CHAPTER 1The Grain

Urban Spaces

Before describing Barcelona's geographies of food, it is necessary to establish just where the city was—not its location on a map of the medieval Mediterranean but rather the various boundaries that divided Barcelona from not-Barcelona in the early fourteenth century. As with any medieval city, the most obvious place to look is the city walls, which served as a demarcation of corporate identity as much as a defensive bulwark.⁵ Barcelona's interior ring of walls had been built during the late third or early fourth century to replace an older set of walls dating from the age of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. These late-antique walls enclosed an area a little under thirty acres that, by the late eleventh century, was crowded with homes and shops arranged along mostly narrow streets that occasionally opened up into a minuscule plaza, food-producing garden plot, or the dooryard of one of the churches that served those streets’ residents. The original walls also enclosed the power centers of church and state that had clustered in the city's northeastern quarter by early in the second millennium: the comital (later royal) residence, the small Romanesque cathedral and episcopal palace, and, perched in the old tower house or Castell Vell that overlooked the city's northeastern gate, the seat of first the viscounts of Barcelona and later the veguers who were the representatives of the counts’ (later kings’) legal and military authority in the city and its surrounding area (see map 1).⁶

MAP 1. Barcelona circa 1333/1334. Adapted from a map created by the [contra] TAEDIUM project, http://www.ub.edu/contrataedium.

The late-antique walls also enclosed Barcelona's original Jewish quarter or call (derived from the Hebrew qahal: roughly, “community”). Although there is no documentary reference to an official Jewish quarter until the end of the eleventh century, archaeological records show that Barcelona's Jewish population had been a small but constant presence in the city since at least the late ninth century. As the city's Jewish population grew during the tenth and eleventh centuries, its members tended to concentrate their homes in the heart of the city between the cathedral and the northwest corner of the late-antique walled enclosure. Although Barcelona's Jews would be segregated by royal order in the late thirteenth century, the physical division between the city's Jewish and Christian communities remained at least moderately fluid through the early fourteenth century, with Jews getting around restrictions on owning property outside the call or the neighboring call menor by leasing houses and storefronts owned by those Christians who were seemingly more interested in rental incomes than in abstract anti-Jewish notions.⁷ It is important here not to overemphasize the conviviality of Barcelona's Jewish and Christian communities: underlying anti-Jewish sentiment is evident in the many municipal ordinances of the early fourteenth century that restricted Jews’ activities, and in royal and municipal correspondence that makes frequent reference to incidents of popular violence against Jews.⁸ Nevertheless, in the early fourteenth century, Barcelona's Jews were by no means isolated from the Christian community in which they were embedded.

While Barcelona's original set of walls would have been sufficient for the minor Roman settlement that the city had been in Late Antiquity, as well as for its later life in the ninth and tenth centuries as part of the Carolingian Spanish March, the city's population, like that of other smaller Mediterranean cities, had begun to expand beyond its original walls after the turn of the millennium. As the extramural clusters of homes and workshops of the late eleventh century grew into the more coherent suburbs of the twelfth and thirteenth, the rulers of Barcelona, like those of other rapidly growing medieval European cities, began construction on new walls to enclose the expanded city. In Barcelona's case, the threat of a French invasion during the reign of Peter II/III (r. 1276–1285) prompted the city to erect emergency palisades to enclose its suburbs. These would eventually be converted into a permanent set of new walls, though the off-and-on nature of medieval construction projects meant that the new walls would not be completed until a century later, in the reign of Peter III/IV (r. 1336–1387).⁹

The area that these second walls would eventually enclose points to an evolving notion of what constituted “the city” in the eyes of both king and council during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: where the area inside the late-antique walls was dominated by structures pertaining to the counts and later kings, the Church, and the city's great lords, the area inside the new walls would include the neighborhoods that had taken root around the churches of Santa Maria del Pi to the west and the monastery of Sant Pere de les Puel·les to the east, as well as the thirteenth-century monastic foundations of Framenors, Jonqueres, and Santa Clara (sometimes referred to as Sant Daniel). The new walls would also enclose the impressive merchant homes of the eastern suburbs and the maritime and manufacturing settlements clustered around the waterfront, the east-west portion of the Merdançar stream, and the lower end of the irrigation channel known as the Rec Comtal.¹⁰ If walls mark the limits of a medieval city, then “the city” was being redefined in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to include not just the seats of Church and state power but also the artisan, mercantile, and maritime districts that fueled Barcelona's prosperity, together with the new types of religious institutions that served these populations.

Within its new walls, Barcelona was a rapidly growing city, one that by the early fourteenth century was home to somewhere around thirty thousand permanent residents.¹¹ As the city's population grew, feeding it became an increasing challenge. Just to the west of the city's newer walls lay a suburb about the same size as the intramural area. Unlike the eastern suburb, this area remained sparsely populated throughout the fourteenth century, home to scattered clusters of dwellings and interlaced with a few roads but consisting predominately of medium-sized agricultural plots—a balance between separation from and proximity to the urban core that made this western suburb or raval an ideal location to build hospitals and religious foundations.¹² At one remove further lay a handful of rural parishes that provided Barcelona with a varied supply of agricultural goods. Jurisdiction over this area in the early part of the fourteenth century rested in the hands of the king's judicial representative, the veguer, rather than with the municipality. These parishes and towns were, however, economically networked into the city, with most of the land itself owned either by the cathedral chapter of Barcelona or by wealthy Barcelona-based estate-holders, and the fact that contemporary documents sometimes refer to them collectively as the city's hort i vinyet (garden and vineyard) signals an understanding of the provisioning relationship between the city and these outlying parishes.¹³

