CHAPTER 3The Captives

“All of These Waters Are Full of Thieves”

The Barcelona that the Lisbon merchants encountered in 1334 was a confident city whose ships were a dominant presence in the western Mediterranean. But until a little more than a century earlier, Barcelona had been one of the many cities in the region that had to be on constant guard against attacks at sea from more powerful foes. For most of the central Middle Ages, the major threat to the ports of the northwestern Mediterranean had come from Muslim ships, whose attacks were both severe and frequent enough that several ports and landings along the Catalan-Provençal coastline that had existed since Roman times found themselves abandoned by the year 1000.⁸ As time went on, however, the threat to Catalan port cities increasingly came from other Christians, and while some of the attacks that Barcelona suffered came at the hands of political enemies, others issued from ports belonging to commercial rivals and on-and-off political allies in the south of France, Castile, and the kingdom of Mallorca.⁹ The history of the coastal town of Collioure provides a particularly illustrative example of the rotating cast of players in this pirate drama. Collioure had been home to a thriving natural harbor in the early Middle Ages, but by the year 1000, it had been abandoned due to the frequency of attack from ships of the caliphate of Cordoba. When King Peter I/II (r. 1196–1213) determined shortly before his death to restore Collioure's port as part of his effort to stimulate the Crown of Aragon's economic reach up and down the Occitan coast, he placed his cousin, Count Nunyo Sanç of Roussillon, in charge of the effort. In an ironic twist, the count spent the nearly three decades from Peter's death in 1213 to his own in 1242 enriching himself by using the port as a base from which to sponsor his own attacks on enemies and allies alike.¹⁰

Barcelona's encounters with both Christian and Muslim raiders at sea only increased over the course of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries as its ships took the lead in the Crown's territorial expansion into the islands of the western and central Mediterranean.¹¹ While islands were key points in the strategies of Mediterranean powers from the Almoravids to the Normans to the Catalans, they also functioned as both nodes of trade networks and bases for pirate and corsair activity.¹² In some periods, governors or rulers of these islands explicitly offered refuge to pirates in exchange for the protection they, in particular, could lend an island territory, where extensive coastline combined with the distance from powerful mainland allies rendered such places especially vulnerable to attack. At the same time, the less-regulated markets of some islands made them ideal places to offload goods of dubious provenance. A combination of sparse population, extensive coastline, and political instability would transform Sardinia, for example, into a pirate haven by the mid-fourteenth century: far from the authority of the Crown of Aragon's monarchs and subject to the political chaos arising from the conflict that had broken out between the Catalans and their former allies, the judges of Arborea, the island became home to both pirates and corsairs who were tolerated and even supported by both sides.¹³ And while raids originating from Almoravid Mallorca may have formed part of James I's initial justification for targeting the Balearics, the Crown's conquest and annexation of the archipelago did not put a stop to pirate attacks in the region. Even in the late fourteenth century, a representative of Florence's Datini company operating out of Avignon could still complain of the sea around Mallorca that “all of these waters are full of thieves.”¹⁴

Barcelona's status as the premier port of a growing Mediterranean power likely made the city's ships tempting targets for attack, and commercial rivalries could increase the incidence of piracy between politically allied Christian powers. But the fact that Barcelona's Mediterranean-facing neighbors were all confronted with similar threats meant that piracy could also spark alliances.¹⁵ As early as the first decades of the twelfth century, raiding ships launching out of Muslim-controlled Mallorca had prompted a temporary alliance between Count Ramon Berenguer III and the city of Pisa.¹⁶ Centuries later, toward the end of 1333, Barcelona found itself allied with Mallorca, now under the control of a cadet branch of the house of Barcelona, when “thieves with an armed ship” plundered a ship from Collioure (by then a mainland possession of the king of Mallorca) that had been on its way to Barcelona. The pirates disappeared after the attack, initially evading the ships that Barcelona had put out to search for them. But they soon found themselves pursued by the authorities of both Barcelona and Mallorca, a hunt that ended when the Mallorcans captured two suspects, with Barcelona holding another suspected confederate.¹⁷

Whether originating with enemies or allies, frequent attacks at sea had the potential to be catastrophic for a city like Barcelona, where livelihoods—and, in the case of a famine year like 1333/1334, lives—depended on secure transit across the Mediterranean. Pirate attacks meant that Barcelona's shipowners, and the merchants and passengers who chartered their ships, not only risked total loss of their cargo but also had to reckon with the cost of employing men at arms or waiting for a convoy to travel with, both of which would have significantly increased costs and reduced profits.¹⁸ Captains and merchants also faced the possibility of violence. Captives, whether captains, crews, merchants, or paying passengers, might be beaten, held hostage, enslaved, or even killed, and extended captivities explicitly for the purpose of ransom were not unusual.¹⁹ In sum, long before the Lisbon-bound ships were attacked, Christian-led assaults on the ships of enemies and allies alike had become a serious hazard to the transport of merchandise—including grain—in the Mediterranean, one that demanded institutional and legal remedies.

The Law of the Sea

When the Portuguese merchants made landfall in Barcelona and were released by their captors, they immediately filed a complaint with the veguer of Barcelona.²⁰ Their most important task would have been to establish that the seizure of their cargo had been unlawful. In theory, determining the legality of any attack at sea was a relatively straightforward matter based on the political relationship between perpetrator and victim: corsairing was a legal raid carried out against a political enemy of the perpetrator's home government, with or without explicit state sanction, while attacks at sea that targeted the ships of allies or neutral parties fell into the category of illegal acts of piracy.²¹ Medieval records of actual attacks, however, are much less clear-cut on the distinction. While contemporary records occasionally refer to voyages as being organized for the purpose of corsairing (in cursu) or attacks being carried out “in the manner of pirates” (in modo piratico), they just as often use terms like “enemy ships” or “armed ships” that leave the nature of the attack itself open to interpretation. It was, in fact, rare that particular ships or their captains and crews were ever solely “pirate” or “corsair” ships; rather, operators tended to lease their ships out to merchants when they could, seizing other ships’ cargoes when profitable or opportune, at times even interrupting a merchant voyage to raid (lawfully or otherwise) other ships that they happened along in their journey.²²

By the time of the attack on the Portuguese merchants, the city of Barcelona—specifically, its Consulate of the Sea—had developed a body of law, the Llibre del consolat de mar (Book of the Consulate of the Sea), devoted to resolving ambiguities and imposing some order on the vital but largely unregulated world of maritime commerce.²³ Barcelona was not unique in such efforts. Legal codes like the Llibre emerged around the same time in several places in medieval Europe, as port cities throughout the northwestern Mediterranean and beyond were developing their own mechanisms to regulate maritime commerce in a way that balanced royal, local, and independent mercantile interests.²⁴ In this broader international context, the issue of theft at sea was of particular concern: the entire final section of the Llibre was devoted to ordinances governing the staffing and operation of armed ships, a concerted effort to keep all plunder on the right side of the law.²⁵

