CHAPTER 4The House of Barcelona

As the famine sunk deeper into the Crown of Aragon in the winter of 1333/1334, King Alfonso received two envoys from Barcelona at his winter court in Calatayud. The two men, Arnau Bernat and Berenguer Vives, were there on behalf of the Council of One Hundred to propose a radical response to the grain shortages in their city. The real problem, the envoys argued, was one of distribution rather than supply. Other towns in Catalonia had been hoarding their grain, ignoring the permits that the king himself had issued granting individual merchants permission to bypass local export restrictions. If the king would order his Catalan towns to keep only enough grain to last them through the new harvest, allowing the surplus to be sold to whoever wished to buy it, then every city and town could obtain the food necessary to its survival: “Because it is according to true reason that the places that have grain aid those that do not, given that it does not result in a shortage for them.”¹

Back in Barcelona, the councilors were projecting guarded confidence in this proposal, even writing to their counterparts in the town of Manresa (who were also suffering from severe shortages) about their embassy to the king and expressing the hope that his intervention would put an end to “the unrest that is so great in the land.”² For his part, King Alfonso likely would have known that Barcelona's assumption about the abundance of grain that such a royal edict would unleash was overly optimistic. Many Catalan cities had already been reporting either severe crop shortfalls or depleted reserves.³ But the king may well have been intrigued by Barcelona's proposal for other reasons. While monarchs like Alfonso often employed verbal and visual rhetoric that projected a top-down sovereignty, their actual power, especially in Catalonia, rested not in the person or even the office of the king but rather in agreements made with individual constituent entities under their jurisdiction.⁴ The cities of the Crown, and of Catalonia in particular, had long guarded the relative autonomy granted to them in the royal privileges they had accumulated over many decades. Yet here were two representatives of one of Alfonso's most favored cities proposing that the king step in to regulate a core function of a city's municipal government—feeding its own people—and essentially inviting him to approach his cities less as partners in a pactual relationship and more as components in a larger system in which individual interests were subordinate to the common good.⁵

Barcelona's proposal invites us to consider the nature of the city from the perspective of a governing authority for whom Barcelona was only one constituent, albeit an important one. King Alfonso was not, however, the only member of the royal house whose decisions and actions had an impact on cities like Barcelona. The Crown of Aragon was what some historians have referred to as a “plural monarchy,” one in which rulership was, as Theresa Earenfight has put it, “a multiplicity of power relations which [were] not separate entities but elements contained within a network that extended beyond the persons of the king and queen.”⁶ Monarchy, in other words, was a corporation in which the king was the guardian and main representative of a royal power that could be embodied in various individuals. In the famine year especially, Barcelona found itself negotiating with not just one member of the royal family but four—a king, a queen, an archbishop, and a crown prince—each of whom embodied a different type of sovereign authority. Separately, each of these members of the house of Barcelona saw the city through the lens of his or her own individual configuration of personal position and broad governing powers. The city that emerges from their combined vantage points, while an important entity in and of itself, was only one among the many interests that the house Barcelona had to balance in order to achieve harmonious rule.

The Accidental King

The man who ruled the Crown of Aragon when famine struck in 1333 was never meant to be king. Alfonso was born in early 1299, the second child of King James II and his second wife, Blanche of Anjou, and younger brother to another James who had been designated heir to the realm. As the younger James grew into manhood, however, he showed little interest in the duties of government. Even more troubling to his father was his reluctance concerning the marriage that had been arranged for him with Eleanor, the daughter of Ferdinand IV of Castile (r. 1295–1312).⁷ Desperate to salvage an alliance with Castile, the elder James persuaded Pope John XXII (r. 1316–1334) to write to the crown prince and counsel him to abandon his sullen manner, to stop avoiding attendance at court sessions, and, most importantly, to go through with the marriage to Princess Eleanor.⁸ Eventually, the king had to settle for a compromise. To preserve the alliance between the two kingdoms, the couple would solemnize the union but would not be pressured to consummate it. Yet the prince undermined even this small victory: on October 5, 1319, in what must have been an awkward ceremony, Prince James exchanged vows with Eleanor but walked out as soon as the formalities had concluded, leaving his new wife behind.⁹ At this, King James finally gave up. That December, in a session of the Catalan general assembly (corts) celebrated in Tarragona, the king stood witness as his firstborn son renounced his place in the succession in favor of the religious life, leaving Alfonso as heir-presumptive.¹⁰

When he took over his older brother's place as heir, Alfonso also took on the position of procurator general. Holders of this office, which dated back to the thirteenth century, were empowered to act with full royal authority in one of the Crown realms while the king was in another. As such, they constituted a vital part of royal rule in a federated Crown and represented an institutionalization of the Crown's pluralist approach to monarchy. When James II named Prince James as procurator general when the prince was only four or five years old, then immediately transferred the position to Alfonso when he replaced his brother as heir, he established the tradition of attaching the office to the position of heir-apparent.¹¹ Alfonso would earn mixed reviews from his older advisors in his capacity as procurator general: while some praised him for his steady judgment, others complained that he was too easily influenced and too reluctant to deny anyone anything.¹² It may be that Alfonso's interests and talents simply lay more in military ventures than in administration. His personal leadership of the conquest of Sardinia in the 1320s, in particular, would have inspired confidence in the future king, especially among the merchants and shippers of Barcelona, who gained not only access to the island's grain, silver, and coral but also a base from which to defend their shipping routes in the central Mediterranean.¹³

In addition to his military experience, the new crown prince fulfilled another expectation of an heir to the throne by providing a secure line to succeed him. By the time the Corts of Tarragona recognized him as heir in 1319, Alfonso had been married for half a decade to Teresa d’Entença, grand-niece and heir of Count Ermengol of Urgell. Over the course of the couple's thirteen-year marriage, Teresa gave birth to seven children. Although only three of these seven would survive to adulthood, each in his or her own way would play a role in the expansion of the Crown's authority in the next generation. Their firstborn, Constança, would marry King James III of Mallorca (r. 1324–1349), setting the stage for the Crown's later reabsorption of that kingdom in the 1340s; their oldest surviving son, Peter, would inherit the throne and enjoy a half-century reign as Peter III/IV; the youngest, James, would eventually inherit his mother's claim to Urgell, bringing that quasi-independent Catalan county more firmly into the orbit of the house of Barcelona. Teresa herself, however, would never be queen: her death in 1327 came only a few days before that of her father-in-law, James II. Alfonso would remarry not long after taking the throne, this time to his older brother's would-be queen, Eleanor of Castile. That marriage produced two additional children and helped to reassemble the fragile alliance that had been upset by Prince James's insulting abandonment of the Castilian princess a decade earlier, giving Alfonso one thing fewer to worry about as his reign got underway.¹⁴

The realm that Alfonso inherited was a complicated one to rule, composed as it was of three distinct regions, each with its own constitutional relationship to the monarch. The leaders of the house of Barcelona, the dynasty to which Alfonso belonged, had begun their centuries-long rule in the early ninth century as counts of the Carolingian county of Barcelona, gaining their independence over the course of the tenth century largely through Frankish inaction. Over the course of the next few centuries, the counts of Barcelona absorbed many of the neighboring Catalan counties through a combination of dynastic marriages, annexation, and inheritance. By the end of the twelfth century, they were lords of most of what is now Catalonia as well as of several possessions north of the Pyrenees, ruling these territories not as a centralized monarchy but rather as a patchwork of seigniorial rights and individual agreements. The situation would grow more complicated as sovereigns granted charters of privileges to individual towns in the territories they conquered in the south of Catalonia. It became still more complex as the counts of Catalonia became kings of other territories: first in Aragon, with the betrothal of Count Ramon Berenguer IV in 1137 to Petronilla, daughter and heir of King Ramiro II of Aragon; next, in Mallorca and Valencia during the reign of James I, who created both as new kingdoms under his direct rule when he conquered those territories during the first half of the thirteenth century.¹⁵

The distinct legal and political traditions of the various parts of this federated crown meant that the monarchs had to rule their territories separately in spite of their sporadic attempts to institute a more centralized rule.¹⁶ In the cities of Catalonia, local royal officials like the veguers, who exercised jurisdiction over a broad range of civil and criminal cases, and the bailiffs, who oversaw royal finance and properties, shared local rule with municipal councils in a system that was more transactional than top-down.¹⁷ If James I can be credited with providing the foundation for Barcelona's urban government when he established the Council of One Hundred in the mid-thirteenth century, it was his successor, Peter II/III, who granted the set of privileges that would codify broad areas of self-government for the city.¹⁸ 1283 had been a difficult year for King Peter: he had taken Sicily from the Angevin French the previous year, but this victory came at the price of papal excommunication, a sentence that absolved his subjects of their oaths of fealty to him. The king's precarious political position supplied an opportunity for disaffected nobles in Aragon, who formed a coalition (unión) that gathered in Zaragoza that fall to force the king to confirm a list of privileges they had drawn up. The Catalans quickly followed suit. At a corts held in Barcelona from December 1283 through January 1284, Peter agreed to hold such an assembly every year to solicit the consent of the assembled Catalan nobles, prelates, and urban representatives for his legislation and taxes or subsidies. At that same corts, he ratified a list of privileges for the city that would come to be known as Recognoverunt proceres (The leading men have acknowledged …) and that would become the main body of royal law for the city of Barcelona and its territory, including both longstanding privileges and new concessions in the areas of civil law, commerce, and legal procedure.¹⁹