In addition to the gardens and orchards of the raval and the exurban parishes, Barcelona could draw on the resources of the city's territorium. According to a 1329 royal privilege, the land connected with Barcelona corresponded roughly to the Barcelona plain itself, its limits inscribing a more or less semicircular area beginning at the coastal tower of Montgat about nine miles northeast of Barcelona, moving inland by way of the castle of Montcada and the low Collserola mountain range, passing through the settlements of Vallvidrera and Molins de Rei before meeting the coastline again at Castelldefels, about fifteen miles southwest of Barcelona—in total, a territory extending about two dozen miles from northeast to southwest along the coast, and comprising an area of just over sixty square miles, including the city itself (see map 2).¹⁴ The territorium was an essential part of Barcelona's food system in the early fourteenth century, providing not only arable land for orchards, olive groves, and vineyards but also wild game and a modest area of forage pasture land for the livestock that supplied the city markets with meat, poultry, eggs, and cheeses.¹⁵ Calling this “Barcelona's hinterland,” however, would be somewhat misleading. The original source delineating the territorium appears to be the eleventh-century compilation of feudal rights known as the Usatges de Barcelona, which understood the “Barcelona” that this land pertained to as the county and its counts (later count-kings of the Crown of Aragon) rather than the city as a municipal entity.¹⁶ Although Barcelona's fourteenth-century ordinances frequently mention the territorium, jurisdiction here, as in the exurban parishes of the hort i vinyet, remained in the hands of the king and his veguer, not the municipality.¹⁷ The same applied to Barcelona's coastal waters: the sea was an important source of food for the city, especially during Lent and other fasts, and the waterfront was home to a thriving fish market where women and men sold Barcelona's residents a wide variety of fish, ranging from relatively inexpensive tuna to costly sturgeon.¹⁸ But while municipal ordinances from the early fourteenth century frequently treat the sea twelve leagues out from shore as part of Barcelona's territory, the fines associated with violation of these ordinances were paid to the veguer, and the specific measure of twelve leagues can be traced back to the same passage in the Usatges as pertaining to the counts of Barcelona rather than to the city itself.¹⁹

MAP 2. Barcelona plain with fourteenth-century coastline

Grain and the City

Questions of jurisdiction aside, Barcelona's proximity to and economic ties with nearby food-producing areas meant that the city's markets were generally well supplied with a wide variety of foodstuffs. But as much as the sea, pastures, orchards, and vines of the area surrounding Barcelona provided, they could not supply that most vital element of the medieval diet: grain. The daily consumption of bread in Catalan cities ranged anywhere from half a pound to a pound and a half per adult, with bread making up a greater proportion of the diet the further down the social scale one went.²⁰ Along with the relative proportion of grain in one's diet, the type of bread one ate varied according to social station: according to the Usatges, one important signifier of nobility, together with riding one's own horse, was the consumption of bread made solely from pure wheat flour.²¹ By the fourteenth century, bread made from nonwheat grains like barley, rye, spelt, or grain mixtures was a marker of inferior social status, while sorghum, millet, and oats were most commonly regarded as animal feed, to be consumed by human beings only in truly dire circumstances.²² Processing of grain was just as status-marked as type of grain: where elites favored white breads made from highly sifted wheat flour, the humbler classes might make do with relatively unprocessed gruels, porridges, and polentas. Lower socioeconomic status also corresponded to a higher proportion of a household's food expenses devoted to grain products: about a third for professional households (e.g., notaries, apothecaries), compared with approximately half for an artisan household.²³ The diet onboard Barcelona's ships reflects this emphasis on grain products in the diet of the laboring classes: along with meat or stew and wine supplemented by either vegetables or preserved foods, crewmen were entitled to a daily ration of about a pound and a half of either fresh bread or its equivalent in the hard ship's bread known as bescuyt—so called because it was twice-cooked to remove as much moisture as possible to render it easily transportable and less perishable.²⁴

If we combine the needs of Barcelona's seafaring population with those of its land-bound one, we realize that this was a city that required a great deal of grain to maintain both its population and its maritime ventures. But grain served much more than the city's nutritional needs. Feasts, like fasts, were part of the Christian liturgical year, with bread in particular evoking the central Christian sacrifice.²⁵ The Franciscan moralist Francesc Eiximenis wrote in the late fourteenth century that “in the beginning, when our Lord God created man, He wished that, during his life, it would be primarily bread that he ate,” and that while humans could go without bread, they could do so only at the cost of great pain and suffering.²⁶ Bread held religious significance for Barcelona's Jews as well: many Jewish communities in Crown lands maintained their own bread ovens, and those that did not sought special permission to bake matzoh in their homes for Passover, sometimes in exchange for financial compensation paid to the local Christian bakers for the lost business.²⁷

So where did Barcelona turn to for its grain? Some came from Catalonia itself, especially from inland sources along the Ebro River and in the Urgell plain that lay just east of the city of Lleida (see map 3).²⁸ While some of this grain traveled along trade roads that crisscrossed the Catalan interior, the expense and time involved in land transport meant that most of the grain from these two regions came along the Ebro River and its tributaries, from Lleida to Tortosa, and from there northward along the coast to Barcelona, a process that could at times test the limits of cooperation between cities all loyal to the same king.²⁹ Barcelona also imported grain from further afield: from the neighboring Crown kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, and occasionally from markets in Languedoc, Flanders, and even North Africa. During the early fourteenth century, however, some of the most important sources of Barcelona's grain lay on the islands of the central Mediterranean. In 1286, the future King James II (r. 1291–1327), who inherited the title of king of Sicily upon his father's death in 1285, granted Catalan merchants access to grain from the island, a privilege that largely continued when James's younger brother Frederick became king of an independent Sicily. And while the grain harvest of Sardinia was never as vast or dependable as that of Sicily, it, too, became an important source of grain for the Crown cities, with the king granting privileges to the merchants of Barcelona in particular as a reward for the city's contributions to the Crown's conquest of large parts of the island in the 1320s (see map 4).³⁰

