melted into thin air.”28 Peter’s political discourse enabled the emergence of distinctive principles and policies that would enable Catalans of the future to distinguish themselves from their eternal Castilian rivals: the trust in their peculiar institutions of the monarchy, the Cort, and the Diputació del General; the singularity of their specific values; and the sharing of traditions. Peter the Ceremonious is remembered as the king who unsuccessfully tried to balance the institutions and yet managed to preserve tradition: the “historian king” who wrote and made others write the history of Catalonia. He also liked to write and sign chancellery documents. He used, as no one had done before, written texts as a tool for the control of his large kingdom, from “autography” to authority.29 Peter the Ceremonious also engaged all manner of symbols to consolidate his power. The “image” of the king, imprinted in the Catalan imaginaire for centuries, reveals the efficacy of his strategy. Because of his projects such as the placement of sculptures of his ancestors in the royal palace of Barcelona, the

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restoration of the royal pantheon in Poblet, and the carving of the nineteen figures of his predecessors on the new royal coronation sword, he is considered the “custodian of tradition.” His title “the Ceremonious” refers to his obsessive attention to gestures, rituals, ceremonies, and liturgies as privileged platforms of political power.30 Popular recognition of him as “the constructor king” acknowledges his construction of public buildings in Barcelona, the capital of the kingdom: the royal palace, the new walls, the “merchant cathedral” Santa Maria del Mar, the finishing of the main cathedral, the huge Drassanes (the shipyard), the Saló de Cent (the Lounge of the Hundred, in reference to the hundred counselors of the city of Barcelona), and the majestic Saló del Tinell.31 Peter used all the external historical means and symbols available to reinforce not only the image of his kingdom but also that of his person. In the prologue of his chronicle, he likens himself to the historical and sacred figure of King David. Glossing biblical texts from the Psalms, Genesis, Judith, Kings, the letters to the Corinthians and Timothy, and the letter of James, he portrays himself as a sacred king. The wars and tribulations that King David suffered prefigure Peter’s reign: And, truly, Our wars and tribulations were prefigured in the wars and troubles of David. Just as David not only fought against the kings, his neighbors, but with his own people, who rose against him with Absalom his son, We have not only had wars with the kings who were our neighbors and had lands contiguous to that of Aragon but also with Our own people, who chose captains of Our blood, Our brothers. And, as the goodness of the Creator delivered David out of the hand of Saul, king of the Philistines, and out of the hand of Absalom and the people who had risen against him, so the mercy of the Lord has delivered Us and Our kingdoms out of the hand of all Our enemies.32

As Peter compared himself with David, contemporary chroniclers such as Fra Canals likened his youthful wisdom to that of Solomon, and his greatness of soul in a small body to that of Alexander the Great and Pepin, king of the Franks: “If, in his

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stature, he was dissimilar to his ancestors [all the biographers agree on this point], not so in his greatness and power of soul. Following their footsteps in probity of customs, power of arms, and greatness of heart, he was their equal.”33 Peter was aware that any policy of consolidation required recourse to the authority of the past. He not only emphasizes the collective memory shared by his subjects but also operates with the symbols that made the emergence of his own authority possible. Many of these gestures are described in the Llibre to illustrate his political power and to elevate his natural authority as king. Yet the most impressive of the gestures took place when Peter was still an adolescent of sixteen, and it definitively marked his tendency to autocracy and authoritarianism: his selfcoronation. This event, related to historiography because of its inclusion in the Llibre, deserves special attention for two reasons: because it constitutes one of the crucial events of the chronicle and because of the fascinating parallels between the textual selfportrait derived from the Llibre and the symbolic meaning derived from the self-coronation.

A Self-Sufficient Gesture: The Practice of Self-Coronation The exercise of power always demands symbolic practices. Historians and anthropologists agree on the value of rites and ceremonies as tools to strengthen images of dignity and supremacy for medieval and early modern European monarchies.34 King Peter succeeded in making power virtually coterminous with the symbolic apparatus of monarchy and, in particular, with the person of the monarch.35 He harnessed the idea that power was measured by proximity to the body of the king.36 Thus, Peter’s self-coronation becomes a multifaceted gesture, evidence of the complexity of the relationship between the king’s physical body and the mystical body of kingship. In order to better understand the implications of Peter’s action, we should examine the expansion of coronations in medieval Europe and the exceptional nature of self-coronations. Medieval coronations always served as an opportunity to

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emphasize the king’s authority, the relationship between the king, the nobles, and the prelates, and the sacred idea of the monarchy.37 The coronation ceremony is the supreme moment of the association between the secular and the spiritual, and the power of the symbol naturally emerges in connection with the experience. The anointing with oil, based on the priestly anointing of the kings of Israel, affirms the king’s supernatural election and confirms his royal duty as mediator between God and his people.38 The medieval king is therefore viewed as human by nature and divine by grace.39 Because of his consecration, he is linked to the altar both in his public and in his personal dimension. The medieval coronation orders emphasized this: in analogy with his role as mediator between God and man, the king shall mediate between the clergy and the people, for the king, who in some respect belongs also to the clergy, bears, as the Christus Domini, the image of Christ in his name.40 In recent decades, historians have examined the symbols of rulership and ritual acts. Coronation ceremonies have become one of the privileged fields for understanding the symbols and politics of the Middle Ages. Percy E. Schramm argues that the consecration of the monarch is one of the most magnificent and most genuine products of the medieval spirit, and for this reason it is worthwhile attempting to grasp its minute details. It is impossible, of course, for us to do so directly, for we have degraded symbols into tokens, and have adopted the habit of sundering form from content. When we turn to the medieval coronation, we must bear in mind that we are moving in a world that has become completely strange to us; a world where form is not something merely external, and where, together with the language of words, there is also employed the language of symbols.41

There are seven basic steps in medieval coronations. First, the king takes the oath before God to defend the holy Catholic faith; before the church to uphold and defend the churches and their ministers; and before the people to govern and defend the regnum granted him by God according to the tradition of justice

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of his fathers. Second, he undergoes the ceremony of anointing with oil, the sacred blessing taken from the tradition of Israel, parallel to the unction of bishops. The anointing is performed by the archbishop, who daubs oil on the king’s head, chest, shoulders, between his shoulders, his elbows, and, finally, his hands. The king, after his ritual, has become like the kings and prophets of the Old Testament, like David anointed by Samuel (Benedictus et constitutus Rex in regno isto, super populum isto [Blessed and constituted king of this kingdom and over this people]). In the third ritual, the knighting, the bishop invests the king with spurs and the royal sword, making him a knight. The sword makes him the secular arm of the church, representing the secular idea of the “two swords.” Fourth, the royal insignia is conferred on him: the royal mantle, the orb, the ring, and the scepter. Fifth, in the culminating moment of the ceremony, the archbishop crowns the king. Sixth, the king sits on the throne. And, finally, he receives the homage of the church authorities, the knights, and the people.42 Medieval Catalan chroniclers paid detailed attention to the coronations of their kings, and both Muntaner’s Crònica and Peter’s Llibre highlight the fascinating stories of the self-coronations of Alfonse the Benign (1328) and Peter the Ceremonious (1336). Historians agree that the incorporation of Sicily into the Crown of Aragon was an event of great consequence for the direction and rate of change in the Catalan-Aragonese court and its political thought and practice. To be sure, there are few cases of the practice of self-coronation in medieval Europe. The most impressive precedent is the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II’s self-coronation in Jerusalem in 1229. Ernst Kantorowicz notes the exceptionality of the gesture: the excommunicated emperor desired to connect his potestas directly to God, without the mediation of the church, and he placed the crown upon his head in the church of the Holy Sepulcher, the most sacred space of all Christianity.43 Interestingly, Frederick was also king of Sicily, which in 1282 was incorporated into the Crown of Aragon. We may conclude that the tendency to use political symbols and

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rituals on the part of Roger II of Sicily and Frederick II greatly influenced later Aragonese kings.44 Yet perhaps even more interesting because of his chronological and spatial proximity to King Peter, Alfonse XI (1312–59), in neighboring Castile, also performed the same ceremony.45 His self-coronation in 1332 was the culmination of a complex ritual that began with his journey to the monastery of Las Huelgas in Burgos to receive the sacred oil, continued with his pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela to be knighted by the mechanical arm of the sculpture of the apostle and patron of Spain, and ended with his return to Burgos for the actual ceremony. Only then did the king sit on the throne, take the royal diadem, and place it on his head.46 When he crowned himself, Alfonse XI broke with tradition and strayed from the Ordo. Alfonse XI’s chroniclers tell the story in this manner: “The king ascended to the altar alone, and took his crown, which was made of gold with stone of very great price, and placed it on his head; and he took the other crown, and placed it on the queen, and knelt again in front of the altar.”47 One may reasonably assume that Alfonse XI’s gesture was taken up by Peter for his own self-coronation. The Castilian court was culturally close to the Aragonese one, and Peter used the model of Alfonse X of Castile (1252–84) to create his own brilliant court, where historians, poets, legislators, translators, astronomers, and artists gathered.48

King Alfonse’s and King Peter’s Self-Coronations and Their Historical Narration In the Iberian peninsula of the fourteenth century, the need to reaffirm the autonomy of the kings against the church was enacted through the manipulation of the symbols and rites of coronation. Peter’s gesture is the culmination of a long Aragonese dynastic tradition: his self-coronation and the writing of a new Ordo for the coronation conclude the cycle of coronations of the Aragonese kings (1204–1399). The first Aragonese king, Peter the

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Catholic, went to Rome in 1204 to be crowned by Pope Innocence III, who also conferred upon him the scepter and received his homage. His son James the Conqueror steadfastly refused to be crowned by Pope Gregory X, because he wanted to liberate the kingdom of Aragon from servitude to Rome. As he confesses in his Crònica, he preferred to return to his kingdom without the crown rather than have to pay homage to Rome.49 His successor Peter the Great was the first Aragonese king crowned in Zaragoza, the capital of the kingdom, in 1276, in the presence of the principal nobles and citizens. Although he was crowned by the bishop, he made the ceremony autonomous, liberating it from Rome.50 Peter the Great’s successor, Alfonse the Liberal, introduced the oath in the ceremony of the coronation in Zaragoza in 1286 and explicitly declared that though he received the crown from the bishop, he was not politically subordinate to Rome.51 James Just Fair was not crowned officially, perhaps because he considered that his previous coronation as king of Sicily made a new ceremony unnecessary.52 The rupture in the traditional practice of the coronation shows the inconvenience of the ceremony for Aragonese kings, because of their tense relationship with Rome, the question of Sicily, and the difficulties in balancing the several branches and multiple territories of the kingdom at that time. Thus, Alfonse the Benign restored the ceremony of the coronation but introduced the original and daring practice of self-coronation in 1328, repeated by his son Peter the Ceremonious (1336) and his grandsons John (1388) and Martin, the last king crowned, in 1399.53 Muntaner ends his chronicle with a meticulous account of Alfonse’s coronation, which he most probably witnessed, in 1328. Before the start of the Mass, the king placed the crown and the sword on the high altar “with his own hands.” The king was anointed with chrism on his right shoulder and arm by the archbishop of Zaragoza. At the end of the Mass, the king unstrapped his sword himself and placed it back on the altar, near the crown. Then they began a second Mass, and, after a long ceremony, at the moment of the coronation, “the Lord King himself took the

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crown from the altar and placed it on his own head; and when he had done this, the lord Archbishop of Toledo [the king’s brother, who had celebrated the second Mass] and the Lord Infante en Pedro [also the king’s brother] adjusted it for him.”54 A murmur of astonishment must have invaded the church, since no Iberian or European Ordo of coronation had foreseen the possibility of a substitution of the officiating bishop by the monarch in the act of placing the crown. Yet all the attendants seemed to be in agreement with this unusual procedure, because when the king placed the crown on his head, all the archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, princes, knights, and citizens sang in a loud voice the supreme thanksgiving prayer, the Te Deum Laudamus, in the customary manner. Thus, the king took the gold scepter in his right hand and put it in his left and then took the orb in his right. The king’s intention to separate the church from his secular power was further manifested in his prayer to God: “And when all this was done and the Gospel had been sung, the Lord King again, with a great reverence, offered himself and his sacred crown to God, and knelt down very humbly before the altar.”55 Then he sat on the royal throne, placed the scepter and orb on the altar in front of him, sent for all the nobles, and knighted them. Eight years later, in 1336, Peter the Ceremonious observed similar rituals during his own coronation, but in a context of considerably more tension.56 Peter, unlike his father, Alfonse, had to not only perform the self-coronation but also justify it. The king was reluctant to be crowned because he knew very well that after centuries of the practice, this ritual confirmed the subordination of the temporal (the king) to the divine (the bishop). In fact, he did not observe some of the traditions linked to the ceremony: for instance, he slept soundly in the sacristy the night before the coronation, instead of keeping the traditional vigil. Before the ritual of the coronation, while the prelates were dressing in the sacristy, the archbishop asked Peter to let him place the crown in his head. The king refused, claiming that it would be damaging to the crown (“car seria prejudici de la Corona que nós fóssem coronats

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per mà de prelat”). Yet all his advisers, except Ot of Montcada and the citizens of Zaragoza who were present, supported the archbishop’s demand. Peter, aware of the general hostility, admits in his account that his heart was troubled and his mind hesitated—indeed, he was at that time only sixteen years old. Nevertheless, he overcame his fears and reiterated his intention to crown himself. The archbishop continued the discussion, in the hope that the king would change his mind. Seeing that he had not convinced him, the archbishop begged the king to at least let him adjust the crown before the people, looking for a populist gesture that would lessen in some way his loss of reputation, perhaps remembering the gesture of King Alfonse’s brother eight years earlier.57 Peter continues his narration with a very long sentence that describes his contradictory feelings: on the one hand, the request came from the most honorable ecclesiastical authority of the kingdom, whom the king respected. Moreover, all his advisers and the citizens of Zaragoza were against his decision. Worried about the increasing length of the argument, which could scandalize the people waiting in the nave, and trying to win time, Peter told the archbishop that he accepted his requirements. Peter has always been remembered as an artful and cunning king, capable of telling a strategic lie or of evasive actions in order to win the final battle. Once they had agreed, the Mass procession began with the king, archbishop, bishops, abbot, prelates, knights, citizens, and other persons who had witnessed the discussion in the sacristy. When the crucial moment of the coronation arrived, the king approached the altar and informed the archbishop of his decision to crown himself, telling him that he could not even touch it. The archbishop was disturbed (mogut, in the original) but hid his discomfort and anxiety. Then the king solemnly placed the crown upon himself, in the sight of the archbishop and the entire congregation. Peter concludes his account by noting the archbishop’s nobility, as he, with deep piety and solemnity, continued celebrating the Mass, accomplishing his task elegantly.58

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Peter recounts these events in his Llibre with the simplicity of truth but also with the pride of one who has performed according to his dignity, overcoming adversity. The autonomy that emerges from Peter’s textual self-representation runs parallel with the political self-sufficiency that emerges from his gestural self-coronation. The story demonstrates the power of ritual gestures and symbols and the control King Peter exercised over them. The account reveals his calculated domination of the situation, even under pressure from his adversaries. Interestingly, he agreed to take the oath—the sign of the consensual character of the royal dignity— aware that the gesture of self-coronation was much more effective than the consequences of the juridical contract. At a time when royal succession was dynastic rather than elective—independent both of approval or consecration by the Church and of election by the people—Peter the Ceremonious claimed for himself the power of symbols.59 Because of this, he won for himself the nickname of “Ceremonious,” a reputation that has surpassed his reputation for cruelty in Catalan tradition. Peter’s self-coronation transcends mere symbolic meaning, as it signifies the Aragonese kings’ desire for independence from Roman authority. This was made explicit in 1344, by Peter’s refusal to pay tribute to Rome for the possession of Sardinia. Peter rejected papal intervention and denied the preeminence of the pope in Aragon, speaking of “the superiority which is falsely claimed over the kingdom of Aragon, for which, after God, we recognize and have no superior in temporal things.”60 This statement illustrates why Peter considered himself one of the “great lords of the world.”61

The Symbolic Meanings of Self-Coronations Muntaner’s and Peter’s accounts of two crucial self-coronations explain the meanings of the signs and symbols. Using the chants sung by the troubadours during the celebration after the coronation, Muntaner elucidates the symbolism of the royal crown, which applies to Peter’s ceremonies as well:

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The meaning of the crown is this; that the crown is round and as in a round thing there is no beginning no end, it signifies Our Lord, the True, Almighty God, Who has no beginning, and will have no end; and because it signifies God Almighty it has been placed on the king’s head, and not in the middle of his body, nor at his feet, but on his head, where the understanding is; and therefore he should remember God Almighty and be resolved to gain, with this crown he has taken, the crown of Heavenly glory, which is an everlasting kingdom. And the scepter signifies justice, which he should practice in all things; as the scepter is long and strong, and like a rod which beats and punishes, so does justice punish, to prevent the wicked from doing evil and to improve the condition of the good. And the orb signifies that, as he holds it in his hand, so should he hold his dominions in his hand and power and, as God has entrusted them to him, he should defend and rule them with truth and justice and mercy, and should not consent that any man, either for himself or for another, should do them any injury.62

This description differs only slightly from that given by modern medievalists. Kantorowicz posits that the crown symbolizes the entire realm. Obviously, the “crown” meant something more transcendent than the gold rim adorning the king’s head, different from both he rex and the regnum, but the symbolism is polysemous. “Crown” was not quite identical with “king” because of the distinction between “king’s physical head” and the “crown of the realm” adorning that head. Kantorowicz applies this symbolism to his theory of the two bodies: In the phrase “head and crown” the word crown served to add something to the purely physical body of the king and to emphasize that more than the king’s “body natural” was meant; and in the phrase “realm and crown,” the word crown served to eliminate the purely geographic-territorial aspect of regnum and to emphasize unambiguously the political character of regnum which included also the emotional value of patria.63

In other contexts, historians have used these images to speak of royalty and power. Strayer narrates the story of Philip II of France requesting military support tam pro capite nostro, tam pro

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corona regni defendenda, “for the defense of our head as well as of the crown of the realm.”64 In French royal coronations, Jacques Le Goff explains that the hyacinth tunic draped by the king symbolized the color worn by the high priests of Israel, which became the color of the kings of France. Above the tunic, the cloak or surcoat is turned up on the left arm like a priest’s chasuble. The king’s ring represents his royal dignity, the Catholic faith, and perhaps the marriage that God contracts with his people. The king receives the scepter in his right hand and the rod, which represents the hand of justice, the most sacred of all royal duties, in his left. Finally, the two principal insignias of power are the crown, which the peers are called upon to place on the king’s head, and the throne upon which he sits, thereby establishing the fullness of his dignity and power.65 Symbolic anthropologists have explained the power of these ceremonies. They convince the audience with their rituals. As ceremonial forms, they can be perceived independently of their content—the majesty, splendor, and dignity of the new king— but this content is directly and immediately transmitted through the form. It confirms that the person being crowned is the legitimate successor in a dynasty. The words and the gestures included in the ceremony of the coronation (its form) validate what it communicates (its content). The audience believes that the person being crowned deserves the dignity of the position. The panegyrics of the laudes regiae of medieval Europe functioned in this manner, and, as Kantorowicz has shown, they have a constitutive or “crypto-constitutive” meaning: “to ‘acclaim’ meant: to ‘create’ a new ruler and to recognize him publicly in his new dignity.”66 In the end, Louis Marin conclude that “the power-effect of representation is representation itself ”—the king is really a king in his images, both visual and narrative.67 The ceremony of the coronation is more effective as performance than as argument. The ceremony of the coronation gives cultural legitimacy to the practice it represents. Peter’s refusal to be crowned by the archbishop, and his insistence on doing it himself, recall the traditions of other Iberian

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kingdoms. Outside Iberia, this reluctance on the part of Iberian kings was well known. John of Paris, in his defense of antihierocratism, declared that kings were kings even without anointing and that in many Christian countries, such as Hispania, the anointing of kings was not practiced at all.68 Indeed, Portugal never crowned its kings, and Navarre introduced coronation and unction only after 1257. Castile abandoned its coronation ritual in 1157, though taking it up again later, but only in isolated cases. Aragon had introduced the ceremony only in 1204, which became a self-coronation in 1328 with Alfonse the Benign. And yet Iberia was the land where the practice originated—or, more correctly, was adapted from biblical Israel; the custom of the royal unction developed under the Visigoths and from there was transmitted to the French and Anglo-Saxon monarchy and to the Byzantine empire.69 One fact in the devaluation of late medieval royal coronations was their separation from episcopal unction—a true sacrament—and the subsequent decrease in the rank of the liturgy and its different canonical treatment.70 The unction was kept as an important part of the Ordo of the coronation but possessed less symbolic power than the act of the coronation itself. This strengthened the influence of the gesture of self-coronation. The fourteenth-century Aragonese kings’ self-coronation is also remarkable if we consider that it existed in a period when the monarchy was becoming more consensual, parallel with the increasing power of the church councils over the Roman primate. After the thirteenth century, kingship gradually became politycentered rather than Christ-centered.71 In the case of Aragon and Castile, this tendency meant that Iberian monarchies were never authoritative and absolute in the Middle Ages, because their jurisdiction was limited not only by the religious and moral norms imposed by ecclesiastical authority but also by the laws, customs, and traditions of the counties, which protected the general interests of the kingdom, and by the juridical status of the different estaments.72 In connection with this evolution, the Iberian kings of the late Middle Ages were no longer figures upon whose head a crown

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was bestowed by the hand of God. One of the most difficult periods of Peter’s reign, as he tells us in his Llibre, was during the insurrection of the Unions, a powerful alliance between Aragonese and Valencian citizens and nobles, created in 1264 and cruelly crushed by Peter in 1348.73 This period witnessed the tension between two opposing tendencies. On the one hand, new theories of political systems emerged that recast the monarchy to include the notion of consent by an enlarged constituency of subjects. On the other hand, although the notion of the priestking had long disappeared, the fervent belief in the supernatural mission of the anointed kings continued to exist, supported by the introduction of the idea of the absolute power of the monarchy, based on Roman law. In the fourteenth century, the theory of the king’s two bodies consolidated, providing the monarchy with a solid ideological and symbolic basis, which lessened the effects of the increasing consensualism. The king had both a mortal body that reflected the transitory aspect of monarchy and an immortal one that functioned as an undying legal “body” of the realm and guaranteed its continuity and stability via hereditary transmission. We owe to Kantorowicz the idea of the progression from a Christ-centered kingship to a law- and man-centered rule, one of the most powerful paradigms for understanding continuity and change in medieval kingdoms and their symbolic representations. As a consequence of this evolution, coronations became, in the late Middle Ages, rituals laden with symbols that emerged from visual, rhetorical, and ceremonial spectacle, able to attract not only ecclesiastical but also lay audiences.74 The ceremony might have lost part of its real “content”—the sacred nature of kingship—by that time, but the vigor of the symbolic and ritual “form” prevailed with no less genuine power. Seventeen years after his coronation, in January 1353, Peter the Ceremonious issued a new Ordo for the ritual, in which the extraordinary self-coronation was elevated to the status of ordinary practice, liberating his sons John and Martin from the tensions he experienced that Sunday morning in the sacristy.

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The text was completed in August of the same year.75 Peter paid personal attention to the many details of the new Ordo, which was based on similar European and Byzantine texts.76 Among other things, the new Ordo states that the king has to place the crown upon himself, “sine adiutorio alicuius persone” (without being helped by anyone).77 This contrasts radically with other European ordines, which usually record that at the moment of the coronation, “metropolitanus reverenter coronam capiti regis imponant” (when the Metropolitan reverently put the crown on the king’s head).78 The definitive codification of self-coronation was, nevertheless, ephemeral. It survived only one generation after Peter the Ceremonious. In 1412, the enthronement of the Castilian lineage of Trastamara in Aragon imposed a new style of government, one more authoritative and more disposed to the prose of facts than to the poetry of symbols. This evolution is also the best image of the evolution of Catalan historiography after Peter’s Llibre.