But the order envisioned by the Llibre and other codes like it was often a poor fit with the disorderly sea it strove to regulate. The often unclear line between legitimate and illegitimate targets was complicated by the ever-shifting political map of the Mediterranean, which created situations in which individual ships and captains could unwittingly cross lines of legality, such as during a period of relative peace between the Crown of Aragon and Castile beginning around 1305 that turned legitimate corsairing between the two kingdoms into illegal piracy overnight.²⁶ A second factor complicating the Llibre's neat division between legal corsairing and illegal piracy was the fact that shipowners and the merchants who leased their ships were not themselves state actors, nor did their crews, often recruited piecemeal from ports across the Mediterranean, owe allegiance to any particular kingdom.²⁷ A ship like that of the Lisbon merchants might be legally boarded if a captain suspected a ship flying under a friendly flag of carrying cargo belonging to a declared enemy. Passages of the Llibre governing encounters like this one present captains in corsair attacks as improbable accountants of the sea, carefully questioning captains and merchant passengers of seized ships and inspecting account books to determine whether any of the cargo on board belonged to “the enemy” and could thus be legitimately confiscated.²⁸ In one case from late 1332, a ship from Barcelona captured and looted another ship from Montpellier (by that point part of the kingdom of Mallorca) that had made a stop at the French port of Aigues-Mortes while en route from Nice with a cargo of textiles.²⁹ The fact that the kingdom of Mallorca and the Crown of Aragon were not at war at the time would have normally placed this attack firmly on the wrong side of the line that divided legal corsairing from illegal piracy. But Aigues-Mortes, by virtue of its proximity to the Ligurian coast, was, by the early fourteenth century, home to a thriving community of expatriate Genoese craftsmen, port engineers, shipwrights, and political exiles who had fled their home city's endemic political turmoil.³⁰ The ships, crews, and merchants using that port thus might have had political identities that were more open to interpretation than most, which made ships sailing into or out of that port potential targets for corsair captains operating out of Barcelona, which was at that time at war with Genoa. As a result, Barcelona was able to defend the actions of one of its captains by asserting that he had thought that he was taking goods from the enemy Genoese rather than from friends who were subjects of the king of Mallorca.³¹

Although the authors of the Llibre tried to imagine and provide clear guidelines for any legal troubles a corsair ship might encounter, other more mundane hazards remained. First among these was the economic risk involved in taking part in such an attack in the first place. The Llibre allowed for a vote to be held among a ship's crew and any merchants on board as to whether to make a detour to attack a nearby enemy vessel. If the crew and merchants assented, they were effectively agreeing to become passive partners in a corsair attack in exchange for a share of the profits from a successful raid. But that same section of the Llibre also makes it clear that passengers and crew who did so renounced the right to claim restitution for any loss or damages they might suffer if things went sideways.³²

Participants in corsair voyages, even passengers who were essentially no more than consenting bystanders, also risked more tangible harm. The Llibre paints a picture of a corsair raid as a cool and considered negotiation between attacker and attacked, in which captains were only interested in the ship's cargo and might even negotiate an agreement with the owners of the merchandise to ransom their goods back then and there, thereby saving everyone involved a great deal of trouble.³³ But the Llibre's authors still had to acknowledge the threat of violence that always lurked in the background of this optimistically orderly vision of theft at sea. One passage stipulates that even before his obligation to protect and defend his cargo, a merchant captain's main responsibility when faced with attack was to protect the merchants, pilgrims, and other passengers on board, regardless of rank, and especially to defend them against “pirates and corsairs and all others who may want to do them harm.”³⁴ Another part of the Llibre, which notes that a corsair captain could legally respond to resistance by sinking the ship in question, takes care to stipulate that the attacking captain first had to take measures to protect the lives of those on board.³⁵

Given the potential risks, the decision of whether to resist, run, or give in when faced with an attack at sea was not a simple one, and merchants, captains, and crews might differ as to the best course of action.³⁶ The Llibre authorized captains to use their own judgment to overrule merchant passengers in order to preserve the ship and crew even before an attack occurred, whether this meant making a strategic decision to take a different route, insisting on sailing in convoy with other ships to provide protection (even if this meant delays), jettisoning cargo, or even leaving a merchant and their cargo behind if the captain saw that the port they were in was in imminent danger of attack.³⁷ It is easy to imagine just such a conflict between captain and merchants taking place on the deck of the Lisbon ships. Although the documents surrounding this case do not mention any force of arms either in the attack or the resistance to it, knowledge of the potential for violence may explain why the captains of the Lisbon ships gave up their resistance early on, later asserting that they had “feared even worse treatment” after the merchants had been confined belowdecks on the pirate captain's ship.³⁸

Barcelona's shipowners and captains had long profited from corsair voyages, but merchants needed a safe sea in which to ply their trade. Barcelona's development and elaboration of the Llibre del consolat de mar illustrates the substantial overlap between the interests of the city's government, those of the merchants and captains who were that city's economic lifeblood, and those of the monarchs who simultaneously ruled and depended on both. Merchants and shippers may have operated in a sea that they experienced at most times as relatively borderless, but the Llibre's extensive treatment of piracy and corsairing seems to have been constructed with as much sensitivity to the politics of international alliances as to merchant profits and losses. During the famine year, however, Barcelona would turn to another use of maritime law, one that allowed it to engage in its own territorializing project in Mediterranean space far beyond its shores.

“By Force or by Favor”: Controlling the Sea in the Bad Year

The experience of the Portuguese captives, while vivid in its details, was far from unique during this famine year, when shortage prompted an increase in predatory behavior that could strain relationships among allies. Around the same time as the attack on the Lisbon-bound ships, the councilors of Barcelona had arranged a purchase from a Tortosa merchant who had grain in Burriana, a town that lay south along the coast in the kingdom of Valencia and that, like Barcelona and Tortosa, was part of the larger domains of the kings of Aragon. Barcelona's councilors took precautions before transporting this shipment. Having heard that King Alfonso's younger brother Peter, lord of the coastal county of Empúries, had been sending out armed ships to capture other cities’ grain shipments in order to feed his own lands, the councilors invested 100 lliures to arm the ship they had procured.³⁹ Despite these precautions, Barcelona's grain was captured in transit. The culprit, however, was not the count of Empúries but rather agents of yet another Crown city—Tarragona, located about halfway between Barcelona and Tortosa. The councilors were forced to write to John, the archbishop of Tarragona (and another brother of the king), asking him to intercede on their behalf to get both the grain and the cost of the ship's armaments back.⁴⁰