MAP 3. Catalonia circa 1333/1334

In 1333/1334, naval war with Genoa would combine with weather-related crop shortfalls throughout the Mediterranean to make the normally abundant grain of the central Mediterranean difficult to obtain.³¹ But in the usual course of events, the waters off Barcelona's shoreline were crowded with commercial traffic, including ships laden with grain imported to support the growing city. Barcelona's status as the premier port city of the Catalan coast—arguably of the entire Crown of Aragon until Valencia supplanted it in the fifteenth century—was not a given. Unlike other places along the Catalan coast, such as Sant Feliu de Guíxols to the north and Salou to the south, medieval Barcelona possessed no natural harbor. The city's “port” in the early fourteenth century was actually an offshore anchorage divided into two zones by a sandbar: the area on the near side was navigable only for vessels with a relatively shallow draft while larger craft had to anchor in the deeper waters farther out.³² What propelled Barcelona to the maritime power it would become in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was thus not any natural suitability as a port but rather royal favor: in the early twelfth century, as a reward for participating in the Pisan-led campaign against the Muslim-ruled Balearic Islands from 1113–1115, Count Ramon Berenguer III (r. 1097–1131) had exempted Barcelona from a new tax on ships, an exemption that the city leveraged to build a shipping economy. Barcelona's subsequent contributions to King James I's (r. 1213–1276) second, more successful attempt to capture the islands a century later would give Barcelona's merchants their own stepping-stone into the wider Mediterranean.³³

MAP 4. Barcelona and the western Mediterranean

By the beginning of the fourteenth century, a combination of royal privileges and local initiatives had transformed Barcelona into one of the western Mediterranean's busiest trading hubs. Grain was the major import from the central Mediterranean and the ports of the Occitan coast, but the ships that anchored off Barcelona bore a wide range of goods imported to the city: dried fruit, ceramics, and the red dye known as grana from Valencia; raw coral and silver from Sardinia; wine from Calabria. Sicilian, Calabrian, and Cypriot markets were also points of exchange where Barcelona's merchants could pick up luxury goods like cotton, indigo, and spices that had originated in more distant lands.³⁴ Many of these goods were brought to Barcelona as part of major trading contracts, but small-scale traders also played an important role in the city's merchant economy: it was common for trading expeditions to be cobbled together from small- to medium-sized investments and purchase orders from one or two dozen men and women who never set foot on a ship; even crew members on these voyages took part by bringing along a bit of coin or a few local products to exchange for more exotic foreign goods obtained in their various ports of call.³⁵

Despite all this activity, Barcelona's port area in the early fourteenth century still functioned much as it had a century earlier, albeit on a much busier scale, with large ships anchoring on the far side of the sandbar while smaller craft darted in and out of the shallower waters immediately offshore.³⁶ Some of these small boats would have belonged to the city's fisherfolk, but once the day's catch had been brought in early in the morning, the waters between the anchorage and land became the domain of the boatmen (barquers) who ferried cargo from the large vessels.³⁷ Because the pay of these boatmen depended on how much cargo they could bring to shore in a day, the municipal council kept a close watch to prevent them from damaging loads of grain in their haste, reminding them not to load their boats with more than six sacks of grain per trip and to unload the sacks at least ten paces from the waterline once they had landed.³⁸

Upon arriving on shore, the grain became part of the controlled chaos of the landing area that the city's governing council had ordered marked off with boundary stones.³⁹ Here, the sound of salt sellers announcing their prices mingled with the calls of the wine criers and the come-ons of the barkers that shipowners hired to advertise upcoming voyages and entice potential crew members to enlist.⁴⁰ Adding to the general din were the cries of the fishmongers, usually women, who set up their tables in the open-air market just steps from the shoreline. There, they would meet up with the fishermen (often husbands or other relations with whom they worked as a team) as they brought in their catch. Fishmongers likely arrived early, as the council had ruled that no single one could claim a right to a preferential spot, even if she was customarily stationed there.⁴¹

As the sacks of grain were unloaded on shore, they were met by the longshoremen (carregadors), who were responsible for moving cargo from the shore, either toward its destination or into temporary storage.⁴² This beehive of activity took place among a cluster of shacks (barraques) at the shoreline. Some of these were informal temporary dwellings where the city's fisherfolk camped with their equipment. Others were pop-up establishments where women and men sold wine and food to the waterfront workers.⁴³ The municipal council occasionally tried to crack down on shacks they suspected of serving as covert bases for gambling, and by the late fourteenth century, these shacks had gained a reputation as gathering places for the city's most disreputable inhabitants.⁴⁴ But in the early fourteenth century, the councilors were primarily concerned with imposing some sort of order on this little waterfront world by limiting the shacks to the area inside the boundary markers of the landing proper, by forbidding any of their proprietors from having a fire of any kind in them, and by trying to keep these flimsy structures from becoming permanent by restricting any individual shack to three months’ duration and by ordering the owners to clean up any wine barrels when they decamped.⁴⁵

From the waterfront, the grain moved toward the first of many points of sale. Some of the grain from the port would be sold only a short distance from the waterfront in one of the city's alfòndecs. Known variously as the alhóndiga (Castilian), fondaco (Italian), fondegue (Occitan), or al-funduq (Arabic), the Mediterranean merchant hostel was typically a combination of warehouse and lodging for foreigners as well as a center for wholesale commerce where the governments or individuals who ran these institutions could profit from large-scale trade while monitoring the foreigners in their midst.⁴⁶ The history of Barcelona's alfòndecs can be difficult to untangle, due to the fact that royal documents use variations of the phrase alfundico nostro (our alfòndec) to refer both to the structures themselves and to the shoreline blocks they anchored.⁴⁷ But the possessive pronoun in the phrase “our alfòndec” also points to the fact that the royal alfòndecs, built during the first decade of the thirteenth century not far from the southeastern edge of the late-antique walls, were not the only ones in the city. In 1268, ten years after King James I had ceded the royal alfòndecs and their incomes to the noble Berenguer de Montcada in return for several castles in the recently established kingdom of Valencia, he granted permission for the Barcelona citizen Pere Ferrer to build a new alfòndec on his own property just below the royal palace, where he would be permitted to lodge Christian, Jewish, or Muslim merchants as he saw fit.⁴⁸ Early twenty-first-century archaeological excavations have also uncovered massive storage silos dating from the early thirteenth century in the city's Jewish quarter, which suggests that Barcelona's Jews may have maintained their own alfòndec or, at the very least, a major temporary grain storage facility.⁴⁹