Conclusion Peter’s political treatise, written on the threshold of the Renaissance, brings to culmination the classical period of Catalan historiography. After the transitional fifteenth century, there was a long gap during which Catalan historiography seemed to be limited to the patient labor of the officials of the city council, who carefully took note of the events they lived, some of them even autobiographically. The Dietaris—account books based on chronological recollections of public events—replaced narrative chronicles in the early modern period. In the eighteenth century, scholars produced important historical works, based on the massive recovery of historical data, but in schematic rather than narrative language. In spite of their intrinsic historical value, these texts did not possess the ability to create stories with the originality, literary quality, and permanent historical value of their medieval forerunners. Finally, in the nineteenth century, the medieval Catalan chronicles were rediscovered, analyzed, and distributed, in the cultural context of the Renaixença—a kind of “renaissance” in the cultural context of romanticism—and a new cultural age emerged in Catalonia.1 This book traces the history of medieval Catalan historiography, its development, consolidation, and maturity. I argue that each of the five historical texts analyzed in this book reflects the

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political and social objectives of the kings: consolidation of the monarchy via lineage at the beginnings of the Catalan-Aragonese kingdom (the genealogy of the Gesta Comitum); legitimization of the aggressive policy of territorial expansion in the classical period (King James‘s autobiography, Desclot’s and Muntaner’s chivalric narratives); and, finally, justification of authoritarian political practice (King Peter’s political autobiography). The chroniclers use both evidence and invention to develop official versions of the stories they tell to achieve specific political and cultural purposes. Each of the texts’ features were shaped by and simultaneously shaped its contexts. All of them introduced new rhetorical de­ vices to provide the present with historical vindication rather than to explain the past. For this reason, I argue, these texts say more about the context in which they were written than about the period they describe. For instance, the Gesta Comitum elucidates the twelfth-century feudal world more vividly than the ninth century described. Historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers have highlighted the links between the poetic and the political, by stressing the formal processes that reflect social mutations and political changes.2 These theories explain Catalan historiography’s tendency to project the present into stories about the past. The process is also compatible with the claims of methodologies that emphasize the connection between text and context.3 There has been no place in this book for what George Steinmetz called “foundationalist decontextualization.”4 Rather, I have sought to describe what William Sewell defined as the semiotic coherence of culture.5 Instead of making ahistorical assumptions about human evolution or positing transhistorical institutions as fundamental to human society, new cultural historians have helped us to understand that there are no timeless, decontextualized, ahistorical characteristics, institutions, or historical writings, a theory compatible with the belief in the historical continuity of certain permanent human values. As a consequence, I argue that the consolidation of vernacular historical prose in Catalonia

Conclusion

in the first half of the thirteenth century, which replaced the Latin annals and schematic genealogies, implies far more than a simple literary and formal shift. When we analyze the texts from both a historical and a literary perspective, we uncover the social world that structured them, illuminating an entire collective dimension. One of my conclusions concerning the general development of Catalan medieval historiography is that there is a clear difference between early genealogical texts and typical narrative chronicles, and even between these chronicles. The transformation of historiographic practices in Catalonia in the second half of the thirteenth century reflects the social and political conditions within which the texts were drafted. The reign of King James I marked a crucial turning point in medieval Catalan history and historiography. Earlier political fragmentation had prevented the consolidation of a historiographic culture. During the thirteenth century Catalan historiography evolved from compilations to compositions, from unofficial to official, from monastic to courtly, from anonymous to an author’s acknowledged text, from schematic catalogue to narrative, from the poetic to the narrative, from Latin to vernacular, from genealogy to historical chronicle. In short, political interest generated literary transformation, reflected in both the form and the content of historical texts. I have also focused on the ways historical texts incorporated or transformed contexts, shaping their motivations, modes of legitimation, methods of justification, and approaches to the past, rather than simply providing a textual homologue for those events. As Margaret Somers has suggested, “narratives . . . not only convey information but serve epistemological purposes. They do so by establishing veracity through the integrity of their storied form. This suggests that in the first instance the success or failure of truth claims embedded in narratives depends less on empirical verification and more on the logic and rhetorical persuasiveness of the narrative.”6 If no absolute boundaries can be drawn between a text and its interpretations, or between society,

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culture, and modes of discourse, then we have to acknowledge the dual function of the historical text as, simultaneously, representation of the past and manner of shaping the present.7 Thus, Catalan medieval chronicles not only exercised real power as representations of the past but also existed as political and cultural artifacts that influenced the present. Although no one can deny its specificity in relation to other historiographical traditions, I also have tried to avoid considering medieval Catalan historiography as a unified corpus. Though these historical works have traditionally been (artificially) linked by Catalan scholars, who generally refer to them as Les quatre grans cròniques, perhaps on analogy with the French historiographical cycle of the Grandes chroniques, discontinuities outnumber continuities in this cycle. Three very different periods can be identified. First, the genealogical Gesta, which connects with a period of legitimization of a recent dynasty. Second, the Cròniques by James, Desclot, and Muntaner, which engage the period of political consolidation and, more specifically, the aggressive stage of the peninsular and Mediterranean expansion of Catalonia. Third, King Peter’s Llibre, which reflects a context of serious economic and demographic crisis and intense political and cultural changes, which undermined not only traditional social structures but also the very notion of power and its representation. These differences are also reflected in the texts’ themes: lineage in the Gesta, chivalric gestures in King James’s autobiography, the hegemony of the Aragonese kings in Desclot’s narrative, heroic deeds of the Catalan Mediterranean military expansion in Muntaner’s chronicle, and political actions in Peter’s Llibre. These thematic variations are supported by different rhetoric strategies. The anonymous authors of the monastic Gesta use a schematic and concise language. King James and Muntaner employ an epic, straightforward, but passionate style. Desclot writes elegant and vivid prose. And, finally, King Peter produces a dramatic, tormented, and biased account, based on his radical political realism. The Gesta Comitum’s rhythmical cadence is conditioned by the succession of generations. King James’s

Conclusion

life-writing exercise is personal and intimate to emphasize the singularity of his own character. Desclot’s and Muntaner’s accounts are synthetic because the events have been selected and ordered in order to preserve the intensity and the continuity of the narration. King Peter’s analytical account evolved from the unpredictability of his narrative and the varying significance he attaches to different events. The use of different levels and extension of time also helps us comprehend the different rhetorical strategies employed in medieval Catalan historiography. In the twelfth century, the Gesta Comitum forged a long-term history of Catalonia by inventing the remote past and at the same time fixing the beginnings of the genealogy of the counts and kings. The efficacy and durability of this historical text lay in its capacity to link the “origins” of the country with the “beginnings” of the kingdom. On the contrary, late medieval historical texts privilege the contemporary in the events they recount, and they are basically testimonies. King James, Desclot, and Muntaner consolidated the tradition with epic historical narratives of kings’ deeds. King Peter, in the end, summarizes the remote and recent past with his tormented evocation of his own experiences, representing himself as the culmination of the venerable Aragonese lineage. Unlike the other three Catalan chronicles, which base their coherence on chronological structure, the Llibre’s episodic structure leads readers to focus on thematic sections. In this sense, the term “Llibre,” a word provided by the king himself in the prologue, best defines this historical exercise, in contrast to chronicle, genealogy, or annal. Peter the Ceremonious’s text seems to fall into the category of tragedy. The king has to challenge reactionary forces and employs all means possible to uphold the reputation of his lineage and nation. The difficult times he faced discouraged the normal development of the state apparatus and weakened monarchical political instruments. The tragic fate that hovers over King Peter contrasts with that of Wilfred the Hairy, the mythical hero typical of the mode of romance. James I, Desclot, and Muntaner’s

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chronicles, in contrast, function as comedy, where characters comprehend the reason for their existence and the narration accommodates trivial accounts of everyday life (King James), festive events like tournaments and plays (Desclot and Muntaner), and even happy endings like the king’s coronation (Muntaner). All of these variations—in language and style, in literary and historical genre, in theme, in conception of length of the time, in literary category—are compatible with the reception of the corpus of medieval historiography as a unity by future generations of Catalan scholars. In the cycle of the history of Catalonia reflected in nineteenth-century romantic historiography, the founding hero Wilfred the Hairy inaugurated the Catalan odyssey, the chivalric King James I reached the zenith of cultural and political dominance, and Peter the Ceremonious’s reign signaled the beginning of the end. Nineteenth-century historians’ judgments of the literary value of Catalan medieval historiography also heed this itinerary: the Gesta is schematic but original, typical of narratives of origins of an imagined nation; King James’s, Desclot’s, and Muntaner’s narratives are brilliant and prototypical, reflecting Catalonia’s zenith, and Peter’s Llibre is complex and dramatic, a sign of the decadence that will last until the nineteenth-century Renaixença. The different forms of representing the past reflect the ways cultures justify, legitimize, or rationalize their present. As Valerio Valeri posits, “in many cultures an implicit or explicit argument for following the practices and knowledge inherited from the past is that they embody the experience of numerous generations.”8 The very duration of time (tradition) provides social practices and cultural knowledge with legitimizing force for the present. Yet this sense of tradition is consolidated also by an active strategy of reconstruction and reenactment of the past. Historical writing thus becomes one of the most effective mechanisms for social and political legitimization, giving a society a sense of belonging to the tradition that validates its new projects. Thus, “writing history” is synonymous with “making history,” and providing accounts of the past also projects into the future.9 This

Conclusion

examination of medieval Catalan historiography demonstrates once again that the past is not a monolithic system of models repeated identically in time but a complex and dynamic reality that changes according to the different “presents” from which it is visited. The integrated approach to historiography, authorship, and politics that I deployed in this study sought to unveil possible meanings of these stories for us today. These narratives invite us to think about how discourses function on diverse levels. Though we might argue about the veracity and imaginative content of these texts, there is no denying that as tales that unified and promoted a society, as well as explained it to itself, the chronicles have served for centuries to promote awareness of history and the desire and ability to pass it on to succeeding generations.

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Notes introduction

1. The theoretical studies on the New Medievalism that I have used in this book include Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 677–704; Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols, eds., The New Medievalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Allen J. Frantzen, Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); Leslie J. Workman, ed., Medievalism in England (Cambridge: Brewer, 1992); Leslie J. Workman, ed., Medievalism in Europe (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994); John Van Engen, ed., The Past and the Future of Medieval Studies (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994); R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, eds., Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Richard Utz and Tom Shippey, eds., Medievalism in the Modern World (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998). 2. Although more accurately connected to Renaissance and early modern studies, I have used some theoretical postulates of the New Historicism in this study, especially the notion that subjects are connected by text and context, although I do not share its radical tendency to establish a homology between text and context, between representations

230 Notes to Page 3

and events. The New Historicists, led by Stephen Greenblatt, insisted we read literary texts as integral parts of changing contexts, rather than aesthetically removed from their contexts. See, for instance, Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, with a new Preface in the 2005 edition); Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 2007); Catherine Gallagh and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Lee Patterson, “Introduction: Critical Historicism and Medieval Studies,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1–14; Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, eds., Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992); H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994); Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London: Routledge, 1996); Kiernan Ryan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996); Jürgen Pieters, Moments of Negotiation: The New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 3. The Almugavars (Catalan: Almogàvers, from the Arabic: alMugavari) were a class of soldiers from the Crown of Aragon, wellknown during the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula. They were often hired by Aragonese kings in Italy, Latin Greece, and the Levant during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 4. For detailed analyses of intertextuality between these historical and fictional texts, see Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer, “La Crònica de Ramon Muntaner. Filiació dels seus textos,” in Homenatge a Antoni Rubió i Lluch. Miscel.lània d’Estudis Literaris Històrics i Lingüistics (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1936), 1: 69–76; Martí de Riquer, Aproximació al “Tirant lo Blanc” (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1990); Anton Espadaler, Una reina per a Curial (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1984); Martí de Riquer, Literatura catalana medieval (Barcelona: Ayuntamiento de Barcelona, 1972), 117–18; Lola Badia, Tradició i modernitat als segles XIV i XV. Estudis de cultura literària i lectures d’Ausiàs March (Valen-

Notes to Pages 5–8 231

cia: Institut Universitari de Filologia Valenciana, 1993), especially the chapter “Veritat i literatura a les cròniques medievals catalanes: Ramon Muntaner,” pp. 21–22. 5. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 65 (1990): 84. 6. A seminal moment in the history of the “New Philology” was the publication of Speculum 65 (1990) that contained important essays such as Stephen G. Nichols, “Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture”; Siegfried Wenzel, “Reflections on (New) Philology”; Suzanne Fleischman, “Philology, Linguistics, and the Discourse of the Medieval Text”; R. Howard Bloch, “New Philology and Old French”; Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies.” See also Anne Middleton, “Medieval Studies,” in Greenblatt and Gunn, Redrawing the Boundaries, 12–40; Sylvia Huot, The Romance of the Rose and its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Keith Busby, ed., Towards a Synthesis? Essays on the New Philology (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993); John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de Buen Amor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Burt Kimmelman, The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of Modern Literary Persona (New York: Peter Lang, 1996); D. C. Greetham, “The Resistance to Philology,” in The Margins of the Text, ed. Greetham (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Roger Dahood, ed., The Future of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Problems, Trends, and Opportunities for Research (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998); Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Illiterati et uxorati. Manuscripts and Their makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris, 1200–1500, 2 vols. (Turnhout: H. Miller, 2000); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Laurence de Looze, Manuscript Diversity, Meaning, and Variance in Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor (Toronto: Carleton University, 2006). 7. Ferran Soldevila, ed., Les Quatre Grans Cròniques: Jaume I, Bernat Desclot, Ramon Muntaner, Pere III. (Barcelona: Selecta, 1971); Ferran Soldevila, ed., Les quatre grans cròniques. I. Llibre dels feits del rei en Jaume, revised by Jordi Bruguera and M. Teresa Ferrer i Mallol (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2007); Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer, “L’escola poètica de Ripoll en els segles X–XIII,” Anuari de l’Institut

232 Notes to Page 8

d’Estudis Catalans 1 (1915–1920): 3–84; Manuel de Montoliu, Les quatre grans cròniques (Barcelona: Alpha, 1959); Miquel Coll i Alentorn, “La historiografia de Catalunya en el període primitiu,” Estudis Romànics 3 (1951–52): 139–96; Miquel Coll i Alentorn, Llegendari (Barcelona: Curial, 1993); Bernat Desclot, Crònica, ed. Coll (Barcelona, 1949–1951); Coll, Historiografia (Barcelona: Curial, 1991); Martí de Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana (Barcelona: Ariel, 1964). The founding critical article was Jaume Massó i Torrents’s “Historiografia de Catalunya en català, durant l’època nacional,” Revue Hispanique 15 (1906): 486–613. For a documentary and bibliographical summary of peninsular historiography, see Peter Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), and Mario Huete, La historiografía latina medieval en la Península Ibérica (siglos VIII–XIII). Fuentes y bibliografía (Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 1997). 8. Thomas N. Bisson, “L’essor de la Catalogne: identité, pouvoir et idéologie dans une société du XIIe siècle,” Annales. Économies. Sociétés. Civilisations 39 (1984): 454–79; Bisson, “Unheroed Pasts: History and Commemoration in South Frankland before the Albigensian Crusades,” Speculum 65 (1990): 293–301; Robert I. Burns, “The King’s Autobiography: The Islamic Connection” in Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), appendix 1; Burns, “The Spiritual Life of James the Conqueror, King of Aragó-Catalonia, 1208–1276: Portrait and Self-Portrait,” Catholic Historical Review 62 (1976): 1–35; Burns, The Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: Reconstruction on a Thirteenth-Century Frontier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). 9. Josep Maria Salrach and Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Entorn de la mentalitat i la ideologia del bloc de poder feudal a través de la historiografia medieval fins a les quatre grans cròniques,” in La formació i l’expansió del feudalisme català, ed. Jaume Portella (Girona: Estudi General, 1985), 467–506; Rubiés, “The Idea of Empire in the Catalan Tradition from Ramon Muntaner to Enric Prat de la Riba,” Journal of Hispanic Research 4 (1995–96): 229–62; Rubiés, “Mentalitat i ideologia de Ramon Muntaner,” Historiographie de la Couronne d’Aragon. Actes du XIIe Congrès d’Histoire de la Couronne d’Aragon (Montpellier: Université de Montpellier, 1985), 3 : 83–108; Martin Aurell, Les noces du Comte. Mariage et pouvoir en Catalogne (785–1213) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995); Josep M. Pujol, “The Llibre del rei En Jaume: A Matter of Style,”

Notes to Pages 9–10 23  3

in Historical Literature in Medieval Iberia, ed. Alan Deyermond (London: Queen Mary and Westfield College, 1996); Stefano M. Cingolani, La memòria dels reis. Les quatre grans cròniques i la historiografia catalana, des del segle X fins al XV (Barcelona: Base, 2007); Cingolani, “De la historia privada a la historia pública y de la afirmación al discurso: una reflexión entorno a la historiografía medieval catalana (985–1288),” Talia Dixit 3 (2008): 51–76; Stefano Asperti, “Il re e la storia: Proposte per una nova lettura del Libre dels feys di Jaume I,” Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 3 (1984) : 279; Llibre dels fets del rei en Jaume, ed. Jordi Bruguera (Barcelona: Barcino, 1991). 10. See, for instance, http://libro.uca.edu/chronicleofjames/chronicle .htm, available from the Library of Iberian Resources Online; for the location of all the extant manuscript copies of Catalan chronicles, see the online “Bibliografía de Textos Catalans Antics”: http://sunsite .berkeley.edu/PhiloBiblon/phhmbi.htm. 11. There are some English editions of the five texts studied in this book available online, but most of them, apart from King James’s and Peter’s autobiographies, require revision. For King James’s autobiography, see The Book of Deeds of James I of Aragon: A Translation of the Medieval Catalan Llibre dels Fets, trans. Damian Smith and Helena Buffery (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003); for Bernat Desclot’s chronicle, see Chronicle of the Reign of King Pedro III of Aragon by Bernat Desclot, trans. F. L. Critchlow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1928–34), that reproduces only part of the text and is obsolete today; for Ramon Muntaner’s chronicle, The Chronicle of Muntaner, trans. L. Goodenough (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1967); for King Peter’s autobiography, Chronicle. Pere III of Catalonia (Pedro IV of Aragon), trans. Mary Hillgarth, with an introduction and notes by Jocelyn N. Hillgarth (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980). There is no English edition for the Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium. Further proof of this lack of knowledge of Catalan historiography is the absence of chroniclers such as Bernat Desclot and Ramon Muntaner in the lists of medieval historians selected. See, for example, Beryl Smalley’s Historians in the Middle Ages (London: Scribner, 1974). 12. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California

234 Notes to Pages 10–21

Press, 1993); Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Nancy F. Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Zrinka Stahuljak, Bloodless Genealogies of the French Middle Ages: Translation, Kinship, and Metaphor (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005); Sophie Marnette, “The Experiencing Self and the Narrating Self in Medieval French Chronicles,” in The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature, ed. Virginie Greene (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Jeanette M. Beer, Narrative Conventions of Truth in the Middle Ages (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1981); Suzanne Fleischman, “On the Representations of History and Fiction in the Middle Ages,” History and Theory 22 (1983): 278–310; Peter F. Ainsworth, Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History: Truth, Myth and Fiction in the Chronicles (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); David G. Pattison, From Legend to Chronicle: The Treatment of Epic Material in Alphonsine Historiography (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1983); Georges Martin, Les juges de Castille. Mentalités et discours historique dans l’Espagne médiévale (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992). 13. See, for instance, Steven D. Kirby, Eric W. Naylor, and Dayle Seidenspinner Núñez, “Dialogue Review of John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de Buen Amor,” La Corónica 25, no. 2 (1998): 237–47, with most of the issue devoted to this debate. chapter one

1. For a critical edition of the original version, see Lucien BarrauDihigo and Josep Massó Torrents, eds., Cròniques catalanes. II. Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1925) (hereafter, Barrau, Cròniques catalanes). A critical edition of a later Catalan versión is Stefano M. Cingolani, ed., Gestes dels comtes de Barcelona i reis d’Aragó (Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2008). All English translations are mine except where otherwise indicated.

Notes to Pages 22–23 235

2. The Usages of Barcelona (in Catalan, Usatges de Barcelona) were the customs that form the basis for the Catalan constitutions. They are the fundamental laws and basic rights in Catalonia, dating back to their codification in the twelfth century. The Usages combined fragments of Roman and Visigothic law with the resolutions of the court of Barcelona and the religious canons of ecclesiastic synods. The first Usages were compiled and codified by Ramon Berenguer I, count of Barcelona (1035–76), to repair the deficiencies of Gothic law. However, the evidence for Ramon’s work dates from the codes of James the Conqueror of a later date (reigned 1213–76), and most of the terms were settled by the twelfth century. For a critical edition of the text, see Joan Bastardas, ed., Usatges de Barcelona: El codi a mitjan segle XII (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 1984). See also Donald J. Kagay, The Usatges of Barcelona: The Fundamental Law of Catalonia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), and Adam J. Kosto, “The Limited Impact of the Usatges de Barcelona in Twelfth-Century Catalonia,” Traditio 56 (2001): 53–88. 3. For this historical context, see the chapter “L’expansion en Occitanie,” in Martin Aurell, Les noces du Comte. Mariage et pouvoir en Catalogne (785–1213) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995), 389–426; José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, A propósito de Alfonso, rey de Aragón, conde de Barcelona y marqués de Provenza (Barcelona: Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, 1996), 109–30; Thomas N. Bisson, Fiscal Accounts of Catalonia under the Early Count-Kings (1151–1213) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Paul Freedman, The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 135–39; Jeffrey A. Bowman, “Councils, Memory, and Mills: The Early Development of the Peace of God in Catalonia,” Early Medieval Europe 9 (2000): 99–129; and Thomas N. Bisson, “The Organized Peace in Southern France and Catalonia (c. 1140–1233),” American Historical Review 82 (1977): 290–311. 4. Some of these ideas, which I will develop more extensively in chapter 6, are from Gabrielle M. Spiegel’s “Genealogy: Form and Function in Medieval Historical Narrative,” History and Theory 22 (1983): 43–53, and Georges Duby’s “Structures de parenté et noblesse dans la France du Nord aux XIe et XIIe siècles” and “Remarques sur la littérature généalogique en France aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” both in Hommes et structures du moyen âge (Paris: Mouton, 1973).

236 Notes to Pages 23–26

5. The Barrau-Dihigo and Massó edition of the Gesta Comitum (see note 1) includes a valuable introduction (xi–lxxiii) that describes the different stages of the writing of the text, noting the existence of a “primitive” (original) edition and other, “definitive,” ones. I will focus on the “primitive” edition (about 1180–84), because the later ones reveal different chronologies and motivations that would have to be examined according to other criteria and different historical contexts. 6. Thomas N. Bisson, “Unheroed Pasts: History and Commemoration in South Frankland before the Albigensian Crusades,” Speculum 65 (1990): 299. 7. The foundation of the monastery is attributed to Oliba, who was the son of Oliba Cabreta, descended from the Pyrenean Counts Besalú and Cedanya. Oliba was abbot of the monastery of Ripoll beginning 1008. 8. Michel Zimmermann, “La prise de Barcelona par al-Mansûr et la naissance de l’historiographie catalane,” in L’historiographie en Occident du Ve au XVe siècle, Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 87 (1980): 191–218. 9. For the concept of official history and its different levels of spontaneity, see Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1980), 337–46. For connections between the concepts of chronology and genealogy, see Bisson, “Unheroed Pasts,” 293–301. 10. Stefano M. Cingolani, “De la historia privada a la historia pública y de la afirmación al discurso: una reflexión entorno a la historiografía medieval catalana (985–1288),” Talia Dixit 3 (2008): 52. 11. The Gesta’s different versions were fixed by Barrau, Cròniques catalanes, xi–lxxiii. See also Ferran Valls i Taberner, “Les diverses redaccions de la Crònica dels comtes de Barcelona,” in Matisos d’història i de llegenda (Zaragoza: Arxiu de la Biblioteca Ferran Valls i Taberner, 1991), 129–40; Miquel Coll, Historiografia (Barcelona: Curial, 1991), 54–61. For the complex process of formation of the definitive version, see Stefano M. Cingolani, La memòria dels reis. Les Quatre grans cròniques i la historiografia catalana, des del segle X fins al XV (Barcelona: Base, 2007), 146–58. More details in Cingolani, Historiografia, propaganda i comunicació al segle XIII: Bernat Desclot i les dues redaccions de la seva crònica (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2006), 175–221. 12. Cingolani, La memòria dels reis, 74. Critical edition: Stefano M. Cingolani, ed., Llibre dels reis (Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2008).