Between the theft itself by Tarragona to the south and the lurking threat from Empúries to the north, Barcelona's leaders had to be vigilant during this famine year, when even one's closest neighbors could turn predatory. But Barcelona was just as frequently the aggressor in cases of grain piracy against its near neighbors. In one such case from late summer of 1333, the councilors of Barcelona responded to a complaint lodged by a group of grain merchants who had been doing business in Montpellier. The merchants had been transporting two shiploads of grain to Collioure by way of Aigues-Mortes when they were set upon by ships that forced them to divert to Barcelona and unload their grain to be sold there. For their part, Barcelona's leaders hotly objected to a key portion of the complaint: the ships, they asserted, had not been anywhere near the (at that time allied) French port of Aigues-Mortes. Rather, they had been intercepted in the waters off the northern coast of Catalonia, where the merchants had allegedly been negotiating to sell their grain to the cities of Girona and Palamós. It was this revised location that the councilors referred to in their argument that the attack had been lawful, citing a royal privilege that allowed Barcelona, in times of shortage, to confiscate the cargoes of any grain-laden ships passing through their waters.⁴¹

As authors and enforcers of a law code that devoted so much space to regulating attacks at sea, the leaders of Barcelona had an obvious self-interest in representing even the most egregious theft of other cities’ property as legally aboveboard. But the councilors’ arguments in this case and others like it take the distinction between lawful seizure and piracy out of the Llibre's discourse of enemies and allies and place it into a new conversation—this one about famine and necessity. The unnamed privilege Barcelona's council invoked in the foregoing case was almost certainly Vi vel gratia, a privilege whose title derives from a phrase within the document referring to grain given over either “by force or by favor.” One of the earliest surviving direct references to the content and conditions of this privilege comes in January 1329 as part of a response that King Alfonso had issued regarding a dispute over a shipment of grain that Barcelona had seized from a ship from Tortosa. Barcelona's councilors had asserted that their city had the right to confiscate whatever shipments of grain wandered into its waters, invoking “usage, custom, and an ancient ruling” that allowed that city's officials to compel any food-bearing ships passing through Barcelona's waters to make landfall in their city, where their grain would be sold in that city's market—notably, at a price determined by the city rather than by the merchant who owned the cargo.⁴²

The wording of this particular document suggests that the privilege itself predates its 1329 inclusion in the collection of Barcelona's urban privileges known as the Llibre vermell (Red Book). This impression is reinforced by a case dating from September 1323 in which the councilors responded to a complaint from the city of Mallorca that Barcelona had confiscated one of their grain shipments, arguing that Barcelona's captains had done so “in accordance with privilege and custom.”⁴³ Barcelona also invoked the privilege against one of its own Catalan sister cities in 1331 when ships operating out of Barcelona captured a grain shipment that the merchant Pere Domenech had been transporting to Girona. When Girona's leaders demanded that the grain be returned to them, Barcelona's councilors wrote to the royal officials stationed in that city, offering to return the ship but defending the legality of their seizure of the grain itself by citing both royal privilege and “ancient custom” that allowed the city of Barcelona, in times of urgent necessity, to confiscate any grain shipments in the seas pertaining to that city.⁴⁴

Barcelona's use of Vi vel gratia during the bad year of 1333/1334 thus would not have been new. Nor was it unique to Barcelona. Over the course of the fourteenth century, various kings of Aragon would issue similar privileges to other coastal cities of their realms.⁴⁵ What was noteworthy about Barcelona's use of the privilege during the famine year was how the city used it as a tool to reach out actively into the Mediterranean as opposed to waiting passively for grain-laden ships to blunder into the waters off their coast. As noted in chapter 1, the same provision of the twelfth-century Usatges that designated the plain circumscribed by the Colleserola mountains as part of the territorium of Barcelona had also included the sea extending twelve leagues out from that section of shoreline.⁴⁶ Although the twelfth-century compilers of the Usatges were referring to the counts of Barcelona rather than to the city itself when assigning these maritime territories to “Barcelona,” the text provided Barcelona's municipal leaders almost two centuries later with some spatial parameters to assign to the somewhat vague wording of Vi vel gratia, which asserted the city's right to whatever food-laden ships it encountered “traveling through the sea of that city, or next to it” (per maria seu iuxta maria dicte civitatis).⁴⁷ While the phrase “next to it” might be interpreted in a restrictive way, as referring to those ships already anchored off the city, the subsequent clause in the privilege notes that those ships found in the designated zone should be brought to the city's shores (ad appellendum in plagia eiusdem), suggesting that the phrase refers to ships at sea some unspecified distance beyond the twelve-league boundary specified in the Usatges.

The case mentioned above involving the two shiploads of grain en route from Montpellier that Barcelona's ships had diverted to its own markets provides one example of how the latter city's leaders took advantage of the ambiguous phrasing of the privilege to extend the limits of the sea they regarded as being under their direct control. Before invoking “established privilege” to justify that seizure, the councilors were careful to stipulate that the ship in question had been in the waters off northern Catalonia when their ships had seized it and not, as the complaining merchants had implied, in either French or Mallorcan waters.⁴⁸ Girona and Palamós, however, both lay well outside of the maritime limits of Barcelona's territorium as outlined above. In arguing their case, the councilors seem to be drawing on a different passage in the Usatges, one that delineated the waters subject to the count of Barcelona's Peace and Truce: not the sea off the coast of the twenty-five miles or so between Montgat and Castelldefels but rather a nearly 200-mile stretch of coastline that ran from well north of Girona to just south of Tarragona.⁴⁹ Barcelona's invocation of the privilege in this case, linking it to northern Catalan waters, suggests that the city's leaders felt justified in using this broader definition of what portion of the sea fell under their control and was thus subject to their rights under Vi vel gratia.