While the alfòndecs operated as temporary storage facilities for grain as well as other merchandise, the city would not build its own permanent granary building, the casa dels pallols, until the reign of Peter III/IV.⁵⁰ Early fourteenth-century documents do occasionally refer to the payols del porxo—that is, storage silos located near the waterfront—but more frequent references to the porxo del mar or porxo nou or even the porxo del forment suggest that, at this point at least, any storage facilities were less permanent structures than recognizable parts of the landing area as a whole.⁵¹ This delineation of a distinct area for grain may have been part of the municipal government's efforts in the early fourteenth century to set up the port area as a secondary market for grain coming in by sea, in order to alleviate the congestion at the city gates by reserving the plaça del Blat at the city's northeastern gate for grain being brought in by land.⁵² The attempted diversion of much of the city's grain commerce does not, however, seem to have had an immediate effect, either because the volume of grain coming into the city by sea exceeded the capacity of the port facilities or because people were simply accustomed to thinking of the plaça del Blat as the center of all grain commerce. By 1320, the council seems to have acknowledged the futility of trying to divert all maritime grain commerce to the port when it began the process of expanding the central grain market by annexing another small nearby plaza and razing the structures that connected them.⁵³

From this busy waterfront area, whatever grain was not sold at the porxo began its journey to the plaça del Blat. The council had forbidden the use of carts in the narrow streets within the city's thirteenth-century walls, so grain coming into Barcelona's port would have been carried the quarter-mile from the shore to the marketplace on the backs of the city's porters (bastaixos).⁵⁴ Working singly or in pairs, the porters hired out their labor throughout the city, but the waterfront would have been the busiest place to pick up work. The knots of men gathered in the marina neighborhood looking to haul cargo were a motley mix: enslaved and free; city residents and immigrants from the Catalan countryside and beyond; Christians (Latin Rite or otherwise), Muslims, and conversos.⁵⁵ Ordinances from the early fourteenth century reveal city leaders’ anxieties about what they perceived as the disorder inherent in this mix. They excluded Muslim and converso porters from corners near the homes of certain well-to-do citizens, and they ensured that porters were monitored more generally for suspicious activity, such as playing at dice along the streets where they were waiting to pick up work or taking shortcuts through cultivated fields or orchards (possibly fearing that they would steal the produce, as suggested by the fact that the fine for this offense doubled at night).⁵⁶ The most frequent ordinance concerning this potentially disorderly group was that they not be allowed to go about the city armed: year after year, city ordinances prohibited porters from carrying any blade except for a blunted knife.⁵⁷ But the fact that the council stipulated in 1321 that the ordinance did not apply to porters who were Barcelona citizens, and that they made another exception the following decade for porters who had both a wife and a residence in the city, suggests that the real issue here was an anxiety over the perceived hazards of this population of poor immigrants, enslaved people, and religious outsiders living and working together in the tightly packed blocks along the waterfront.⁵⁸

As the grain moved on the backs of the porters into the waterfront neighborhood proper, it would have passed through the densely populated and demographically diverse lower portion of Barcelona's eastern suburb, the Vilanova del Mar (New Town of the Sea). Initially a small waterfront-hugging development begun on lands leased from the cathedral chapter around the turn of the twelfth century, settlement in the area had by the fourteenth century expanded eastward and northward to merge with other development near the city's northeastern road, a location between the political center of the old city and the commercial center of the port that had drawn many urban elite families in the thirteenth century. Here, the grand homes of urban patricians stood only a few streets away from the shoreline blocks that were home to a large portion of the city's poorest immigrants who had settled in the area to find work as sailors, fisherfolk, or waterfront laborers. Both wealthy and poor shared the neighborhood with the artisans and craftworkers involved in the city's textile trade, as well as the offal butchers, tanners, and parchment-makers whose messy or malodorous work required a source of running water—in this case, the short east-west portion of the Merdançar stream and the lower part of the Rec Comtal.⁵⁹

As the grain porters began their trudge up the short incline of the carrer del Mar (Street of the Sea) that led diagonally from the sea to the city center, they would have passed not too far from an emerging wonder of their day: the beginnings of the Gothic basilica of Santa Maria del Mar. While pious tradition places the origins of this church in Late Antiquity as the original shrine for the relics of Barcelona's patron Saint Eulàlia, the first firm documentation of a church in the area dedicated to the Virgin Mary comes from the year 998. If that church ever briefly went by the name of Santa Maria de las Arenys (Holy Mary of the Sands), as is often reported, the name never caught on: one Latin document from 1005 already refers to the church as Santa Maria “de ipsa mare” (Holy Mary “nearby the sea”). In 1009, ecclesiastical authorities, perhaps foreseeing the growth of a new suburb from the settlements that were already beginning to spring up in the area, decided to convert this church into the seat of its own parish. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the increasing population of the neighborhood—not to mention the increasing wealth and prestige of some of its inhabitants—had outgrown this modest temple to the Virgin, and on March 25, 1329, at the Feast of the Annunciation that marked the turning of the year, the first stone was laid in the construction of a larger basilica built in the Gothic style. The new edifice that would rise to tower above the low surrounding buildings was completed in 1383—a startlingly fast pace for medieval monumental construction, made possible by donations of both funds from the parish's wealthy merchants and stone from the royal quarry at Montjuïc, as well as by the volunteer labor of the city's porters who carried the stones most of the roughly three miles from the quarry to the worksite on their backs.⁶⁰ For much of the fourteenth century, however, construction on the new basilica would have turned the streets surrounding the worksite into an obstacle course for the grain porters who would have had to detour around piles of lumber and barrels of lime for mortar in addition to the usual muck and refuse found in that city's streets.⁶¹