Notes to Pages 26–29 237

13. Paleographical and formal details of this manuscript in Barrau, Cròniques catalanes, xi–xx, and Cingolani, La memòria dels reis, 146–53. 14. Barrau, Cròniques catalanes, 11. 15. For the figure of Ramon Borrell, see Santiago Sobrequés, Els grans comtes de Barcelona (Barcelona: Editorial Vicens-Vives, 1985), 2–20. 16. Barrau, Cròniques catalanes, 6. 17. For the different theories of the time and circumstances of the production of the legend of Wilfred the Hairy, see Miquel Coll i Alentorn, “Guifré el Pelós en la historiografia i la legenda,” in Llegendari (Barcelona: Curial, 1993), 51–135, and, more recently, Stefano M. Cingolani, “Estratègies de legitimació del poder comtal: l’abad Oliba, Ramon Berenguer I, la Seu de Barcelona i les Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium,” Acta Mediaevalia 29 (2008): 135–75 (especially 172–75). 18. Barrau, Cròniques catalanes, xx–xxvii. 19. For other examples of these mixtures, see Jaume Massó i Torrents, “Historiografia de Catalunya en català, durant l’època nacional,” Revue Hispanique 15 (1906): 486–613 (especially 493–94). 20. “Genealogia comitum Barcinone, Urgelli et aliorum comitatum, ab archivo monasterii Rivipulli a quondam vetustissimo libro pergameneo abstracta” (Massó, “Historiografia,” 495). 21. Gesta Comitum, chaps. 1 and 2. 22. For Wilfred’s story and the question of its historicity, see Miquel Coll i Alentorn, “La historiografia de Catalunya en el període primitiu,” Estudis Romànics 3 (1951–52): 139–96; Josep M. Salrach, El procés de formació nacional de Catalunya (segles VIII–IX) (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1978), 87–107; Paul Freedman, “Cowardice, Heroism, and the Legendary Origins of Catalonia,” Past and Present 121 (1988): 3–28 ; Armand de Fluvià, “La qüestió de l’ascendència del comte Guifré I el Pelós,” Revista de Catalunya 28 (1989) : 83–87; Martin Aurell, “La réminiscence du mariage fondateur,” in Les noces du Comte, 504–13; and Paul Ponsich, “El problema de l’ascendència de Guifré el Pelós,” Revista de Catalunya 23 (1988): 35–44. 23. See, for instance, the eloquent parallelisms with the genealogical texts of ancient India as described in Romila Thapar, “Society and Historical Consciousness: The Itihasa-purana Tradition,” in Interpreting Early India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 158. 24. Abilio Barbero and Marcelo Vigil, La formación del feudalismo en la Península Ibérica (Barcelona: Crítica, 1978), 232ff. See also Peter Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford: Clarendon,

238 Notes to Pages 30–31

1993). For the function of the genealogies in medieval Castile, see Georges Martin, Les juges de Castille. Mentalités et discours historique dans l’Espagne médiévale (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992); Robert Folger, Generaciones y Semblanzas. Memory and Genealogy in Medieval Iberian Historiography (Tübingen: Narr, 2003); and Arsenio Dacosta, “Relato y discurso en los orígenes del reino asturleonés,” Studia Historica 22 (2004): 153–68. 25. Bernd Schneidmüller, “Constructing the Past by Means of the Present: Historiographical Foundation of Medieval Institutions, Dynasties, Peoples, and Communities,” in Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography, ed. Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J. Geary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 170– 71. For the historiographical tradition of Saint-Denis, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis: A Survey (Brookline, MA: Classical Folia Editions, 1978). 26. “Et Rodulfum episcopum Urgellensem, monachum vero prius monasterii Rivipollensis, quod ipse Gufredus a fundamentis primitus construxit” (Barrau, Cròniques catalanes, 6). 27. See Roger Collins, “Charles the Bald and Wilfred the Hairy,” in Charles the Bald, Court and Kingdom, ed. Margaret T. Gibson and Janet Nelson (Oxford: B.A.R., 1981). 28. Paul Ponsich, “Le rôle de Saint-Michel de Cuxa dans la formation de l’historiographie catalane et l’historicité de la légende de Wifred le Velu,” Etudes Roussillonnaises (1954–55): 156–59; Ramon d’Abadal, Els temps i el regiment del comte Guifré el Pilós (Sabadell: AUSA, 1989); and Aurell, Les noces du Comte, 507. 29. For the context of the ninth to tenth centuries in Catalonia, see Ramon d’Abadal, Els primers comtes catalans (Barcelona: Teide, 1958); Santiago Sobrequés i Vidal, Els grans comtes de Barcelona (Barcelona: Vicens-Vives, 1961); Pierre Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du Xe a la fin du XIe siècle. Croissance et mutations d’une société (Toulouse: Association des publications de l’Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 1975–76); Salrach, El procés de formació; Ramon d’Abadal, “Formació i evolució dels comtats catalans,” in Dels visigots als catalans (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1986), 1: 240–362; Thomas N. Bisson, Medieval France and Her Pyrenean Neighbors (London: Hambledon Press 1988); Michel Zimmermann, En els orígens de Catalunya. Emancipació política i afirmació cultural (Barcelona: Editions 62, 1989); Adam J. Kosto, Making Agreements

Notes to Pages 31–33 239

in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word, 1000–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For information on the Catalan cultural universe, see Michel Zimmermann’s Écrire et lire en Catalogne (IXe–XIIe siècle) (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2003). 30. “Ecce quomodo de potestate reagali in manus nostrorum comitum Barchinonensium honor ipse Barchinonensis devenit” (Barrau, Cròniques catalanes, 5). 31. Josep Maria Salrach and Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Entorn de la mentalitat i la ideologia del bloc de poder feudal a través de la historiografia medieval fins a les quatre grans cròniques,” in La formació i l’expansió del feudalisme català, ed. Jaume Portella (Girona: Ajuntament de Girona, 1985), 479. 32. See Thomas N. Bisson, “Feudalism in Twelfth-Century Catalonia,” in Structures féodales et féodalisme dans l’Occident méditerranéen (Xe–XIIIe siècles). Bilan et perspectives de recherches (Rome: École française de Rome, 1980), 173–92, and Adam J. Kosto, “The Limited Impact of the Usatges de Barcelona in Twelfth-Century Catalonia,” Traditio 56 (2001): 53–88. 33. Leah Shopkow, ed., The History of the Counts of Guines and Lords of Ardres by Lambert of Ardres (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 34. Duby, Hommes et structures, 280. 35. Aurell, Les noces du Comte, 510. 36. On the claims by European counts of the twelfth century to Carolingian blood, see Andrew W. Lewis, Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 120. 37. For a discussion of the power of the legend and memory of Charlemagne in medieval Europe, see Robert Folz, Le souvenir et la légende de Charlemagne dans l’Empire germanique médiéval (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1950). 38. This is compatible with the idea of the lack of historical records in South Frankland, as Bisson suggests in “Unheroed Pasts,” 293–301. 39. For this complex historical context, see Abadal, Els primers comtes, 261–338. 40. Ramón d’Abadal, “Un gran comte de Barcelona preterit: GuifréBorrell (897–911),” Dels visigots, 1: 323–62. 41. Barrau, Cròniques catalanes, 6.

240 Notes to Pages 34–36

42. “Miro itaque comes genuit Seniofredum comitem Barchinonensem, et Olibam qui vocatur Cabreta, comitem Bisillunensem simul et Cerritaniensem, et Mironem episcopum Gerundensem; quibus nondum adultis, idem Miro mortuus est. Cuius frater Suniarius rexit comitatus donec crevit Seriofredus nepos suus, de quo proles nulla remansit. Suniarius itaque frater Mironis genuit Borrellum et Ermengaudum et Mironem. Borrellus igitur successit Seniofredo consobrino suo in comitatu Barchinonensi; huius Borrelli comitis temporibus civitas Barchinona a Sarracenis capta et devastata est, anno dominice incarnationis DCCCCLXXXV. Ermengaudus vero frater eius apud Baltargam bello interfectus sine filio obiit. Frater quoque eius Miro sine filio defunctus est. Borrellus itaque genuit comitem Urgellensem primum, vocatum Ermengaudum, qui apud Cordubam obiit, et Raimundum Borrelli comitem Barchinonensem” (emphases mine) (ibid., 6). 43. “Sinamus autem loqui adhuc de generatione comitum Bisillunensium vel Urgellensium, quorum alter initium fuit Oliba Cabreta, alter vero Ermengaudus Cordubensis, et exponamus primitus de generatione comtium Barchinonensium, quorum dignior et longior posteritas adhuc perseverat” (ibid.,6). 44. “qui in omni parentela sua probitate fuisse inferior adhuc etiam narratur” (ibid., 6). 45. For the public activity of noble women, see Aurell, Les noces du Comte, 113–298. 46. “Petrus Raimundi madrastram suam Adalmoim interfecit, unde et in Hispania sub penitentia obiit sine filio . . . Berengarius Raimundi fratrem suum Raimundum Berengarii dolo in loco qui vocatur Pertica, inter Gerundam et Sanctum Celidonium, interfecit” (Barrau, Cròniques catalanes, 7). 47. Jocelin N. Hillgarth, “The problem of a Catalan Mediterranean Empire, 1229–1327,” English Historical Review, supplement 8 (1975): 1–54. 48. “Hic Raimundus Berengarii quartus mira probitate, scientia, ingenio ac consilio pollens, toto orbe famosissimus claruit” (Barrau, Cròniques catalanes, 8). 49. “Nam adhuc valde iuvenis regnum Aragonense cum filia Ranimiri regis Urracha obtinuit” (ibid., 8). 50. “Et ipse in introitu eiusdem urbis cum quinquaginta duobus tantum militibus armatis viginti fere milia Sarracenorum mira strenuitate et audacia invasit” (ibid., 8).

Notes to Pages 36–41 241

51. “Regnum Aragonense ac comitatum Barchinonensem filius eius Ildefonsus videlicet dictus rex habendum suscepit” (ibid., 9). 52. “In comitatu vero Cerritaniensi successit post Olibam Cabretam Guifredus filius eius, frater Bernardi Taiaferr . . . Guifredo vero successit Raimundus Guifredi comes filius eius . . . Raimundo vero Guifredi successerunt duo filii eius . . . Guillelmo Raimundi vero successerunt duo filii eius” (ibid., 10–11). 53. “Ermengaudo itaque de Castella successit filius eius Ermengaudus, qui neptim predicti Raimundi Berengarii comitis Barchinonensis et principis Aragonensis in matrimonium assumpsit, qui et nostris adhuc temporibus inclitus et famossimus vixit” (ibid., 12). chapter two

1. The chronicle was written in Catalan. I use the critical edition Llibre dels fets del rei en Jaume, ed. Jordi Bruguera (Barcelona: Barcino, 1991) (hereafter, Bruguera, Llibre dels fets). The first translation was in Latin, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, by Pere Marsili. For a modern English edition, see The Book of Deeds of James I of Aragon: A Translation of the Medieval Catalan Llibre dels Fets, trans. Damian Smith and Helena Buffery (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003) (hereafter, Smith, Book of Deeds). For an older English edition, see The Chronicles of James I, King of Aragon, Surnamed the Conqueror, trans. John Forster (London: Chapman and Hall, 1883). I use the spelling fets, as preferred by Bruguera, but other spellings, such as feyts or feits, depending on the text, have been used. 2. For an account of the political changes that began after this defeat, see Marta van Landingham, Transforming the State: King, Court and Political Culture in the Realms of Aragon (1213–1387) (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 3. Together with the construction of historical texts, one of these “mechanisms” was the doctrine called pactisme. See Jaume Vicens Vives, Notícia de Catalunya (Barcelona: Destino, 1982), 107–39. 4. That is, the exhaustion of the “feudal model” described by Pierre Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du Xe a la fin du XIe siècle. Croissance et mutations d’une société (Toulouse: Association des publications de l’Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 1975–76), and the rise of the “urban patriciate,” as described by Stephen P. Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 1096–1291 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

242 Notes to Pages 41–43

5. José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, El rei, el burguès i el cronista: una història barcelonina del segle XIII (Barcelona: Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, 2001). 6. Carme Batlle, “La burguesía de Barcelona a mediados del siglo XIII,” in X Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 1980–82), 2: 7–19, and Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 1–15. 7. Philip Banks, “L’estructura urbana de Barcelona, 714–1300,” in Història de Barcelona, ed. Jaume Sobrequés (Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 1992), 2: 25–72. 8. Josep Maria Font i Rius, Orígenes del régimen municipal de Cataluña (Madrid: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Jurídicos, 1946). 9. Ferran Soldevila, Jaume I. Pere el Gran (Barcelona: Vicens-Vives, 1955). 10. For the context of James I’s reign, see Jane C. Wilman, Jaime I “El Conquistador” and the Barons of Aragon, 1244–1267: The Struggle for Power (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1987); for Philip Augustus’s France, see La France de Philippe-Auguste: Le temps des mutations, ed. Robert H. Bautier (Paris: CNRS, 1982). 11. Existing studies of the chronicle generally emphasize the historical or literary nature of the text but rarely analyze it as an autobiography. The autobiographical perspective was proposed by Robert I. Burns, “The King’s Autobiography: The Islamic Connection,” in Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), appendix 1, in which he discussed the influence of Islamic historiography on the writing of the chronicle and its autobiographical form. 12. Bernat Desclot, Chronicle of the Reign of King Pedro III of Aragon, trans. F. L. Critchlow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1928– 1934), 1: 63 (chap. 12). 13. The miniature is from a frame of six illustrating no. 169 in the Cántigas de Santa María, codex done by Alfonso X the Wise of Castile after 1259. See Robert I. Burns, “The Spiritual Life of James the Conqueror, King of Aragó-Catalonia, 1208–1276: Portrait and SelfPortrait,” Catholic Historical Review 62 (1976): 4. 14. This information is provided by Burns, “Spiritual Life” (the quote is on pp. 1–2) and Ferran Soldevila, Els primers temps de Jaume I (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1968).

Notes to Pages 45–48 243

15. Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer, “La Crònica del Conqueridor i els seus problemes,” Estudis Universitaris Catalans 11 (1926): 79–88. 16. Smith, Book of Deeds, 16. 17. Ferran Soldevila, ed., Les Quatre Grans Cròniques: Jaume I, Bernat Desclot, Ramon Muntaner, Pere III. (Barcelona: Selecta, 1971), 191 n. 10. 18. “Retrau mon senyor sent Jacme que fe sens obres morta és. Aquesta paraula volch nostre Seyor complir en los nostres feytz” (Bruguera, Llibre dels fets, 2: 5). 19. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Political Utility in Medieval Historiography: A Sketch,” History and Theory 14 (1975): 314–25. 20. “Nostre pare, lo rei En Pere, no volia veser nostra mare la reyna. E esdevenc-se que una vegada lo rei nostre pare fo en Latas, e la reyna nostra mare fo en Miravals; e venc al rei un ric-hom, per nom En Guillem d’Alcalà, e pregà’l tant que el féu venir a Miravals, on era la reyna nostra mare. E aquella nuit que ambdós foren a Mirvals volc nostre Senyor que Nós fóssem engenrats” (Bruguera, Llibre dels fets, 2: 10–11). Smith, Book of Deeds, 20. 21. Smith, Book of Deeds, 20. Montoliu finds Arthurian reminiscences both in this episode and in the conception’s narration: Manuel de Montoliu, “Els elements èpics, principalment arturians, en la crònica de Jaume I,” Homenaje a Menéndez Pidal (Madrid: Hernando, 1924), 1: 707. 22. Smith, Book of Deeds, 25. 23. “We were armed as a knight at the church of Santa Maria de la Huerta in Tarzona, and after hearing the Mass of the Holy Spirit we girt on our sword, which we took from upon the altar.” Ibid., 34. 24. Ibid., 34. 25. Ibid., 201–2. 26. Ibid., 95: “They then brought the head of Infantilla to the army, and we ordered it placed in the sling of the almajanech and thrown into the town.” 27. The detailed description of the cure is obviously potentially interesting for the history of medicine: “Then a squire said to us: ‘Lord, Don Bernat Guillem has been wounded in the leg by an arrow.’ And we said: ‘Let us send for lint from the camp, and draw the arrow out.’ And we did so. And we ourselves pulled out the arrow and we put lint with water on the wound, and we had the wound bound with a piece of the shirt of a squire. And when the wound was bound, we asked him to

244 Notes to Pages 48–51

go into the camp, and said that we would take charge there, and would excuse him from any service until he was better. And he said: ‘Lord, I will not do it, as I will get better here as quickly or quicker than if I were in the camp.’ And not one noble came to his aid, but we alone. And we recognized that he was showing great courage, so we permitted it.” Ibid., 167. 28. Ibid., 192. Cingolani argues that this passage is an imaginative invention with symbolic dimension: Stefano M. Cingolani, “Memòria i estratègies comunicatives al Llibre del rei Jaume I,” Revista de Catalunya 154 (2000): 134–35. 29. Smith, Book of Deeds, 110. 30. “And when they arrived, we did not wish to speak with them until we all had dined, so that we would be happier from having eaten and from the wine we would drink” (ibid., 214); “and the Muslims ate with us, as we did not wish to speak with them until they were warmed up by food and wine” (ibid., 215). 31. Ibid., 221. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 69–71. Pactisme is a Catalan word that comes from pacte (deal). It describes a political system specific to medieval Catalonia, based on the precarious but effective balance between the three sources of political power: the monarch, the nobles, and the merchants. See Jaume Aurell and Alfons Puigarnau, La cultura del mercader en la Barcelona del siglo XV (Barcelona: Omega, 1998), 88–100. 34. Smith, Book of Deeds, 70. 35. Ibid. 36. The verb used by the king in Catalan (escridam-los: shouting) denotes a strong voice in order to urge the knights to battle. This loud voice in the dawn of the starting day increases the tragedy of the scene (Bruguera, Llibre dels fets, 2: 97). 37. This dramatic scene is related in chapters 84 and 85 (Bruguera, Llibre dels fets, 2: 96–98) and interpreted by Martí de Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana (Barcelona: Ariel, 1964), 1: 411–412. See Xavier Renedo Puig, “Ciutat de Mallorca, 31 de desembre del 1229: Sant Silvestre, San Jordi i Jaume I,” in Caplletra 43 (2007): 177–98. For this and for other medieval “historical” Catalan legends, see Riquer, Legendes històriques catalanes, (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 2000), and Anna Cortadellas, Repertori de llegendes historiogràfiques de la Corona d’Aragó

Notes to Pages 51–57 245

(segles XIII–XVI) (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2001). 38. And, interestingly, this reputation has been reflected in his almost sacred portraits: Marta Serrano Coll, Jaime I el Canquistador. Imágenes medievales de un reinado (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2008). 39. Bruguera, Llibre dels fets, 2: 77: “E prenguem-lo per la regnas e dixem-li: ’tornats a la batayla, que bon cavaller per aytal colp con aquel enfelonir-se’n deu, que no deu exir de batayla.’ ” 40. Smith, Book of Deeds, 89. Bruguera, Llibre dels fets, 2: 77: “E, a cap d’una peça que nós lo gardam, no el vim.” 41. Bruguera, Llibre dels fets, 2: 73: “e, si moríets, per lo meylor hom del món morríets.” The information about King James in the last paragraphs is based on his own version of his career, presented here rather uncritically. The issue of how much we can trust James’s accounts of his own heroic deeds will be discussed in the second part of the book. 42. Smith, Book of Deeds, 293. It is important to note here the difficulty of fixing the geographical and emotional boundaries of James I’s Catalonia. It is not the Catalonia of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and not a “nation” in the modern sense of the word. Nevertheless, his praises for Catalonia show his esteem for what he considered an important part of his kingdom. 43. Ibid., 380–81. 44. Burns, “Spiritual Life,” 35. chapter three

1. Bernat Desclot. Crònica, ed. Miquel Coll i Alentorn (Barcelona: Barcino, 1949–51) (hereafter, Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica), 1: 131–33. This is the Catalan version of Desclot’s chronicle (the English translations of Desclot’s chronicle included in this chapter are mine). Subsequently, other Catalan historians and literary scholars have analyzed diverse facets of Desclot’s Crònica. See Manuel de Montoliu, “La crònica de Bernat Desclot,” in Les quatre grans cròniques (Barcelona: Alpha, 1959), 51–74. Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, Història i historiografia (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1987), contains a long article originally published in 1911, “Consideraciones acerca de la historiografía catalana medieval y en particular de la crónica de Desclot.” See also

246 Notes to Pages 58–60

Martí de Riquer, “La Crònica de Desclot,” in Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana (Barcelona: Ariel, 1964), 1: 429–48; Ferran Soldevila, “Prefaci a la crònica de Bernat Desclot,” in Les Quatre Grans Cròniques: Jaume I, Bernat Desclot, Ramon Muntaner, Pere III., ed. Soldevila (Barcelona: Selecta, 1971), 65–87. Cingolani has recently published a new edition of the chronicle: Bernat Desclot, Llibre del rei en Pere, ed. Stefano M. Cingolani (Barcelona: Barcino, 2010). 2. Stefano M. Cingolani, Historiografia, propaganda i comunicació al segle XIII: Bernat Desclot i les dues redaccions de la seva crònica (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2006). 3. Stefano M. Cingolani, “Historiografia catalana al temps de Pere II i Alfons II (1276–1291). Edició y estudi de textos inèdits: 1. Crònica del rei Pere,” Acta Medievalia 25 (2003–4): 204. For Desclot’s political ideas, see Raquel Homet, “Monarquía y expansión en la historiografía catalana: la Crónica de Bernat Desclot,” in Oriente e Occidente tra Medioevo ed Età Moderna. Studi in onore di Geo Pistarino, ed. Laura Balleto (Genoa: G. Brigati, 1997), 1: 479–550. 4. “Ací comença lo libre que.n Bernat Desclot dictà e escriví” (Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica, 2: 5). 5. “E d’açò fa testimoni cel qui açò recompte en aquest libre, que vahé la cella del rey e lo ferro que.y era romàs” (ibid., 5: 85–86). 6. Ibid., 1: 123–74; Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, Història i historiografia (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1987), 138–47; Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, 1: 432–34. 7. See Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica, 1: 123–74. 8. “Assí comensa lo libre qu.En Bernat Desclot dictà e escriví dels grans feyts e de les conquestes que feeren sobre saraÿns e sobre altres gens los nobles reys que hac en Aragó qui foren del alt linyatge del comte de Barcelona” (ibid., 2: 5). 9. “Tells the story” (ibid., 2: 7, 2: 84, 2: 95, 3: 168). 10. In fact, the manner in which Desclot deals with his sources, before historians began favoring the use of numerous annotated sources— the infamous footnotes—in order to give at least the appearance of rigor and veracity, actually connects in significant ways with postmodern forms of negotiating the past. Many leading history journals today encourage a more creative use of sources and privilege evidence that was previously dismissed as not completely verifiable. For the evolution of this notion, see Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History

Notes to Pages 60–61 247

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Currently, several important historical journals such as Rethinking History or Biography ask that contributors limit their use of footnotes. 11. The narration of the important battle of Ubeda against the Muslims (chapters 5–6) is included in this first section, but since it is more historical than properly legendary it could be better associated with the rest of the chronicle (see Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica, 1: 22–31). 12. Jaume Aurell, “From Genealogies to Chronicles: The Power of the Form in Medieval Catalan Historiography,” Viator. Medieval and Renaissance Studies 36 (2005): 235–64. 13. John C. Shideler, A Medieval Catalan Noble Family: The Montcadas, 1000–1230 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 14. Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica, 1: 17. 15. Joseph J. Duggan, “Medieval Epic as Popular Historiography: Appropriation of Historical Knowledge in the Vernacular Epic,” in La littérature historiographique des origines à 1500, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Ursula Link-Heer, and Peter-Michael Spangenberg (Heidelberg: Winter, 1986), 296–98. 16. Ferran Soldevila, “Les cançons de gesta i la Crònica de Desclot,” Revista de Catalunya 46 (1928): 385–97, and Soldevila, “Les prosificacions en els primers capítols de la Crònica de Desclot,” Discurso de recepción de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona (Barcelona: Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, 1958). See also Miquel Coll i Alentorn, “Notes per a l’estudi de la influència de les cançons de gesta franceses damunt la Crònica de Bernat Desclot,” Estudis Universitaris Catalans 2 (1927). 17. Stefano Asperti, “La qüestió de les prosificacions en les cròniques medievals catalanes,” in Actes del Novè Col.loqui Internacional de Llengua i Literatura Catalanes (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1993), 1: 85–137, and Stefano M. Cingolani, “Modelli storici, tradizioni culturali e identità letteraria nella Catalogna medievale,” Lengua & Literatura 5 (1992–93): 479–94. 18. Cingolani, Historiografia, propaganda, 68–69. 19. Miquel Coll i Alentorn, “La llegenda de Guillem Ramon de Montcada,” in Llegendari (Barcelona: Curial, 1993), 212–28. 20. Cingolani suggests that a more “creative” function of medieval historians lies in their process of creating new legends (Historiografia, propaganda, 72).

248 Notes to Pages 61–65

21. Vivian H. Galbraith, Kings and Chroniclers: Essays in English Medieval History (London: Hambledon, 1982). 22. For the story of the “real” Guillem Ramon de Montcada, the assassin of the archbishop of Tarragona, see Shideler, Medieval Catalan Noble Family, 123–27. 23. “Lo melor cavaler, el pus prous e del pus alt linyatge qui sia al món” (Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica, 2: 16). 24. Cingolani, Historiografia, propaganda, 68. 25. “Que, aytant con viva, no vul éser apelat rey; que yo són ara I dels melors chomtes del món, e si era apelat rey, no seria gens dels majors” (Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica, 2: 17). 26. François Delpech, Histoire et légende. Essai sur la genèse d’un thème épique aragonais (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1993). 27. Manuel de Montoliu, “Els elements èpics, principalment arturians, en la crònica de Jaume I,” Homenaje a Menéndez Pidal (Madrid: Hernando, 1924), 1: 697. 28. Desclot repeats this detail in his version: “E ela no parla gaire” (Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica, 2: 24). 29. “E fèts escriure la nuyt e la hora, que axí ho trobarets” (Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica, 2: 25). 30. Ferran Soldevila, “Un poema joglaresc sobre el engendrament de Jaume I,” in Estudios dedicados a Menéndez Pidal (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1957), 7: 71–80. 31. Noel Coulet, Affaires d’argent et affaires de famille en Haute Provence au XIVe siècle (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1992), 81–89. 32. Martin Aurell, “Mémoire louée,” in Les noces du Comte. Mariage et pouvoir en Catalogne (785–1213) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995), 459–63. 33. Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica, 2: 45–62. I use Martin Aurell’s analysis of this legend in Les noces du Comte, 513–20. See also Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, “Les versions catalanes de la legenda del bon comte de Barcelona i l’emperadriu d’Alemanya,” Estudis Universitaris Catalans 17 (1932): 250–87, and Josep Miquel Sobré, L’èpica de la realitat. L’escriptura de Ramon Muntaner i Bernat Desclot (Barcelona: University of Barcelona, 1978). 34. See Cingolani, Historiografia, propaganda, 153. 35. Geneviève Bührer-Thierry, “La reine adultère,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale (1992): 299–312.