The councilors’ willingness to interpret the limits of Vi vel gratia as flexibly as possible, both in terms of whose jurisdiction this was—the counts’ or the city's—and how far it extended, meant that even Barcelona's closest Catalan allies needed to be wary of their powerful neighbors. In March 1334, not long before Barcelona's ships set upon those from Lisbon, ambassadors from Girona had come before the Council of One Hundred bearing news of the “great necessity for and lack of food” in their city.⁵⁰ Unlike Barcelona, Girona had not been able to blunt the impact of the harvest shortfalls by importing more overseas grain, due to the fact that the beginning of the famine in the Girona region had coincided with an order issued by King Alfonso forbidding any ships from unloading grain at Girona's main port of Sant Feliu de Guíxols in order to pressure Girona's leaders to settle a long-running dispute with the abbot of the monastery of Sant Feliu.⁵¹ By the time the king lifted the embargo, the grain shortage in the city had already become severe. According to the Gironan ambassadors, the whole of the city and diocese of Girona were suffering, and unless God intervened, they were prepared to either abandon the city or perish from famine. Barcelona's councilors expressed sympathy and avowed brotherhood with Girona (not neglecting, of course, to mention the shortages in their own city), then got to what had undoubtedly been the real business of the embassy: that Barcelona would help to ensure that two shipments of grain—one from Tortosa and another from Sicily—would arrive in Girona safely. The councilors assured the leaders of Girona that they had already taken the step of writing to Galceran Marquet, ordering him to let the returning Gironan ships proceed to their intended destination and even aid in protecting the ships from other potential attackers.⁵²

Barcelona's response to Girona's plea for aid makes it clear that at the time of the attack on the Portuguese ships, Galceran Marquet had been patrolling the waters of the Mediterranean at the behest of his city, looking for grain shipments to waylay. But his seizure of the Portuguese ships was of another order of magnitude. Although Barcelona's councilors would not explicitly invoke Vi vel gratia in this case, their actions—an attack on an allied shipment of grain during a year of shortage—relied on a similar logic. The fact that the attack on the Lisbon ships took place not off the coast of Barcelona or even Catalonia but rather halfway across the Mediterranean suggests the council had gotten into the habit of thinking of large swaths of the sea in the same territorial terms that it had long applied to the waters off the two-dozen-mile shoreline of the territorium—and, more recently, most of the Catalan coast north of Tarragona. The vague wording of Barcelona's privilege, in terms of both the limits of that city's territorial waters and the question of whether the “Barcelona” of the Usatges applied to the city or to the count-kings, allowed the councilors to treat the maritime reach of their city as subject to adjustment at their discretion. In attacking the Lisbon ships at a port halfway across the Mediterranean, Marquet, explicitly acting as his city's agent, signaled that these waters were now part of the territory in which Barcelona felt justified in exercising coercive force—in other words, the maritime territory where his city could act like a state. While attacks such as the one on the Lisbon grain ships might be chalked up as just an emergency measure, the way Barcelona's leaders applied their royal privilege in general is revealing about how they saw their own position as a city and how far they were willing to project their sovereignty into maritime space.

If the previous section showed us how Barcelona's leaders and merchants, mindful of the city's dependence on orderly maritime commerce, took care to draw clear lines between legal and illegal seizures, the cases from the famine year demonstrate that, in a time of crisis, Barcelona's authorities seemed prepared to use one body of its own law to get around the restrictions of another, even when it meant running roughshod over the Crown's broader political alliances. In one sense, we might interpret these incidents as acts born of desperation, carried out by a municipal government that urgently needed to bring food to the city in a time of famine. Indeed, that is how Barcelona's authorities portrayed their own actions whenever they were confronted, whether by their own monarchs or by allies they had victimized. At the same time, they were careful to couch their forays in the language of royal privilege, walking a tightrope between subject and sovereign status even as they implicitly asserted their own territorial claims on the sea. But victims of these attacks, like the Portuguese merchants, would have seen a Barcelona that was illegitimately projecting its own city-centered authority into the Mediterranean, a space where the boundaries were both figuratively and literally fluid and where, at any given moment, it might be advantageous to affirm borders, ignore them, or attempt to redraw them.⁵³

Law, Outlaws, and the Limits of Urban Sovereignty

With Barcelona projecting confidence in the legality of its frequent grain seizures during the famine year and its ships stretching ever further the limits of the city's waters, it is no surprise that the Lisbon merchants got no satisfaction when they complained to local authorities in Barcelona. In fact, quite the opposite was the case—they found themselves detained while their cargoes of grain were unloaded and sold in the city market. As a final added indignity, representatives of either the council or the veguer—it is unclear which—ordered the notary who had been called in not to record their testimony, suppressing the complaint as if it had never existed.⁵⁴ Denied justice in the city, the Lisbon merchants returned home without their grain. There, they were eventually able to lay their case before King Alfonso IV of Portugal (r. 1325–1357), who, together with the leaders of the city of Lisbon, brought the merchants’ complaint before King Alfonso of Aragon.⁵⁵ As in earlier seizures that its city's ships had conducted off the coast of Catalonia, Barcelona had been using its naval might to control a significant swath of the western Mediterranean to its own advantage. But in this case, the city's actions threatened to cause the sort of international incident that its king could not easily ignore, and the response of both its victims and its king would demonstrate the limits to Barcelona's independent action in Mediterranean space.

Barcelona's attack on the Portuguese grain ships was not the first time that Aragon's King Alfonso had needed to intervene in an incident where his city's interpretation of its royal privilege had come into conflict with the Crown's broader political arrangements. Months before the attack on the Lisbon ships, the leaders of the city of Valencia had complained to the king that ships from Barcelona had captured a ship loaded with Sardinian grain that the merchant Arnau Guillem ça Bastida had been under contract to deliver to their city. Barcelona's councilors did not deny the facts of the case. Rather, after noting the shortages in their own city, they justified their actions by portraying themselves as only passive participants. As was common practice, the Valencia-based ship had been leased by a group of merchants, not just ça Bastida, and Barcelona's councilors asserted that the majority of the merchants on board had decided that they should divert the ship to Barcelona, where they could claim the twelve-diner bonus per quartera of grain that the city was offering.⁵⁶ In other words, Barcelona's authorities claimed that this incident, far from being an act of piracy, was a case of merchants using their own agency to respond to a market incentive; ça Bastida merely had the misfortune to find himself on the losing side of the vote.

The councilors managed to smooth over this particular incident, but the blow-up between cities did not prompt a change in Barcelona's behavior when it came to selling whatever grain came its way without asking questions; the councilors apologized after the fact only if confronted. In March 1334, another merchant under contract with the city of Valencia, Ramon d’Agramunt, purchased 270 cafices (about 750 quarteras) of barley to take to Valencia to sell. As his ship was rounding the cape of Tortosa, it encountered contrary winds that blew it off course, at which point an armed ship intercepted it, diverting it to Barcelona to have its cargo sold there. Ramon was paid for his grain, but he feared that he would be subject to an inquest in Valencia, where that city's leaders had recently instituted a ban on exporting grain as part of their own famine response. Barcelona's leaders did take the step of asking the king to write to the bailiff-general of Valencia to explain the situation and direct him not to subject Ramon to an inquest or impound his goods. They did not, however, offer to return Valencia's grain.⁵⁷