The structure of Barcelona's constitutional relationship with its monarchs was not unique among Catalan cities. However, due to the aid to royal ventures that Barcelona provided over the course of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the number and types of privileges that city, in particular, enjoyed would grow rapidly during the roughly half-century between Recognoverunt proceres and the beginning of Alfonso's reign.²⁰ As was the custom for newly crowned monarchs, King Alfonso ratified Barcelona's privileges upon his first entry into the city as king in December 1327.²¹ But, just like his predecessors, Alfonso expected something in return—the cooperation of Barcelona's city council when it came to contributions to extraordinary expenses. The first such demand came early in his reign—a 100,000-sou subsidy to fund his wedding to Eleanor of Castile. In December 1328, the Council of One Hundred agreed to finance the nuptials in exchange for a formal acknowledgment that royal consumption taxes on grain, wine, meat, and ship transport used to fund this grant existed only with the ongoing consent of the council, that these taxes would be collected by the council's representatives and not the king's, and that the king could not claim any proceeds of these special taxes in excess of 100,000 sous.²²

But if city and king were going through the steps of a well-known dance in the early years of Alfonso's reign, that dance could still have its stumbles. One frequent bone of contention was the issue of urban weapons ordinances. Barcelona's earliest surviving books of municipal ordinances record strict prohibitions on the carrying of weapons within the city, and if we can judge by the placement of these restrictions relative to the other ordinances for any given year—usually appearing second only after the prohibition against blasphemy—the issue constituted a major priority.²³ Two-thirds of each fine collected went to the king's veguer (the remaining third went to the accuser), a tacit affirmation that oversight of weapons and any violence related to them fell under the aegis of the king's peace. But weapons control within the city remained a source of friction between the city and the monarchs, due largely to the latter's willingness to grant individual exemptions from the weapons bans. At one point in 1329 and again in 1330, King Alfonso responded to the evident protests of the councilors by revoking weapons licenses that he had previously granted.²⁴ But this issue did not go away: some of the first privileges that Alfonso's heir, Prince Peter, granted in his capacity as procurator general when he came of age were exemptions from Barcelona's urban weapons ban to figures such as the merchant brothers James and Arnau Forner, who had applied for an exemption in order to be able to protect valuable merchandise they were transporting, or the brothers Berenguer and Pere de Riaria, who needed permission to carry weapons within Barcelona because they had enemies in the city who wanted to do them harm.²⁵

Conflicts such as these between king and council were less about the issues themselves than about the symbolic freight they carried regarding the balance between royal authority and urban self-government. Take, for example, a dispute from the famine year itself over who would hold the office of veguer in the city. Although both veguers and bailiffs swore an oath before the Council of One Hundred at the beginning of each new conciliar year in November or December, the right of the appointment itself lay solely in the power of the king. But in December 1333, the council instructed its envoys to Alfonso's court to request that the king remove the veguer Berenguer de Santmenat from that office, alleging that he and his men had been responsible for unspecified injuries that the envoys “knew well” in addition to other incidents that had taken place after the envoys had left the city.²⁶ A few months later, in March of 1334, the council was again complaining about the veguer—this time that he was dragging out his investigation into accusations that Francesc and Guillem ça Bastida had violated royal jurisdiction by setting up a gallows in the outlying town of Molins de Rei to hang some bandits who had been troubling the area. The two men had insisted that they had permission from the count of Pallars to hang any bandits, and the council would have been eager to get Guillem, in particular, cleared of charges, as he was one of the city's major grain merchants.²⁷ Finally, on April 10, the councilors wrote directly to Prince Peter, at that point in Lleida, this time asking that he replace not only the veguer but also the subveguer and bailiff due to “defects in justice” that were undermining both public order and royal authority in the city.²⁸

While Barcelona's objections to the king's appointed officials, or conflicts over weapons within the city, might suggest a relationship grounded in conflict, the way the city phrased its complaints—focusing on injuries to royal authority as much as to city and council—points not to an adversarial “town-versus-crown” dynamic but rather a relationship in which the king worked together with Barcelona's leadership class, just as he did in other cities and towns throughout Catalonia. Barcelona's wealth and strategic importance simply made it the most extreme example of the type of pactual relationship that the kings of Aragon had with all of their Catalan jurisdictions. Given this context, Alfonso likely would have seen Barcelona's famine-year proposal that the king drop all barriers to the free movement of grain within Catalonia as simply another instance of Barcelona's leaders trying to leverage their city's outsized negotiating power to get the king to lean on the other Catalan cities. But it also demonstrates how Barcelona, a city accustomed to acting relatively independently in matters ranging from municipal laws to conflict at sea, occasionally had to recognize how much of its fate lay in the hands of others for whom the welfare of one city, even a strategically important one, was only one priority among many.

Barcelona and Her Neighbors

King Alfonso may well have been intrigued by the unprecedented opportunity to restructure the relationship with his Catalan cities that Barcelona's grain-sharing proposal represented. Barcelona, in particular, had always guarded the autonomy granted it by its royal privileges, even—as chapter 3 illustrated—uncomfortably pushing their limits. But for all its size, wealth, and influence, Barcelona's very survival depended on being part of a food system that required it to build and maintain its own network of cooperative relationships with other cities in Catalonia. In this year of famine, Barcelona's authorities would discover what its neighbors had learned from long experience of living so close to a powerful city—that while one's own autonomy was a thing to be protected as closely as possible, the autonomy of one's neighbors was often less convenient.

In normal years, Catalan grain flowed into Barcelona's markets relatively smoothly, some coming from the neighboring Vallès region and the countryside around Tarragona but most of it from important grain-growing regions in the Ebro valley and northern Catalonia.²⁹ During the famine year, however, Barcelona's leaders took a more active role, seeking out grain to bring to the city rather than assuming that merchants would be delivering it to market in a steady stream. One resource the councilors drew on was their relationships with members of prominent Catalan noble houses. On January 20, 1334, the councilors wrote to their envoys who were traveling throughout Catalonia attempting to negotiate bulk grain purchases on behalf of the city and instructed them to add Viscount Hugh de Cardona and his wife Lady Beatriu to their itinerary. The councilors had heard that the viscount and his wife had a great quantity of grain in their lands and wanted to procure as much as the couple was willing to sell them.³⁰ These same envoys also paid calls on several other Catalan nobles in their search for grain: Ot of Montcada, Guillem d’Anglesola, his wife Beatriu, Pere de Queralt, Berenguer d’Anglesola, and Constança, wife of Ramon d’Anglesola.³¹ It is notable that, while the council addressed the women on this list as “wife of” their various noble husbands, it solicited them separately, a fact that confirms what other historians have noted time and again—that such women were substantial holders of real property in their own right as well as in partnership with husbands or male relatives.³² The councilors of Barcelona recognized the economic power of these aristocratic women and knew that their potential to contribute to Barcelona's survival in a time of crisis could not be overlooked.

The women and men who owned grain-producing lands in Catalonia did not, however, always respond favorably to the council's pleas, as the council discovered when it tried to convince Francesc Marquès, a citizen of Barcelona with lands in the nearby Vallès region, to part with some of his grain. Marquès had never been one of the magistrates, but he had served on the broader Council of One Hundred at least three times.³³ More importantly, the Marquès family had, since 1287, been the holders of Castell de la Roca, an eleventh-century fortification that anchored its own small agricultural territory in the Vallès region.³⁴ In response to the Council of One Hundred's call for all its citizens to sell the city any grain they had in their rural holdings, Francesc pledged 300 quarteras of wheat and 80 of barley. But when the council's collector, Bernat ça Rovira, arrived to take delivery of the grain in January 1334, he found Francesc willing to part with only 50 quarteras of wheat and even fewer of barley. The councilors wrote to Marquès, reminding him that it was every citizen's duty to send what he or she could and warning him that if he did not send the whole of the promised grain without delay—“which we do not believe will happen”—neither the councilors nor the city would think well of him. The councilors closed their letter by stating that they were willing to resort to force to get the promised grain, but this seems almost an afterthought.³⁵ The real threat here was the potential damage to Marquès's reputation among his peers. Unlike the men and women mentioned in the previous paragraph, Francesc Marquès was not a member of the hereditary aristocracy but rather an honrat, which meant that while his lands might be responsible for his economic status, his position in the city depended in large part on what his fellow honrats thought of him. The council could thus use vague threats of official displeasure with a man like Francesc in a way that it could not with an aristocrat whose status was independent of the good or ill will of the city leaders.

Such stories of individual resistance illustrate how the famine would test the cooperative network that Barcelona depended on for its Catalan food supply. As Barcelona's ability to use its economic dominance to manipulate the ties between city and countryside began to weaken, other Catalan cities that had formerly been reliable trading partners resorted to the same tactics on land that Barcelona had used at sea, diverting shipments of grain on their way to Barcelona in order to feed their own citizens. In early June 1333, two Barcelona grain merchants, Ferran Pascual and Berenguer ça Vila, were leading a packtrain through Manresa when some of that city's constables forcibly confiscated the wheat they had been transporting, citing a new local statute that prohibited taking grain out of the city to sell anywhere else. Barcelona's letter to Manresa's leaders expressed shock and amazement at the confiscation and demanded that the authorities in Manresa restore Ferran's and Berenguer's wheat and refund the fines that they had been made to pay.³⁶ Six months later, Barcelona's councilors complained to Ferrer de Lillet, bailiff-general of Catalonia, alleging that the veguer of Vilafranca had blocked Barcelona's merchants from leaving that city with grain they had already purchased and asking Lillet to remind the veguer that he had no authority to make such prohibitions.³⁷