At the top of the carrer del Mar, the grain from the port would have converged with packtrains coming in along the arterial road that led from northern Catalonia to the city's northeastern gate. Above this road lay the northern portion of the city's eastern suburb, where a lower population density had encouraged the planting of religious foundations along with the gardens and orchards irrigated by the Rec Comtal.⁶² Some of these communities, like the monastery and church of Sant Pere de les Puel·les, dated back to the city's early comital period.⁶³ But many more were newer, built in response to the wave of enthusiasm for the mendicant orders that had swept through the cities of western Europe during the thirteenth century: over the century between 1220 and 1320, Barcelona saw the foundation of at least six mendicant communities, three of which were located in the city's eastern suburb.⁶⁴

One of the eastern suburb's mendicant foundations, the Dominican convent of Santa Caterina, located just above the main northeastern road and halfway between the old walls and the new, provided not only spiritual services but also a convenient location for the meetings of the city's recently formed governing council.⁶⁵ The Consell de cent, or Council of One Hundred, had taken shape as a formal municipal institution during the reign of James I, who experimented with several different compositions between 1249 and 1274 before finally settling on a group of five magistrates or councilors who served one-year terms at the head of the city government. These councilors were advised by a larger group of jurats (sworn men) or prohoms (from the Latin probi homines: “upright/judicious men”) known collectively as the Council of One Hundred—though the actual number of members would vary over the years. What did not vary was the body's predominantly urban-patriciate composition: other than one member of the minor military aristocracy numbered among the prohoms of both 1258 and 1265, and another who served as one of the city's five ruling magistrates in 1274, hereditary nobles are notably absent from the medieval rolls of Barcelona's municipal council. The city's fourteenth-century magistrates were primarily (though not exclusively) honrats—that is, men from families whose wealth came from rents on urban and rural properties (honors)—or, by the late thirteenth century, those who had made their fortunes investing in trade and shipping. These same honrats also served on the more socio-economically diverse Council of One Hundred together with merchants, members of the professions, and eventually some of the higher-status trades.⁶⁶ Until the council got its own dedicated chambers in 1369, the meeting hall of the convent of Santa Caterina would be where these men convened their regular meetings throughout the year as well as occasional special sessions that were announced by the council's criers.⁶⁷

It was just to the south of this seat of municipal power and outside the northeastern gate of the late-antique walls that the two streams of grain—one from the carrer del Mar and the other from the northeast road that led to northern Catalonia—would have converged as they approached Barcelona's primary grain market. The plaça del Blat was part of a broader landscape of urban food markets that did business most days in the city's few small open spaces: the flour market adjacent to the royal palace; the game market located near the grain market; the vegetable market situated between the grain market and the church of Sants Just i Pastor; and the smaller fruit markets located in the forecourt of the church of Santa Anna, the plaza of the Born near the construction site of Santa Maria del Mar, and near the cemetery behind the central-city church of Sant Miquel.⁶⁸ The city was also home to roughly half a dozen meat markets, including one just outside the call, where Jewish butchers sold meat that had failed to meet Jewish ritual standards to Christian customers.⁶⁹

Amid the dozens of specialized markets large and small, the plaça del Blat (often referred to in early fourteenth-century documents as the plaça de Barcelona or simply la plaça) was the commercial city's beating heart, the place where the walled city met the worlds of both the Catalan interior and the Mediterranean Sea, and where large-scale foreign traders came together with provisioners and individual or institutional purchasers. As the grain entered into the market precincts, it would have encountered a busy scene: benches and tables of merchants selling grain to bulk purchasers, retailers, and people in the city's provisioning trades; porters coming and going with their loads; official measurers making sure that both buyer and seller had paid the tax on the grain before they doled it out using the official measure for the quartera (a variable measure of volume but usually around 60–70 liters/45–55 kilograms for unmilled wheat).⁷⁰ All of this was overseen by one or sometimes two market supervisors the council appointed from among their number: although the council did not receive the royal privilege to name its own mustaçaf or mostassaf (an official charged with regulating commerce within the city) until 1339, it had informally taken over those duties—at least those covering the grain market—from the veguer around 1324 or 1325 and required the market's measurers and porters to denounce any violations they witnessed to the council's appointee.⁷¹

Barcelona's officials were diligent in their pursuit of anyone trying to evade the grain taxes, not only fining tax evaders themselves but also passing ordinances that required everyone from the official measurers to the porters to verify that both the purchaser and the seller had paid their portion of the tax before the grain was transferred to a buyer's hands or home.⁷² The tax in most years was not particularly onerous: seller and buyer each paid four diners per quartera of wheat and two per quartera of barley.⁷³ Women and men in the processing trades, however, were assessed double the rate charged to ordinary consumers: the city taxed bakers, flour-sellers, and makers of bescuyt eight diners per quartera of wheat they purchased and four diners per quartera of barley or any other grain.⁷⁴ Members of these trades sometimes devised schemes to get around the higher tax rate, either enlisting ordinary consumers to buy grain on their behalf or working in husband-and-wife teams in which the member of the couple working as a flour-seller would sell their product to a baker spouse while declaring the sale at the lower consumer rate. And while bakers, millers, and bescuyt makers were allowed to import the grain directly rather than buying in one of the city's two grain markets, they were required to report these purchases to the tax collector within two days of taking delivery; any secondary processor or retailer caught trying to evade the tax entirely by smuggling grain in by one of the city's minor roads or waterways rather than through the port or along one of the main roads was subject to a fine of 50 sous and forfeiture of the grain in question.⁷⁵