If Vi vel gratia had emboldened Barcelona's leaders to work the borderlands between legal and illegal seizures, then they could not have chosen a better person to carry out these missions than Galceran Marquet, a man who, as chapter 2 noted, had managed to attain the status of naval hero despite occasionally transgressing the law in his own activities at sea. In addition to his fines for violating the international embargo on trading with the Mamluk sultanate, Marquet had at least once before the famine year offended one of the Crown's allies by attacking and plundering a ship from the city of Pisa. Far from being contrite, Marquet reportedly flew into a rage when the commune of Pisa demanded restitution. Gathering a group of armed men, he burst into the hostel where the Pisan merchant had been lying low for three days and stormed from one room to the next proclaiming that he was after the man who had dared to demand compensation from him.⁵⁸

King Alfonso had placated the Crown's Pisan allies by demanding a full investigation of Marquet's behavior.⁵⁹ But that was 1332, before the famine had seriously taken hold. By the following year, Marquet's nonchalance about the line that divided corsairing from piracy had become an asset to his city. In July 1333, as Barcelona's war with Genoa heated up, the councilors wrote to Marquet about a relatively conventional mission for that year: he was to lead a squadron of ships on escort duty for Mediterranean grain shipments on the way to Barcelona. In their orders to Marquet, the councilors emphasized the importance of haste, given the danger of unrest that any prolonged shortage would pose to the city. But the councilors made an exception for one type of delay in particular. While he was providing military escort for Barcelona's own ships, Marquet should also be on the lookout for other ships that he could commandeer and load with grain for the city, even if those ships belonged to Venetians, Pisans, or other allies.⁶⁰ By February 1334, this secondary mission had taken center stage in the council's orders to Marquet, whom they now instructed to obtain grain however he could, filling every ship he could find, even if those ships belonged to other cities.⁶¹

Given both these direct orders and Barcelona's history of condoning raids like these, the attack on the Portuguese ships comes as little surprise: piracy, apparently, had become policy. But the city's operations were beginning to bring it into conflict with the carefully crafted alliances of the Crown's monarchs in a way that the king could not ignore. When the news of the attack on the Lisbon-bound ships reached King Alfonso of Portugal, that king wrote to Alfonso of Aragon, declaring himself “astounded” that his fellow monarch would allow his subjects to treat an ally in this manner and serving notice that he would be sending representatives of his own from Lisbon to see justice done.⁶² The Portuguese king was not the only monarch to complain to Alfonso about attacks like this during the famine year. Already by fall 1333, King Philip VI of France (r. 1328–1350) had received so many letters from Montpellier, Narbonne, and other famine-starved cities of France's Mediterranean coast complaining of Catalan attacks on their grain shipments that he had sent out a general order to his officials: as soon as a French vessel presented evidence of robbery, the seneschal was to immediately open an investigation and, if the accused's guilt was proven, arrest them and confiscate their goods.⁶³ When the attacks did not abate, Philip wrote to King Alfonso, calling for the perpetrators to pay financial restitution to their French victims.⁶⁴

In demanding restitution, the French king was drawing on a core mechanism of maritime law that allowed cities and kingdoms to escape the diplomatic corners that piracy could paint them into. It was also the final step that needed to be taken before a victim of piracy could invoke the custom of reprisals. A practice that had its roots in both Roman law and early medieval custom, reprisals as applied to later medieval piracy provided a means by which private individuals might work together with governmental authorities to obtain redress for an illegal seizure. If an individual victim of a theft at sea could not get an attacker or their governing authority to pay compensation, they could obtain legal authorization from their own government to recoup the value of the damages by engaging in raids against ships flying under the flag of an otherwise friendly state. Because the aggressor's governing authority had not compelled the perpetrator to compensate their victim, that ruler (and, by extension, all of their subjects) were regarded as complicit in the robbery, which thereby rendered attacks on any of their shipping legitimate until the amount of the damages had been fully recovered.⁶⁵ The Crown of Aragon's own monarchs had at least once in recent memory used the threat of reprisals to hold other kingdoms to account for their cities’ bad behavior. When ships based in Seville had engaged in a series of attacks on Aragonese shipping in the late thirteenth century, King James II of Aragon informed the municipal leaders of that city that if they did not bring their captains under control he would retaliate by licensing his own corsairs to attack Castilian shipping more generally.⁶⁶

The possibility of widespread economic impact made reprisals a threat that individual cities—and the monarchs to which they were subject—could not afford to ignore. If a government entity could not either legally justify an attack or clearly disassociate themselves from the individuals responsible by bringing them to justice, it usually resorted to paying compensation out of the government purse—generally in cash or other properties of value, given that the original merchandise would have long been sold off by the time a settlement was reached.⁶⁷ Throughout the Mediterranean, individual political entities developed their own responses to the threat of reprisals. Venice regularly paid out damages to foreign victims who could prove that seizures of their property at the hands of the city's Captains of the Gulf had been illegitimate.⁶⁸ The city of Genoa, for its part, had gone so far as to set up a special institution—the Officium robarie—dedicated to dealing with the frequent complaints about illegitimate seizures carried out by that city's ships and to issuing state-financed compensation as a means to stave off reprisals.⁶⁹ Cities in the Crown of Aragon had no formal institution to compare with Genoa's Officium robarie, nor did they have Venice's standing arrangement to pay off claimants from the city coffers. What they had instead was a system of indemnities. In 1250, James I restricted corsair privileges to ships with a royal license, which could only be obtained by providing a security deposit to pay for any potential damages caused by illegitimate raids. These deposits functioned as a sort of corsair insurance that allowed government authorities to pay out settlements that arose from the actions of overenthusiastic ships’ captains. In addition, any plunder from these licensed ships had to be registered and certified as coming from a legitimate source before it could be sold or distributed.⁷⁰ A similar system seems to have been in place in Seville, where city authorities paid the restitution that James II demanded with funds from an indemnity that the captains who had attacked the Aragonese ships had deposited with the city, and they also threw several of the perpetrators in prison.⁷¹

Neither the letter from Lisbon's municipal authorities nor the one from King Alfonso of Portugal explicitly invoked the possibility of reprisals. But the threat was implicit in the Portuguese king's letter when he demanded that the Crown not only compensate the Lisbon merchants’ financial loss but also address the less tangible harm of the insult to an ally by publicly punishing the captains responsible for the raid.⁷² Threat also lurked behind the careful verbiage of the letter from the Portuguese king, whose repeated use of the term “forcibly” (per força) to describe the way that the ships had been taken echoed the typical language of reprisal suits, which employed specific descriptors like “violently” (violenter), “hostilely” (hostiliter), or “in the manner of pirates” (modo piratico) to justify that their claim qualified for restitution.⁷³ For their part, Lisbon's municipal authorities, conscious of their position relative to the Aragonese king, avoided the implied threats that lurked behind the language their king had employed. Instead, they opted to remind the king of Aragon of the historic good relations between the two kingdoms by referencing a recent incident in which Lisbon's leaders had negotiated for the release of some high-ranking Catalan hostages who had been taken captive by Genoese raiders—a clear attempt to underline their status as allies and thus the illegality of the attack.⁷⁴ The two letters that King Alfonso received differed in tone as much as in content. The letter from Lisbon's municipal leaders was supplicatory in nature, opening with the rhetorical flourish “we kiss your hands” and framed as a request that he act “for charity's sake,” while the one from the king of Portugal was phrased as a straightforward demand that his Aragonese counterpart act in the manner expected of political allies.⁷⁵ But both came to the same thing: while Barcelona was directly responsible for the attack, its status as a subject city meant that Aragon's king bore ultimate responsibility for getting Barcelona to provide restitution for the damages and punish the culprits, lest all of his subjects suffer the consequences.