Notes to Pages 66–71 249

36. Gaston Paris, “Le roman du comte de Toulouse,” Annales du Midi (1900): 5–32. 37. Catherine Velay-Vallantin, L’histoire des contes (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 185–243. 38. Los Usatges de Barcelona. Estudios, comentarios y edición bilingüe del texto, ed. Ferran Valls i Taberner (Barccelona: Promociones Publicaciones Universitarias, 1984), 104–5 (no. 112). 39. “D’aquí avant les cartes se feeren, jurades e fermades molt bé, ab sejel del Emperi, d’aur” (Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica, 2: 61). 40. Ibid., 1: 34; the quote from the Gesta is in Lucien Barrau-Dihigo and Josep Massó Torrents, eds., Cròniques Catalanes. II. Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1925), 8–9. 41. “Ara lexarem a parlar del bon chomte de Barcelona e parlarem del enfant En Jacme, fil del rey En Pere d’Aragó” (Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica, 2: 62). 42. Ibid., 3: 72–73. 43. Ibid., 3: 74. Coll notes that this letter appears to paraphrase the Latin letter transcribed by the anonymous Chronicon siculum, from the city of Palermo to Messina, dated April 13, 1282. 44. Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, 1: 435. 45. “Assí finex lo libre del rey En Pere, dels bons feyts d’armes que ell féu sobra serrahins e altres gents, e com morí” (Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica, 5: 164). chapter four

1. Several critics have noted the important parallels between this itinerary and the life of Jesus Christ, from the annunciation ( James I’s conception) to the ascension (Alfonse’s coronation). See Josep Miquel Sobré, L’èpica de la realitat. L’escriptura de Ramon Muntaner i Bernat Desclot (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1978), 79–80. This parallel heightens the sacralization of the notion of medieval kingship: see Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). More specifically, for the sacralization of the Aragonese crown, see Jose Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, “La parola dell’altro: Muntaner parla dei genovesi,” Storia di Genova 7 (1987): 105–18; Ramon d’Abadal, “Pedro el Ceremonioso y los comienzos de la decadencia política de Cataluña,”

250 Notes to Pages 72–73

in Historia de España, ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal (Madrid: Espasa, 1964), 14: ix–cciii. 2. “E tota hora que oiran les batalles e feits d’armes, vaja-los lo cor que totes les victòries estan tan solament al poder e a la volentat de Déu, e no en poder de gents.” Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 1, in Les Quatre Grans Cròniques: Jaume I, Bernat Desclot, Ramon Muntaner, Pere III., ed. Ferran Soldevila (Barcelona: Selecta, 1971) (hereafter, Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques), 668. The English translations of Muntaner’s chronicle are mine. I have also consulted Ramon Muntaner, Chronicle, trans. Lady Goodenough (Cambridge, UK: Ontario, 2000). 3. As he begins to narrate Roger de Flor’s exploits, Muntaner explains that the account of this knight’s life is his main reason for embarking on the Crònica: “e com, en partida, la cosa per què jo em són mogut a fer aquest llibre, és per les gran meravelles qui per ell [Roger de Flor] se són mogudes e esdevengudes, e grans victòries que catalans e aragoneses han haüdes en Romania per lo seu començament” (And what from the beginning moved me to make this book are the great marvels which have happened through him, and the great Catalan and Aragonese victories there have been in Romania, which were begun by him) (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 193, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 840). 4. See, for instance, Antonio de Bofarull’s biography, Ramon Muntaner, guerrero y cronista (Barcelona: Ayuntamiento de Barcelona, 1883). See also Carles Rahola, En Ramon Muntaner: l’home, la crònica (Barcelona: Ateneu Empordanès, 1922); Rafael Tasis, La vida d’en Ramon Muntaner (Barcelona: Dalmau, 1964). 5. These memorialist-chroniclers and their literary and historical roles have been analyzed by Michel Zink, The Invention of Literary Subjectivity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 187–219. 6. “E jo aitantost comencé aquest llibre, lo qual prec a cascuns qui l’oiran que creguen que per cert tot és així veritat com ho oiran, e no hi posen dubte negun” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 1, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 668). 7. For the external documents, see: Marti de Barcelona, “Regesta de documents relatius al gran cronista Ramon Muntaner,” Estudis Franciscans 48 (1936): 218–33, and “Nous documents per a la biografia de Ramon Muntaner,” Spanische Forshungen 6 (1937): 310–26; a good synthesis is in Martí de Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana (Barcelona: Ariel, 1964), 1: 449–54.

Notes to Pages 73–77 251

8. See for instance how he uses the word “holocaust.” After the conquest and burning of some towns of northern Catalonia by the French, Muntaner tells us that “d’aquest holocaust podets entendre si en pujà lo fum envers lo ceel” (you may imagine whether the smoke of this holocaust mounted to heaven) (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 127, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 785). 9. Some sentences of the chronicle are written in different languages, including Sicilian, French, Provençal, Greek, and Arabic (Muntaner, Crònica, chaps. 54, 43, 121, 247, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 712, 704, 778, 887). 10. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 251, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 892. 11. “Si que anc null hom tan sotil con jo no es poc anc lluir de tan alts senyors con jo fiu d’ells” (No man as insignificant as I can boast of such lofty masters as those I have had) (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 255, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 897). 12. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 255, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 897. 13. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 23, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 687. See also Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 669 (chapter 2), which narrates King James’s stay at Muntaner’s father’s house. 14. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 37, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 699. 15. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 68, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 720. 16. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 125, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 784. 17. See R. G. Keightley, “Muntaner and the Catalan Grand Company,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 4 (1979): 37–58. 18. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 227, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 867–69. 19. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 268–269, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 907–8. 20. The historicity of these events has been confirmed by several scholars: Antoni Rubió i Lluch, Diplomatari de l’Orient Català (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1947); Keightley, “Muntaner and the Catalan Grand Company” ; Michel Zimmermann, “Orient et Occident dans la chronique de Ramon Muntaner. A propos de l’expédition

252 Notes to Pages 77–78

de Romanie,” Le Moyen Age 94 (1987): 201–35; Gabriella Airaldi, “Roger of Lauria’s Expedition to the Peloponnese,” in Mediterranean Historical Review 10, nos. 1–2 (1995): 14–23; Antonio Arribas Palau, La conquista de Cerdeña por Jaime II (Madrid: CSIC, 1952); Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer, L’expansió de Catalunya en la Mediterrània Oriental (Barcelona: Bar­ cino, 1926); Kenneth M. Setton, Catalan Domination of Athens, 1311–1388 (London: Variorum, 1975). 21. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 193, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 840: “Ara vos lleixaré a parlar de misser Carles de França, qui va percaçant la gent qui ab ell deu passar en Sicília, e tornar-vos he a parlar d’un valent hom de pobre afer, qui per sa valentia muntà, a pocs de temps, a més que null hom qui anc nasqués. E per ço vull parlar d’ell, en aquest cas, car los afers seus qui avant se seguiran foren fets molt meravelloses e de gran cosa, e qui tots són reputats, e deuen ésser, al casal d’Aragon; e com, en partida, la cosa per què jo em són mogut a fer aquest llibre, és per les gran meravelles qui per ell se són mogudes e esdevengudes, e grans victòries que catalans e aragoneses han haüdes en Romania per lo seu començament. De les quals meravelles null hom no poria recontar la veritat con jo faç, que fui en Sicília, en la sua prosperitat, procurador general seu, e cabí en tots los seus afers majors que ell feú, e per mar e per terra; per què cascuns me’n devets creure.” 22. Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 980 n. 2. 23. Interesting commentaries on this are in Cecil M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1978). 24. In the same vein, see Alberto Varvaro, “Il testo storiografico come opera letteraria: Ramon Muntaner,” in Symposium in honorem prof. M. de Riquer (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1984), 411. 25. Other historians have seen in late medieval Catalonia the consolidation of one of the first “modern nation-states”: Pierre Vilar, La Catalogne dans l’Espagne moderne (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1962), 1: 448; Jaume Vicens Vives, “Los Trastámaras y Cataluña,” in Historia de España, ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal (Madrid: Espasa, 1964), 15: 637. I use this expression carefully in the context of a discussion of the Middle Ages, aware of the pitfalls of projecting onto the medieval world concepts from contemporary culture and criticism. See Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 677–704.

Notes to Pages 78–80 25  3

26. “Ara d’aquí avant no pertany a la matèria d’aquest llibre que jo deja d’ells parlar, que assats me basta que parle de la matèria per què aquest llibre se fa: ço és a saber, de la honor e de la gràcia que Déus ha feta ne fa al casal d’Aragó.” Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 23, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 687. 27. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 172, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 821; for the historicity of this episode, see Cosme Parpal i Marquès, La conquista de Menorca en 1287 por Alfonso III de Aragón (Barcelona: Casa Provincial de la Caridad, 1901). 28. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 173, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 823. 29. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 14, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 679. 30. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 72, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 726. 31. This expressive image was composed in a very elegant Catalan: “la terra deurien besar que calciguen” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 20, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 684). 32. Muntaner, Crònica, chaps. 49, 72, 91 and 146. 33. Jocelin N. Hillgarth, “The Problem of a Catalan Mediterranean Empire, 1229–1327,” English Historical Review, supplement 8 (1975): 1–54; Joan-Pau Rubiés, “The Idea of Empire in the Catalan Tradition from Ramon Muntaner to Enric Prat de la Riba,” Journal of Hispanic Research 4 (1995–96): 229–262; Rubiés, “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Book of Ramon Muntaner,” Mediterranean Historical Review 26 (2011): 1–29; and Carles Riba, “En Ramon Muntaner, home d’imperi,” Els marges. Obres Completes (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1967), 2: 321–24. 34. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 241, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 883. 35. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 247, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 888 (Granada belonged to Castile, in the distribution that Aragonese and Castilians had negotiated for the conquest of the peninsula). 36. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 107, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 764. 37. Marta Vanlandingham, Transforming the State: King, Court and Political Culture in the Realms of Aragon (1213–1387) (Leiden: Brill, 2002).

254 Notes to Pages 80–82

38. Muntaner, Crònica, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 848; Antoni Rubió i Lluch, “Paquimeres i Muntaner,” Memòries del Institut d’Estudis Catalans 1 (1927): 59. 39. Rubiés, “Idea of Empire,” 243. 40. For the debate between Catalonia and Castile, see Horst Hina, Castilla y Cataluña en el debate cultural, 1714–1939 (Barcelona: Península, 1986). Rubiés also connects medieval political thought with twentiethcentury political ideology and enactment. For a discussion of the reception of Muntaner by Catalans, see Rubiés, “Idea of Empire,” 237ff. 41. Rubiés (“Idea of Empire,” 230) considers Eric Hobsbawm’s definition of tradition reductivist (Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983]), as a ritualized and symbolic practice marked by a desire for repetition and invariance, distinct from popular custom (which does not preclude change) and from social convention (which is determined by practical rather than ideological aims). See also J. Lee Shneidman, The Rise of the Aragonese-Catalan Empire, 1200–1350 (New York: New York University Press, 1970). 42. Jaume Massó i Torrents, “Historiografia de Catalunya en català, durant l’època nacional,” Revue Hispanique 15 (1906): 532–33. 43. Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Idea of Empire,” 243. 44. “Per què cascuns dels reis qui són estats en Aragon, e a Mallorca e en Sicília ne d’aquí avant hi seran, d’ell deixendents, podem fer compte que són en aquell mateix grau reis de gràcia e de vertut e de vera natura” (So every one of the kings who have reigned in Aragon and in Majorca and in Sicily, and all who shall descend from him [King James the Conqueror] hereafter, can reckon that they are in the same degree kings of virtue and grace and by true nature) (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 6, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 672). 45. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 292, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 934. 46. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 15, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 679. For a discussion of “medieval patriotism,” see Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 1: 194. 47. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 202, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 848. 48. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 198, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 844. 49. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 29, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 691.

Notes to Pages 83–87 25  5

50. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 23, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 687. 51. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 17, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 681 and 682. 52. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 29, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 691. 53. Miguel Angel Gomis i Alepuz, “El providencialisme en la Crònica de Ramon Muntaner,” in Estudis de Llengua i Literatura. Miscel.lània Joan Fuster, ed. Antoni Ferrando and Albert Hauf (Barcelona: Publicacions Abadia de Montserrat, 1985), 3: 67–84. 54. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 7, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 673. 55. See, for instance, the heroic actions of Peter the Great against the French knights (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 134, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 793–94). 56. For the tournament, see Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 179, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 827–28. 57. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 20, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 684. 58. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 54, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 712. 59. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 68, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 720. In fact, the narrative is full of expressions like “you who shall hear this book” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 23, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 687). 60. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 5, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 671. 61. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 95, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 751. See also King Alfonse’s kiss of gratitude to his brother Peter (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 156, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 811). 62. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 159, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 813. 63. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 126, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 785. 64. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 238, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 880. 65. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 194, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 841.

256 Notes to Pages 87–88

66. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 195, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 842. 67. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 207, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 855–56. 68. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 100, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 756. 69. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 255, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 896. 70. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 275, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 918. 71. “E null hom no pot ésser bon d’armes si no és alt de cor” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 20, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 684). 72. “Per què debades se treballa qui vol contrastar ab aquesta obra que Déus féu” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 7, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 672). 73. “Espina com púnyer deu, aguda neix” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 95, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 751). 74. “Si ho dix al sord, no ho dix al peresós” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 106, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 762). 75. “L’obra lloa al maestre” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 111, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 766). 76. “Con Déus vol mal a l’hom, la primera cosa en què el puneix és que li tol lo seny” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 203, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 850). 77. “Fé plaer, e no guards a qui” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 234, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 877). 78. “Qui mal fa, no el se llunya de si” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 239, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 882). 79. “On en major grau és l’home, pus pacient e pus dreturer deu ésser” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 239, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 882). 80. “No són tots amics aquells qui rien a hom” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 292, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 934). 81. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 269, in Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 908. Another dialectal sign Muntaner uses is the final n in words like Aragon, raon, or lleon. See Joan Corominas, “Las vidas de santos rosellonesas,” Anales del Instituto de Lingüística 3 (1943): 154, and Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, 1: 480.

Notes to Pages 88–95 257

82. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 283, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 924. 83. Muntaner, Crònica, chaps. 253–55, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 894–97. 84. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 227, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 867–68. 85. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 252, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 893. 86. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 233, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 875. chapter five

1. Chronicle. Pere III of Catalonia (Pedro IV of Aragon), trans. Mary Hillgarth, with introduction and notes by Jocelyn N. Hillgarth (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980) (hereafter, Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III), 1: 32. For the Catalan edition, I use Ferran Soldevila, ed., Les Quatre Grans Cròniques: Jaume I, Bernat Desclot, Ramon Muntaner, Pere III. (Barcelona: Selecta, 1971) (hereafter, Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques). 2. Albert G. Hauf, “Les cròniques catalanes medievals. Notes entorn la seva intencionalitat,” in Història de la historiografia catalana, ed. Albert Balcells (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2004), 63. 3. “Nós som de tal edat i de tal enteniment que una tal carta sabem escriure i redactar sense consell de ningú,” from a king’s letter, quoted by Anna Cortadellas, Pere III. Crònica (Barcelona: Teide, 1993), 13. 4. For peninsular historiographical models, see Diego Catalán’s documented “Rodericus” Romanzado en los reinos de Aragón, Castilla y Navarra (Madrid: Fundación Ramón Menéndez Pidal, 2005). 5. Francisco M. Gimeno Blay, Escribir, reinar. La experiencia gráfico-textual de Pedro IV el Ceremonioso (1336–1387) (Madrid: Abada, 2006), 65. 6. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 202. 7. For the universal chronicles, see Miquel Coll i Alentorn, “Les cròniques universals catalanes,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 34 (1971–72): 43–50. See also the Compendi historial, with comments by Coll, Historiografia (Barcelona: Curial, 1991), 44–45.

258 Notes to Page 96

One of the authors of the Compendi, Jaume Domènec, also wrote two other genealogical texts: Genealogia regum Navarre et Aragonie et comitum Barchinone (1379–80) and Genealogia regum Francorum (1380), which confirms the intense historiographical activity during the reign of Peter the Ceremonious. 8. Antoni Rubió i Lluch, Documents per l’història de la cultura catalana mig-eval (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1908–21), 1: 124–25 (20 September 1342) and 152–53 (17 July 1350). See Heinrich Finke, “Die Beziehungen der aragonesischen Könige zur Literatur, Wissenschaft und Kunst im. 13. und 14. Jahrhundert,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 8 (1910): 41. 9. Rubió, Documents, 1: 191–92 (28 February 1360); Rubió, “Estudi sobre l’elaboració de la crònica de Pere el Cerimoniós,” Anuari de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans 3 (1909–10): 521; Stefano M. Cingolani, La memòria dels reis. Les Quatre grans cròniques i la historiografia catalana, des del segle X fins al XV (Barcelona: Base, 2007), 231. See also Frederic P. Verrié, “La política artística de Pere el Cerimoniós,” in Pere el Cerimoniós i la seva època (Barcelona: CSIC, 1989), 181. 10. Rubió, Documents, 1: 226–28 (3 September 1370) and 2: 152–54, 291–93. For the importance of this work, see Agustí Altisent, Història de Poblet (Poblet: Abadia de Poblet, 1974), 262–92, which describes how Peter treated his ancestors’ remains as though they were relics of the saints. 11. Rubió, Documents, 1: 240–41 (4 May 1372). 12. Antonio M. Aragó Cabañas, “Funciones del archivero real en el s. XIV,” in Homenaje a Federico Navarro (Madrid: Asociación Nacional de Bibliotecarios, Archivos y Arquéologos, 1973), 39–52; Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, “La institució de la biblioteca reial a Poblet en temps de Pere el Cerimoniós,” in Història i historiografia (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1987), 411–53; Blay, Escribir, reinar, 178–90. 13. Rubió, Documents, 1: 300–301 (23 May 1382) and 303–4 (20 August 1382). 14. Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, “Introduction,” 1: 37–38; Martí de Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana (Barcelona: Ariel, 1964), 1: 565–72. 15. Rubió, Documents, 1: 221 (20 June 1369). 16. I take the concept of “mythic present” from Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 27.

Notes to Pages 96–99 259

17. King Peter’s reconstruction of the royal graves parallels King Louis IX of France’s rebuilding of the French kings’ mausoleum in Saint Denis a century earlier. See Bernd Schneidmüller, “Constructing the Past by Means of the Present: Historiographical Foundation of Medieval Institutions, Dynasties, Peoples, and Communities,” in Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography, ed. Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J. Geary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 170. 18. “O, utinam consumpto nostro corpore, post celestem gloriam, talem et tam clari ingenii mereamur scriptorem habere, qui benefacta nostra debitis laudibus extollat, erroresque nostros absque ulla malevolentia reprehendat” (Rubió, Documents, 1: 303). 19. Rubió i Lluch provide us with a list of the king’s favorite readings. In 1339, when he was twenty years old, he read Les Grandes Chroniques de France, which he later translated into Catalan; in 1342, he read a copy of the Cròniques d’Espanya, perhaps the Latin Chronicle of Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada; a year later, he read his great-great-grandfather James the Conqueror’s Llibre dels fets; in 1349, at thirty, the chronicles of the kings of Castile, Navarre, and Portugal. He then expanded his readings to include other classics and foreign texts. In 1363, he read the Suma de les històries del món, in French; in 1369, the Frontí and the works of Saint Isidor, the Pacense, and Paul Orosi; in 1373, he read the Chronicles of Hungary, Denmark and Norway; at the time of his death, he was reading the Speculum historiale by Vicent de Beauvais. Rubió, “Estudi sobre l’elaboració,” 520–21. 20. Ramon d’Abadal, “Pedro el Ceremonioso y los comienzos de la decadencia política de Cataluña,” in Historia de España, ed. Menéndez Pidal (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1964), 14: ix–xxv. 21. Hunt, Politics, Culture, 31. 22. Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 1: 374. “Aquest diumenge, a hora de prim so, nós encara no érem gitats e llegíem lo llibre o Crònica del senyor rei En Jacme, tresavi nostre” (Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1086–87). That day was 21 November 1344. 23. I use the concept of “political culture” as developed in Hunt, Politics, Culture. See also William H. Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 24. Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 1: 132. “Nos, doncs, rei per la sua gran e llarga pietat, regnant en lo regne d’Aragó, qui havem reebudes

260 Notes to Pages 99–102

diverses gràcies, e multiplicades en nostra vida, de la bondat infinida del nostre Creador, havem pensat e proposat que aquelles hajam o dejam en escrit posar e fer-ne llibre, no pas a jactància nostra ne llaor, mas per tal que els reis, succeïdors nostres, lligent en lo dit llibre, oint que diverses perills e multiplicades guerres de poderosos enemics nostres, per ferma esperança e fe, ab paciència ensems, que havem haüda en la gran bondat e misericòrdia del nostre Creador, havem passats e som-ne estats delliurats ab gran honor e victòria, prenguen eiximpli, que, en llurs tribulacions, deuen esperar e confirar en lo llur Creador, de qui vénen tots béns, victòries e gràcies, e suportar e soferir les dites tribulacions ab gran paciència que fa, segons mossèn sent Jacme en la sua Canònica, la obra acabada e perfeta.” Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1005. 25. For a summary of the Llibre, see Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 1: 48–53, and Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, 1: 483–85. 26. Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, 1.1, in Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 1: 136, and Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1006. 27. Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, 1.2, in Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 1: 138, and Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1007. 28. Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, 3.1, in Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 1: 226, and Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1037. 29. Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, 3.1, in Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 1: 226, and Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1037 (emphasis mine). 30. Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, 3.207–8, in Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 1: 386, and Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1090 (emphasis mine). The historicity of the first sentence in this quotation is confirmed by documental proof. See Albert Lecoy de la Marche, Les relations politiques de la France avec le royaume de Majorque (Paris: Leroux, 1892), 2: 147ff., and Jocelyn N. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250–1516 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–78), 1: 365. For the kingdom of Majorca, see also David Abulafia, A Mediterranean Emporium: The Catalan Kingdom of Majorca (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 31. Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, 4.1, in Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 2: 391, and Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1090–91. 32. Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, 6.1, in Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 2: 492, and Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1123 (emphases mine).

Notes to Pages 103–5 261

33. Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, 6.65, in Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 2: 583–84, and Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1154. On Peter of Castile’s “dismemberments” and his nickname “the Cruel,” see Josep Coroleu’s “Cartas en las cuales don Pedro de Castilla y don Pedro el Ceremonioso recíprocamente se retratan,” La España Regional 3 (1887): 713–22. 34. For a synthesis of the historiographical debate on the authenticity of the appendix, see Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1225. 35. “Llibre en què es contenen tots los grands fets qui són entrevinguts en nostra casa, dins lo temps de la nostra vida, començant-los a nostra nativitat” (Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, Prologue, 6, in Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 1: 132). 36. “L’altre capitol, que parla de la rebellió del jutge d’Arborea, tenim per bo e que y sia feta mencio de tos los fets, jassia.n i haia hauts de gran minva nostra, car rao es que s.i contenen les provisions que nos hi faem, e si Deus volia noure a nos e valer al jutge, per aço no romania nos no fossem diligents en los fets, e nostres successors poran veure nostra diligencia.” Rubió, Documents, 1: 263–64, 8 August 1375. 37. For the episode of the bell and the torture of condemned men, see Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, 4.60, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1109; for the order of execution, in which the king re­ quested the greatest discretion from the officer, see Rubio “Estudi sobre l’elaboració,” 527; for his stepbrother’s execution, Riquer, Historia de la literatura catalana, 1: 496. 38. Coll, Historiografia, 428–30; for the Dietaris of early modern Catalonia, see James Amelang, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 39. Cingolani, La memòria dels reis, 253–54. 40. For instance, Peter describes the popular revolt in Valencia as “formigues [que] venien e corrien” (“ants that came and ran around”) (Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, 4.42, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1103). Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 2: 428. 41. Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, Introduction, 1: 3. 42. Jerónimo Zurita, Anales de la corona de Aragón (Saragossa: Institución Fernando el Católico, 1967), 10: 39. For information on Zurita’s chronicle, see Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, Introduction, 1: 3; for a commentary on cynicism, see Josep Maria Salrach and Joan-Pau Rubiés,

262 Notes to Pages 106–7

“Entorn de la mentalitat i la ideologia del bloc de poder feudal a través de la historiografia medieval fins a les quatre grans cròniques,” in La formació i l’expansió del feudalisme català, ed. Jaume Portella (Girona: Ajuntament de Girona, 1985), 498–99. 43. “Bajo de estatura, de genio violento y harto colérico; pero atento, político, curioso y valiente, de ideas caballerescas, muy dado a las letras, gran astrólogo y alquimista, y uno de los mejores trovadores del siglo.” Próspero de Bofarull y Mascaró, Los condes de Barcelona vindicados (Barcelona: Imprenta de J. Oliveres y Monmany, 1836), 2: 271. 44. Antoni Rubió i Lluch, “La cultura catalana en el regnat de Pere III,” Estudis Universitaris Catalans 8 (1914): 219–45; David Romano, “Pere el Cerimoniós i la cultura científica,” L’Avenç 41 (1981): 26–30. See also Jose María Millàs Vallicrosa, Las tablas astronómicas del rey don Pedro el Ceremonioso (Barcelona: CSIC, 1962). 45. Abadal, “Pedro el Ceremonioso,” 14: ix. 46. Ferran Soldevila, El Compromís de Casp (Barcelona: Dalmau, 1965). 47. Alan Ryder, The Kingdom of Naples under Alfonso the Magnanimous: The Making of a Modern State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). 48. Some historians have recognized this creative dimension of the fourteenth-century European monarchies, rather than its (supposed) decadent activity: Samantha Kelly, The New Solomon: Robert of Naples (1309–1343) and Fourteenth-Century Kingship (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 4; Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years War: England and France at War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 95; Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270–1380 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 17–18. More specifically, they have stressed the cultural and political power of the late medieval court. See Norbert Elias, The Court Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983); James H. Burns, Lordship, Kingship and Empire: The Idea of Monarchy, 1400–1525 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Trevor Dean, “The Courts,” in The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300–1600, ed. Julius Kirschner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 136–51; Peter Arnade, Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Vale, Princely Court.

Notes to Pages 111–12 263 chapter six

1. Stephen Greenblatt, introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, ed. Greenblatt (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 6. 2. Ralf Cohen, “History and Genre,” New Literary History 17 (1986): 214–16. 3. Francis Cairns, Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1972), 6–7. 4. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 247. 5. Spiegel summarizes these two positions regarding the existence of medieval genres in these terms: “Efforts to rehabilitate genre as a concept governing the production of history throughout the medieval period [she quotes the collection edited by Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis, Historiography in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2003)], have been, in my view, equally unsuccessful in sustaining generic differences beyond the labels used to designate specific works. That is, while medieval texts themselves would appear to deploy genre as a useful category for discriminating between different forms of historiography, the actual texts, as in the case of the works studied here, fail to maintain these distinctions in practice.” Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Introduction, in Representations of History: Art, History, Music, ed. Robert Maxwell (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 209 n. 7. 6. Some literary scholars have emphasized this genre’s epistemological value: Cohen, “History and Genre,” 210–11; Hans-Robert Jauss, “Littérature médiévale et théorie des genres,” Poetique 1 (1970): 79–101; Elizabeth Bruss, Autobiographical Acts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 4; Heather Dubrow, Genre (London: Methuen, 1982), 135; Carolyn R. Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151–67. About the notion of “conventions for interpretation,” and the idea that the study of genre has to be based on the study of convention, see Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 243–51, and Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), chap. 5. 7. Jauss, “Littérature médiévale et théorie des genres,” 89, Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 3–28.