Beyond tax collection and fraud prevention, another concern of municipal authorities in the first third of the fourteenth century was hoarding. The council required anyone who had grain for sale in the city to bring it to market every customary day and sell it until the market closed in the evening or until their supply was exhausted.⁷⁶ Ordinances like these were designed to prevent manufactured shortages that would drive up prices, a concern that the councilors occasionally addressed directly by prohibiting sellers from changing their prices over the course of any given day.⁷⁷ The council was also aware that hoarding by consumers, as much as by sellers, could create price instability: city ordinances limited any single purchaser to no more than five quarteras of grain (presumably a daily limit) and required them to swear an oath that they did not have more stored in their home at the time they made their purchase. Flour-sellers and bakers could not buy until after the midday meal, nor could they buy on credit.⁷⁸ The possibility of deliberate hoarding by food processors was another concern of the council, which in 1302 fined bakers and flour-sellers who exceeded the five-quartera purchase limit at almost double the rate of the fine for ordinary consumers (50 sous compared with 30 sous).⁷⁹ By 1324, the council had increased the daily purchase limit for members of these processing professions to ten quarteras a day but had also doubled the fine for a violation to 100 sous while lowering the fine for individual consumers to 20 sous.⁸⁰ That consumer fine would bounce back up again to 50 sous in 1326 at the same time that the daily limit for barley or oats (no mention of wheat) was lowered to two quarteras a day, along with a new requirement that the purchaser swear an oath that she or he was purchasing it only for household use and not for resale.⁸¹

The grain market was, thus, like the convent of Santa Caterina, a site of the council's authority, part of a geography of power that the grain's path intersected at various points as it passed through the market and into the city's eastern gate. Another locus of institutional power loomed above the market in the very gate itself: the Castell Vell that served as the court of the veguer and that also contained cells that held prisoners ranging from individuals locked up for a few days in lieu of fines for minor offenses to long-term prisoners incarcerated for more serious crimes.⁸² Royal power was also represented by the small palace complex just inside the northeastern gate that served as the residence of the itinerant kings when they were in Barcelona. The structures of the royal compound had been remodeled and expanded numerous times over the centuries, and by the end of the fourteenth century would include a residence, an official palace, a chapel, and a massive audience hall.⁸³ But for most of the early fourteenth century, the palace complex was a work in progress and a place where King Alfonso (r. 1327–1336) spent relatively little time over the course of his reign.⁸⁴

Finally, immediately adjacent to the royal palace lay another landmark in Barcelona's geography of power: the cathedral. The cathedral, like the palace complex and Santa Maria del Mar, would have been an active construction zone off and on for most of the fourteenth century: work on the present-day Gothic structure that sits on the site of the earlier Romanesque edifice began in 1298 and continued in stages, only finishing in 1430 (minus its current neo-Gothic façade, which was added in the decades around 1900).⁸⁵ The construction of this expanded cathedral received a boost in the early fourteenth century when Bishop Ponç de Gualba (r. 1303–1334), only two weeks after being named to the office and over a month before his official investiture, decreed a forty-day indulgence for any man or woman who contributed alms to the construction of the new cathedral and a ten-day indulgence for anyone who contributed a day of his or her own labor, as well as other indulgences offered to those who contributed raw materials or who sponsored the work of a laborer for a year.⁸⁶

As it passed these centers of church and state power, the grain's path diverged. Some grain was purchased in bulk by large institutional consumers like the cathedral almonry. But a significant portion went to the city's revenedors (literally “resellers”; more loosely, retailers). Barcelona's economy teemed with middlemen of many sorts. Some were brokers (corredors) who facilitated the purchase of everything from real estate to clothing to luxury goods and furnishings, either in privately negotiated deals or at auction.⁸⁷ More numerous and varied, however, were the retailers who made their living buying in bulk and then selling to individual consumers, most notably agricultural goods from the territorium, from game to fresh and dried fruit to cheeses.⁸⁸ The city's revenedors were probably the main conduit for any unprocessed grain moving from the plaça or the porxo to individual consumers, a business strategy incentivized by city ordinances that exempted retailers from the seller's tax for any grain sales of less than half a quartera.⁸⁹

On any given day, however, much of the grain that was sold in the plaça would have made its way into the hands of a member of one of the city's many food processing trades. The first step along this path would be the grain mills along the Rec Comtal. Barcelona's millers, city residents who leased their rights to operate one of the city's mills, occupied a position somewhere between members of the skilled trades and agents of the state.⁹⁰ This position, combined with the control they exercised over an essential commodity, meant that millers were one of Barcelona's most closely regulated trades. The earliest surviving collection of council ordinances, dating from 1301, forbade millers from allowing anyone to gather the floor sweepings at the end of the day, and a miller who kept the sweepings for himself rather than giving them to the person who had brought in the grain would be fined 50 sous for theft or face whipping.⁹¹ Additionally, any miller who habitually drank in taverns, gambled, or publicly kept a mistress faced both flogging and permanent ejection from office.⁹² The only other urban officers held to this moral standard were the veguer's urban guard, which indicates that millers, like the guard, were people who occupied an essential position of public trust that could easily be abused and whose character thus had to be above reproach.⁹³

Once milled into flour, the grain had a few more potential stops in store. The first of these might be the city's flour market, which took place in the forecourt of the royal residence just inside the northeastern gate.⁹⁴ City ordinances required the women and men who sold flour at the royal palace to sell it in whatever quantity the purchaser wanted, “whether they request a half-peça or a quartera,” which suggests that, in contrast to the grain market, many of the flour market's patrons were individual consumers.⁹⁵ Once the flour had been purchased and processed into bread dough, its next stop would be one of the many public ovens located throughout the city, including one in the city's Jewish quarter (though there seem to have been no restrictions on Jews using any of the city's ovens that they wished). The ovens’ owners, roughly split between wealthy citizens and ecclesiastical institutions, leased out the right to operate their ovens to individual forners who paid between 200 and 260 sous a year for the right to profit from cooking whatever food people brought to them.⁹⁶ City ordinances regulated the prices that oven operators could charge for cooking not only loaves of bread—paid in kind, at 1/20 of the bread itself or its equivalent in cash—but also everything from sweet pastries (half a diner) to meat or fish pies (1 diner) to an entire goose (2 diners), with the operator required to pay the replacement cost of any food that they burned through inattention.⁹⁷ Alternatively, individual households might skip the flour market and the public ovens and buy finished loaves directly from a licensed baker. These women and men were some of the city's most essential workers: time and again, council ordinances ordered bakers to bake their bread on every customary day, and while bakers, like oven operators, were forbidden from lighting their ovens on Sundays or religious holidays, they were, together with butchers, the only businesses allowed to maintain normal operations during a June 1324 procession and two-day city-wide holiday to honor then-Prince Alfonso's conquest of Sardinia.⁹⁸