Confronted with the details of his city's misbehavior and the potential consequences for his entire realm, Aragon's king responded in a way that seemed designed to remind Barcelona of its subject position. On June 8, 1334, the king wrote to the council of Barcelona, relaying the complaints he had received from both the king of Portugal and the leaders of Lisbon about the stolen grain cargo and demanding in no uncertain terms that Barcelona return either the stolen goods or their value; additionally, the city should reimburse the two merchants for the expenses that they had incurred in pursuing their complaint.⁷⁶ The councilors responded with a lengthy defense of their city's actions, acknowledging that they had indeed forced the ships to unload their cargo of grain in Barcelona but arguing that this was only because of the “intolerable shortage and dearth of grain” that the city had been suffering at the time. Probably realizing that invoking Vi vel gratia as they had in cases involving other Crown cities would not work in a case where the king's foreign policy was at stake, the councilors fell back on another line of defense that they had employed in the past: ignorance of the illegality. Because Marquet had placed a Catalan member of his own crew in each of the ships to take them back to Barcelona, the city leaders claimed not to have known that the grain was stolen. Rather, they had assumed that the merchants on board were responding to their standing offer of a financial bonus for grain brought to their city and had collectively decided to sell it in Barcelona, where they could make a greater profit. The councilors offered to show proof of the amount already paid to the merchants for their grain and to reimburse the city of Lisbon for any balance that might still be owed. But they also slipped in an offhand reference to the fact that the man in charge of this operation, Galceran Marquet, was at the time serving as captain of the armada against the Genoese “and other of Your Majesty's enemies”—likely an attempt to forestall the humiliation of the public punishment that Portugal's king had demanded by reminding their own king of the key role Marquet played in his overall Mediterranean strategy.⁷⁷

Crucially, at no point in the letter did Barcelona's councilors acknowledge their own involvement—namely, the fact that Marquet had been acting on standing orders to seek out and commandeer any ships he found, regardless of whether they belonged to friends or enemies. Yet, faced with this rebuke from their own king, the city ultimately had to back down. Alfonso had a diplomatic incident to deal with, one in which the actions of one of his cities could put the entire Crown at risk at a time when it could least afford it. Both of the Portuguese letters had stopped short of accusing Barcelona of directly sponsoring this act of piracy; rather, they pressured Alfonso to force Barcelona to provide a remedy, thereby preserving diplomatic relations between the two kingdoms. The settlement also allowed everyone, for the moment, to maintain the fiction that Barcelona was still a lawful actor in the Mediterranean and one under the control of its monarch. The overall message to the leaders of Barcelona was clear: it might be the king's leading city, able to negotiate certain special privileges, but the leaders should only attempt to push their autonomy so far.

By the time of the famine year 1333/1334, both piracy and corsairing between Christians had become a feature of the medieval Mediterranean, and cities like Barcelona that depended heavily on access to overseas grain found themselves especially vulnerable. At this moment of crisis, Barcelona showed itself willing to act against both foreign allies and sister cities in the Crown of Aragon in ways that put its king and the entire realm in a dangerous position, all while couching even its most blatantly predatory actions in the language of law. As piracy intertwined with politics in the contest for control of a maritime space that was in many ways borderless, Barcelona's council attempted to subject increasingly extensive reaches of the sea to its own control. Galceran Marquet's fleet was key to this process, a roving expression of Barcelona's implicit claims to sovereignty at sea.

Any questions of legitimacy with regard to attacks on other cities’ grain shipments, in part, revolved around Barcelona's complex relationship with the kings of the Crown of Aragon. On the one hand, Barcelona and its council were subject to the authority of their monarch, dependent upon royal privileges for the broad autonomy they enjoyed. On the other, it was the city's leaders, not its king, who were most directly responsible for the welfare of its citizens and residents. Chapter 2 showed how this tension could resolve itself reasonably smoothly when the councilors obtained King Alfonso's permission for the city to wage its own military campaign against Genoa to protect its shipping.⁷⁸ During the famine year, however, the threat to Barcelonans’ welfare was more existential, and the councilors brought the weight of one type of law—royal privileges—to bear against another—the Llibre del consolat de mar and its regulations on corsairing and piracy—in order to secure a supply of food for their city. The fact that Barcelona did not hesitate to stretch the limits of its royal privileges suggests that the city's careful attention to maritime law could, at times, be little more than a veneer of order that the city layered over a much more pragmatic reality. It raises the question of which—the order or the ambiguity—the city relied on more.

The experience of the Portuguese captives, more generally, is suggestive of several types of blurred boundaries in later medieval port cities: boundaries between public and private enterprise, between war and commerce, and between lawful and unlawful actions at sea. A city like Barcelona could assert its authority beyond its borders by prosecuting attacks on its ships, so many of Barcelona's actions in Mediterranean space were aligned with the fight against piracy, even while other interests may have been served by it. Using piracy to think about Barcelona's relationship with the Mediterranean illustrates both overlap and tension between two means of asserting state-like coercive authority. Law and extralegal violence were, in this case, not opposites but two sides of the same coin. But while the perspective of the Portuguese captives shows how Barcelona's government was at times thinking and acting more like a sovereign city than a subject one, the responses of both Barcelona's king and its victims show that its ability to act independently had limits. As chapter 4 will illustrate, this tension between dependence and independence applied to Barcelona not just in a Mediterranean context but in its relationship with other cities within Catalonia itself.

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1. Josefa Mutgé i Vives, La ciudad de Barcelona durante el reinado de Alfonso el Benigno (1327–1336) (Madrid: CSIC, 1987), 102. Catalan ships also did business during this period in the Sicilian ports of Catania, Marsala, Trapani, and Syracuse, none of which were located on the southern shore. Guillem Morro Veny, La marina catalana a mitjan segle XIV (Barcelona: Museu Marítim de Barcelona, 2005), 15.

2. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2630, doc. 1 (May 8, 1334). This document, like the one on the same subject from the Portuguese King Alfonso IV with which it is bundled, gives the year as 1372, reflecting Portugal's continued use of the Spanish-era dating system.

3. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 529, 59v–60v (June 22, 1334).

4. See, for example, Janice Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Christopher Harding, “‘Hostis Humani Generis’: The Pirate as Outlaw in the Early Modern Law of the Sea,” in Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550–1650, ed. Claire Jowitt (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 20–38; Travis Bruce, “Piracy as Statecraft: The Mediterranean Policies of the Fifth/Eleventh-Century Taifa of Denia,” Al-Masāq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 22 (2010): 235–48.

5. Lauren Benton, “Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean Regionalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 47 (2005): 700–724.

6. Emily Sohmer Tai, “Marking Water: Piracy and Property in the Pre-Modern West,” in Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed. Jerry Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 205.

7. Charles Tilly, “Entanglements of European Cities and States,” in Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800, ed. Charles Tilly and Wim P. Blockmans (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), 8. See also Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), esp. 15–28; and Flocel Sabaté Curull, “Discurs i estratègies del poder reial a Catalunya al segle XIV,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 25 (1995): 622–30.

8. Christophe Picard, Sea of the Caliphs: The Mediterranean in the Medieval Islamic World, trans. Nicholas Elliott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2018), 260–61; Silvia Orvietani Busch, Medieval Mediterranean Ports: The Catalan and Tuscan Coasts, 1100 to 1235 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 65–67, 86, and 91. These raids continued to be a dimension of the off-and-on conflict between Christian and Islamic powers in the region into the central Middle Ages and beyond. See Stephen Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 1096–1291 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 223; Robert Ignatius Burns, “Piracy: Islamic-Christian Interface in Conquered Valencia,” in Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 109–25; Andrés Díaz Borrás, Los orígenes de la pirateria islámica en Valencia: la ofensiva musulmana trecentista y la reacción cristiana (Barcelona: CSIC, 1993).

9. Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 223–25; Georges Jehel, Aigues-Mortes, un port pour un roi: les Capétiens et la Méditerranée (Roanne, Le Coteau: Horvath, 1985), 175–76 and 182–83; Emily Sohmer Tai, “Honor among Thieves: Piracy, Restitution, and Reprisal in Genoa, Venice, and the Crown of Catalonia-Aragon, 1339–1417” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1996), 41–50; Charles Dufourcq, La vie quotidienne dans les ports méditerranéens au moyen âge: Provence, Languedoc, Catalogne (Paris: Hachette, 1975), 128–33; Josefa Mutgé i Vives, “Activitat piràtica entre catalano-aragonesos i castellans a la Mediterrània occidental durant el regnat de Jaume II,” Anales de la Universidad de Alicante. Historia medieval 11 (1996–1997): 445–52.

10. Busch, Medieval Mediterranean Ports, 68–77.

11. See this book, chapter 2.

12. Pinuccia F. Simbula, “Iles, corsaires et pirates dans la Méditerranée médiévale,” Médiévales: langue, textes, histoire 47 (2004): 18–20; Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, “Patrons i corsaris de Menorca a la baixa edat Mitjana,” Randa 60 (2008): 17–30.

13. Simbula, “Iles, corsaires et pirates,” 20–23.

14. Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, “Corso y piratería entre Mediterráneo y Atlántico en la Baja Edad Media,” in La península ibérica entre el Mediterráneo y el Atlántico. Siglos XIII–XV (Cádiz: Diputación de Cádiz; Sociedad Española de Estudios Medievales, 2006), 297.

15. In 1399, representatives of the cities of Barcelona, Valencia, Mallorca, as well as several Sardinian ports, resolved to band together for their own defense of maritime commerce. They would agree not to shelter rogue corsairs and to prosecute their own corsairs if they stepped over the line. The group also created a sort of coast guard, paid for by a port tax on merchant vessels. Morro Veny, La marina catalana, 51.

16. Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 223.

17. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 43r (December 4, 1333).

18. Ferrer i Mallol, “Corso y piratería,” 319–22.

19. Ferrer i Mallol, “Corso y piratería,” 301–303; Dufourcq, La vie quotidienne, 133–42; Jarbel Rodriguez, Captives and Their Saviors in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 9–36.

20. Although the protest letter from King Alfonso IV of Portugal (r. 1325–1357) is vague on who judged this case, referring simply to “the justices of that city” (ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2630, doc. 2 [May 2, 1334]), a later document from the Aragonese royal chancery suggests that these “justices” were royal officials, likely in the service of the veguer; see ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 465, 236r–v (June 8, 1334).

21. Molly Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 53; Tai, “Honor among Thieves,” 3–11; Morro Veny, La marina catalana, 25–28; Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 21–22.

22. Ferrer i Mallol, “Corso y piratería,” 256–57.

23. LCM 3.1 (Estudi jurídic): 256–62; Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, “Sobre els orígens del Consolat de Mar a Barcelona el 1279 i sobre el cònsols d’Ultramar a bord de vaixells: un exemple de 1281,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 23 (1993): 141–43. Tomás de Montagut i Estragués gives a detailed accounting of the various steps in the Catalan phase of the evolution of this code, which I have severely compressed here in the interest of space. See Montagut i Estragués, “El ‘Llibre de Consolat de Mar’ y el ordenamiento jurídico del mar,” Anuario de historia del derecho español 67 (1997): 210–17; see also Vicente García Edo, “Una aproximació als llibres del Consolat de Mar,” in La Mediterrània de la Corona d’Aragó, segles XIII–XVI: VII centenari de la sentència arbitral de Torrellas, 1304–2004. XVIII Congrés d’Història de la Corona d’Aragó, ed. Rafael Narbona Vizcaíno (Valencia: Universitat de Valencia—Fundació Jaume II el Just, 2005), 1:595–601; and Tai, “Honor among Thieves,” 73–78. For Barcelona's Consulate of the Sea as an institution, see this book, chapter 2.

24. See, most notably, the thirteenth-century development of the Rolls of Oléron: Timothy J. Runyan, “The Rolls of Oleron and the Admiralty Court in Fourteenth Century England,” American Journal of Legal History 19 (1975): 95–111.

25. LCM 2:chaps. 298–334.

26. Mutgé i Vives, “Activitat piràtica,” 445–52.

27. Tai, “Honor among Thieves,” 107–108.

28. LCM 2:chap. 276. For a thorough study of how such ambiguities of identity intensified in the early modern Mediterranean, see Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants.

29. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 52v (January 3 [?], 1333).

30. Jehel, Aigues-Mortes, 137–43.

31. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 52v (January 3 [?], 1333).