Because the perpetrator in this latter case of grain confiscation was a royal official, it made sense for Barcelona to draw on the aid of the king's bailiff-general to help resolve the dispute between cities. But in other cases, Barcelona acted on its own in a way that illustrates this city's confidence in its own superior position relative to its neighbors. One such incident erupted in late 1333 between Barcelona and the town of Piera. Piera's agricultural land was divided between grain and vineyards, but its location along the road leading from Barcelona to Cervera and from there to Lleida also made it an important stop along inland grain routes more generally (see map 3).³⁸ A few days before Christmas 1333, Barcelona's councilors wrote to their counterparts in Piera, expressing astonishment that the latter had confiscated grain that the council's envoys had purchased through a merchant; they demanded the return of the grain, noting that (according to them) there was a much greater shortage in Barcelona than in Piera.³⁹ The Barcelona merchant in question was probably Balaguer de Montlleó, who was leading his pack animals through town when locals confiscated his grain after he could not satisfy them that the grain was under contract to Barcelona.⁴⁰ The tension between the two cities escalated a few months later when Barcelona's councilors detained two merchants from Piera, Ramon Castelet and Bernat Gras, whom Barcelona's council had hired to purchase grain for the city. When the two men returned to Barcelona, however, the money the councilors had given them was gone, and they had no grain to show for it. This time, Piera's council acknowledged that a theft had taken place but asserted that it was a mob of desperate citizens who had been responsible. According to Piera's leaders, Castelet and Gras had been passing through town the previous Wednesday with their grain-laden pack animals when some of the townspeople had confronted them and demanded that they produce written proof that the grain they were carrying was under contract to Barcelona. When they could not do so, the crowd decided that they were lying and, incensed by what they perceived as a combination of greed and betrayal on the part of two merchants who originated from their own city, took the grain by force. Insisting that they had had nothing to do with the theft and had no wish to detain grain shipments en route to Barcelona, Piera's leaders requested the release of their two citizens, noting that keeping the men in custody would substantially harm Piera without profiting Barcelona at all.⁴¹

Depending on how trustworthy we find the account from Piera's leaders, the incident illustrates one of two things, both plausible in a climate of food crisis. Either ostensibly allied cities within a region were poaching each others’ resources, or desperate town residents had turned to banditry to provide for themselves when their government could not. Regardless of which of these is true, both cities seem to have acknowledged Barcelona's generally dominant position among Catalan cities. Where Piera's March 1334 letter was diplomatic in tone, Barcelona's reply was anything but, asserting that the letters from Piera's officials “contain[ed] nothing of the truth, or even a reasonable justification for their behavior” and proclaiming astonishment that that Piera's leaders would not acknowledge their role in the theft. The councilors also brought up Piera's response to the earlier Balaguer de Montlleó incident, accusing Piera of flat-out lying in that case. Although Piera's leaders had expressed a willingness to return Balaguer's grain once they learned it did, indeed, belong to Barcelona, Balaguer told Barcelona's council that when he returned to Piera and appeared before that city's leaders, he had been ignominiously thrown out. Barcelona's councilors continued their letter with the acid recommendation (one that was more than a little ironic given Barcelona's own willingness to waylay other cities’ grain shipments at sea) that, if the Pierans found themselves in need of grain, they should seek it out for themselves rather than use force to take grain or other foodstuffs that someone else had gone to the effort of procuring. They closed by warning that Barcelona would be prosecuting the matter in order to serve as an example both to Piera and to any of its neighbors who might think to act similarly against Barcelona.⁴² Said retribution was not long in coming: only a few weeks after writing to Piera, the councilors confiscated from Castelet's and Gras's funds on hand the current market value of the stolen grain. They sent the two merchants back to Piera, adding insult to injury by making Piera's own citizens deliver Barcelona's demand that Piera reimburse the merchants for both their losses and the substantial expenses they had incurred while detained in Barcelona. If Piera would not pay, the men could return to Barcelona for full reimbursement. But if it came to that, Barcelona would recoup this outlay by confiscating the merchandise of every Pieran merchant who passed through the city until accounts were squared.⁴³

The similarities here with Barcelona's behavior at sea in chapter 3 are clear: Barcelona's councilors did not hesitate to use strong-arm tactics with neighbors in the pursuit of feeding their city. But while Barcelona's power at sea allowed it to command grain from abroad, the city encountered stiffer resistance when it tried to throw its weight around among its neighbors in Catalonia. In this context, it is worth noting that the very next letter that Barcelona's council composed after its first letter to Piera in December 1333 was the one it addressed to its envoys to the royal court, in which it laid out the grain-sharing scheme that it wanted brought before the king.⁴⁴ Given this timing, it is likely that the incident with Piera had driven home to Barcelona's councilors the reality of the situation: intimidation and economic might would no longer be enough to bring Catalonia's grain to their doorstep, and they would need an ally who had the authority to compel other cities to part with their grain.

But the councilors’ plan for the king to persuade other cities to release grain to them was more than just the already complicated process of convincing one man to act in their favor. Instead, the councilors had to work with a whole array of powerful members of the royal family network, each of whom held a different type of sovereign authority within Catalonia and each of whom had his or her own broad constituency to look after. If Barcelona's own vision of its position within the larger federation of semi-independent Catalan cities was decidedly superior, observing Barcelona from the perspective of not only the king but the other members of the ruling family in this moment of crisis reveals a very different picture, one in which the needs of Barcelona had to be weighed against those of other cities or even the good of the realm as a whole.

Sovereigns and Cities in the Bad Year

Alfonso

When King Alfonso considered his response to Barcelona's proposal, his first instinct likely would not have been to see things in terms of a single issue affecting the entire region but rather as something that required him to balance the interests of his leading city against those of his other cities and towns. His position as sovereign meant that he could at least theoretically respond to what was a realm-wide crisis in a way that local officials could not. Yet Alfonso's early responses to reports of shortages throughout his lands show him still addressing the famine on a case-by-case basis while trying to interfere as little as possible in local policy decisions. In June 1333, for instance, he responded to reports of the failure of the grain harvest in the Aragonese town of Salvatierra by ordering debts that any Salvatierran owed to Christians be extended for a period of three years, instructing his local officials to make payments on the debts in the meantime.⁴⁵ Debt extensions like these would grow more common as the famine wore on, becoming a regular feature of the royal crisis response but remaining largely localized in scope. This same ad hoc approach to famine also underpinned Alfonso's permission that May for Girona to substitute a cash subsidy for the grain provisions the king had requisitioned for a planned military expedition.⁴⁶

These early responses illustrate Alfonso's inclination, first to view the famine as a series of local issues rather than as a single problem that demanded a collective solution, and second to leave his cities to work out their own solutions with minimal intervention from above. But one common type of response to the crisis, local embargoes on grain exports, would force Alfonso to confront the fact that the integrated nature of the food system in his realms meant that local problems were not going to stay local for long. King Alfonso himself had regularly used embargoes like these to ensure that he would have the grain he needed to provision his military ventures. Grain could travel freely within any of his realms but not between them and certainly not outside them, except with the king's express permission.⁴⁷ Beginning in mid-1333, however, several individual cities had begun to institute their own local versions of the embargo to keep grain from leaving their municipal jurisdictions.⁴⁸ Barcelona was later than other cities in implementing a local embargo, having been temporarily insulated from the effects of the famine by both its access to Mediterranean markets and the fact that it could draw on its economic resources to offer financial incentives—a bonus to grain merchants of 8 diners per quartera of wheat and 4 per quartera of barley, on top of whatever price the grain was fetching at the market at the time as well as tax immunities on grain imports.⁴⁹ But as the sailing season on the open Mediterranean drew to a close in late 1333, and Barcelona made its usual late autumn pivot to grain sources within Catalonia itself, the city began to feel the effect of the embargoes its neighbors had instituted. In January 1334, desperate to preserve what little grain was actually making its way to the city, Barcelona's leaders finally instituted their own ban on grain or grain products leaving the city. The council did make exceptions, allowing individual merchants to obtain export licenses and permitting any resident of Barcelona or its territorium to take up to twelve large loaves of bread a day out of the city, presumably to resell in the city's rural outskirts, or up to a single pound of flour and three large loaves of cooked bread or its equivalent in uncooked dough intended for personal consumption. But any other attempts to take grain out of the city once it had come in would be met with a fine of 500 sous—or, for those who could not pay, the loss of a hand—as well as confiscation of whatever ship or pack animals had been carrying the grain or flour in question.⁵⁰

King Alfonso was not indifferent to the ripple effects created by all these local embargoes. In late December, in an open letter to all royal officials, the king addressed the situation in Barcelona in particular:

The councilors and prohoms of the city of Barcelona, in order to gain relief from the need and shortage of food that is known now to obtain in that city, are arranging to have wheat and other grain delivered to the city from various places in Catalonia. We therefore firmly and expressly charge and order each and every one of you not to impede said wheat or grain or the persons transporting it, so that they may freely transport it to the said city of Barcelona; nor shall you allow any local interdicts to disrupt its transport.⁵¹

This letter, sent around the time that Barcelona's envoys would have been at the court in Teruel, suggests that while the king was not quite ready to take the leap to thinking in terms of a realm-wide policy, he was beginning to see the integrated nature of the crisis and to consider how the grain policies of any one of his cities might affect others. Barcelona was hardly unique in this regard: over the winter of 1333/1334, Alfonso issued numerous time-limited, nontransferable export permits to individual merchants attached to various cities, permits which his cities sometimes respected and sometimes ignored.⁵² But case-by-case mediation in response to specific petitions remained the king's primary mode of addressing the crisis in his lands. Perhaps the fragmented and pactual nature of royal authority in Catalonia made a sweeping centralized response difficult for Alfonso to conceive. But the king was not the only member of the house of Barcelona capable of aiding the city. As noted earlier in this chapter, the nature of monarchy in the Crown of Aragon, as in many other medieval kingdoms, was plural, with the king as head but with many other individuals empowered with varying degrees of quasi-independent royal authority broad enough to cut through the knots in the relationships between cities. The way that each member of the royal family network saw their own individual relationship with Barcelona would thus be crucial to the city's ability to feed itself in a time of famine.