In addition to millers, oven operators, and bakers, some of the grain sold in Barcelona's markets would have made its way to another important group of processors: the city's bescuyters. On sea as on land, bread was the center of the medieval diet: the evening meal onboard ship typically consisted of bread and companatge (accompaniments; but literally, “things that go with bread”), such as cheese, sardines, salt fish, or onions, with an ideal ration onboard ship of around one and a half pounds of bread per day.⁹⁹ But while merchant ships might make port every few days to resupply with fresh bread as they traded along their normally coast-hugging routes, military galleys and trading ships on long trajectories away from land depended on bescuyt for the calories that would normally come from bread, which made bescuyters an essential part of any maritime city's food system.¹⁰⁰

Whether sold as flour, bread, or bescuyt, Barcelona's grain was as likely to pass through a woman's hands as a man's during the final stages of its journey from port to plate. City ordinances consistently refer to bakers as flaquers o flaqueras, flour-sellers as fariners o farineras, and the makers of ship's bread as bescuyters o bescuyteras. It is possible that the council consciously used both male and female variants to ensure that no farinera, for instance, could plead exemption from an ordinance directed at fariners. Yet the fact that the council used both sex designations for these professions as they did not for, say, butchers (always carniçers; never carniçeras) suggests that women were common in the grain trades in particular, whether working independently or in a team with husbands, children, apprentices, and servants. In fact, other than millers and butchers, women were visible and active members of almost all of Barcelona's provisioning trades: as sellers and sometimes resellers (revenedoras) of produce, cheese, poultry, and eggs; as proprietors of tables in the fish market; and as workers in or proprietors of hostels, taverns, and the food and wine shacks of the waterfront.¹⁰¹

It is not difficult to see why the amateur mapmaker of the city's 1389 census selected the grain market—not other nearby landmarks, such as the council chambers, the cathedral, or even the royal palace—as their map's conceptual center. As it moved through the city, the grain drew together Barcelona's producers and consumers, its great merchants and small provisioners, and its worlds of land and sea. Barcelona's municipal ordinances paint a picture of a city government that understood how central grain was to the public good and worked to facilitate its orderly movement throughout the city. But the smooth functioning of this system would be challenged when famine struck.

The Arrival of Famine

In the late spring of 1333, grain-growing regions across Catalonia began to report harvest shortfalls. A precursor of what was to come had appeared in the spring of 1332 with a localized drought that affected grain supply in Girona.¹⁰² While records from the period do note this drought, they do not seem overly alarmed: localized shortfalls were not uncommon and were generally offset by an integrated food system that allowed for grain supply to move from one region in Catalonia to another with relative ease.¹⁰³ By the following spring, however, officials in Girona were sounding the alarm bells. On May 15, 1333, the leaders of that city wrote to King Alfonso, regretfully informing him that they would not be able to provide their city's share of the provisions he had requisitioned for a planned military expedition because of poor harvests in the lands around both Girona and Besalú.¹⁰⁴ As spring turned to summer that year, cities and towns throughout Catalonia began to report their own drought-related shortages, with many localities holding rogation processions in the hope that divine intervention would bring much-needed rain.¹⁰⁵ In Barcelona, the councilors openly referenced the region's shortages in their plans for grain-buying expeditions across the Mediterranean as well as in other locations in the Crown of Aragon itself.¹⁰⁶

Despite the “first bad year” label, 1333/1334 was not the Crown's—or even Barcelona's—first major shortage in recent memory. Catalonia had experienced at least six shortage cycles in the first three decades of the fourteenth century due to factors that ranged from weather-related crop failures to labor migration away from agricultural lands and into the cities to local stocks being diverted to foreign markets experiencing war-related shortages of their own.¹⁰⁷ But while 1333/1334 turns out not to have been the region's “first bad year” after all, it was the worst that Barcelona had experienced to that point, exacerbated by the fact that grain-growing regions the city normally depended on for its imports had been suffering their own severe weather events that destroyed grain crops in the field and created higher demand internationally for what little grain remained. By the summer of 1333, grain was in such short supply in neighboring Valencia that people there were turning to legumes as a substitute source of bread flour; by that fall, grain-producing regions in Aragon were reporting shortages and a “great sterility” of grain crops.¹⁰⁸ Even in the normally abundant export markets of the central Mediterranean, grain was in short supply due to catastrophic weather events ranging from drought in Parma (1333) to severe flooding in Friuli (1327), Emilia-Romagna (1331), and Tuscany (1333)—the last of these part of what the author of the annals of Arezzo referred to as “a great deluge over nearly the entire globe.”¹⁰⁹ Closer to Barcelona, the city of Montpellier endured severe famines in both 1330 and 1333; during the latter of these, according to one chronicler, people “spent the winter eating raw grasses, and died along the roads.”¹¹⁰