264 Notes to Pages 112–15

8. For a description of these movements, see Robert Dale Parker, How to Interpret Literature: Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), and Ernst Breisach, On the Future of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 9. For a distinction between the different historical genres in the Middle Ages and the relative arbitrariness of these classifications, see Bernard Guenée, “Histoires, Annales, chroniques. Essai sur les genres historiques au Moyen Âge,” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 28 (1973): 997–1016. It is important to note here that although there is abundant criticism on medieval literary genres, few studies focus specifically on historiographical genres. 10. David Baguley, “Genre and ‘Genericity’: Recent Advances in French Genre Theory,” in Poetics of the Text: Essays to Celebrate Twenty Years of the Neo-Formalist Circle, ed. Joe Andrew (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 5–6. See also Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “Du texte au genre. Notes sur la problématique générique,” Poetique 53 (1983): 3–18, and the collective work Théorie des genres, ed. Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 1986). 11. Mark Salber Phillips, “Histories, Micro- and Literary: Problems of Genre and Distance,” New Literary History 34 (2003): 211–29; Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Cohen, “History and Genre,” 203–18. 12. Stefano M. Cingolani, Els Annals de la família rivipullense i les genealogies de Pallars-Ribagorça (forthcoming). 13. For the general evolution of this historical genre, see Michael McCormick, Les Annales du haut Moyen Âge (Turnhout: Brepols, 1975); Rosamond McKitterick, “Political Ideology in Carolingian Historiography,” in The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See also Thomas N. Bisson, “Unheroed Pasts: History and Commemoration in South Frankland before the Albigensian Crusades,” Speculum 65 (1990): 287–89. 14. Lucien Barrau-Dihigo and Josep Massó Torrents, eds., Cròniques catalanes. II. Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1925) (hereafter, Barrau, Cròniques catalanes), 6. For the centrality of this event in the history of Barcelona and Catalonia and its historiographical effects, see Miquel Coll i Alentorn, “La

Notes to Pages 115–16 265

crisi del 985,” in Historiografia (Barcelona: Curial, 1991), 16–17; Ferran Valls i Taberner, “Els inicis de la historiografía catalana,” in Matisos d’història i de llegenda (Zaragoza: Arxiu de la Biblioteca Ferran Valls i Taberner, 1991), 113; Michel Zimmermann, “La prise de Barcelona par al-Mansûr et la naissance de l’historiographie catalane,” in L’historiographie en Occident du Ve au XVe siècle, Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 87 (1980): 191–218; Bisson, “Unheroed Pasts,” 280; Miquel Coll i Alentorn, “La Crònica de Sant Pere de les Puel.les,” in I Col.loqui d’història del Monaquisme Català (Santes Creus: Ajuntament, 1966), 35–50; José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, “Iluminaciones sobre el pasado de Barcelona,” in En las costas del Mediterráneo Occidental, ed. David Abulafia and Blanca Garí (Barcelona: Omega, 1997), 63–93 (especially 63); Paul Freedman, “Symbolic Interpretations of the Events of 985–988,” in Symposium internacional sobre els orígens de Catalunya (segles VIII–XI) (Barcelona: Comissió del Mil.lenari de Catalunya, 1991), 1: 117–29; Manuel Rovira i Solà, “Notes documentals sobre alguns efectes de la presa de Barcelona per al’Mansur,” Acta Historica et Archaeologica Mediaevalia 1 (1980): 31–53; Joan Vernet, “La Barcelona del segle X, segons les fonts àrabs coetànies,” in Symposium Internacional, 2: 201–8. 15. R. W. Southern, “Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing, 1: The Classical Tradition from Einhard to Geoffrey of Monmouth,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 20 (1970): 180. 16. Robert F. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 37, and Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 5–21. 17. The text includes references to scriptural events (“Anno 33. Christus passus est et resurrexit”), the Roman Empire (“Anno 81. Claudius regnat”; “Anno 82. Titus regnat”), Roman-Hispanic society (“Anno 602. Obitus sancti Isidori episcopi Ispalensis”), Islamic-Hispanic society (“Anno 707. Sema rex cum sarracenis in Hispania ingressus est”), the Carolingian empire (“Anno 767. Obitus Karoli imperatoris”), the liberation of Girona and Barcelona from the Moors (“Anno 785. Gerundam civitatem homines tradiderun regni Karolo,” “Anno 801. Introivit Ludovicus in Barchinona”); and Count Wilfred (“Anno 888. Prima dedicatio nostri caenobii sub Dagino abbate a Gifredo comitem”).

266 Notes to Pages 117–19

All the references are taken from the still unpublished transcription “Annals de Ripoll I, anys 27–1191,” by Stefano M. Cingolani. 18. Sarah Foot, “Finding the Meaning of Form: Narrative in Annals and Chroniclers,” in Writing Medieval History, ed. Nancy Partner (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005), 92 and 102. On medieval AngloSaxon annals, see also Cicely Clark, “The Narrative Mode of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle before the Conquest,” in England before the Conquest, ed. Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 215–21; Yitzhak Hen, “The Annals of Metz and the Merovingian Past,” in Uses of the Past, 175–90; and Janet Nelson, “The Annals of St-Bertin,” in Charles the Bald: Court and Kingdom, ed. Margaret T. Gibson and Janet L. Nelson (London: Variorum, 1990), 23–40. 19. Some germinal studies on early and premodern cultures by anthropologists have been very useful for my understanding of some of the concepts I develop in this chapter. See Edward E. Pritchard, The Nuer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940); John Middleton and Derek Tait, Tribes without Rulers (London: Routledge, 1958); Jack Goody, Succession to High Office (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); Meyer Fortes, Kinship and the Social Order (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). 20. William H. Sewell Jr., “Cultural Systems and History: From Synchrony to Transformation,” in The Fate of Culture: Geertz and Beyond, ed. Sherry B. Ortner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 38–39. See also Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 21. Ronald G. Suny, “Back and Beyond: Reversing the Cultural Turn?” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 1498. 22. Pierre Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” in State/Culture: State–Formation after the Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 57. 23. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 142–43. 24. Georges Duby analyzed the social implications of the continuity of lineages in “Structures de parenté et noblesse dans la France du Nord aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” and “Remarques sur la littérature généalogique en France aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” both in Duby, Hommes et structures

Notes to Pages 120–21 267

du Moyen Âge (Paris: Mouton, 1973). Léopold Genicot linked communities of blood with territorial possessions in Les Généalogies (Turnhout: Brepols, 1975), and in “Princes territoriaux et sang carolingien. La Genealogia comitum Buloniensium,” in Genicot, Études sur les principautés lotharingiennes (Louvain: Université de Louvain, 1975), 217–306. Bernard Guenée emphasized the political consequences of the process of legitimization of the genealogies in “Lés généalogies entre l’histoire et la politique: la fierté d’être capétien, en France, au Moyen Age,” Annales, Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 33 (1978): 450–77. 25. Anita Guerreau-Jalabert, “Sur les structures de parenté dans l’Europe médiévale,” Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 6 (1981): 1032. 26. R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), and Bloch, “Genealogy as a Medieval Mental Structure and Textual Form,” in La littérature historiographique des origines à 1500, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Ursula Link-Heer, and Peter-Michael Spangenberg (Heidelberg: Winter, 1986), 155. 27. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Genealogy: Form and Function in Medieval Historiography,” in Past as Text, 106. 28. Zrinka Stahuljak, Bloodless Genealogies of the French Middle Ages: Translation, Kinship, and Metaphor (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 1–2. 29. Valerio Valeri, “Constitutive History: Genealogy and Narrative in the Legitimation of Hawaiian Kingship,” in Culture Through Time: Anthropological Approaches, ed. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 174. 30. Romila Thapar, “Genealogy as a Source of Social History,” in Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1978), 327. 31. Bloch, Etymologies, 84. For the dynastic self-consciousness of the counts of Barcelona and kings of Aragon, see Stefano M. Cingolani, “Seguir les vestígies dels antecessors. Llinatge, reialesa i historiografia a Catalunya des de Ramon Berenguer IV a Pere II (1131–1285),” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 36 (2006): 201–40. 32. David Dumville, “Kingship, Genealogies and Regnal Lists,” in Early Medieval Kingship, ed. Peter H. Sawyer and Ian N. Woods (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1977), 72–104, and Gabrielle M. Spiegel,

268 Notes to Pages 121–23

The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis: A Survey (Brookline, MA: Classical Folia Editions, 1978). Notably, the association between political power and ecclesiastical institutions for the custody and recreation of historical tradition via genealogies exists not only in Western Christian traditions but also in Asian traditions. See, for example, for Buddhist contexts, Romila Thapar, “The Tradition of Historical Writing in Early India,” Ancient Indian Social History, 268–93. 33. José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, “Reminiscencia y conmemoración: el proceder de la literatura genealógica,” La memoria de los feudales (Barcelona: Argot, 1984), 219. See also Constance B. Bouchard, Those of My Blood: Constructing Noble Families in Medieval France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 34. Jacques Le Goff, “Au Moyen Âge: Temps de l’Église et temps du marchand,” in Pour un autre Moyen Âge. Temps, travail et culture en Occident (Paris: Gallimard, 1977): 46–65, and Le Goff, “Le temps du travail dans la crise du XIVe siècle: du temps médiéval au temps moderne,” Le Moyen Âge 69 (1963): 597–613. See also Jaume Aurell, “Merchants’ Attitudes to Work in the Barcelona of the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 27 (2001): 197–218. 35. Romila Thapar, “Society and Historical Consciousness: The Itihasa-purana Tradition,” Interpreting Early India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 171. 36. Guenée, “Les généalogies,” 450–477; Spiegel, “Genealogy,” 43–53. See also Amy G. Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), and Raluca L. Radulescu and Edward D. Kennedy, eds., Broken Lines: Genealogical Literature in Medieval Britain and France (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). 37. Considering the genealogies’ political potential, social projection, and ability to promote identity, it is not surprising that this genre has been used in very different cultures and times. Scholars have analyzed the function of historical genealogies in societies and cultures as diverse as ancient India, modern Hawaii, and contemporary Native America. See Romila Thapar, “Genealogical Patterns as Perceptions of the Past,” Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 709–53; Valeri, “Constitutive History”; Davida Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1971); Samuel M. Kamakau, The Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii (Honolulu: Kamehameha

Notes to Pages 123–25 269

Schools Press, 1961), 243; Karen I. Blu, The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001). 38. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 15. 39. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, 26 (1989): 21, and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Medieval Canon Formation and the Rise of Royal Historiography in Old French Prose,” in Past as Text, 195–212. 40. Miquel Coll i Alentorn considers the publication of the Història de Poblet in 1746 by Jaume Finestres a turning point in the historiographical canon in Catalonia (Coll, Historiografia, 54). 41. For the making of the historical imaginaire in modern Catalonia, see Jaume Aurell, “La formación del imaginario histórico del nacionalismo catalán, de la Renaixença al Noucentisme (1830–1930),” Historia Contemporánea 16 (2001): 257–88, and Josep Fontana, “Els historiadors romàntics,” L’Avenç 200 (1996): 10–11. 42. Josep M. Muñoz, Jaume Vicens i Vives. Una biografia intel.lectual (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1997), 256–61. 43. Miquel Coll i Alentorn, “Guifré el Pelós en la historiografia i la llegenda,” in Llegendari (Barcelona: Curial, 1993), 51. 44. Ramon d’Abadal, Dels visigots als catalans (Barcelona, Edicions 62, 1986), 1: 323. 45. Abadal, “Un gran comte de Barcelona preterit,” Dels visigots, 1: 323–62. 46. The concept of re-presentación­ in the context of medieval historiography is explained by Ruiz-Domènec, La memoria de los feudales, 219–39. 47. M. Fortes, “The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups,” American Anthropologist 55 (1953): 17–41. 48. Andrew W. Lewis, Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies in Familial Order and the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). 49. Bernd Schneidmüller, “Constructing the Past by Means of the Present: Historiographical Foundation of Medieval Institutions, Dynasties, Peoples, and Communities,” in Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography, ed. Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J. Geary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 176.

270 Notes to Pages 125 –30

50. For the successive versions of the Gesta Comitum, see Cingolani, “Seguir les vestígies,” 208. 51. Jean Viard, ed., Les Grandes Chroniques de France, 10 vols. (Paris, 1920–53), 5: 1–2; Anne D. Hedeman, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the Grandes Chroniques de France, 1274–1422 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 95–105. 52. Guenée, “Lés généalogies,” 357–462. 53. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 66. 54. Lucien Barrau-Dihigo and Josep Massó Torrents’s edition of the Gesta Comitum (Barrau, Cròniques catalanes) contains two Catalan versions that differ from the original, which is called “primitive” and written in Latin. It is particularly interesting to compare the “primitive” version with the Catalan translation, done years later, to which different passages had been added over time. 55. Spiegel, Past as Text, 104. 56. Antonia Grandsen, Historical Writing in England, c. 550–c. 1307 (London: Routledge, 1974). 57. Some of these differences between the two texts are explained in Miquel Coll i Alentorn, “La historiografia de Catalunya en el període primitiu,” Estudis Romànics 3 (1951–52): 139–96. 58. This distinction between monastic and courtly origins is not always highlighted in medieval historiography: for instance, the Grandes Chroniques were written at the abbey of Saint-Denis. 59. Phillips, “Histories, Micro- and Literary,” 213–14. 60. For this legend and its political and ideological scope, see the chapter “L’honneur sauvé de l’impératrice,” in Martin Aurell, Les noces du Comte. Mariage et pouvoir en Catalogne (785–1213) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995), 513–20. 61. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “The Reditus Regni ad Stirpem Karoli Magni. A New Look,” French Historical Studies 7 (1971): 145–46. For a different perspective, see Andrew W. Lewis, “Dynastic Structures and Capetian Throne Right: The Views of Giles of Paris,” Traditio 33 (1977): 225–52, and Elisabeth Brown, “La notion de la légitimité et la prophétie à la cour de Philippe-Auguste,” in La France de PhilippeAuguste: le temps des mutations, ed. Robert-Henri Bautier (Paris, Editions du CNRS, 1982), 77–117. 62. Hedeman, Royal Image, 99.

Notes to Pages 131–35 271

63. James I, Llibre dels fets, chap. 47. 64. See the chapter “Ruta de les espècies i ruta de les illes,” in Mario del Treppo, Els mercaders catalans i l’expansió de la corona catalanoaragonesa (Barcelona: Curial, 1976), 15–21; Jaume Vicens Vives, Notícia de Catalunya (Barcelona: Teide, 1982), 122–24. 65. Bisson, “Unheroed Pasts,” 308, and Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dans l’Occident médiéval (París: Aubier Montaigne, 1980), 337. chapter seven

1. For general perspectives on autobiography, see Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975); James Olney, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); and Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). For the shifting nature of the genre in different historical and cultural contexts, see Elizabeth Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), and William C. Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). For a synthesis of the evolution of critical perspectives on the genre, see G. Thomas Couser, “Authority,” A/b: Auto/biography Studies 10, no. 1 (1995): 34–39. 2. Brian Stock, “Reading, Writing, and the Self: Petrarch and His Forerunners,” New Literary History 26, no. 4 (1995): 717. 3. In this sense, and after considering the presence of the autobiographical “I” and “we” in Catalan historical literature and their analysis, I agree with the theories proposed by James Amelang in The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), and Meredith Anne Skura in Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), which note the presence of autobiographical practice in early modern Europe. See also the introduction to Eakin’s Touching the World. 4. Lejeune, Le pacte, 14. See also Jean Starobinski, “Le style de l’autobiographie,” Poetique 3 (1970) : 257–65. 5. Pioneering studies on autobiography in the Middle Ages include: Leo Spitzer, “Notes on the Poetic and Empirical “I” in Medieval Authors,” Traditio 4 (1946): 414–22; Ernst R. Curtius, “Mention of the

272 Notes to Page 135

Author’s Name in Medieval Literature,” in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Pantheon, 1953); and Paul Lehman, “Autobiographies in the Middle Ages,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 3 (1953): 41–52. Georg Misch published his five-volume work on the subject in the 1950s and 1960s: Geschichte der Autobiographie (Frankfurt/Main: G. Schulte-Bulmke, 1955–67). He writes about James I in vol. 4, pt. 1, pp. 312–428. The debate continued with Paul Zumthor’s, “Autobiographie au Moyen Age?” in Langue, texte, énigme (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 165–80, who concludes that the degree of individuality required by the first-person pronoun in medieval texts never attains the level we have come to expect of true (contemporary?) autobiography. Taking into account Collin Morris’s ideas in The Discovery of the Individual (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 79–86, Caroline W. Bynum emphasizes the importance of group identities in defining the self in the twelfth century as opposed to a “renaissance” or a “discovery of the individual.” See her “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” in Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 82–109. More inclined to the existence of autobiography in the Middle Ages are Evelyn B. Vitz, “Type et individu dans l’autobiographie médiéval,” Poétique 24 (1975): 426–45; John F. Benton, “Consciousness of Self and Perceptions of Individuality,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 263–95; Karl Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Brian Stock, “The Self and Literary Experience in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” New Literary History 25 (1994): 839–52; Kevin Brownlee, “Discourse of the Self: Christine de Pizan and the Romance of the Rose,” in Rethinking the “Romance of the Rose”: Text, Image, Reception, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 234–261; Burt Kimmelman, The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (New York: Peter Lang, 1999); Jean-Claude Schmitt, La conversion d’Hermann le Juif. Autobiographie, histoire et fiction (Paris: Seuil, 2003); Michel Zink, The Invention of Literary Subjectivity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 157–241; and Jay Rubenstein, “Biography and Autobiography in the Middle Ages,”

Notes to Pages 135–37 273

in Writing Medieval History, ed. Nancy Partner (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005), 22–41. 6. With the narration of his death, King James and his collaborators fill the gap present in any autobiographical narration: “To point to an obvious lacuna, it cannot include the subject’s death, which provides the conventional closure, historical as well as narrative, of biography” (Couser, “Authority,” 40). 7. See the classic theoretical reflection on these concepts in MarieDominique Chenu, “Auctor, actor, autor,” Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 3 (1927): 81–86. On this subject, see also Alastair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Latter Middle Ages (London: Scholar Press, 1984); La notion d’autorité au Moyen Âge: Islam, Byzance, Occident, ed. George Makdisi, Dominique Sourdel, and Janine Sourdel-Thomine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982); Auctor et auctoritas: invention et conformisme dans l’écriture médiévale, ed. Michel Zimmermann (Paris: École des Chartes, 2001). 8. For instance, see Stefano Asperti, “Indagini sul Llibre dels feyts di Jaume I: dell’originale all’arquetipo,” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 33 (1982): 269–82; Asperti, “La tradizione manoscritta del Llibre dels feyts,” Romanica Vulgaria 7 (1984): 107–67; Stefano Cingolani, “Jo Ramon Muntaner. Consideracions sobre el paper de l’autobiografia en els historiadors de llengua vulgar,” Estudis de llengua i literatura catalanes 11 (1985): 95–125 (see his opinion on the Llibre dels fets’s autobiographical dimension on pp. 115–16); Jordi Bruguera, “La Crònica de Jaume I,” Arxiu de textos catalans antics 12 (1993): 409–18. 9. Josep M. Pujol, “Introducció,” in Jaume I. Llibre dels fets, versió a cura de Josep M. Pujol (Barcelona: Teide, 1994), 4. 10. Zink, Invention, 190. 11. Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 7. For ideas on the relationship between history, literature, and autobiography, see Amelang, Flight of Icarus, 7; Paul John Eakin, introduction to American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 6; Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1–32, and Jaume Aurell, “Autobiography as Unconventional History: Constructing the Author,” Rethinking History 10 (2006): 433–49.

274 Notes to Pages 137–41

12. Spengemann, Forms of Autobiography, 60. For his notion and examples of “historical autobiography,” see pp. 34–61. 13. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush, eds., The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and David C. Rubin, ed., Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 14. James Olney, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment,” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13. 15. Schmitt, La conversion, 65. 16. In this context, some parallels can be drawn between the Catalan Grans Cròniques and French Grandes Chroniques. For the influence of the Grandes Chroniques on French historiography, see the Epilogue of Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 315–19; for the influence of the Grans Cròniques on the Catalan tradition, see Ferran Soldevila, Introducció, in Les Quatre Grans Cròniques: Jaume I, Bernat Desclot, Ramon Muntaner, Pere III., ed. Soldevila (Barcelona: Selecta, 1971), 3–5. 17. Zink, Invention, 185. For the evolution of the function of the medieval author and the author’s role in the texts, see the chapter “The Figure of the Author in the Thirteenth-Century,” in Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing of Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 39–45, and David F. Hult, “The Medieval Author,” in Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First Roman de la Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 25–64. 18. Quoted and translated in Zink, Invention, 187–88. 19. Ibid., 218. See his comments on these chronicles and their nature as memoirs on pp. 187–218. 20. Llibre dels fets del rei en Jaume, ed. Jordi Bruguera (Barcelona: Barcino, 1991), 2: 75–78, especially chap. 64. This has also been noted by Stefano Asperti, “Il re e la storia: Proposte per una nova lettura del Libre dels feys di Jaume I,” Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 3 (1984): 276. 21. For this episode, see François Delpech, Histoire et légende. Essai sur la genèse d’un thème épique aragonais (Paris: Publications de la

Notes to Pages 141–44 275

Sorbonne), 1993, and the chapter “Mémoire louée,” in Martin Aurell, Les noces du Comte. Mariage et pouvoir en Catalogne (785–1213) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995), 459–63. 22. For the idea of “collective national memory,” see Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). For the definition of “canon” applied to medieval historiography, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 195–212 23. Zink, Invention, 241. 24. Others prefer to simply call it “memoirs” (Albert G. Hauf, “Les cròniques catalanes medievals. Notes entorn la seva intencionalitat,” in Història de la historiografia catalana, ed. Albert Balcells (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2004), 59) and deny any historical content in Muntaner’s text: Cingolani, “Jo Ramon Muntaner,” 95–121, and Alberto Varvaro, “Il testo storiografico come opera letteraria: Ramon Muntaner,” in Symposium in honorem prof. M. de Riquer (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1984), 403–15. 25. Zink, Invention, 175. Sefano M. Cingolani argues that Muntaner’s condition as witness is precisely what makes his narration “dialogic” rather than “monologic” (“Jo Ramon Muntaner,” 97). 26. “Per què jo no us parle res d’afers que a mi esdevenguessen, si no fossen fets qui es feessen per senyors” (Muntaner, Crònica, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 897). 27. Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 69. 28. Susanna Egan, Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 7. 29. Rocío G. Davis, “Mediating Historical Memory in Asian/American Family Memoirs: K. Connie Kang’s Home Was the Land of Morning Calm and Duong Van Mai Elliott’s The Sacred Willow,” Biography 30, no. 4 (2007): 493. 30. “E per ço com, entre els altres hòmens del món, jo Ramon Muntaner, nadiu de la vila de Peralada e ciutadan de València, és raó que faça moltes gràcies a nostre senyor ver Déu e a la Verge madona Santa Maria e a tota la cort celestial, de la gràcia e de la mercè que m’ha feita: de molts perills que m’ha gitats he escapat: així, de trenta-dues batalles entre de mar e de terra en què són estat, e de moltes presons e tuments qui en ma persona són estats donats en les guerres on jo són

276 Notes to Pages 144–45

estat, e per moltes persecucions que he haüdes, així en riquees com en altres maneres, segons que avant porets entendre en los fets qui en mon temps son estats. E segurament que jo m’estegra volenters de recontar aquestes coses.” Muntaner, Crònica, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 667. 31. For Castilian and Portugese historiography, see Diego Catalan, De Alfonso X al Conde de Barcelós: Cuatro estudios sobre el nacimiento de la historiografía romance en Castilla y Portugal (Madrid: Gredos, 1962). In fact, the late thirteenth-century Castilian king-historian Alfonse X trusted written records over their oral versions: “Et algunos dizen en sus cantares et en sus fablas de gesta que conquirió Carlos en Espanna muchas çipdades et muchos castiellos, et que ovo y muchas lides con moros, et que desenbargó et abrió el camino desde Alemannia fasta Sanctiago. Mas en verdat esto non podria ser, . . . onde mas debe omne creer a lo que semeia con guisa et con razon de que falla escritos et recabdos, que non a las fablas de los que cuentan lo que non saben.” (Some say in their songs and the chansons de geste that Charles conquered many cities and castles in Spain, and that there were numerous skirmishes against the Muslims, and that he opened the way from Germany to Santiago. But this cannot be true, and we must believe what the writings argue, not those fables that recount what they don’t know.) Alfonso el Sabio, Primera Crónica General de España, ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal (Madrid: Gredos, 2008), chap. 623. For English historiography, see Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London: Hambledon, 2004), Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England (London: Routledge, 1974–82), and, more specifically for the fourteenth century, John Taylor, English Historical Literature in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), and Robert A. Albano, Middle English Historiography (New York: Peter Lang, 1993). 32. “E per ço reconte aquestes coses que cascun sàpia que jo viu lo dit senyor rei e que pusc dir ço que d’ell viu e aconseguí, que d’àls jo no em vull entremetre sinó de ço que en mon temps s’és fet” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 2, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 669). 33. “E puis d’aquí avant no m’entremetré d’ells, que si res ne deïa poria fallir, així com aquell qui de llurs fets d’aquí avant no sap res de veritat” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 238, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 881).

Notes to Pages 145–48 277

34. Josep Miquel Sobré, L’èpica de la realitat. L’escriptura de Ramon Muntaner i Bernat Desclot (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1978), 58, and Thomas R. Hart, “The Author’s Voice in the Lusiads,” Hispanic Review 44 (1976): 45–55. 35. William W. Ryding also argues that lengthening the story was common practice among medieval chroniclers: see Structure in Medieval Narrative (Paris: Mouton, 1971), 66ff. 36. Zumthor, “Autobiographie au Moyen Age?” 165. 37. For the concept of “eyewitness history,” see Peter Ainsworth, “Contemporary and ‘Eyewitness’ History,” in Historiography in the Middle Ages, ed. Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 249–76, and Peter Damian-Grint, The New Historians of the TwelfthCentury Renaissance: Inventing Vernacular Authority (Oxford: Woodbridge, 1999). 38. Peter F. Dembowski, La “Chronique” de Robert de Clari. Étude de la langue et du style (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 9; Jeanette M. Beer, “Villehardouin and the Oral Narrative,” Studies in Philology 67 (1970): 267–77. 39. Zink, Invention, 200. 40. Ibid., 218. 41. Manuel de Montoliu, Les quatre grans cròniques (Barcelona: Alpha, 1959), 88, and Cingolani, “Jo Ramon Muntaner,” 106–7. 42. Desclot, Crònica, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 405. 43. Cingolani, “Jo Ramon Muntaner,” 98–99. 44. The problems posed by these notions in medieval historiography and literature and the difference between the writer (a real person) and the author (a textual creation) are discussed by Sophie Marnette, Narrateur et points de vue dans la littérature française médiévale: Une approche linguistique (Bern: Lang, 1998), 18–19 and 216–20. In an “impersonal” narrative, Marnette posits, the I is mostly absent from the text but latent since the narrative entity can sometimes express certain opinions and often presents the events from a perspective that is distinct from the characters’ points of view (17–22). 45. Sophie Marnette, “The Experiencing Self and the Narrating Self in Medieval French Chronicles,” in The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature, ed. Virginie Greene (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 117–36.