Eleanor

On December 13, 1333, Alfonso received a letter from Barcelona's council detailing a particularly complicated tangle of embargoes that had been preventing grain from reaching the city. The same two envoys who would soon stand before King Alfonso to propose the city's grain-sharing scheme had just visited the grain-growing regions of the Catalan interior on behalf of the council and had managed to arrange for a significant purchase of grain from the bishop of Lleida's lands in the area around Fraga, a town located about eighteen miles west of Lleida on the border between Catalonia and Aragon. Unlike other regions in Catalonia, the agricultural lands around Lleida seem to have been spared the dramatic shortfalls of that year. The bishop of Lleida, who controlled a substantial share of the grain-producing land in the diocese, had enough grain on hand to offer Barcelona 1,000 cafices (approximately 2,850 quarteras) of combined wheat and barley, although the asking price of 8,000 lliures—about 55 sous per quartera—had caused the councilors to consider backing out of the deal, despite the need in the city, until a wealthy Barcelona citizen offered to lend them the entire sum.⁵³ The cost was not, however, the only obstacle standing between Barcelona and the grain that lay so tantalizingly close. The first roadblock came from the town of Fraga itself, which, like most towns in Catalonia by this time, had banned the export of any grain from the city. The second potential problem was the city of Tortosa. Located at the mouth of the Ebro River and serving as the main link between the inland grain sources and the sea, Tortosa had lately been retaining shipments of grain that Barcelona merchants had been attempting to transport through that city's port.⁵⁴ Anticipating that trouble might come from either of these cities, the councilors asked the king to provide them with letters smoothing their passage. In both cases, however, the fate of Barcelona's grain lay not in the hands of the king but rather those of the queen—Alfonso's second wife, Eleanor of Castile.

Much of what is generally known of Eleanor's tenure as Alfonso's queen is suspect, as historians have drawn their information primarily from the autobiographical chronicle written long after the fact by Peter III/IV (r. 1336–1387), the eldest surviving son of Alfonso and his first wife, Teresa d’Entença.⁵⁵ The portrait Peter paints of his stepmother is one of a grasping foreign queen surrounded by equally unscrupulous Castilian advisers whose actions threatened to divide the Crown of Aragon.⁵⁶ In general, a queen's foreign origin was seen as an advantage in that it could help to create or cement important diplomatic alliances; foreignness in a queen usually only surfaced as a liability in contemporary sources when it became entangled in other political or personal grievances.⁵⁷ In Eleanor's case, a large part of Peter's resentment stemmed from his father's attempts to transfer the incomes of several towns from the crown prince to his new half-brother, Ferdinand. In his later chronicle, Peter reports with some satisfaction that the king was met with a flat refusal from several Valencian towns whose jurisdiction he had attempted to transfer to his newborn son.⁵⁸ But another of Alfonso's gifts to his new son was more successful. In January 1330, Alfonso revived the dormant title of marquis of Tortosa and bestowed it, together with the lands pertaining to it, on Ferdinand, with Queen Eleanor to serve as guardian and administrator of her son's properties and rights during his minority.⁵⁹

Eleanor's authority as queen was not all that unusual. The queens of Aragon formed an important part of the Crown's plural monarchy, some of them even holding the lieutenancy or exercising full royal authority.⁶⁰ Queen Eleanor's power did not extend so far, but she was an important political figure, both as regent for her son in the marquisate of Tortosa and because of the lordship she exercised over the territories she had received in her marriage agreement with Alfonso. The agreement for Eleanor's marital assigns specified that she would have the right to collect incomes from several cities that often went to queens-consort: Huesca and Calatayud in Aragon; Xàtiva, Xèrica, Castellón de la Plana, and Burriana in Valencia; and Montblanc and Tàrrega in Catalonia. In addition, the agreement granted her the Valencian towns of Morvedre (today Sagunt), Morella, and Alzira and stipulated that additional towns could be added later if the incomes from the towns and cities already specified turned out to be insufficient to her needs.⁶¹

By 1333, the group of cities and towns under Queen Eleanor's direct control included Fraga, a town that lay on the border between southern Catalonia and Aragon.⁶² Although Fraga operated under the same collection of customary law (fueros) that applied to Eleanor's city of Huesca, it was also part of the diocese of Lleida, which owned substantial grain-producing lands there. But the correspondence surrounding Barcelona's attempted purchase of grain from Fraga suggests that hers was the sovereign authority in the town: in their letter to Alfonso requesting an export license to show the leaders of Fraga, Barcelona's councilors do not ask him to provide the license himself but rather that he ask the queen to do so.⁶³ Queen Eleanor's position as the member of the family most able to overrule Fraga's council seems even clearer when placed side by side with a similar situation from April of that year in which she had ordered the municipal leaders of Fraga to permit Prince Peter's councilor Ferrer Colom to extract 200 cafices (about 550 quarteras) of grain for the use of the prince's household.⁶⁴

Eleanor's intervention was even more crucial in Tortosa, where she served as administrator for her son, the marquis. Barcelona may have been Catalonia's primary Mediterranean port, but Tortosa's position at the mouth of the Ebro River made it the main gateway for grain coming from the Catalan interior and further inland in Aragon. During the famine year, Tortosa, like other Catalan cities, had instituted an embargo on any grain leaving its precincts, effectively turning the city into a trap for grain: merchants would bring their grain from the interior into the city, where it was to be loaded onto ships for transport up and down the coast, but the ships would not be allowed to leave. When Barcelona's council wrote to Tortosa's leaders about this problem in June of 1333, they chose to appeal primarily to the friendship and brotherhood that they asserted had always existed between the two cities.⁶⁵ But by December of that same year, the councilors had run out of patience, fuming privately to their envoys about the grain that Tortosa had been “iniquitously” confiscating.⁶⁶

King Alfonso had written his own letter to his royal officials in general, alerting them to the grave situation in Barcelona, in particular, and ordering them not to impede the transit of grain to that city.⁶⁷ But it was Eleanor, as de facto lord of Tortosa, who had the authority to intervene with that city's council. That winter the queen received two letters within two weeks from her royal spouse, both of them asking her to work with local authorities in Tortosa to make sure that Barcelona's grain was not held up in that city.⁶⁸ Unlike her husband, Eleanor did not have a direct pactual relationship with Barcelona, and her main interest in Tortosa lay in administering the resources of its new marquisate until her son came of age. Her intervention—which came in the form of letters demanding that Tortosa allow Barcelona's grain free movement through its port, provided that the merchants transporting it could demonstrate proof that the grain was, in fact, going to Barcelona and not some other destination—came only when Alfonso, a much more directly interested party, brought the issue to her attention and solicited her aid.

This sort of mediating action with the queen was not unique to the king's relationship with Barcelona. In late November and again in early December of 1333, Alfonso had asked Eleanor to allow various individuals to take grain either from or through Tortosa to other destinations within the Crown lands.⁶⁹ But, several of his interventions over that winter favored Barcelona in particular. In late November, the king wrote to the queen informing her that he had issued a license to a certain Master Pere Gavet to allow him to extract up to 350 cafices (about 1,000 quarteras) of grain from his lands in Lleida, with Barcelona as the grain's final destination.⁷⁰ Alfonso had already written to the governing council of Lleida, instructing them to allow Gavet to export grain from their city.⁷¹ But it was Eleanor, not Alfonso, who possessed the authority to direct the bailiff of Tortosa to ensure that Gavet's grain faced no local embargo as it made its way to Barcelona. Eleanor's intervention in these cases must have been effective. Tortosa released two ships loaded with grain, sending them to Barcelona along with both expressions of brotherhood and a pointed complaint about the councilors’ decision to bring the king and queen into the matter.⁷² The queen's intercession was also needed for smaller quantities passing through Tortosa en route to Barcelona, like the two cafices that the royal official Simon de Celler wanted to bring back to Barcelona in February 1334 for the use of his own household.⁷³ The king may have been the active party on behalf of Barcelona or its citizens in these cases, but when it came to Eleanor's lands, he could only request, not require.

Barcelona's councilors did not hesitate to throw their weight around with most of their Catalan neighbors, but in the face of grain embargoes, they often found themselves relatively powerless and had to reach out to individuals who had the authority to apply pressure in localities that lay beyond Barcelona's control or influence. In the case of Tortosa and, to a lesser degree, Fraga, Barcelona's councilors found themselves dependent on the cooperation of a queen who did not share the king's long relationship of reciprocal dependency with their city. The Council of One Hundred, perhaps aware that it had no leverage with Eleanor, never reached out directly to the queen, and on only one occasion—a relatively routine request for an export license—did the councilors even copy her on their correspondence regarding grain purchases.⁷⁴ Barcelona's councilors were not ignorant. They would have been fully aware that the city that was giving them so much trouble lay within the queen's jurisdiction. Their choice to ask Alfonso to intercede in these cases rather than making their appeal directly to Eleanor may suggest that Barcelona's leaders did not see the queen as a full partner in Alfonso's rule in the way that historians writing about plural monarchy have suggested. More likely, the city's primary negotiating partner had always been its kings, so they chose the most familiar path to secure royal influence. But even as mediated through King Alfonso, the crucial involvement of Queen Eleanor illustrates that the king was not the only member of the royal family who could address Barcelona's issues, nor was he necessarily the person whose authority was most immediate or puissant in a given situation. As for Eleanor, although she consistently acceded to Alfonso's requests on Barcelona's behalf, she did not depend on the city's financial resources in the same way that the king did, nor did she seem all that interested in interfering in local politics in favor of one city or another. For her, Barcelona was just another supplicant, only worth her direct interest on those occasions when the king intervened.