32. LCM 2:chap. 288.

33. LCM 1:chaps. 230–231; Ferrer i Mallol, “Corso y piratería,” 304–307.

34. LCM 1:chap. 61.

35. LCM 2:chap. 276.

36. LCM 1:chap. 144. In a strikingly catty digression in the midst of this long section on what to do when disputes arose between crew members and captains, the authors of the Llibre note: “There are sometimes sailors who, attending only to their own desires, do not care a bit whether their captain loses his ship entirely … because there live in this world many men who are sad and despairing when they see anyone profit or improve themselves: since they are unfortunate and badly off, they think everyone else should be as well. And this is just the way of such men.”

37. LCM 1:chaps. 93, 111, and 234.

38. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2630, doc. 2 (May 2, 1334).

39. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 70v–71 (March 17, 1334). For the reputation of the count of Empúries as a notorious sponsor of pirates, see Dufourcq, La vie quotidienne, 126–27.

40. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 70v–71r (March 17, 1334).

41. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 80v (September 11, 1333).

42. AHCB, Llibre vermell de Barcelona, vol. 1, 65r–67r; royal affirmation of privilege at 65r, col. b. Esteve Bruniquer dated the privilege to January 1328. See Bruniquer, Rúbriques, 4:163. The slight discrepancy here results from the opening dating clause (quintodecimo kalendas febrerii anno domini millesimo trecentesimo vicesimo octavo), which, accounting for the Crown's practice at that time of marking the year on March 25, would place the privilege in January 1329 by modern reckoning.

43. Bruniquer, Rúbriques, 4:163. Juanjo Cáceres Nevot cites several instances between 1329 and 1333 when the city invoked this privilege either directly or obliquely. See Juanjo Cáceres Nevot, “La participació del consell municipal en l’aprovisionament cerealer de la ciutat de Barcelona (1301–1430)” (PhD diss., University of Barcelona, 2006), 118–19.

44. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 11, 72v–73r (March 3, 1331), document repeats, with same date, on 78v.

45. Adam Franklin-Lyons and Marie A. Kelleher, “Framing Mediterranean Famine: Food Crisis in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona,” Speculum 97, no. 1 (2022): 64 n.122.

46. Usatges, 58 (p. 77).

47. “Baiulus Barchinone compellit et distringit ad requisicionem consiliariorum civitatis eiusdem naves, cochas et omnes alios lembos seu vassellos qui cum victualibus transeunt per maria seu iuxta maria dicte civitatis ad appellendum in plagia eiusdem ac discarrigandum ibidem pro vendendo blado de quo onerati existant.” AHCB, Llibre vermell de Barcelona, 65r, col. b. For the Usatges references to “Barcelona” being about the counts rather than the municipality, see this book, chapter 1.

48. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 80v (September 11, 1333).

49. Usatges, 57 (p. 77).

50. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 69r–v (March 13, 1334).

51. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 554, 19v–20r (July 15, 1333). An explanation linking the embargo to the dispute can be found in a later document revoking the embargo; see ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 554, 22v (March 11, 1334).

52. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 69r–v (March 13, 1334) The council did not, however, neglect this as a good moment to negotiate a few beneficial (and unrelated) trade agreements with their northern “brother.”

53. Tai, “Marking Water,” 205–10.

54. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2630, doc. 2 (May 2, 1334).

55. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2630, docs. 1 and 2 (May 2–8, 1334).

56. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 70v–71r (June 27, 1333). The city of Valencia itself would offer a similar incentive to grain merchants during the famine of the 1370s; see Abigail Agresta, The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022), 121.

57. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 70v (March 18, 1334).

58. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 1992 (September 5, 1332).

59. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 1992 (September 5, 1332).

60. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 72r (July 5, 1333).

61. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 57r–v (February 15, 1334).

62. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2630, doc. 1 (May 8, 1334).

63. ACA Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2450 (October [date obscured] 1333).

64. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2144, doc. 1 (February 12, 1334); Joaquim Miret i Sans, Les represàlies a Catalunya en l’edat mitjana (Barcelona: Revista jurídica de Catalunya, 1925), 57–58.

65. Miret i Sans, Les represàlies a Catalunya, 11–12 and 42–45; Ferrer i Mallol, “Corso y piratería,” 313–18; Tai, “Honor among Thieves,” 140–55.

66. José Hinojosa Montalvo, “Piratas y corsarios en la Valencia de principios del siglo XV (1400–1409),” Cuadernos de historia. Anexos de la revista Hispania 5 (1975): 99–100; Mutgé i Vives, “Activitat piràtica,” 445–46.

67. Emily Sohmer Tai, “Restitution and the Definition of a Pirate: The Case of Sologrus de Nigro,” Mediterranean Historical Review 19 (2004): 36; Edward Lewis, “Responsibility for Piracy in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, Third Series 19 (1937): 77; Enrico Basso, “Pirati e pirateria a Genova nel Quattrocento,” La storia dei Genovesi 11 (1991): 332–34.

68. Irene B. Katele, “Piracy and the Venetian State: The Dilemma of Maritime Defense in the Fourteenth Century,” Speculum 63, no. 4 (1988): 865–89.

69. Basso, “Pirati e pirateria,” 327–52. For a detailed treatment of the Officium robarie at the end of the fourteenth century, see Ausilia Roccatagliata, L’officium robarie del comune di Genova (1394–1397) (Genoa: Università di Genova, Istituto di Medievistica, 1989).

70. Ferrer i Mallol, “Corso y piratería,” 264–66. By the 1350s, abuses of corsair privileges had become enough of a concern that King Peter III/IV had to require captains from the newly reincorporated kingdom of Mallorca to swear an oath not to attack friendly shipping, on pain of a 3,000-sou fine. Capmany 2:doc. 164.

71. Antonio Ortega Villoslada, “‘… Et secum deferebant usque ad femoralia.’ Actitud de mercaderes y corsarios frente a la violencia,” in La Mediterrània de la Corona d’Aragó, segles XIII–XVI: VII centenari de la sentència arbitral de Torrellas, 1304–2004. XVIII Congrés d’Història de la Corona d’Aragó, ed. Rafael Narbona Vizcaíno (València: Universitat de València, 2005), 1175–90; Mutgé i Vives, “Activitat piràtica,” 445–46.

72. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2630 (May 2–8, 1334) and Cancelleria, Reg. 529, 59r–v (July 4, 1334).

73. Tai, “Restitution and the Definition of a Pirate,” 38–39.

74. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2630, doc. 2 (May 2, 1334).

75. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2630 (May 2–8, 1334).

76. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 465, 236r–v (June 8, 1334).

77. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 529, 59v–60v (June 22, 1334).

78. See this book, chapter 2.