278 Notes to Pages 149–52

46. Ibid., 118. See also Jeanette M. Beer, Narrative Conventions of Truth in the Middle Ages (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1981). 47. Michel Zink, “Time and Representation of the Self in Thirteenth-Century French Poetry,” Poetics Today 5, no. 3 (1984): 611. See also Brownlee, “Discourse of the Self,” 245–46. 48. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 222, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 863. 49. “Petrus etc. Venerabili et dilecto abbati monasterii Populeti, salutem et dilectionem. Miramur de vobis et merito quare librum pergameneum quem ut nobis dixistis ad opus vestri rescribi facere debebatis et sumi ex quodam alio papireo libro nostro facto scilicet gestis dive recordacionis domini Jacobi Regis Aragonum abavi nostri, nobis tamdiu mittere tardavistis. Quare vos rogamus quod si eum rescribi fecistis, alio ipsum rescribi celeriter faciendo, ad nos librum pergameneum supradictum protinus per latorem presencium transmittatis” (Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, R. 1059, fol. 52). For this document, see Antoni Rubió i Lluch, Documents per l’història de la cultura catalana mig-eval (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1908–21), 1: 128; Chronicle. Pere III of Catalonia (Pedro IV of Aragon), trans. Mary Hillgarth with introduction and notes by Jocelyn N. Hillgarth (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 1: 83; and Luciano José Vianna, “La utilització del passat en el present: El Ceremoniós i el Manuscrit de Poblet” (unpublished). This Poblet manuscript is preserved today (Biblioteca Universitaria of Barcelona, MS 1) and reproduced in facsimile with an introduction by Martí de Riquer and a codicological description by Rosalia Guilleumas, Llibre dels feyts del rey En Jacme (Barcelona: Barcino, 1972). 50. Ramon d’Abadal, “Pedro el Ceremonioso y los comienzos de la decadencia política de Cataluña,” in Historia de España, ed. Ramon Menendez Pidal (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1964), 14: cxi, and also Montoliu, Les quatre grans cròniques, 119; Martí de Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana (Barcelona: Ariel, 1964), 1: 489; Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 1: 62–64; Alberto Boscolo, “I cronisti catalano-aragonesi e la storia italiana del basso Medioevo,” in Nuove questioni di storia medioevale (Milan: Giuffrè, 1964), 31; Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, “Literatura catalana,” in Historia general de las literaturas hispánicas, ed. Guillermo Díaz-Plaja (Barcelona: Barna, 1949), 1: 710. 51. John Sturrock, “The New Model Autobiographer,” New Literary History 9, no. 1 (1977): 51–63, and Couser, “Authority,” 35–36.

Notes to Pages 153–57 279

52. Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” 87–88. chapter eight

1. I refer specially to the proliferation of studies on modern theories of authorship and their connection to (literary, cultural, and political) authority. See Stephen Donovan, Danuta Fjellestad, and Rolf Lundén, eds., Authority Matters: Rethinking the Theory and Practice of Authorship(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008); Marina S. Brownlee and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, eds., Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); G. Thomas Couser, “Authority,” a/b: Auto/biography Studies 10, no. 1 (1995): 34–49. For medieval theories of authorship, see J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scholar Press, 1988), and David F. Hult, “The Medieval Author,” in SelfFulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First Roman de la Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 25–64. 2. Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” in Barthes, Image-MusicText (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–48, and Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 101–20. 3. Ernst Breisach, On the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and Its Aftermath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 63. 4. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 65 (1990): 62. See also Donald W. Foster’s controversial article, “Commentary: In the Name of the Author,” New Literary History 33 (2002): 375–96. 5. For the concept of “authorial intention,” see Quentin Skinner, “Motives, Intentions, and the Interpretation of the Texts,” New Literary History 3 (1972): 393–408; Anthony Savile, “The Place of Intention in the Concept of Art,” in Aesthetics, ed. Harold Osborne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 158–76; and Stein Hangom Olsen, “Authorial Intention,” British Journal of Aesthetics 13 (1973): 219–31. 6. On the concept of “imagined authors” and the construction of the authorship by scribes, readers, and poetic imitators of a work rather than its original author, see Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

280 Notes to Pages 157–59

7. On the concept of “authorial authority” and ways to introduce a character who is also an author, see Julia Ardley, “Cover Story: Authorial Authority in the Interwar roman du roman,” in Auctoritas: Authorship and Authority, ed. Catherine Emerson, Edward A. O’Brien, and Laurent Semichon (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2001), 125–37. 8. Jean-Claude Schmitt, La conversion d’Hermann le Juif. Autobiographie, histoire et fiction (Paris: Seuil, 2003), 235. 9. Vita Caroli Quarti. Die Autobiographie Karls IV, ed. Eugen Hillenbrand (Stuttgart: Fleischhauer & Spohn, 1979). I thank Jean-Claude Schmitt and Pierre Monnet for this information and for details about this chronicle that I provide in the text. 10. Peter Damian-Grint, The New Historians of the TwelfthCentury Renaissance: Inventing Vernacular Authority (Oxford: Woodbridge, 1999), 151ff. On my comment on the modern use of footnotes, see Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 11. Josep M. Pujol, “Cultura eclesiàstica o competència retòrica? El llatí, la Bíblia i el rei En Jaume,” Estudis Romànics 23 (2004): 147–71. 12. On the deployment of biblical texts, their cultural meaning and political purposes, see Isabel Las Heras, “Temas y figuras bíblicas en el discurso político de la Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris,” in Els discurso político en la Edad Media. Le discours politique au Moyen Âge, ed. Nilda Guglielmi and Adeline Rucquoi (Buenos Aires & Paris: CNICT & CNRS, 1995), 121–35. 13. Lucien Barrau-Dihigo and Josep Massó Torrents, eds., Cròniques Catalanes. II. Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1925), 22. 14. Ibid., 3. 15. On the monks of Ripoll’s historiographical task, see Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer, “L’escola poètica de Ripoll en els segles X–XIII,” Anuari de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans 1 (1915–20): 3–84 ; Ramon d’Abadal, “La fundació del monestir de Ripoll,” Analecta Montserratensia 9 (1962): 25– 49; Miquel Coll i Alentorn, Llegendari (Barcelone: Curial, 1993), 56–57; and Stefano M. Cingolani, “Nel taller storiografico di Santa Maria di Ripoll,” in Filologia aperta ovvero per amicizia. Scritti offerti a Fabrizio Beggiato, ed. Sabina Marinetti (Perugia: Pliniana, 2009), 71–90. 16. José Luis Villacañas, Jaime I el Conquistador (Madrid: Espasa, 2003), 21.

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17. For the possible influence of Islam on the autobiographical form of the chronicle of James I, see Robert I. Burns, “The King’s Autobiography: The Islamic Connection,” in Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), appendix 1. 18. “Dixiemos nos muchas vezes: el rey faze un libro, non porquél el escriva con sus manos, mas porque compone las razones dél, e las emienda e yegua e enderesça, e muestra la manera de cómo de deven fazer, e desí escrívelas qui él manda, pero dezimos por esta razón que el rey faze el libro. Otrossí quando dezimos: el rey faze un palacio o alguna obra, non es dicho porque lo él fiziesse con sus manos, mas porquel mandó fazer e dio las cosas que fueron mester para ello.” Antonio G. Solalinde, “Intervención de Alfonso X en la redacción de sus obras,” Revista de Filología Española 2 (1915): 286. See also Xavier Renedo i Puig, “Dels fets a les paraules, i de les paraules al Llibre dels fets: observacions sobre la gènesi del Llibre del rei en Jaume,” in Translatar i Transferir. La transmissió dels textos i el saber (1200–1500), ed. Anna Alberni, Lola Badia, and Lluís Cabré (Santa Coloma de Queralt: Edèndum, 2009), 91–120. 19. James I, Llibre, chap. 16, in The Book of Deeds of James I of Aragon: A Translation of the Medieval Catalan Llibre dels Fets, trans. Damian Smith and Helena Buffery (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003) (hereafter Smith, Book of Deeds), 32 : “qui era ab nós quan fayem aquest llibre” (Llibre dels fets del rei en Jaume, ed. Jordi Bruguera [Barcelona: Barcino, 1991], 2: 20). 20. Martí de Riquer, Història de la Literatura catalana (Barcelona: Ariel, 1964), 1: 428–29. 21. Smith, Book of Deeds, 24. 22. Ibid., 223. “E, quan aquest libre és aital, que coses de menuderies no y deu hom metre, lexam-nos de comptar moltes coses que y foren e volem dir les majors, per ço que.l libre no s’haguès molt a alongar; mas de les coses que foren grans e bones, d’aqueles volem tocar e parlar” (Bruguera, Llibre dels fets, 2: 223). 23. Of all the scholars who have analyzed the Llibre dels fets, only Jaume Riera i Sans contradicts this hypothesis: “La personalitat eclesiàstica del redactor del Llibre dels fets,” in Jaime I y su época (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 1982), 3: 575–89. 24. Bruguera, Llibre dels fets, 2: 187. For the metaphor of the king as lord of the swallow, see Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana,

282 Notes to Pages 162–163

1: 419. Interestingly, Donald Kagay, writing about this scene, suggests: “Far from demonstrating his sentimentality . . . this charming vignette showed that victory on the battlefield was ultimately to be subordinated to a set of chivalric and royal certitudes which put protection of the weak above defeat of the strong.” “The Line between Memoir and History: James I of Aragon and the Llibre dels Feyts,” Mediterranean Historical Review 11 (1996): 173. 25. Bruguera, Llibre dels fets, 2: 212. 26. Smith, Book of Deeds, 15. Bruguera, Llibre dels fets, 2: 5: “E quan nostre Seyor Jhesuchrist, que sap totes coses, sabia que la nostra vida s’alongaria tant, que faríem ajustament de bones obres ab la fe que nós havíem, feÿa’ns tanta de gràcie e de merçè, que per peccadors que nós fóssem de peccats mortals ni de venials, no volch que nós preséssem onta.” 27. “Even though it was then January and it was very cold, during the night we tossed and turned on the bed more than a hundred times, from one side to another, and we sweated as if we were in a bath. When we had deliberated for a long time, we went to sleep, from fatigue at the vigil we had kept. But when it was between midnight and dawn, we woke up and returned to our thoughts; and we considered that we must be dealing with evil people, because usually in the entire world there are no people so proud as are knights.” Smith, Book of Deeds, 206; Bruguera, Llibre dels fets, 2: 204. 28. Burns, Muslims, Christians and Jews, 2: 324. 29. Josep M. Pujol, Introducció, in Jaume I. Llibre dels fets, versió a cura de Josep M. Pujol (Barcelona: Teide, 1994), 11–12. 30. “E per tal que sàpien aquells qui hoiran aquest libre que cara cosa fo d’armes ço que feit fo en Mallorques” (“And so that those who hear this book may know what happened at Majorca was a singular deed of arms”) ( James I, Llibre, chap. 69, in Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, 1: 399; Smith, Book of Deeds, 94). 31. “E sempre, lo rei de Castella, fízolo clamar, e vino el comanador e dixo-le denant Nós: -Comanador, muit noz plaz d’ajuda e de servicio que vós fagades al rei d’Aragó, tanto o más que si a nós los fiziésedes, e esto vos pregamos e vos mandamos que vós lo fagades” (Catalan in Roman; Castilian in italics; Provençal is underlined). Quoted by Pujol, “Introducció,” 14. 32. “E el maestre [Guillem de Montredon] levà’ns a Monsó, e esteguem aquí II ayns e mig ” (“And the master took us to Monzón and we

Notes to Pages 163–64 283

remained there for two and a half years”) (Bruguera, Llibre dels fets, 2: 15; Smith, Book of Deeds, 27). 33. Bruguera, Llibre dels Fets, 2: 370–71. 34. Joan d’Escarcela answers the Master of the Temple, half amused and half indignant: “Master, do not concern yourself about my years,” in reference to the age assigned to him, older than he really was (Smith, Book of Deeds, 364). 35. “Seeing that the castle that he had held for his lord was soon to be lost, Don Pedro Gomes, in full armour, with his shield on his arm, his iron helmet on his head, and his sword in his hand, placed himself at the breach, as one who awaits death rather than life. . . . Because of the great amount of dust from the earth . . . he was almost buried up to his knees” (Smith, Book of Deeds, 31). 36. Bruguera, Llibre dels Fets, 2: 21. 37. Ibid., 2: 194: “And as we rode along, Don Fortuny López de Sádaba, who was a good knight . . . came up to us and said: ‘What do you think will happen today?’ And we said: ‘By my faith, today the wheat will be sorted from the bran.’ Then he made as if to embrace us and said that he wished that God might give us good fortune.” Smith, Book of Deeds, 198. 38. Smith, Book of Deeds, 199. The barbuda was a piece of metal mesh meant to protect the beard. Don Fortuny had lost the rest of his harness in a battle narrated earlier in the chronicle. The scene is grotesque, all the more so since mules were used only by women or peaceful folk such as clerics, merchants, or knights errant, and as a beast of burden. 39. Jacqueline T. Miller, Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3. 40. As noted by Virginie Greene, Introduction, in The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature, ed. Greene (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 3. 41. On the concepts of “auctoritas” and “potestas” in the context of medieval culture, see Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 37–54. On these political concepts, also applied to literary texts, see Alvaro D’Ors, “Auctoritas, Ayoentia, Authenticum,” in Parerga Historica (Pamplona: Eunsa, 1997), 143–51.

284 Notes to Pages 165–69

42. See Bernat Desclot. Crònica, ed. Miquel Coll i Alentorn (Barcelona, 1949–51), 5: 71–90 (chap. 159), and 3: 174–79 (chap. 106). 43. This event is narrated in chapter 100, where Desclot introduces a literal document on the rules of the challenge: Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica, 3: 135–37. 44. Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, 1: 431–32. 45. Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica, 2: 7, 10, and 62. 46. See the chapter “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” in Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 27–57. 47. “E fo ventura que, per alcuna raó que yo no vull ara comtar, que el comte de Barcelona lo gità de la sua terra e el exilà” (Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica, 2: 8–9). 48. “Per qual raó él [Peter the Catholic] era marchès de Prohensa, . . . en cual manera lo bon chomte de Barcelona la gasanyà per sa proea” ibid., 2: 44. 49. See, for example, ibid., 2: 45. 50. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 5–6. 51. Hayden White, “Literary Theory and Historical Writing,” in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 9, and Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 15. 52. Coll, Bernat Desclot. Crònica, 3: 129–37. 53. Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, “Literatura catalana,” in Historia general de las literaturas hispánicas, ed. Guillermo Díaz-Plaja (Barcelona: Barna, 1949), 1: 709. 54. Antoni Rubió i Lluch, Documents per l’història de la cultura catalana mig-eval (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1908–21), 1: 143. Nevertheless, Rubió believes that this letter refers to the Chronicle of the Kings of Aragon rather than to the king’s autobiography. For a synthesis of the status quaestionis on the Llibre’s dates of composition, see the Introduction in Chronicle. Pere III of Catalonia (Pedro IV of Aragon), trans. Mary Hillgarth, with introduction and notes by Jocelyn N. Hillgarth (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 1: 53–57.

Notes to Pages 169–73 285

55. Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, AR, reg. 1351, fol. 23v, Tortosa, 1 April 1371, published in Ramon Gubern, “Notes sobre la redacció de la crònica de Pere el Ceremoniós,” Estudis Romànics 2 (1949–50): 135–48, here p. 147. 56. In 1385 Peter thanked him for his new offer “to finish the book of our life begun by us” (Rubió, Documents, 2: 281). 57. Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, AR, reg. 1239, fol. 39r, Barcelona, 3 April 1373 (Gubern, “Notes sobre la redacció,” 147–48). 58. This letter, perhaps the medieval document that most explicitly describes the manner of writing royal history in the Middle Ages, was originally edited by Josep Coroleu, La España regional (Barcelona, 1887), 531. See also Rubió, Documents, 1: 263–65, letter of 8 August 1375. English translation in Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, “Documents,” 2: 606–9. I use Hillgarth’s translation for the quotes from this document. The emphases are mine. 59. Antonio G. Solalinde, “Intervención de Alfonso X en la redacción de sus obras,” Revista de Filología Española 2 (1915): 286. See also Diego Catalán, “El taller historiográfico alfonsí: Métodos y problemas en el trabajo compilatorio,” Romania 84 (1963): 353–75. 60. Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, introduction, 1: 60. 61. Gubern attributes this payment to the clerk Bernat Ramon Descavall (“Notes sobre la redacció,” 142), but other scholars believe that it is Bernat Descoll: Rubió, Documents, 2: 263. 62. “Rebuda havem vostra letra e regraciants vos la offerta que.ns fets de continuar e acabar lo libre de la nostra vida començat per nos e ya conviventment enantat, plau nos e volem que servan lorde que.ns havets fer saber com nos parega sufficient e bo, hi entenets ab tota diligència de guisa que dins breu haja tal acabament que.n hajam plaer e vos ne siats digne de laor.” (“We have received your letter and are grateful for the possibility you have given us to continue with the book of our life, which we began and which progresses adequately. This pleases us and we desire that the project continue in the way you have indicated, such that it might soon be finished to our satisfaction and you shall be worthy of praise.”) Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, Reg. 1372, fol. 45v, in Rubió, Documents, 2: 281, letter of 10 July 1385. 63. Antoni Rubió i Lluch, “Estudi sobre l’elaboració de la crònica de Pere el Cerimoniós,” Anuari de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans 3 (1909–10): 568: document of 28 January 1388.

286 Notes to Pages 173–74

64. Ibid., 523: letter of 24 February 1391. All the documents on the composition of the Crònica are translated into English in Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 2: 603–13. 65. For the notion of “collaborative authorship,” see Harold Love, Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 33–39. 66. For a discussion of “symmetrical collaborative authorship” and “asymmetrical collaborative authorship,” see Couser, “Authority,” 46. 67. Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, 6.2, in Les Quatre Grans Cròniques: Jaume I, Bernat Desclot, Ramon Muntaner, Pere III., ed. Ferran Soldevila (Barcelona: Selecta, 1971), 1124. 68. Antoni Rubió i Lluch, “Algunes consideracions sobre l’oratòria política de Catalunya a l’edat mitjana,” Estudis Universitaris Catalans 3 (1909): 216. For example, the kind of providentialism evident in the Llibre’s prologue reminds us of the tone of the king’s political discourses. Stefano M. Cingolani, La memòria dels reis. Les Quatre grans cròniques i la historiografia catalana, des del segle X fins al XV (Barcelona: Base, 2007), 241–243. See also the entry “Providentialism” in the introduction to Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 1: 76–82. 69. “This is not the work of one person but a collective task” (Rubió, “Estudi sobre l’elaboració,” 570). 70. For the meaning, function, and working of Peter’s Chancellery and biographies of the clerks, see Francisco Sevillano Colom, “Apuntes para el estudio de la cancillería de Pedro IV el Ceremonioso,” Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 20 (1950): 137–241. 71. Some scholars argued, at the end of the nineteenth century, that the author of the chronicle was the civil servant Bernat Descoll, charged by the king to write his memoir in the first person: see Josep Coroleu, “Descubrimiento del verdadero autor de la crónica de Pedro el Ceremonioso,” La España Regional 3 (1887): 530–36; Gabriel Llabrés, “Bernardo Dezcoll es el autor de la crónica Catalana de Pedro IV el Ceremonioso de Aragón,” Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos 7 (1902): 331–47. Yet research published in the early twentieth century by Jaume Massó and Antoni Rubió, among others, argued persuasively in favor of the king’s authorship of the text: see Jaume Massó i Torrents, “Historiografia de Catalunya en català, durant l’època nacional,” Revue Hispanique 15 (1906): 486–613; Rubió, “Estudi sobre la elaboració,” 519–70; Gubern, “Notes sobre la redacció,” 135–48.

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72. I am obviously aware that I am challenging some modern critics, from Foucault to Donald Pease, who have noted that medieval authors turn to external authorities to legitimize their authority. Pease, for instance, argues that modern authors were “writers whose claim to cultural authority did not depend on their adherence to cultural prec­ edents but on a faculty of verbal inventiveness. Unlike the medieval auctor who based his authority on divine revelation, an author himself claimed authority for his words and based his individuality on the stories he composed.” See Pease, “Author,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 107. chapter nine

1. For the relationship between history and fiction in the Middle Ages see Suzanne Fleischman, “On the Representations of History and Fiction in the Middle Ages,” History and Theory 22 (1983): 278–310; Wesley Trimpi, “The Quality of Fiction: The Rhetorical Transmission of Literary Theory,” Traditio 30 (1974): 1–118; Sarah Foot, “Functions of Fiction in Historical Writing,” in Writing Medieval History, ed. Nancy Partner (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005); Monika Otter, Inventions: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Alan E. Knight, Aspects of Genre in Late Medieval French Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), especially chap. 2: “History and Fiction,” pp. 17–40. 2. Michel Zéraffa, Roman et société (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1971), 17, and Peter F. Ainsworth, Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History: Truth, Myth and Fiction in the Chroniques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 3. Hayden White, “The Fictions of Factual Representation,” in Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 122, and Paul Zumthor’s chapter, “Autobiographie au Moyen Age?” in his Langue, texte, énigme (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 29. 4. Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer, “La Crònica de Ramon Muntaner. Filiació dels seus textos,” in Homenatge a Antoni Rubió i Lluch. Miscel.lània d’Estudis Literaris Històrics i Lingüistics (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1936), 1: 69–76. The possibility that historical writing can contribute to a better understanding of the novel, and connections between

288 Notes to Pages 179–80

the two genres, have been recently discussed by Frank Ankersmit in “Truth in History and Literature,” Narrative 18 (2010): 29–50. 5. Some general visions of the connections between legend and history in medieval historiography are discussed in David G. Pattison, From Legend to Chronicle. The Treatment of Epic Material in Alphonsine Historiography (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1983), and William W. Ryding, Structure in Medieval Narrative (Paris: Mouton, 1971). For French historiography, see Robert Guiette, “Chanson de geste, chronique et mise en prose,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 6 (1963): 423–40; Amy G. Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), and Renate BlumenfeldKosinski, Reading Myth: Classical Mythology and Its Interpretations in Medieval French Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 6. The idea that genealogies were shaped like trees in the medieval period was challenged by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “La genèse de l’arbre généalogique,” in L’Arbre: Histoire naturelle et symbolique de l’arbre, du bois et du fruit au Moyen Age, ed. Michel Pastoureau (Paris: Le opard d’or, 1993), 41–81. See also R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 7. Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past, 4. 8. Eric Bournazel, “Mémoire et parenté,” in La France de l’an mil, ed. Robert Delort and Dominique Iogna-Prat (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 117–19. 9. See the demythologizing ideas of Stefano M. Cingolani, “Seguir les vestígies dels antecessors. Llinatge, reialesa i historiografia a Catalunya des de Ramon Berenguer IV a Pere II (1131–1285),” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 36 (2006): 229–31. 10. Bournazel, “Mémoire et parenté,” 114–24. 11. For a summary of the traits that a hero-founder must possess, see Christine Marchello-Nizia, “De l’Eneida à l’Eneas: Les attributs du fondateur,” in Lectures médiévales de Virgile. Actes du colloque organisé par l’École française de Rome (Rome, 25–28 octobre 1982) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1985), 251–66. 12. For the figure of founder-hero in medieval Iberian kingdoms, see the chapter “Le récit héroïque castillan (formes, enjeux sémantiques et fonctions socio-culturelles),” in Georges Martin, Histoires de l’Espagne médiévale. Historiographie, geste, romancero (Paris: Klincksieck,

Notes to Pages 180–81 289

1997), 139–52; Sophie Hirel, “Le roi, le moine et la cloche. Genèse d’un modèle et tentative de mythification du roi Ramire II d’Aragon (1135– 1137),” in Verité poétique, vérité politique. Mythes, modèles et idéologies politiques au Moyen Âge, ed. Jean-Christophe Cassard, Elisabeth Gaucher, and Jean Kerhervé (Brest: Centre de recherche bretonne et celtique, 2007), 241–60; Isabel de Barros Dias, “Heróis fundadores portugueses em alguns textos da historiografia medieval ibérica,” in Imperium Minervae: Studien zur brasilianischen, iberischen und mosambikanischen Literatur, ed. Dietrich Briesemeister and Axel Schönberger (Frankfurt am Main: Domus Editoria, 2003), 89–109; and Jean-Marie Moeglin, “La mémoire d’un herós fondateur: Lidéric forestier et comte de Flandre,” in La mémoire du temps au Moyen Age, ed. Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Florence: Sismel, 2005), 87–116. 13. Valerio Valeri, “Constitutive History: Genealogy and Narrative in the Legitimation of Hawaiian Kingship,” in Culture Through Time: Anthropological Approaches, ed. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 162. 14. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (Paris: Alcan, 1910), 437. 15. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Myth and Reality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963). 16. See Ryding, Structure in Medieval Narrative, 20–21; Marcel Granet, Danses et légendes de la chine ancienne (Paris: Alcan, 1926), 1: 171–225; and John A. Barnes, “Genealogies,” in The Craft of Social Anthropology, ed. Arnold L. Epstein (London: Tavistock, 1967), 120. 17. That is why tales of origins have such a remarkable political component. See Arsenio Dacosta, “E por otra manera dise la Historia: relatos legendarios sobre los orígenes políticos de Asturias y Vizcaya en la Edad Media,” BiTARTE (1999): 33–50, and the chapter “Un récit: la chute du royaume wisigothique d’Espagne dans l’historiographie chrétienne des VIIIe et IXe siècles,” in Georges Martin, Histoires, 11–42. 18. Valeri, “Constitutive History,” p. 164. 19. Arsenio Dacosta, “¡Pelayo vive! Un arquetipo político en el horizonte ideológico del Reino Asturleonés,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie III, Historia Medieval 10 (1997), 89–135; Madeleine Pardo, L’historien et ses personnages. Étudies sur l’historiographie espagnole médiévale (Lyon: ENS, 2006), 61–115, and Moeglin, “La mémoire d’un héros fondateur,” 87–116.