John

The king and queen were not the only members of the royal family who would shape Barcelona's relationships with other cities in Catalonia. In early 1334, the councilors received an invitation to a meeting of representatives of Catalan cities to be held in the town of Montblanc on February 3 with the goal of devising a joint solution to the grain shortages that had been plaguing them all. In their reply—dated January 31, only days before the proposed meeting was to take place—the councilors expressed their eagerness to work with the other attendees to come to any solution that might be useful to all. The guest list included representatives from jurisdictions throughout Catalonia and several members of the royal family, including the king, the queen, and the meeting's convener, John—the archbishop of Tarragona and the king's younger brother.⁷⁵

Born around 1301 and educated in the Carthusian order, John had been named archbishop of Toledo in 1319 at age eighteen and then, in 1327 and after much lobbying of the papal court by King James II, transferred to head the archdiocese of Tarragona where he could be away from the unfriendly political climate of the Castilian court.⁷⁶ Even in victory, King James kept negotiating, eventually persuading Pope John XXII to add the symbolic title of “Patriarch of Alexandria” to his son's dignities, arguing that the see of Toledo that John had given up was more prestigious than the one in Tarragona he now occupied.⁷⁷ In actuality, Tarragona itself was probably the king's real prize. In addition to being heads of the Catalan Church, the archbishops of Tarragona were also, at that time, lords of the city, and having a member of the royal family installed as archbishop fit with King James's ongoing efforts to bring Catalonia's patchwork of seigniorial and ecclesiastical jurisdictions under greater royal control.⁷⁸

James's negotiations to place his son at the head of the Catalan Church were some of the last that he would conduct, and when the old king died in November of 1327, John himself, in his new capacity as archbishop of Tarragona, officiated at his brother Alfonso's coronation.⁷⁹ John remained closely involved in key events of his brother's early reign, standing in for him to swear homage to the pope for the Crown's possessions in Sardinia and Corsica in 1328 and accompanying him to the border with Castile to receive his second wife (and former sister-in-law), Princess Eleanor of Castile.⁸⁰ John's willingness to use his personal relationship with the king to promote ecclesiastical values in the secular leadership of his archdiocese comes through in one of his sermons in which he recommends that a king's subjects should pray that he be “as head, influential; as a military leader, protective; as a father, loving.” Subjects should also pray that the justice of the king be, like the justice of God, “upright in its equity, pious in its goodness, and the summit of stability.”⁸¹

John's focus on the good of his archdiocese as a whole did not prevent him from leaning on his family ties to protect his own city's particular interests. In January 1334, around the same time that Barcelona's representatives were asking Alfonso to help facilitate their large grain purchase from the bishop of Lleida, John's agents were negotiating with that same bishop for his own purchase of grain in order to feed the many people—including the king himself—who would be attending a great provincial council in Tarragona. At John's request, Alfonso wrote to both his bailiff in Lleida and that city's municipal government, informing them that he had granted a special exemption to Lleida's grain embargo and would be allowing Tarragona's merchants to export up to 1,000 cafices of grain.⁸² Less than two months later, John again drew on his family connections, this time asking his nephew, Prince Peter, to take advantage of his residence in Lleida to prevail upon that city's leaders to sell some of their grain to the cities and towns of Catalonia and to Tarragona and its citizens in particular. Peter made the attempt, but on March 4, he had to write to his uncle to admit that he had not been able to get Lleida's leaders to release any of their city's grain—not yet, at least, implying that he had still not given up—and that he would be sending some grain from his own lands which he hoped would aid the citizens ofTarragona.⁸³

The archbishop may have been the supplicant in these cases involving the secular rulers in his family. But when it came to Barcelona, he could just as easily find himself the object of appeal. In mid-March 1334, agents of his city forcibly captured a shipload of grain that had been making its way up the Catalan coast to Barcelona.⁸⁴ While the councilors were politically astute enough not to hold the archbishop personally responsible for the theft, they did ask him to use his influence to get the cost of the Barcelona ships’ armaments back and to ensure that the leaders of Tarragona never did such a thing again. As part of their appeal, the councilors emphasized the truly dire situation that Barcelona found itself in by the early spring of 1334. According to the council's letter, there was no bread to be had in the city, and Barcelona's leaders did not know if they would be able to stop the already tense situation from boiling over if news of this recent loss of their grain shipment got out.⁸⁵ The councilors invoked the looming social crisis in their city again a month later when they had to refuse the archbishop's request that they send grain to Tarragona, telling him that, although they would normally be well-disposed to aid him, and although they had recently sent a “great ship” to Sicily under the captaincy of Guillem Badia to procure grain, the shortages in their own city were, at the moment, so great that to send away any grain at all would provoke “scandal” and “danger.”⁸⁶

John's correspondence with Barcelona provides a view of that city through the eyes of another member of the royal family whose rule and interests extended beyond the borders of a single city. But where Alfonso's relationship with Barcelona was governed by the longstanding quid pro quo between monarchs and the individual cities of their realms, and where Queen Eleanor probably cared little about Barcelona so long as her sovereign authority in her own lands was respected, John walked a more careful line between his responsibilities as lord of Tarragona and his commitments to all of the towns and cities—including Barcelona—under his archiepiscopal jurisdiction. The fact that John was asking Barcelona for a contribution of grain less than a month after Barcelona had appealed to him for help in stopping Tarragona's agents from taking its own grain shows an ongoing tendency for members of the royal family to conceive of crisis management primarily in local terms, even within the context of the broad jurisdictions that they individually oversaw. But the archbishop's effort to convene a council of Catalan cities to deal with the grain crisis represents something different—the opening of a door to thinking of each of these cities not only as individual constituents but also as potential partners in a centralized response to a shared crisis.

Peter

There was one last member of the royal family to whom Barcelona could appeal for aid in keeping grain flowing—King Alfonso's firstborn son, Prince Peter. As heir-apparent, Peter held the office of procurator general, which empowered him to exercise the authority of the monarch in his father's absence.⁸⁷ The prince, who was only fourteen years old at this time, was still working closely with his lieutenant, Guillem de Cervelló (the same man who held the official title of admiral for the city fleet that Galceran Marquet was leading in the war against Genoa).⁸⁸ Even at this young age, Peter's correspondence from the famine year shows him actively involved in the business of the realm. In late January of 1334, around the time that Archbishop John was planning his summit of Catalan leaders, the king wrote to Prince Peter, who was at that time in Zaragoza, regarding the grain shortage in Barcelona. Alfonso's letter, which referred specifically to the “dangerous lack of wheat and other grain” in that city, shows that the king had, by that time, absorbed the councilors’ sense of urgency. Alfonso kept his letter brief, simply noting that he would be sending former veguer of Barcelona, Pere de Santcliment, to Peter with specific instructions.⁸⁹ Alfonso then communicated his plans for his heir to Santcliment in a way that suggests that at least some of the details of Barcelona's earlier proposal had stuck with him. In Lleida, wrote Alfonso, there was grain in “great abundance”; the prince just needed to sit down with Lleida's council and negotiate a deal to get the grain on its way to market in Barcelona. In another clear echo of the Council of One Hundred's earlier proposal, Alfonso stipulated that Lleida had the right to keep some emergency reserves but no more than six months’ worth and had to allow the rest to pass through the city on its way to be sold in Barcelona.⁹⁰ The young prince seems to have been eager to prove himself in this important mission: on February 10, he wrote to inform his father that he had arrived in Lleida and had summoned into his presence several nobles and knights of Catalonia to brief him on the local situation and that he hoped to provide his father with a complete report within a few days.⁹¹

Peter's swift action upon receiving his father's directive likely confirmed Alfonso's assumption that bringing the weight of even secondhand royal authority to bear on the situation would be enough to get the grain flowing to Barcelona. Seemingly anticipating a quick wrap-up to the situation in Lleida, the king confided to Santcliment that he was already planning to send his son to conduct similar one-on-one meetings with local authorities in other places where grain seemed to be bottlenecking: first to the county of Urgell, ruled by the prince's younger brother James, then on to Cervera, Tàrrega, Montblanc, “and other places in those parts where it seems to him that food might be found for the city of Barcelona.”⁹² The prince, however, almost immediately met with local resistance. Lleida's councilors disputed Barcelona's assertion that there was plenty of grain just lying around in their city, pointing out that they were suffering just as much from the poor harvests and perhaps even more since, as an inland city, they had no easy way to import grain from overseas markets. As proof, they showed the prince the results of their latest grain survey and even offered him the keys to all the grain storage facilities in the city so he could see for himself, assuring him that if he found the surplus that Barcelona asserted was there, he could do with it as he wished.⁹³

Lleida's response would have made two things clear to the prince. The first of these was that the vast reserves of grain that Barcelona had argued were tucked away in places like Lleida likely did not exist. Barcelona may have been able to purchase 1,000 cafices of grain from Lleida's bishop back in December, but the bishop of Lleida's lands were not the same as the city of Lleida's supply on hand, and the bishop's willingness to sell large quantities of grain to a relatively wealthy city like Barcelona actually would have worsened the shortages in the city by siphoning off local grain resources that it normally would have been able to depend on.⁹⁴ The second, more significant lesson that Peter would have taken away was that the piecemeal approach envisioned in the king's instructions to his heir and in his letter to Pere de Santcliment was not going to be sufficient to resolve the larger problem. In early February 1334, the prince addressed himself to this second part of the larger problem when he hosted a meeting on the subject of grain distribution. Perusing the guest list—Peter's younger brother, Count James of Urgell; his uncles, Archbishop John and Count Peter of Empúries; as well as members of the prince's council of advisors, including his vice-procurator Guillem de Cervelló—it seems that this was the same summit to which Archbishop John had invited the councilors of Barcelona to send representatives at the end of January, which suggests that the young crown prince was likely working together with his uncle with an eye to a broader solution.⁹⁵

The first part of Peter's mandate to the gathered lords and urban representatives would have pleased Barcelona's councilors insofar as it largely lined up with their own proposal to Alfonso back in December: the prince declared an end to all local export bans and the resumption of free passage of grain throughout Catalonia. But Peter and his advisors also understood that he had more than just Barcelona's welfare to look after, so any plan had to take into account the effect that it could have on the grain-producing regions of the interior, which risked being left with nothing to eat as the grain that they had grown flowed to cities like Barcelona where it could fetch a higher price. To prevent this outcome, the prince's decree set maximum prices for wheat, barley, and oats throughout Catalonia—including even seigniorial and ecclesiastical jurisdictions—ensuring that a wealthy city (like Barcelona, though he did not say so) would not be able to outbid other cities to corner the market on grain and leave poorer regions to starve. The decree also established a gradual decline in maximum grain prices, from a higher price during the winter months when grain supply would be at its lowest, to a lower price in early summer when the Mediterranean markets were accessible again and supply would hopefully be more plentiful, to July when the emergency decree was set to expire.⁹⁶

Peter's aim was to convince the attendees at the meeting that the suffering of towns and cities throughout Catalonia was due as much to hoarding and speculation as to poor grain harvests—behavior, he argued, that was contrary to both law and equity and toxic to the common good.⁹⁷ But while he may have convinced Catalonia's leaders to agree to the notion in principle, any success he had in practice was short-lived. In March 1334, the prince wrote to Ferrer de Lillet, bailiff-general of Catalonia, to complain that certain city leaders and rulers of independent baronies were not incurring any punishments for having violated his ordinance by blocking grain exports from their territories or by selling grain for up to three times the mandated maximum price. Peter again invoked the idea of the common good in rebuking this behavior and asserted that these cities’ actions placed them in contempt of royal authority.⁹⁸ But various localities continued to resist the prince's ordinance to the point that Alfonso, who had first put Peter in charge of the situation in Catalonia, advised his son to apply a more judicious hand with how strictly he enforced his decree.⁹⁹ As for the price restrictions, there was an attempt to comply during the first months after the decree took effect when the set prices, though lower than the market rate, were at their highest. But it was not long before the prince began to receive complaints from municipal leaders that people who had grain to sell refused to let it go at the set maximum, and Peter soon found himself issuing special permits for individual cities to purchase grain for prices above the maximum rather than face having no grain at all.¹⁰⁰ The leaders of Manresa, for instance, noted that, while Peter's lifting of internal export bans had made it possible for grain to flow to their city again, those who actually had the grain would not sell it to the city for the price specified by the decree, which left the local baker women with no grain with which to make their bread. So it was that, less than a month after establishing his price controls, Peter found himself issuing the bailiff of Manresa a limited permit for the city's bakers to purchase grain at whatever price merchants and brokers were asking for it, regardless of the prices set in the decree; by April and May grain was regularly being sold throughout Catalonia at prices well above the decreed maximum.¹⁰¹

What should we take away from this episode overall? Joan Maltas i Montoro has pointed out how local resistance to Prince Peter's decree underlines “the contradictions between the dynamics of merchant activity, the economic policies of the sovereign, and the jurisdictional fragmentation of the Principate [of Catalonia].”¹⁰² In other words, effective implementation of the prince's decree would have required a degree of centralized control over commerce that the monarchs lacked in Catalonia. But when analyzing this decree, we might look beyond its ultimate failure and back toward the underlying assumptions that made it possible to even conceive of such a policy. Those assumptions speak to a clash between two conflicting conceptions of the position of a city like Barcelona relative to its monarchs and its fellow cities, as the famine revealed cracks in the tradition of largely hands-off rulership in a system of pactual monarchy. Even a powerful and privileged city like Barcelona might need to sacrifice its individual prerogatives in service of the common good.

The stories in the previous chapters have shown Barcelona acting independently whenever it could, accepting the limitations of a subject city only when it had no other choice. Through the eyes of the royal family, however, we see another Barcelona, one that needed the aid of someone with sovereign authority, even if it meant sacrificing some of its treasured autonomy. Under normal circumstances, Barcelona could manage its relationships with other Catalan cities using a combination of diplomacy and intimidation. Even in years of shortage, the city's wealth could blunt the effects of crisis by affording it purchasing power on the grain market that other Catalan cities lacked. But the bad year of 1333/1334 illustrates how the regional dominance that usually served Barcelona well could result in a backlash from other Catalan cities that saw grain grown in their own regions being drained off by their powerful and wealthy neighbor. Over time, the famine slowly eroded Barcelona's ability to dominate its neighbors in Catalonia as all competed for the same scarce peninsular grain, forcing Barcelona to turn to the monarchs to intervene.

In the context of the Crown of Aragon's composite monarchy, the constitutional status of Barcelona, like that of other Catalan cities, was a transactional one that balanced royal authority with local autonomy. The kings of Aragon reinforced their claims to sovereignty by using their personal presence or that of their procurators or royal officials to project royal authority in the cities. But those same kings had also granted their cities extensive privileges of self-government in exchange for the infusions of funds that they regularly required. While Barcelona's value to its kings as a shipping power meant that it had accrued more privileges than most Crown cities, its neighbors in Catalonia had negotiated their own respective balances between local autonomy and subordination to royal authority. This pactual style of government worked for both the king and Barcelona in good times, but it provided precious little framework for dealing with a crisis that extended far beyond the borders of a single city. When Barcelona's leaders turned to the king for aid, they opened the door to a fundamental restructuring of the relationship between monarchs and their cities, including Barcelona itself.

Yet the plural nature of the Crown's rule meant that there were areas where even the king was powerless to intervene. Royal authority did not rest in a single ruler but rather in a constellation of individuals related by blood and marriage, each of whom had a slightly different relationship with Barcelona. Queen Eleanor was an important seigniorial power, exercising control over several key points in Barcelona's grain network within Catalonia. Yet, unlike Alfonso, she did not depend directly on Barcelona to sustain her position. For Eleanor, that city's needs were not a matter of personal concern, and she intervened on its behalf only when directly asked to do so. King Alfonso's younger brother John was lord of the city that was his archiepiscopal seat, and his actions on behalf of that city show him, like Barcelona's leaders, thinking locally in terms of crisis management. But as the famine wore on, John's attitude seems to have begun to shift. As archbishop of Tarragona, he exercised a broad spiritual authority that allowed him, and perhaps even obligated him, to look to the good of all the cities and towns of his archdiocese as a whole. Barcelona was only one city under his purview, but it was one whose participation was essential to any broad solution to a crisis that affected his archdiocese as a whole. Prince Peter had the most direct contact with Barcelona in its famine year. He also possessed the closest thing to full royal authority in his capacity as procurator general. Barcelona's direct correspondence with and appeals to the prince show that it respected him, or at least his office, as a legitimate source of royal authority. For his part, Peter's work with his uncle to organize a grain summit and the terms laid out in his decree show that, like the other members of his family, he regarded Barcelona as one potential partner among many. As heir-apparent to the Crown of Aragon, he would have been conscious of the outsized role that this city, in particular, played in any royal strategy. But he also couched parts of his response in terms of a common good that superseded individual needs, a concept that the Crown of Aragon's kings would increasingly invoke in their relationships with Barcelona in centuries to come.¹⁰³

There are some indications that everyone—from the cities to the archbishop to the king and his ruling partners—saw the need for broader crisis management. Even as a short-term emergency measure, Barcelona's proposal that the king impose his will on the individual cities and towns under his jurisdiction could have had the power to fundamentally transform the nature of the royal lordship of Catalan cities and, with it, the place in that new configuration for a powerful city like Barcelona. The proposal with which this chapter opened shows that Barcelona's leaders, faced with a crisis, were capable of conceptualizing their political position within the Crown in ways that ran counter to their usual way of operating. The responses of at least some of the members of the royal house show that they, too, would have reconceived this relationship in favor of a more sovereign authority, one that gave them emergency powers to compel even a city like Barcelona, despite its abundance of royal privileges. But the habits of local rule proved too deeply rooted to give up so easily. Making such a plan work would have required a degree of unity and central control over politics and economics that Catalonia's many quasi-independent political constituencies, including Barcelona, did not yet seem to have been fully prepared to accept.

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1. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 46r (December 22–24 [?], 1333).

2. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 45v (December 18, 1333).

3. Joan Maltas i Montoro, Caresties, fams i epidèmies a Catalunya: de la conquesta de Sicília a la Pesta Negra (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2022), 158–95.

4. Flocel Sabaté Curull, “Discurs i estratègies del poder reial a Catalunya al segle XIV,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 25 (1995): 617–46, and “El poder reial entre el poder municipal i el poder baronial a la Catalunya del segle XIV,” in El poder real de la Corona de Aragón (siglos XIV–XVI): XV Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón (Zaragoza: Departamento de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, 1996), 2:327–42; Núria Silleras-Fernández, “La creación de la identidad lingüística catalana (siglos XIII–XVII) en su contexto peninsular y mediterráneo: un prefacio,” in La creación de la identidad lingüística catalana (siglos XIII–XVII), ed. Vicente Lledó Guillem (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2019), 11; John Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past & Present 137 (1992): 52–53.

5. Historians of medieval Catalan royal government often center the concept of “pactism” in their analyses: even in a context where the monarchs were trying to push a Roman-law-based conception of top-down sovereignty, monarchy in Catalonia was based on a series of agreements or pacts. For literature on “pactism” as a political theory in the late medieval and early modern periods, see James Sobrequés i Callicó, El pactisme a Catalunya: una praxi política en la historia del pais (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1982); Tomás de Montagut i Estragués, “Pactisme o absolutisme a Catalunya: les grans institucions de govern (s. XV–XVI),” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 19 (1989): 669–80; and Josep Olives i Puig, “Del pactisme medieval al contractualisme modern,” Finestrelles 6 (1994): 205–41. For an exploration of Catalan governing authority based on individual agreements in the central Middle Ages, see Adam J. Kosto, Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word, 1000–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

6. Theresa Earenfight, “Without the Persona of the Prince: Kings, Queens and the Idea of Monarchy in Late Medieval Europe,” Gender & History 19 (2007): 10.