290 Notes to Pages 182–83

20. Lucien Barrau-Dihigo and Josep Massó Torrents, eds., Cròniques Catalanes. II. Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1925), 3. 21. Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer, “L’escola poètica de Ripoll en els segles X–XIII,” Anuari de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans 1 (1915–20): 3–84. See also, for this monastic center, Ramon d’Abadal, “La fundació del monestir de Ripoll,” Analecta Montserratensia 9 (1962): 25–49; Manuel Riu, “L’Església catalana al segle X,” in Symposium internacional sobre els orígens de Catalunya (segles VIII–XI) (Barcelona: Real Academia de Buenas Letras, 1991), 1: 161–89, and Stefano M. Cingolani, “Nel taller storiografico di Santa Maria di Ripoll,” in Filologia aperta ovvero per amicizia. Scritti offerti a Fabrizio Beggiato, ed. Sabina Marinetti (Perugia: Pliniana, 2009), 71–90. 22. On oral tradition and its application to historical narration, see Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); David P. Henige, The Chronology of Oral Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); Ruth H. Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance and Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 23. Romila Thapar, “The Historian and the Epic,” in her Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 614. 24. The quotation regarding the founder of the Catalan nation in Ramon d’Abadal, Els primers comtes catalans (Barcelona: Teide, 1983), 13, is obviously an anachronism. For the study on the mortal remains, see Abadal, “Informe antropològic sobre les restes òssies atribuïdes a Guifré el Pilós,” Els temps i el regiment del comte Guifred el Pilós (Sabadell: Ausa, 1989), 197–209. 25. “Ecce quomodo de potestate regali in manus nostrorum comitum Barchinonensium honor ipse Barchinonensis devenit” and “Et Rodulfum episcopum Urgellensem, monchum vero prius monasterii Rivipollensis, quod ipse Guifredus a fundamentis primitus construxit” (Barrau, Cròniques catalanes, 5). 26. “De què no.ns membra.l nom del pare d’aquela dona, mas ella avia nom Dona Agnès.” Llibre dels fets del rei en Jaume, ed. Jordi Bruguera (Barcelona: Barcino, 1991), 2: 9). See also James I, Llibre dels fets, chaps. 221, 227 and 386, and Martí de Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana (Barcelona: Ariel, 1964), 1: 425.

Notes to Pages 183–84 291

27. Several Catalan scholars in the twentieth century embarked on a search for verses camouflaged in prose in medieval Catalan chronicles. This quest began in the 1920s with the publication of Manuel de Montoliu’s articles, “La canço de gesta de Jaume I,” Butlletí Arqueològic Tarraconense, 1922, 177–86, and “Sobre el primitiu text versificat de la crònica de Jaume I,” Anuari de l’Oficina Romànica 1 (1928): 253–336. Ferran Soldevila continued this line of research in the 1950s, publishing “Les prosificacions en els primers capítols de la Crònica de Desclot,” in Discurso de recepción de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona (Barcelona: Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, 1958). See also Miquel Coll i Alentorn, “La historiografia de Catalunya en el període primitiu,” Estudis Romànics 3 (1951–52): 139–96. Antoni Rubió i Lluch is more skeptical, though he does not deny the existence of prosification, in “Els Cants de Gesta Catalans,” Revista de Catalunya 3 (1925): 592–97. See also, for medieval Castilian historiography, Diego Catalán, La épica española. Nueva documentación y nueva evaluación (Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2001). 28. Stefano M. Cingolani, “Jo Ramon Muntaner. Consideracions sobre el paper de l’autobiografia en els historiadors de llengua vulgar,” Estudis de llengua i literatura catalanes 11 (1985): 95–125; Stefano Asperti, “Il re e la storia: Proposte per una nova lettura del Libre dels feys di Jaume I,” Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 3 (1984): 279, and Asperti, “La qüestió de les prosificacions en les cròniques medievals catalanes,” in Actes del Novè Col.loqui Internacional de Llengua i Literatura Catalanes (Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat, 1993), 1: 85–137. 29. William H. Sewell Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Victoria E. Bonell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 49–50. 30. Ralf Cohen, “History and Genre,” New Literary History 17 (1986): 217. 31. Some examples of these prosifications are in Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, 1: 390. 32. The idea of “the presence of the now” is in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana, 1979). For the identity of medieval epic literature, see Marcia Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in Medieval Theory of Knowledge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth

292 Notes to Pages 184–87

Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), and Joseph J. Duggan, “Medieval Epic as Popular Historiography: Appropriation of Historical Knowledge in the Vernacular Epic,” in La littérature historiographique des origines à 1500, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Ursula Link-Heer, and Peter-Michael Spangenberg (Heidelberg: Winter, 1986), 285–311. An illuminating theoretical point of view on this issue is in Anita Kasabova, “Memory, Memorials, and Commemoration,” History and Theory 47 (2008): 331–50. 33. Some Castilian legends have been reconstructed from the chronicles. See Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Reliquias de la poesía épica española (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1951). See also Manuel Alvar, Cantares de gesta medievales (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1972), where each poetic legend is reproduced in a reconstructed verse form; Alan Deyermond, La literatura perdida de la Edad Media castellana: catálogo y estudio, vol. 1: Épica y romances (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1995); and Joseph J. Duggan, The Cantar de mio Cid: Poetic Creation in Its Economic and Social Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 34. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Forging the Past: The Language of Historical Truth in the Middle Ages,” History Teacher 17 (1984): 274, and Nancy F. Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), chap. 8. 35. For Desclot’s combination in the opening chapters of legendary and historical material to build a composite model of the ideal ruler, see Alison G. Elliott, “The Historian as Artist: Manipulation of History in the Chronicle of Desclot,” Viator 14 (1983): 195–209. 36. Romila Thapar, “Historian and the Epic,” 613. 37. Jordi Rubió y Balaguer, Història i historiografia (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1987), 126–27. 38. Clifford Geertz, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 3. 39. “Muntaner, lleva sus e pensa de fer un llibre de les grans meravelles que has vistes que Déus ha fetes en les guerres on tu és estat, com a Déu plau que per tu sia manifestat.” Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 1, in Les Quatre Grans Cròniques: Jaume I, Bernat Desclot, Ramon Muntaner, Pere III., ed. Ferran Soldevila (Barcelona: Selecta, 1971), 667. 40. “La terça raó és que a Déu plau que tu recontes aquestes aventures e meravelles con altre no és viu qui ho pogués així ab veritat dir”

Notes to Pages 187–90 293

(Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 1, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 668). 41. “E així, per aquesta raon, lleva, e comença ton llibre e ta història, als mills que Déu t’aministrarà” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 1, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 668). 42. This also parallels the Old Testament story of Jonah, to demonstrate how divine initiative overcomes human resistance. 43. Jacqueline T. Miller, Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 7, and David F. Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First Roman de la Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 116, who analyzes an example similar to Muntaner’s dream in the chapter “The Prologue: Dreams and Their Significance,” 114–126. See also Constance B. Hieatt, The Realism of Dream Visions: The Poetic Exploitation of the Dream-Experience in Chaucer and His Contemporaries (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), and Werner Wolff, The Dream: Mirror of Conscience (New York: Grune, 1952), which provides a comprehensive summary of dream theory from antiquity through the twentieth century. 44. James I, Llibre dels Fets, chap. 389, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 144. See also Josep Miquel Sobré, L’èpica de la realitat. L’escriptura de Ramon Muntaner i Bernat Desclot (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1978), 105–9; and Stefano M. Cingolani, La memòria dels reis. Les Quatre grans cròniques i la historiografia catalana, des del segle X fins al XV (Barcelona: Base, 2007), 163. 45. Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 3. 46. “En los fets qui en mon temps són estats” (Ramon Muntaner, Crònica, “Pròleg,” in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 667). 47. For Muntaner’s use of the sources, see Cingolani, La memòria les reis, 178–80. Interestingly, Muntaner’s strategy for choosing sources seems to be to follow the chronology of Castilian historiography. On the growing fictionalization in the post-Alphonsine chronicles, see Diego Catalán, La Estoria de España de Alfonso X. Creación y evolución (Madrid: Fundación Ramón Menéndez Pidal, 1992), 139–56. See also Isabel de Barros Dias, “Gathering, Ranking and Denegating Sources in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Iberian Chronicles,” in The Medieval Chronicle V (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 47–60.

294 Notes to Pages 190–92

48. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 117, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 775. 49. See Muntaner, Crònica, chaps. 123–24, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 780–82, and compare with chapter 159 of Desclot’s Llibre del rei en Pere, which appears more reliable. 50. Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, Introducció, 77. 51. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 66, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 718. 52. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 161, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 815. 53. Manuel de Montoliu, Les quatre grans cròniques (Barcelona: Alpha, 1959), 102–10; Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, 1: 461–67. 54. Martin Aurell, “Les troubadours et le pouvoir royal: l’exemple d’Alphonse Ier (1162–1196),” Revue des Langues Romanes (1981): 53–67. 55. Nicolau d’Olwer, “L’ escola poètica,” 27ff. See also Pere Bohigas, “La matèria de Bretanya a Catalunya,” in Aportació a l’estudi de la lit­ eratura catalana (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1982), 277–94, and Harvey L. Sharrer, A Critical Bibliography of Hispanic Arthurian Material, vol. 1: Texts: The Prose Romance Cycles (London: Grant and Cutler, 1977). 56. Michel Zink, The Invention of Literary Subjectivity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), vi. 57. Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, 1: 458, cites the example of the Chanson d’Aspremont. 58. Miquel Coll i Alentorn, Historiografia (Barcelona: Curial, 1991), 149. 59. Duggan, “Medieval Epic,” 306–7; Louis Michel, Les légendes épiques carolingiennes dans l’oeuvre de Jean d’Outremeuse (Brussels: La Renaissance du Livre, 1935), and Joseph M. G. Schobben, La part du Pseudo-Turpin dans les Chroniques et Conquestes de Charlemagne de David Aubert (The Hague: Mouton, 1969). 60. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 116, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 774: “pogra hom fer major romanç que no és aquell de Jaufré.” Muntaner uses the word romanç in the same sense as the French word roman, referring to chivalric literature, and Jaufre and Brunisenda was a Provençal poem dedicated to the first kings of the Aragonese crown. In another passage, Muntaner quotes the Gesta of Galceran of Vilanova, where we “will find it all in due order” (Muntaner, Crònica,

Notes to Pages 192–93 295

chap. 173, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 823); this poem has disappeared but, as Soldevila argues, could have been a fictional song or poem used by the Catalan chronicles as a source (Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 976). 61. The troubadour quoted was actually Peire Cardenal. See Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, 1: 462, who quotes René Lavaud, Poésies complètes du troubadour Peire Cardenal (Toulouse: Privat, 1957), 362. 62. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 195, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 843; see also Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, 1: 462. 63. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 134, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 794. 64. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 247, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 888. 65. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 125, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 783. 66. The Arthurian cycle in twelfth-century literature idealized the figure of the prince, as universal aspirations regarding the medieval monarchy merged into the virtues of the perfect knight. See Erich Köhler, L’aventure chevaleresque. Idéal et réalité dans le roman courtois (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 43. See also Martin Aurell, La légende du roi arthur, 550–1250 (Paris: Perrin, 2007); N. J. Higham, King Arthur: MythMaking and History (London: Routledge, 2002), and Rosemary Morris, The Character of King Arthur in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982). Muntaner was familiar with this literature, as all knights of the time were. See Elspeth Kennedy, “The Knight as Reader of Arthurian Romance,” in Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend, ed. Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). 67. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 163, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 815. 68. “Que ço que el rei feia no era obra de cavaller, mas obra de Déu pròpriament; que Galeàs, ne Tristany, ne Llançalot, ne Galvany, ne Boors, ne Palamides, ne Perceval lo Galois, ne el Cavaller ab la Cota mal tallada, ne Estor de Mares, ne el Morant de Gaunes, con tots ensems fossen ajustats ab tan poca gent con lo senyor rei d’Aragon era, no pogren tant fer en un jorn contra quatre-cents cavallers tan bons com aquells eren, qui eren la flor del rei de França, con féu lo senyor rei d’Aragó e aquells qui ab ell eren aquella hora.” In other manuscripts

296 Notes to Pages 193–95

the list is shorter and finishes with the interesting annotation: “nor the other knights of the Table Round.” Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 134, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 794; for the explanation of the different content of these manuscripts, see Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 970 n. 9. 69. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 51, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 709. Other manuscripts also include “Alexander,” before Roland (Muntaner, Crònica, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 955 n. 5), which is very characteristic of Muntaner’s tendency to blend historical heroes with fictional characters. 70. Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, 1: 466. 71. For the function of games in the chronicle, see Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Mentalitat i ideologia de Ramon Muntaner,” XII Congrès d’Histoire de la Couronne d’Aragon, Montpellier, 26–29 septembre 1985 (Montpellier: Société archéologique de Montpellier, 1987–88), 3: 85. 72. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 297, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 938–43. 73. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 166, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 817. 74. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 293, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 934. 75. “E com aquesta festa fo passada, lo senyor rei tornà-se’n en Barcelona, e a Barcelona veérets tots jorns taules redones, torneigs, anar ab armes, e bornar, e solaç e goig; que tota la terra anava de goig en goig e de balls en balls” (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 161, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 815). 76. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 296, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 937. 77. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 113, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 770. 78. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 215, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 858. 79. Muntaner, Crònica, chaps. 216–17, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 858–859. The last sentence: “E aço és tota veritat, que jo de la mia man n’he colleta” (And this is the real truth, for I have gathered it [the blood] with my own hands). 80. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 219, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 860.

Notes to Pages 195–97 297

81. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 227, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 868. 82. Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 985 n. 5. 83. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 226, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 866. 84. Joan-Pau Rubies, “The Idea of Empire in the Catalan Tradition from Ramon Muntaner to Enric Prat de la Riba,” Journal of Hispanic Research 4 (1995–96): 243. 85. Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 975 n. 1. 86. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 214, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 857. 87. See also the reference to the Aesop’s fables (Muntaner, Cròn­ ica, chap. 234, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 925), very well known by Catalan learned men like Muntaner. For the reception of this literature in Catalonia, in comparison with Majorca, see Jocelyn N. Hillgarth’s Readers and Books in Majorca (1229–1550) (Paris: CNRS, 1991). 88. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Political Utility in Medieval Historiography: A Sketch,” History and Theory 14 (1975): 314–25. 89. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 172, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 911–14. For an analysis of the “Sermó,” see Manuel Milà i Fontanals, “Lo sermó d’En Muntaner,” in Obras Completes del Doctor D. Manuel Milà i Fontanals (Barcelona, 1890), 3: 243–75, and Alberto Boscolo, “Una nota sobre el Sermó de Ramon Muntaner,” in Miscel. lània Antoni M. Badia i Margarit (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona 1985), 3: 127–34. 90. Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, “La juglaría en el siglo XIV,” in “Literatura catalana,” in Historia general de las literaturas hispánicas, ed. Guillermo Díaz-Plaja (Barcelona: Barna, 1949), 1: 670–75; Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, 1: 462–63. 91. Comí appears also as a jongleur of the Aragonese king in the last chapter of the chronicle, singing at the coronation of Alfonse the Benign (Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 298, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 942). 92. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 298, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 942. 93. Sobré, L’èpica, 127–28. 94. As Stefano M. Cingolani demonstrates in “Nos en leyr tales libros trobemos plazer e recreation: L’estudi sobre la difusió de la literatura

298 Notes to Pages 197–200

d’entreteniment a Catalunya els segles XIV y XV,” Lengua & Literatura 4 (1990–91): 39–127. 95. Miriam Cabré, “En breu sazo aura.l jorn pretentori: Cerverí i Jaume I interpreten els fets de 1274,” in Actes del X Congrés Internacional de l’Associació Hispànica de Literatura Medieval, ed. Rafael Alemany (Alicante: Institut Interuniversitari de Filologia Valenciana, 2005), 453–68. 96. Monika Otter, “Functions of Fiction in Historical Writing,” in Partner, Writing Medieval History, 122. 97. Interestingly, one of the signs of the preeminent role of historiography in Catalonia is the peculiar practice of publishing Muntaner’s and Desclot’s chronicles in one volume, in order to increase, paradoxically, the sense of the literary rather than the historical dimension of the narration (Nicolau d’Olwer, “La Crònica de Ramon Muntaner,” 1: 75–76). 98. See the chapter “Veritat i literatura a les cròniques medievals catalanes: Ramon Muntaner,” in Lola Badia, Tradició i modernitat als segles XIV i XV. Estudis de cultura literària i lectures d’Ausiàs March (Valencia: Institut Universitari de Filologia Valenciana, 1993), 21–22. See also Juan Miguel Ribera Llopis, “Intertextualidad y literariedad: las Croniques catalanas, texto confluyente,” in Actas. II Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval, ed. José Manuel Lucía (Alcalá: Universidad de Alcalá, 1992), 683–89. 99. I take this image from Richard Waswo, “The History That Literature Makes,” New Literary History 19 (1988): 541–64. chapter ten

1. Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, 1: 40, in Chronicle. Pere III of Catalonia (Pedro IV of Aragon), trans. Mary Hillgarth, with introduction and notes by Jocelyn N. Hillgarth (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980) (hereafter, Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III), 1: 170; Ferran Soldevila, ed., Les Quatre Grans Cròniques: Jaume I, Bernat Desclot, Ramon Muntaner, Pere III (Barcelona: Selecta, 1971), 1017. 2. “E jassia Déus no ens haja fets gran de persona, emperò la volentat e lo cor havem aitant bastant com negun cavaller que sia al món.” Ricard Albert and Joan Gassiot, eds., Parlaments a les Corts Catalanes (Barcelona: Els nostres clàssics, 1928), 24, quoted by Martí de Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana (Barcelona: Ariel, 1964), 1: 489.

Notes to Page 201 299

3. Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, III: 47, in Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 1: 281–82, and Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1055. 4. This distinction is based in the works of Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). For the connection of these concepts to rhetorical authority, see also Larry Scanlon, “Auctoritas and Potestas: A Model of Analysis for Medieval Culture,” Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 36–54. 5. For a general introduction to political culture, see Murray J. Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964); Sean Wilentz, ed., Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); David Cannadine and Simon Price, eds., Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Alain Boureau, “Les cérémonies royales françaises entre performance juridiques et compétences linguistiques,” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 54 (1991): 1265–333; Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, eds., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Eric R. Wolf, Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). For the political uses of history in early modern Castile, see Richard L. Kagan, Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 6. See the historical sources of these episodes in the Llibre, in Antoni Rubió i Lluch, “Estudi sobre l’elaboració de la crònica de Pere el Cerimoniós,” Anuari de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans 3 (1909–10): 530. 7. Josep Miret i Sans, “Itinerario del rey Alfonso III de Cataluña, IV de Aragón, el conquistador de Cerdeña,” Boletín de la Real Academia de las Buenas Letras de Barcelona 10 (1909). 8. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Political Utility in Medieval Historiography: A Sketch,” History and Theory 14 (1975): 321. 9. For the sources of King Peter’s Llibre, see Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, Introduction, 1: 65–68.

300 Notes to Pages 202–3

10. Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, I: 41, in Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 1: 171, and Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1017. 11. “Fizo fer” (ordered done) is the exact Castilian expression used by Peter’s son, King John I, when referring to this book: “libro que el senyor Rey nuestro padre, que Dios haya, fizo fer de la Genealogía de los reyes de Aragon.” Gabriel Llabrés, “¿Quién es el autor de la Crónica de San Juan de la Peña?” Revista de Huesca I (1903): 12. This shows that while Peter can be properly considered the author of the Llibre, he was only the patron of the genealogy Crónica de San Juan de la Peña. See also Eduardo González Hurtebise, “La Crónica General escrita por Pedro IV de Aragón,” Revista de Bibliografía Catalana 4 (1907): 188–214. For an English edition of this work, see Lynn H. Nelson, ed., The Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña: A Fourteenth-Century Official History of the Crown of Aragon(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). There is another historical text from Peter the Ceremonious’s time, the Latin Chronicle of Canals. This text appears to have been written from personal initiative rather than by royal orders: Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, “Fra B. de Canals i la seva desconeguda crònica llatina (segle XIV),” in Història i historiografia (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1987), 381–410. See how, interestingly, the official title of the Chronicle of Sant Joan de la Penya (Crònica dels reis d’Aragó i comtes de Barcelona) inverted the order of the Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium (in which the counts of Barcelona precede the kings of Aragon). Jordi Rubió has described the connection between the Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium and the Crònica de Sant Joan de la Penya. “La versió llatina de la crònica general de Catalunya i Aragó,” in Homenatge a Antoni Rubió i Lluch. Miscel.lània d’Estudis Literaris Històrics i Lingüístics (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1936), 1: 343–55. 12. Amada López de Meneses, “El canciller Pedro López de Ayala y los reyes de Aragón,” Estudios de Edad Media de la Corona de Aragón 8 (1967): 189–264. 13. Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, 1: 498. See the passage in Peter the Ceremonious’s Crònica, 6.2, in Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1124. See also the detailed section “Omissions and distortions,” in Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 1: 69–76. 14. Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 1: 380, and Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1088. The dança mesclada (mixed dance) was a dance

Notes to Pages 203–4 301

for both men and women. Amédée Pagès, “La ‘dansa’ provençale et les ‘goigs’ en Catalonge,” in Homenatge a Antoni Rubió i Lluch, 1: 201–24. 15. Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, 3: 33 (Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1051–52), 3: 76 (Soldevila, 1063), and 3: 52 (Soldevila, 1057). 16. Antoni Rubió i Lluch, “La cultura catalana en el regnat de Pere III,” Estudis Universitaris Catalans 8 (1914): 241–43, who gives us the titles of the books Peter read. For the influence of French literature on Peter the Ceremonious, see Isabel de Riquer, “La literatura francesa en la corona de Aragón en el reinado de Pedro el Ceremonioso (1336–1387),” in Imágenes de Francia en las letras hispánicas, ed. Francisco Lafarga (Barcelona: PPU, 1989), 115–26. 17. Ramon d’Abadal, “Pedro el Ceremonioso y los comienzos de la decadencia politica de Cataluña,” in Historia de España, ed. Ramon Menendez Pidal (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1964), 14: civ. 18. See Rubió, “Estudi sobre l’elaboració,” which explains why he considers Peter’s Llibre an extension of the Royal Chancellery (524). See also Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, Introduction, 1: 58. 19. See the documents collected by Antoni Rubió i Lluch, Documents per l’història de la cultura catalana mig-eval (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1908–1921), 1: 399 (11 April 1398) and 1: 400 (29 June 1398), in which King Martin asks one of his collaborators to remember “all the deeds of Sicily” in order to continue the writing of his chronicle. 20. Robespierre, “Rapport sur les principes du gouvernement révolutionnaire,” 25 December 1793. This interesting quote is used and contextualized by Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 1–16. 21. Clifford Geertz, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,” in Culture and Its Creators: Essays in Honor of Edward Shils, ed. Joseph Ben-David and Terry Nichols Clark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 150–71. 22. Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 23. In his classic work, Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), shows how central the king’s body was to the monarchical cultural frame. 24. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 87.

302 Notes to Pages 204–7

25. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 168. 26. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 24. See the chapter “The Concept of a Language and the métier d’historien: Some Considerations on Practice,” in John G. A. Pocock, The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 19–40. 27. Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, Introduction, 1: 63–68. 28. Cannadine and Price, Rituals of Royalty, 1. 29. Armando Petrucci notes Peter had an “alphabetic mentality.” Francisco M. Gimeno Blay, Escribir, reinar. La experiencia gráfico-textual de Pedro IV el Ceremonioso (1336–1387) (Madrid: Adaba: 2006), 11–13 and 21). See also M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 185–90, and Attilio Bartoli Langeli, La scrittura dell’italiano (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000), 40–75. 30. For the cultural and political power of rituals, see Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 31. Frederic P. Verrié, “La política artística de Pere el Cerimoniós,” in Pere el Cerimoniós i la seva època (Barcelona: CSIC, 1989), 177–92; on King Peter’s construction agenda, see Jaume Aurell and Alfons Puigarnau, La cultura del mercader en la Barcelona del siglo XV (Barcelona: Omega, 1998), 20–47. 32. Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, Prologue, 4, in Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, 1: 128–29, and Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1004. 33. Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, Introduction, 1: 106; Jordi Rubió, “Fra B. de Canals i la seva desconeguda crònica llatina,” in Homenaje a Johannes Vincke 1 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1962–63), 239ff. For Canals’s historiographical personality, see Stefano M. Cingolani, La memòria dels reis. Les quatre grans cròniques i la historiografia catalana, des del segle X fins al XV (Barcelona: Base, 2007), 200–205. The comparison is interesting, because we also find it in Peter’s contemporary, King Robert of Naples (1309–43). Guiglielmo da Sarzano says that “like another Solomon, most wise, builder of the house of God, he will reign in peace.” Quoted in Samantha Kelly, The New Solomon: Robert of Naples (1309–1343) and FourteenthCentury Kingship (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 5. For references to Solomon in

Notes to Pages 207–8 303

connection with other fourteenth-century kings, see the section “Royal Wisdom: Sources and Models,” 259–269 and 252–256. See also Daisy Delogu, Theorizing the Ideal Sovereign: The Rise of the French Vernacular Royal Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 34. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 54 and Clifford Geertz, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma,” 150–71. 35. For Peter’s political thought and discourse, see Jocelyn N. Hillgarth, “La personalitat política i cultural de Pere III a través de la seva crònica,” Lengua i Literatura 5 (1993): 7–102, and Raquel Homet, “El discurso político de Pedro el Ceremonioso,” in El discurso político en la Edad Media, ed. Nilda Guigliemli and Adeline Rucquoi (Buenos Aires: Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, 1995), 97–115. 36. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 55. 37. For an excellent bibliographical source on medieval coronations, see János M. Bak, “Introduction: Coronation Studies—Past, Present, and Future,” in Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern Monarchic Ritual, ed. Bak (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1–15. For a general account of the symbols of kingship based on a study of coronations, see Percy E. Schramm, A History of the English Coronation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937); for its connection with political and legal theory, see Walter Ullmann, The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship (London: Methuen, 1969); for the political theology and the overall reception of the medieval state, see Kantorowicz’s King’s Two Bodies. For more concrete analyses of English coronations, see Roy Strong, Coronation: A History of Kingship and the British Monarchy (London: Harper, 2005); H. G. Richardson, “The Coronation in Medieval England: The Evolution of the Office and the Oath,” Traditio 16 (1960): 111–202; Ernst Kantorowicz, “Inalienability: A Note on the Canonical Practice and the English Coronation Oath in the Thirteenth Century,” Speculum 29 (1954): 488–502; Paul L. Ward, “The Coronation Ceremony in Medieval England,” Speculum 24 (1939): 160–78; for French coronations, Richard A. Jackson, Vive le Roi! A History of the French Coronation from Charles V to Charles X (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), and Eloisa Ramírez Vaquero, ed., Ceremonial de la Coronación, unción y exequias de los reyes de Inglaterra (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 2008). For the analysis of the longterm continuity of political symbols, see Ernst Kantorowicz, “Oriens Augusti—Lever du roi,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 17 (1963): 117–77.