7. J. Ernest Martínez Ferrando, Els fills de Jaume II (Barcelona: Aymá, 1950), 25–39.

8. Butllari, nos. 753 (August 29, 1319) and 755 (September 19, 1319).

9. Martínez Ferrando, Els fills de Jaume II, 40–44.

10. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 348, 22v–23v (December 14, 1319).

11. Jesús Lalinde Abadía, La gobernación general en la Corona de Aragón (Madrid: CSIC, 1963), 49–67 and 93–96; José Maria de Francisco Olmos, “Jaime II y la ‘constitución’ de la corona de Aragón,” Anales de la universidad de Alicante: historia medieval 11 (1996–1997): 524–25; Thomas N. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 72; Enric Bagué, “Alfons el Benigne,” in Els descendents de Pere el Gran (Barcelona: Vicens-Vives, 1991), 169–71.

12. Martínez Ferrando, Els fills de Jaume II, 91–94. This uncritical open-handedness may have been the source of Alfonso's eventual sobriquet as king, el benigne.

13. Carme Batlle i Gallart [as Carme Batlle], Història de Catalunya, vol. 3, L’expansió baixmedieval (segles XIII–XV), ed. Pierre Vilar (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1988), 53–54. The importance of this conquest to Barcelona, in particular, is illustrated by the council's June 1324 decree of not only a procession to honor the victorious prince but also a two-day celebration during which almost all businesses would be closed and all but widows were to put off their mourning dress on pain of a fine of 200 sous and forfeiture of the mourning garb; AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 31v–32r (June 9, 1324).

14. Martínez Ferrando, Els fills de Jaume II, 96–100.

15. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon, 19–30 and 63–67.

16. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon, 31–35, 65–66, and 73–74; Kosto, Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia, 219–67; Sabaté Curull, “Discurs i estratègies del poder reial,” 617–19.

17. Jesús Lalinde Abadía, La jurisdicción real inferior en Cataluña (Corts, veguers, batlles) (Barcelona: Ayuntamiento Museo de Historia de la Ciudad, 1966), 93–96 and 220–21; Stephen Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 1096–1291 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 63–72 and 314–16; Josefa Mutgé i Vives, La ciudad de Barcelona durante el reinado de Alfonso el Benigno (1327–1336) (Madrid: CSIC, 1987), 193–94. Ortí Gost, “El Consell de Cent,” 33–36; Sabaté Curull, “Discurs i estratègies del poder reial,” 617–19.

18. For James I's establishment of the Council of One Hundred, see this book, chapter 1.

19. Luis González Antón, Las uniones aragonesas y las Cortes del reino (1283–1301) (Zaragoza: CSIC, 1975), 1:67–86; Josep Maria Mas i Solench, Història i dret a Catalunya (Lleida: Pagès, 2003), 63 and 150. For the complete text of Recognoverunt proceres, see Privilegios reales, no. 22.

20. Privilegios reales, nos. 42 and 43 (1292), and 50 (1299); Ortí Gost, “El Consell de Cent,” 29–33; Mutgé i Vives, La ciudad de Barcelona, 231; Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 82.

21. Josefina Mutgé i Vives, “Alfons el Benigne i el govern municipal de Barcelona: aspectes concrets,” Barcelona quaderns d’història 4 (2001): 148–50. As had been the case with kings before him, Alfonso retained the rights to certain revenue-generating offices within the city, such as the official grain measurer at the plaça del Blat or supervisor of the fish market, farming out the right to collect the taxes associated with these offices or using these profit-generating appointments to reward political allies; see, for example, ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 575 (October 13, 1328); see also Ortí Gost, Renda i fiscalitat, 119–20 and 434–85.

22. Mutgé i Vives, “Alfons el Benigne i el govern municipal de Barcelona,” 147–50.

23. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 1, 4r (December [9?] 1301); for later instances, see Llibres 12, 7r–9v (December 7, 1332) and 13, 8r–10r (December 7, 1333).

24. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 521, 17v (April 10, 1329) and 523 74r (July 10, 1330).

25. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 576, 71r–v (October 2, 1334), and 76r–v (October 19, 1334).

26. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 46r (December 24, 1333).

27. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 67v (March 16, 1334). For Guillem as grain merchant for the city, see ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 527, 126r–v (June 26, 1333) and 139v–140r (July 9, 1333); and Reg. 487, 283v [April 19, 1334]); and AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 30r–v (January 12, 1334).

28. AHCB, Consellers, Miscel·lànea 6/5, no. 2 (April 10, 1334). By the time that the councilors wrote to Peter, Alfonso had already taken action, appointing Bernat Guillem de Rippis as veguer and Guillem Despuig as subveguer. See ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 507, 204r–205r (March 30–April 1, 1334). The bailiff would, however, keep his office. See this book, chapter 5.

29. Eva Serra i Puig, “Els cereals a la Barcelona del segle XIV,” in Alimentació i societat a la Catalunya medieval (Barcelona: CSIC, 1988), 72–82; Antoni Riera Melis, “El mercat dels cereals a la Corona catalanoaragonesa: la gestió de les crisis alimentàries al segle XIII,” in Crisis frumentàries, iniciatives privades i polítiques públiques de proveïment a les ciutats catalanes durant la baixa edat mitjana, ed. Antoni Riera Melis (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2013), 101–104; Christian Guilleré, Girona al segle XIV (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1993), 1:358–59; Juanjo Cáceres Nevot, “La participació del consell municipal en l’aprovisionament cerealer de la ciutat de Barcelona (1301–1430)” (PhD diss., University of Barcelona, 2007), 48–52; Josefina Mutgé i Vives, Política, urbanismo y vida ciudadana en la Barcelona del siglo XIV (Barcelona: CSIC, 2004), 222–27.

30. Llibre del Consell 13, 58v (January 20, 1334).

31. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 50v–51r (January 13, 1334). In addition to the nobles, the city sent messages and requests to several non-noble leading citizens (honrats) as well as to municipal authorities of towns in grain-growing regions: Vilafranca, Montblanc, Lleida, Cervera, Tarrega, Vilagrassa, Piera, and Igualada.

32. Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 270–75; Andrée Courtemanche, La richesse des femmes: patrimoines et gestion à Manosque au 14. siècle (Montréal: Bellarmin, 1993), 112–15; Linda McMillin, “The House on Sant Pere Street: Four Generations of Women's Land Holding in Thirteenth-Century Barcelona,” Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Culture in Confluence and Dialogue 12 (2006): 65–72; Kathryn Reyerson, Mother and Sons, Inc.: Martha de Cabanis in Medieval Montpellier (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 109–28; Daniel Lord Smail, “Démanteler le patrimoine: les femmes et les biens dans la Marseille médiévale,” trans. Kathleen M. M. Smail and Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 52, no. 2 (1997): 356–59; and Rebecca Lynn Winer, Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c.1250–1300: Christians, Jews, and Enslaved Muslims in a Medieval Mediterranean Town (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 20–27.

33. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 5, 1-bis r (January 3, 1319); 6, 4r (December 5, 1319); and 7, 2r (December 2, 1321).

34. Pere Català i Roca, Els Castells catalans (Barcelona: R. Dalmau, 1967) 2:247–48; Antoni Pladevall Font, Catalunya romànica (Barcelona: Enciclopèdia catalana, 1984–1999), 18:399.

35. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 50v (January 13, 1334).

36. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 69v (June 23, 1333).

37. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 44r (December 9, 1333).

38. Àngel Casals and Pere Català i Roca, Història de Piera (Lleida: Pagès, 1999); 116–27, 147–50, and 180–82; Lluís Cifuentes and Gemma Escribà, “El monopoli de la paraula: cura d’ànimes, educació i fe pública a la parròquia de Santa Maria de Piera durant la baixa edat mitjana,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 28 (1998): 790–94.

39. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 45v (December 22, 1333).

40. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 65r–66r (March 7, 1334); Balaguer reference at 65v.

41. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 65r–66r (March 7, 1334).

42. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 65r–66r (March 7, 1334).

43. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 77r–v (April 27, 1334).

44. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 46r (December 22–24 [?], 1333). The councilors reiterated the request a month later, this time writing to another pair of envoys, Bernat de Marimon and Jacme Salzet; AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 52r–53r (January 26, 1334).

45. This seemed to be a program aimed at small borrowers: the king excluded most large debt obligations, such as dowries, testamentary bequests, real estate sales, and trade partnership contracts, and capped the total amount that the crown officials should cover at 4,000 sous. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2293 (June 20, 1333). He also excluded debts owed to Jews, as any such extensions ran counter to the royal privileges that that Jewish community enjoyed; see ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2162 (March 9, 1334), and this book, chapter 5.

46. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2224 (May 15, 1333).

47. Alfonso instituted the first of these export bans in early summer of 1328 and renewed the prohibition on a roughly annual basis thereafter: ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 554, 1r–3r (May 31–June 26, 1328); 4r–5r (May 25, 1329); 7r–8v (May 29, 1330); 10v–12v (May 24, 1331); 14v–17r (May 30, 1332); 17v–19r (May 25, 1333); and 22v–25r (April 19–20, 1334).

48. Municipal grain embargoes were not new to 1333/1334, and while they were often linked to years of shortage, this was not always the case. See Cáceres Nevot, “La participació,” 312–13.

49. AHCB, Llibres 12, 67r–v (June 2, 1333); see also Cáceres Nevot, “La participació,” 313–16; Mutgé i Vives, La ciudad de Barcelona, 85–89; Jean Broussolle, “Les impositions municipales de Barcelone de 1328 a 1462,” Estudios de historia moderna 5 (1955): 13–14.

50. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 28v–30r (January 12, 1334). Barcelona's very first surviving council register, from 1301, records an export ban, forbidding any woman or man from exporting wheat or barley or flour or oats by sea, on pain of a fine of 200 sous—notably less than half of the 1334 fine (AHCB, Llibre del Consell 1, 6r [December (9?), 1301]). But the fact that the council ordinances are silent on this matter for the next three decades is testament to how little Barcelona's leaders liked regulating large-scale commerce.

51. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 487, 228r (December 29, 1333).

52. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 487, 203r–205r (November 24–December 7, 1333) and 234r–v (January 14–15, 1334).

53. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 44r–v (December 13, 1333), 47r–v (December 29, 1333), 49v (January 4, 1334), 50r (January 9, 1334), and 54v (February 3, 1334); see also Maltas i Montoro, Caresties, fams i epidèmies, 175–77.

54. Antoni Riera Melis and Gaspar Feliu Montfort, “Activitats econòmiques,” in Història de Barcelona, vol. 3, La ciutat consolidada, ed. Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó (Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, for the Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1992), 182. Since 1296, Tortosa had enjoyed a special privilege that made it the general warehouse and distribution point for grain that came down the Ebro and the place where ships waited to take their cargoes up and down the coast. See Serra i Puig, “Els cereals,” 78; Cáceres Nevot, “La participació,” 303–304.

55. Peter III/IV, King of Aragon, Crònica de Pere III el cerimoniós, ed. Ferran Soldevila, Jordi Bruguera, and Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2014), book 1, chaps. 44–54. Alejandra Recuero Lista has recently revisited this and other chronicle material concerning Eleanor in an attempt to see the woman behind the polemic. See Recuero Lista, “Doña Leonor: infanta castellana, reina aragonesa y elemento de discordia en las relaciones castellano-aragonesas en la primera mitad del siglo XIV,” Estudios medievales hispánicos, no. 2 (2013): 221–40.

56. Peter III/IV, Crònica, book 1, chaps. 44–52.

57. Janna Bianchini, The Queen's Hand: Power and Authority in the Reign of Berenguela of Castile (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Marta van Landingham, “Royal Portraits: Representations of Queenship in the Thirteenth-Century Catalan Chronicles,” in Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, ed. Theresa Earenfight (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 109–19. For an example of a queen whose foreign origins were at times perceived as a liability, see the case of Maria of Castile (r. 1416–1458), whose Castilian origin could be made to underline an ongoing dissatisfaction with the fact that her husband, King Alfonso IV/V of Aragon, was himself only two generations removed from the Castilian royal line. See Theresa Earenfight, The King's Other Body: Maria of Castile and the Crown of Aragon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 37–38.

58. Peter III/IV, Crònica, book 1, chaps. 44–48.

59. ACA, Reg. 551, 16v–18r (December 28, 1329) and 23r–24v (January 29, 1330); for probably ceremonial usage of the title by Count-King Ramon Berenguer IV after his 1148 conquest of Tortosa, see Ubieto Arteta, Historia de Aragón (Zaragoza: Anubar, 1981), 226–27.

60. Núria Silleras-Fernández, Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria De Luna (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), esp. 37–64; and Earenfight, The King's Other Body, esp. 131–41. Recent scholarship on Castilian queens has emphasized a centuries-long legacy of such direct authority. See, for example, Lucy K. Pick, Her Father's Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017); Miriam Shadis, Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Peggy K. Liss, Isabel the Queen: Life and Times (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Bianchini, The Queen's Hand.

61. ACA, Pergamins, Alfons III, 282 (February 1, 1329).

62. Joaquín Salleras Clarió, “La Baronía de Fraga: su progresiva vinculación a Aragón (1387–1458)” (PhD diss., University of Barcelona, 2007), 61–62.

63. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 44r–v (December 13, 1333); see also 50r (January 9, 1334).

64. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 578, 221v (April 21, 1334).

65. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 70r (June 23, 1333).

66. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 47r–v (December 29, 1333). Even as they were trying to find a way to get grain through Tortosa, the councilors were also looking for ways around it, encouraging their merchants to transport the grain along the Ebro only as far as the town of Mora and then take it overland through a pass in the low coastal mountains for the twenty-five miles from Mora to either Guardamar or Sant Jordi (both coastal fortifications near what is currently the town of l’Ametlla de Mar), leaving the grain to be picked up by ship well north of Tortosa and from there transported up the coast to Barcelona (AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 44r–v [December 13, 1333]). Two months later, the councilors once again encouraged their envoys to have the grain they were trying to purchase from the bishop of Lleida transported overland rather than through Tortosa. The councilors argued for this route as a way to reduce expenses, but it is likely that it was just as much a measure to avoid having such a large and desperately needed grain shipment held up in Tortosa (AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 54v [February 3, 1334]). By the end of the fourteenth century, Barcelona's council went to the extreme of purchasing the castles of Flix and La Palma upriver from Tortosa as lynchpins for a planned route that would bypass Tortosa entirely. Jaume Blanch i Amorós, “L’alternativa terrestre de la ruta bladera de l’Ebre en el seu tram inferior,” Miscel·lània del Centre d’Estudis de la Ribera d’Ebre 8 (1991): 26–31.

67. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 487, 228r (December 29, 1333).

68. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 487, 225v–226r (December 22, 1333) and 227v (January 4, 1334).

69. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 487, 203r–v (November 24, 1333) and 204v (December 6, 1333).

70. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 487, 205r (November 24, 1333).

71. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 487, 204v–205r (November 24, 1333).

72. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 59r–v (February 1, 1334).

73. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 487, 253v (February 23, 1334).

74. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 46v–47r (December 28, 1333).

75. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 53v (January 31, 1334).

76. Ignasi de Janer Milà de la Roca, El Patriarca Don Juan de Aragón: su vida y sus obras: 1301–1334. Discurso leido en la sesión pública inaugural de curso (Tarragona: F. Arís é Hijo, 1904), 10–16; Ramon Corts i Blay, Joan Galtés i Pujol, and Albert Manent, eds., Diccionari d’història eclesiàstica de Catalunya (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1998), 1:96–97; J. Vincke, “El trasllat de l’arquebisbe Joan d’Aragó de la Seu de Toledo a la de Tarragona,” Analecta sacra tarraconensia 6 (1930): 127–30. The archbishop of Toledo was also, by tradition, chancellor of the kingdom of Castile. Understandably concerned at having the son of a much older and savvier rival occupying one of the highest offices in royal administration, the advisors of the young King Alfonso XI (r. 1312–1350) pushed John out of his position as chancellor and generally made life difficult for him, leaving him in a position that was, according to one of his father's letters, akin to that of “a daisy among pigs.” ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 338, 124v–125r (February 22, 1323).

77. ACA, Lletres reials, Jaume II, 9736 (September 26, 1327).

78. For James II's overall strategy in this regard, see Thomas W. Barton, Contested Treasure: Jews and Authority in the Crown of Aragon (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 157–60.

79. Marià Marí i Bas, Exposició cronologico-històrica dels noms i dels fets dels arquebisbes de Tarragona: distribuida en tres llibres, repr. ed. (Tarragona: Diputació de Tarragona, 1999), 84. John's official title in Tarragona was “apostolic administrator” rather than archbishop, almost certainly a concession to the canonical prohibition against holding more than one pastoral appointment at once. Most contemporary documents dodge the issue by referring to John as Patriarch of Alexandria, the more prestigious of his two titles. But as John's duties in Tarragona continued to be those of archbishop after his appointment as patriarch, just as they had been before, this chapter will continue to refer to him by the more familiar title of archbishop to avoid confusion.

80. Janer Milà de la Roca, El Patriarca Don Juan de Aragón, 39–40.

81. Ferran Valls i Taberner, “Dues oracions parlamentàries de l’Infant Joan, Patriarca d’Alexandria,” in Franciscàlia, en la convergència centenària del trànsit del “Poverello” (1226): de la seva canonització (1228) i de l'auctoctonia de l'orde caputxí (1528) (Barcelona: Editorial Franciscana, 1928), 379–80.

82. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 487, 234r–v (January 14–15, 1334); see also ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2111 (January 21, 1334).

83. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 578, 197r–v (March 4, 1334).

84. See this book, chapter 3.

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

86. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 74v–75r (April 12, 1334). The councilors’ fears turned out to be prophetic when a riot broke out in the city's main grain market only three days after they drafted this letter; see this book, chapter 6.

87. Lalinde Abadía, La gobernación general, 61 and 66–67.

88. Capmany 2:doc. 126.

89. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 528, 265r (undated; prob. ca. January 22, 1334); see also ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2139 (February 5, 1334). The king had replaced Santcliment as veguer only very recently; see ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 507, 145r (January 19, 1333).

90. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 528, 265r (undated; prob. ca. January 22, 1334).

91. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 578, 188r (February 10, 1334).

92. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 528, 265v (January 22, 1334).

93. Joan Maltas i Montoro [as Joan Montoro], “Del cot fet per lo senyor infant en Pere en la ciutat de Leyda. Una iniciativa general para Cataluña contra la hambruna de 1334,” in Políticas contra el hambre y la carestía en la Europa medieval, ed. Luciano Palermo, Andrea Fara, and Pere Benito Monclús (Lleida: Milenio, 2018), 88–89.

94. Maltas i Montoro, Caresties, fams i epidèmies, 175–76.

95. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 569, 166r–167r (February 12, 1334).

96. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 569, 166r–167r (February 12, 1334).

97. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 569, 166r–167r (February 12, 1334), at 166r.

98. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2160 (March 8, 1334).

99. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2641 (May 13, 1334).

100. Maltas i Montoro, “Del cot fet per lo senyor infant en Pere,” 110–11.

101. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 570, 180r–v (March 8, 1334); Maltas i Montoro, “Del cot fet per lo senyor infant en Pere,” 111–12.

102. Maltas i Montoro, “Del cot fet per lo senyor infant en Pere,” 113.

103. Luis R. Corteguera, For the Common Good: Popular Politics in Barcelona, 1580–1640 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), esp. 43–47.

CHAPTER 5The Bride

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