304 Notes to Pages 208–9

38. Schramm, History of the English Coronation, 115ff. 39. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 87–88. 40. Percy E. Schramm, “Die Krönung in Deutschland bis zum Beginn des Salischen Hauses,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte 24 (1935): 320. 41. Schramm, History of the English Coronation, 10–11. See also articles by Jacques Le Goff, “Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?” Daedalus 100 (1971): 1–19, and David Cannadine, “Introduction: The Divine Rite of Kings,” in Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, ed. Cannadine and Price (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1–19, who describes the connections between history and anthropology in relation to these ceremonies. Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, Edmund Leach, and Meyer Fortes provide historians with rich epistemological data. See also Stefan Weinfurter, “Authority and Legitimation of Royal Policy and Action:The Case of Henry II,” in Medieval Concepts of the Past. Ritual, Memory, Historiography, ed. Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick Geary (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2002), 19–38, and John W. Bern­hardt, “King Henry II of Germany: Royal Self-Representation and Historical Memory,” in Medieval Concepts, ed. Althoff, Fried, and Geary, 39–70. The question of cultural authority has been explored for early modern literature, and some of these theories may be usefully applied to medieval issues. See, for instance, Marina S. Brownlee and Han Ulrich Gumbrecht, eds., Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens, eds., Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989); and Catherine Emerson, Edward A. O’Brien, and Laurent Semichon, eds., Auctoritas: Authorship and Authority (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2001). 42. A very useful synthesis of the ritual of coronation and its symbols is in Álvaro Fernández de Córdova, “Los símbolos del poder real,” in Los Reyes Católicos y Granada, ed. Alberto Bartolomé and Carlos J. Hernando (Granada: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, 2005), 37–58. 43. The circumstances, meaning, and consequences of Frederick’s self-coronation are narrated in Kantorowicz, L’Empereur Frédéric II (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 187–98.

Notes to Pages 210–11 305

44. Marta Vanlandingham, Transforming the State: King, Court and Political Culture in the Realms of Aragon (1213–1387) (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 9. 45. For the coronation of the kings of Castile, see Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, “Un ceremonial inédito de coronación de los reyes de Castilla,” in Estudios sobre las instituciones medievales españolas (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1965), 739–63, and Luis García de Valdeavellano, Curso de historia de las instituciones españolas (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1968), 430–32. For a general view of the ideological conception of the Iberian monarchy, see José Antonio Maravall’s “Sobre el concepto de monarquía en la edad media española,” in Estudios dedicados a Menéndez Pidal (Madrid: CSIC, 1954), 401–17, Francisco Elías de Tejada, Historia del pensamiento político catalán. La Cataluña clásica (987–1479) (Sevilla: Montejurra, 1963), and, more recently, José Manuel Nieto Soria, Ceremonias de la realeza: propaganda y legitimación en la Castilla Trastámara (Madrid: Nerea, 1993), and Nieto Soria, Fundamentos del poder real en Castilla (siglos XIII–XVI) (Madrid: Eudema, 1988). 46. Teófilo F. Ruiz, “Une royauté sans sacre: la monarchie castillane du bas moyen âge,” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 39 (1984): 429. Ruiz explores this story as the singular manifestation of the Castilian “royauté sans sacre,” which does not claim the healing character of both French and English kings, or the backing of the church in the ceremony of the coronation. See also Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges. Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (Paris: Colin, 1961). 47. “El Rey subió al altar solo, et tomó la su corona, que era de oro con piedras de muy grand prescio, et púsola en la cabeza; et tomó la otra corona, et púsola a la Reyna, et tornó fincar los hinojos ante el altar.” Cronica de D. Alfonso el Onceno de este nombre: de los reyes que reynaron en Castilla y en León, ed. Francisco Cerdá (Madrid: Imprenta de D. Antonio de Sancha, 1787), chap. 100. 48. Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, introduction, 1: 36, and Vicente Salavert i Roca, “El problema estratégico del Mediterráneo occidental y la politica aragonesa,” IV Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón (Palma de Majorca: Diputación Provincial de Baleares, 1959), 1: 213. 49. James I, Llibre dels fets, chap. 538 (Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 183).

306 Notes to Pages 211–13

50. The ceremony is described by Bernat Desclot in his chronicle (Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 460). 51. “Non intendimus a vobis recipere tanquam ab Ecclesia romana, nec pro ipsa Ecclesia nec contra Ecclesiam.” Bonifacio Palacios Martín, La coronación de los reyes de Aragón, 1204–1410 (Valencia: Anubar, 1975), 308. See also Francesc Carreras i Candi, “Itinerari del rey Anfós II (1285–1291),” Boletín de la Real Academia de las Buenas Letras de Barcelona 10 (1921–22). 52. Palacios, La coronación de los reyes de Aragón, 190–91. 53. Ibid., 269–276. See also Palacios, “El Ceremonial,” in Ceremonial de consagración y coronación de los reyes de Aragón. II. Transcripción y estudios (Zaragoza: Diputación General de Aragón, 1992), 104–33. Palacios proves that Alfonse the Benign introduced this practice; scholars before him wrongly attributed it to Peter the Great, perhaps confusing this Peter the Great (III king of Aragon but II count of Barcelona) with Peter the Ceremonious (IV of Aragon and III of Barcelona). See Percy E. Schramm, Las Insignias de la realeza en la Edad Media Española (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1960), 93–94. I use the Aragonese kings’ popular names precisely to avoid this kind of confusion. Self-coronation was also practiced in the kingdom of Navarre in the fifteenth century. See Mercedes Osés, “El ritual de la realeza navarra en los siglos XIV y XV: Coronaciones y funerales,” in Ramírez Vaquero, Ceremonial de la coronación, 305–21. 54. Muntaner uses a peculiar and rather unusual Catalan verb, adobar, to emphasize that the gesture of putting the crown on his head was performed by the king himself and that his brothers only “adjusted it.” Notably, the archbishop of Zaragoza was not part of this ritual. 55. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 297 (Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 939–940). 56. For a dramatic narration of Peter’s coronation, see Rafael Tasis, La vida del rei en Pere III (Barcelona: Teide, 1954), 49–52. 57. I have translated the Catalan word, adobar, as “to adjust.” This verb transmits the idea that the archbishop would have little to do once the king had placed it on his own head. At this decisive moment, Peter chooses the same verb (abobar) that Muntaner used in his chronicle in similar circumstances.

Notes to Pages 213–17 307

58. Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, 2.10–12 (Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1025–1026). 59. For the consolidation of late medieval European dynastic monarchy, superseding the sacred or elective, see Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 330. 60. “Superioritas que fabulose pretenditur de regno Aragonum, pro qui nullum post Deum in temporalibus superiorem recognoscimus vel habemus” (quoted by Hillgarth, Chronicle. Pere III, Introduction, 1: 77). 61. “E així com és acostumat de fer per los grans senyors del món en semblants cases” (Peter the Ceremonious, Llibre, 5.30, Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 1119). 62. Muntaner, Crònica, chap. 298 (Soldevila, Les Quatre Grans Cròniques, 942). 63. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 340–41, also quotes H. G. Richardson, “The English Coronation Oath,” Speculum 24 (1949): 50. 64. Joseph R. Strayer, “Defense of the Realm and Royal Power in France,” in Studi in Onore di Gino Luzzatto (Milan: A. Guiffrè, 1949), 292. 65. Jacques Le Goff, “A Coronation Program for the Age of Saint Louis: The Ordo of 1250,” in Bak, Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern Monarchic Ritual, 54–55. 66. Ernst Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Medieval Ruler Worship (Berkeley: University of California Publications in History, 1946), 76–77; see also Valerio Valeri, “Constitutive History: Genealogy and Narrative in the Legitimation of Hawaiian Kingship,” in Culture through Time: Anthropological Approaches, ed. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 183. 67. Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris: Minuit, 1981). 68. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 326, who quotes John of Paris, De potestate, c. 18 (“ut patet in regibus Hispanorum”). 69. On the Visigothic origins of coronations, see Thomas Deswarte, “Le Christ-roi: autel et couronne votive dans l’Espagne wisigothique,” in Églises et pouvoirs, ed. Bruno Béthouart and Jérome Grévy (Boulognesur-Mer: Maison de la Recherche en sciences humaines “Palais Impérial,” 2007), 71–83. 70. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 318–324.

308 Notes to Pages 217–22

71. Ibid., 231. 72. For the concept of pactisme, see Jaume Vicens Vives, Notícia de Catalunya (Barcelona: Destino, 1960). For Castilian monarchies, see Valdeavellano, Curso de historia de las instituciones, 422ff. 73. For the “Aragonese Unión,” see Esteban Sarasa, “El enfrentamiento de Pedro el Ceremonioso con la aristocracia aragonesa: la guerra con la Unión y sus consecuencias,” in Pere el Cerimoniós i la seva època (Barcelona: CSIC, 1989), 35–46. 74. For the long-term evolution of this aspect of European political thought, see David Starkey, “Representation Through Intimacy: A Study of the Symbolism of Monarchy and Court Office in Early Modern England,” in The Tudor Monarchy, ed. John Guy (New York: Arnold, 1997). 75. Edition of the Catalan version of the Ceremonial is in Francisco M. Gimeno, Daniel Gonzalbo, and Josep Trenchs, ed., Ordinacions de la Casa i Cort de Pere el Ceremoniós (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2009), 241–74. 76. Schramm, “Die Krönung in Deutschland,” 591ff. 77. Palacios, La coronación de los reyes de Aragón, 266. 78. This example is taken from the twelfth-century Sicilian Ordo edited by Reinhard Elze, “The Ordo for the Coronation of King Roger II of Sicily: An Example of Dating from Internal Evidence,” in Bak, Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern Monarchic Ritual, 175. conclusion

1. A useful syntheses of the evolution of early modern Catalan historiography is in Albert Balcells, ed., Història de la historiografia catalana (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2004), 77–140. 2. For the concepts of poetics and politics, see James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), and Pierre Carrard, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse form Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 3. Mohsen Ghadessy, ed., Text and Context in Functional Linguistics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999), xi–xvii; Andrew Taylor, Textual Situations; Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Keith Busby, Codex and Con-

Notes to Pages 222–26 309

text: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002). 4. George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture: State–Formation after the Cultural Turn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 20. 5. William H. Sewell Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Victoria E. Bonell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 49–50. 6. Margaret R. Somers, “The Privatization of Citizenship: How to Unthink a Knowledge Culture,” in Bonell and Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn, 129. 7. Patrick Brantlinger, “A Response to Beyond the Cultural Turn,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 1508–9. 8. Valerio Valeri, “Constitutive History: Genealogy and Narrative in the Legitimation of Hawaiian Kingship,” in Culture through Time: Anthropological Approaches, ed. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 154. 9. John D. Y. Peel, “Making History: The Past in the Ijesha Present,” Man 19 (1984): 111–13.

Index of Names Abadal, Ramon d’, 97, 107, 124 Abelard, Peter, 134, 137 Agnes (wife of William of Mont­ pellier), 183 Ainsworth, Peter, 10 Alexander the Great, 80, 191–92, 206 Alfonse II the Chaste (king of Ara­ gon), 4, 11–12, 22, 27, 31–32, 36–37, 39, 55, 97, 129–30 Alfonse III (king of Castile), 29 Alfonse III the Liberal (king of Aragon), 12, 72, 74, 76, 78–79, 191, 194–95, 211 Alfonse IV the Benign (king of Aragon), 12, 71–72, 74, 78, 92, 99, 193, 197, 209, 211–12, 217 Alfonse V the Magnanimous (king of Aragon), 107 Alfonse VIII (king of Castile), 164 Alfonse X the Wise (king of Castile), 74, 131, 161, 172, 192, 210 Alfonse XI (king of Castile), 210 Al-Mansûr, 34, 115 Almodis de la Marca, 35 Aloy, Mestre (sculptor), 96

Andronicus Paleologus, 80 Arnau of Segarra (Dominican), 53 Arnau of Torreles (scribe), 151, 169, 173 Arthur (king), 63, 191–92 Asperti, Stefano, 8, 10, 136 Aubert, David, 192 Augustine, Saint, 134, 137 Aurell, Martin, 8, 64 Ausiàs March, 178 Badia, Lola, 10, 136 Barthes, Roland, 7, 155 Baudouin I Bras-de-Fer (count of Flanders), 32 Beatrice (sister of Queen Constance of Sicily), 194 Beer, Jeanette, 149 Benedict XII (pope), 100, 152 Benjamin, Walter, 184 Berenguer Arnau (knight), 84 Berenguer d’Entença (knight), 78 Berenguer Ramon I (count of Barce­ lona), 35 Berenguer Ramon II (count of Barce­ lona), 35

312

Index of Names Bernard of Septimania (count of  Bar­ celona), 64, 66 Bernat de Cabrera (knight), 102, 170, 171–72 Bernat de Rocafort (knight), 78 Bernat Desclot, 3, 11, 13, 24, 28, 42–43, 46, 55–64, 66–70, 72, 75, 77, 88, 104, 130, 138, 141, 144–45, 147, 150– 51, 164–68, 174–75, 178–79, 185–86, 188, 190–91, 202, 222, 224–26 Bernat Descoll (scribe), 97, 103, 151, 169–70, 173 Bernat d’Estanyol (knight), 78 Bernat de Torre (scribe), 169 Bernat Escrivà, 58–59 Bernat Mallol, 61 Bernat Metge, 178 Bernat Ramon Descavall (scribe), 151, 172, 173 Bernat Rossinyol, 75 Bernat Tallaferro (count of Besalú), 37 Bertrand of Roquebrune (knight), 65 Bisson, Thomas N., 8 Bloch, R. Howard, 10, 120–21 Bofarull, Pròsper de, 106 Borrell (count of Barcelona), 33–34 Bourdieu, Pierre, 116 Bruguera, Jordi, 8, 10, 41, 136 Bunyan, John, 137 Burns, Robert I., 8, 41, 43, 54, 136 Canals (Fra), 206 Carolaldus (Langobard king), 64 Cerverí de Girona ( jongleur), 197 Charlemagne, 63, 192 Charles IV of Bohemia, 158 Charles of Anjou, 56, 67–69, 82, 165, 168 Charles of Sicily, 69 Charles of Valois, 69 Charles the Bald, 31–32

Cicero, 96 Cingolani, Stefano, 8, 10, 41, 58, 61, 136 Coll i Alentorn, Miquel, 8, 10, 58–59, 124, 136, 184 Comí ( jongleur), 197 Commynes, Philippe of, 148 Conradus of Sicily, 67 Constance (wife of Peter the Great and daughter of Manfred of Sicily), 56, 67, 68, 194 Couser, G. Thomas, 173 Damian-Grint, Peter, 158 Dante Alighieri, 56, 137 David (king of Israel), 206, 209 Davis, Rocío G., 143 Derrida, Jacques, 126 Dolça of Provence (wife of Ramon Berenguer III of Barcelona), 35 Eakin, Paul John, 143 Edward I (king of England), 194–95 Egan, Susanna, 143 Eiximenis, Francesc, 178, 201 Ejérica, Pedro d’ (knight), 100 Eliade, Mircea, 181 Ermengol I of Urgell (also called Ermengol I of Cordoba), 27, 34–35, 37 Ermengol VI of Urgell (also called Ermengol VI of Castile), 37 Ferdinand (stepbrother of Peter the Ceremonious), 104 Fernando III (king of Castile), 131 Fernando IV (king of Castile), 202 Fleischman, Suzanne, 10 Foot, Sarah, 116 Foucault, Michel, 7, 119 Francesc (chronicler), 61

Index of Names 313 Franklin, Benjamin, 137 Frederick I of Hohenstaufen (also called Barbarossa), 66 Frederick II (king of Sicily), 73 Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (also called Frederick I [king of Sicily]), 209–10 Froissart, Jean, 73, 98, 148 Frye, Northrop, 112, 168, 186 Galbraith, Vivian, 61 Geertz, Clifford, 186, 204 Geoffrey of Villehardouin, 72, 139, 142, 146–48 George, Saint, 51 Gero (Norman chieftain), 179 Girart d’Amiens, 192 Godfrey of Viterbo, 192 Gomes, Pedro (knight), 164 Greene, Virginia, 10 Gregory X (pope), 163, 211 Guerreau-Jalabert, Anita, 119 Guibert of Nogent, 146–47 Guidfredus, 159, 182. See also Wilfred I the Hairy Guifré Borrell (count of Barcelona), 33–34, 124 Guillem de Alcalá (knight), 46 Guillem de Bellveer (knight), 195 Guillem de Corcelles (Templar), 163 Guillem de Mediona (knight), 51 Guillem de Montcada (knight), 52 Guillem Ramon de Montcada (char­ acter created by Desclot), 57, 60–62, 65, 167, 185 Guillem Ramon of Cerdanya, 37 Guimerà, Angel, 189 Henry II (king of Castile), 102–3, 171 Hermann (the Jew), 137–38, 157

Herodotus, 96, 144 Hillgarth, Mary, 172 Iñigo Arista (king of Pamplona), 96 Innocence III (pope), 211 James (bishop of Valencia), 169 James I the Conqueror (king of Ara­­­­­­ gon), 3, 9, 11–12, 15, 24, 27, 37, 39–49, 51–57, 59–60, 62–63, 65, 67, 70–72, 74, 75, 77, 81, 83, 88, 91, 93, 96–100, 103–4, 107, 128, 129, 130–31, 133, 135–42, 144–47, 150–52, 157–66, 174–75, 178, 183–86, 188, 190, 191, 197, 198, 200, 202–3, 211, 222–26 James II (king of Majorca), 69 James II the Just (king of Aragon), 12, 74, 84, 97, 130, 192, 194, 196, 211 James III (king of Majorca), 76, 100, 101, 201 James the Apostle, Saint, 45–47, 99, 158 Jaufre (knight), 191–92 Jean of Joinville, 72, 93, 139, 141, 144, 146–49 Jiménez de Rada, Rodrigo, 94 John I the Hunter ( Joan el Caçador, king of Aragon), 103, 173 John of Paris, 217 Judith (wife of Louis the Good), 64 Judith of Bavaria (wife of Louis the Pious), 66 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 209, 215–16, 218 Lambert of Ardres, 32 Lancelot, 193 Le Goff, Jacques, 216 Lejeune, Philippe, 134 Leonor of Castile, 47 Leonor of Portugal, 101

314

Index of Names Leonor of Sicily, 101 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 180 Lidéric (of Flanders), 181 Llull, Ramon, 178, 202 Lopes de Sàdaba, Fortuny (knight), 164 López de Ayala, Pedro (chronicler), 202 Louis, Saint, 131, 141, 146–47 Louis IX (king of France), 5, 68 Louis the Pious, 64, 66 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 204 Manfred of Sicily, 56, 67 Marcus, Laura, 136 Maria of Montpellier, 46, 63–64 Marin, Louis, 216 Marnette, Sophie, 10, 148 Martin, George, 10 Martin I the Humane (king of Aragon), 173, 203 Martin IV (pope), 68–69 Martorell, Joanot, 3, 178, 198 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, 184 Miqueli, Skyr, 194 Miró, bishop of Girona, 33–34 Montoliu, Manuel de, 8, 183–84 Muntaner, Ramon, 3, 9, 11, 13, 16, 24, 28, 46, 53, 59–60, 63, 70–89, 92–93, 98, 104, 130, 133, 138, 141–52, 158, 160, 166, 178–79, 185, 187–98, 200– 203, 209, 211, 214, 222, 224–26 Nerra, Foulque, 140 Nicolau d’Olwer, Lluís, 8, 10, 41, 136 Nora, Pierre, 124 Novellet ( jongleur), 197 Oliba Cabreta, 34–35, 37 Ot of Montcada, 213 Otter, Monica, 197

Palerm Abat (knight), 192 Partner, Nancy F., 10 Pasquier, Etienne, 124 Patterson, Lee, 10 Pattison, David G., 10 Pedro (Infant, brother of Alfonse IV the Benign), 197, 212 Pelayo (of Castile), 181 Pepin (king of the Franks), 206 Pere Bernes (silversmith), 96 Peter I (king of Castile), 92, 102, 171 Peter II the Catholic (king of Ara­ gon), 12, 27, 39, 46, 55, 63, 67, 97, 167, 210–11 Peter III the Great (king of Aragon), 12–13, 53, 56–57, 67, 68–70, 72, 74–75, 77, 80, 86, 97, 104, 130–31, 165–66, 168–75, 186, 191–94, 200, 211 Peter IV the Ceremonious (king of Aragon), 2, 7, 9, 11–16, 24, 53, 59, 60, 89, 91–108, 130, 133, 135, 138, 144, 150–52, 158, 160, 188, 191, 194, 199–207, 209–14, 216, 218–19, 221–22, 224–26 Peter the Apostle, 200 Petronella (princess of Aragon), 60, 62 Philip II Augustus (king of France), 41, 130–31, 215 Philip III (king of France), 69, 75 Philippe of Novare, 72, 139, 141–42, 146–47 Phillips, Mark, 129 Pons de Copons (abbot), 150 Pujol, Josep M., 8, 10, 41, 136 Puyo, Guillem de (knight), 161 Ramasset (jongleur), 197 Ramiro the Monk (king of Aragon), 22–23 Ramon Berenguer I (count of Barce­ lona), 35, 37

Index of Names 315 Ramon Berenguer II (count of  Bar­ celona), 35 Ramon Berenguer III (count of  Bar­ celona), 22, 55, 65 Ramon Berenguer IV (count of  Bar­ celona), 22–23, 26–27, 35–37, 55, 57, 60, 62, 65–66, 130 Ramon Borrell (count of Barcelona), 27, 34 Ramon de Montcada (knight), 52 Ramon de Vilanova (scribe), 173, 178 Ramon Ferrer, 28 Ramon Wilfred (count of Cer­­­­­ danya), 37 Ranimir, 36. See also Ramiro the Monk Raoul (bishop of Urgell), 31 Raoul Barbeta, 180 Riquer, Martí de, 8, 10, 69, 196 Rivera, Manel Marian, 96 Robert of Clari, 72, 93, 138–39, 142, 146, 148 Roger de Flor, 3, 13, 72–73, 76–78, 80, 86–87, 147, 192, 194 Roger de Llúria, 67, 69, 76–77, 83, 84, 86, 192–94 Roger II (king of Sicily), 210 Roland, 191–93 Rovira i Virgili, Antoni, 81 Rubiés, Joan-Pau, 8 Rubió, Jordi, 66, 196 Rubió i Lluch, Antoni, 106, 203 Salomon (count of Cerdanya), 30–31 Salrach, Josep Maria, 8 Samuel (prophet of Israel), 209 Sancho IV (king of Castile), 77, 84 Sant Jordi, Jordi de, 178 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 157 Schramm, Percy, 208

Sewell, William H., 184, 222 Shakespeare, William, 56 Simon de Montfort, 39, 43, 163 Soldevila, Ferran, 8, 10, 41, 61, 78, 81, 107, 136, 183–84, 196 Solomon (king of Israel), 158, 206 Somers, Margaret, 223 Spengemann, William C., 137 Spiegel, Gabrielle M., 10, 95, 120, 127 Stahuljak, Zrinka, 10, 120 Steinmetz, George, 222 Strayer, Joseph R., 215 Sunifred I (count of Barcelona), 33–34 Sunyer I (count of Barcelona), 33–34 Thapar, Romila, 182 Thucydides, 144 Tristan, 63, 191–93 Valençona (wife of Ramon Muntaner), 76 Valeri, Valerio, 226 Vicens Vives, Jaume, 97, 124 Victor, Saint, 96 Villani, Giovanni, 98 Villeneuve, Hugo de, 196 White, Hayden V., 167–68 Wilfred (brother of Bernat Talla­­­ ferro, count of Cerdanya), 37 Wilfred I the Hairy (count of Bar­ celona), 12, 23, 26–34, 62, 116, 119, 124, 128, 129, 141, 178–82, 225–26 William of Montpellier, 46, 183 Witikind (Saxon rebel), 180 Zink, Michel, 136, 140, 142, 147, 149 Zumthor, Michel, 145 Zurita, Jerónimo, 105–6