Barcelona seems to have held out for longer than many of its neighbors, likely because of the extensive and flexible provisioning network it had built up in both Catalonia and the Mediterranean, as well as the greater purchasing power that the city's wealth afforded it. But the widespread nature of this most recent round of crop failures, combined with ongoing war with Genoa in the Mediterranean, meant that by the fall of 1333, Barcelonans were finding grain more expensive, and by winter, it was becoming truly scarce. Two chronicles of the city, one from the late fourteenth century and another from the late fifteenth, date the beginning of Barcelona's famine to December 1333: one chronicler places it generally around Christmas, while the other, with uncharacteristic precision, dates it to “Thursday, eight days into the month of December of that year [1333].”¹¹¹ These late medieval chronicles’ short notices are corroborated by the more contemporary records of the city's Council of One Hundred, which in December 1333 and January 1334 passed a number of ordinances regarding grain hoarding and fraudulent adulteration of grain or bread for sale.¹¹² More ominous still are those records’ increasing references to what that shortage was doing to the social fabric of the city: council correspondence from late 1333 frequently employs terms like “great turmoil” and “grave danger,” and by the spring of 1334, the councilors were claiming that the city was in danger of “perishing from hunger.”¹¹³

As these final quotes suggest, the shortages of 1333/1334 alarmed that year's council, which took steps to counteract the danger—or at least to show itself responding to the crisis in a public way—not only increasing the weight of old ordinances but also adding new areas of regulation. Where earlier council grain regulations had been overwhelmingly concerned with preventing tax fraud and price manipulation through hoarding, civic authorities were now demonstrably more focused on simply ensuring an adequate supply of grain in the city. In order to incentivize imports, the councilors for 1333/1334 eliminated the tax on the sale of grain coming to the city from lands owned by citizens of Barcelona and revoked a tax on packtrains coming into the city by land that they had instituted only three years earlier.¹¹⁴ The council also regulated grain commerce within the city itself: already in April 1333, perhaps hoping to head off the crisis it saw emerging in other Catalan cities that spring, the council had doubled the previous 100-sou fine on holding back grain from market to 200 sous or two hundred days in prison.¹¹⁵ This was one of the most severe punishments of that year's grain ordinances, greater even than the 100-sou fine for merchants who mixed straw or refuse into sacks of grain in order to artificially bulk them up.¹¹⁶ Yet, later that same year, the council more than doubled this already severe fine for grain hoarding to 500 sous and expanded the definition of who might be classified as illegal hoarders to include not just merchants but anyone who had more than 50 quarteras of grain laid by in their homes or shops anywhere in the city.¹¹⁷ Although the surviving documents from Barcelona do not speak to the issue of enforcement of this or other famine-year regulations beyond the usual work of the supervisors at the plaça del Blat, the city's neighbors in both Lleida and Tortosa regularly inventoried the amount of grain that their merchants and brokers had warehoused; Barcelona's council might well have delegated agents to conduct similar surveys of its own merchants and brokers known to store grain in the city.¹¹⁸

The councilors may have seen grain wholesalers as the primary area of concern, but they were interested in preventing corruption in all parts of the city's food supply chain, including exchanges between provisioners and individual consumers. The council ordinances of 1333/1334 reiterated earlier regulations that had required flour-sellers to sell to whoever wanted to buy in whatever amount, “whether a peça, a half-peça, or a quartera.”¹¹⁹ Bakers, too, were required to continue selling the half-pound loaves known as dinals alongside the larger doblers, and the following year the council would move to temporarily prohibit the sale of the larger loaves altogether.¹²⁰ Both of these regulations seem designed to ensure that the poorest purchasers did not find themselves unable to buy any flour or bread at all; the council reinstated the ordinance on doblers and dinals in other difficult years like 1338–1339, and in 1376, one-third of the bakers’ output had to be in the form of the smaller loaves.¹²¹ The council kept an eye on the city's grain retailers as well: already in December of 1332 and again the following December, the council forbade any retailers who were not citizens of Barcelona from buying grain in order to resell it, and even the local revenedors were limited to quantities of 5 quarteras (presumably a daily limit, though the ordinance does not specify), on pain of a 50-sou fine or fifty days in prison.¹²² As a final measure, reselling was outright forbidden to city-certified measurers at the plaça and the porters who carried the grain there (presumably because people in these professions had privileged access to premarket grain); any porter or measurer caught purchasing more grain than needed for their personal or household consumption would be fined 100 sous.¹²³

In enacting these measures, Barcelona's council was taking actions similar to those appearing around that time in other Mediterranean cities. As early as the second half of the thirteenth century, cities in the Italian peninsula had begun to respond to increasingly frequent and severe weather-related crop shortfalls by incentivizing grain imports, prohibiting exports, and regulating prices.¹²⁴ By the early fourteenth century, the Italian communes had begun to develop institutions dedicated solely to provisioning: the Officium Frumenti in Venice; the dominius bladi in Bologna; the Sei della biada in Florence; and the officio dell’abbondanza in Florence, Perugia, and Orvieto, among others.¹²⁵ Regulating the grain market in Barcelona, by contrast, remained much less formalized, left to whomever of its own number the council had appointed as market supervisor in any given year.

The task of the city's market supervisor grew more difficult as 1333 turned into 1334, and the shortages in the city worsened. That January, as prices continued to climb with no end in sight, Barcelona's bishop, Ponç de Gualba, urged agricultural parishes throughout his diocese to hold rogation processions and offered a forty-day indulgence in exchange for charitable donations to the city's hospitals, which were suffering from both the famine itself and from funding shortfalls as potential donors’ own financial needs took precedence over charitable giving.¹²⁶ The councilors began to adopt their own more drastic measures around the same time, most notably the imposition of price controls. Before this bad year, there had been very little municipal interference in the price of grain or flour except to insist that sellers not inflate their prices over the course of a given day.¹²⁷ The only precedent for price controls had come in December 1325, toward the end of a multiyear shortage cycle, when the council placed an upper limit on the wholesale price of barley—though, oddly, not of wheat.¹²⁸ But as the crisis deepened in early 1334, the council capped the price of wheat at 20 sous per quartera and barley at 15 sous per quartera.¹²⁹ The council, likewise, for the first time set prices for flour, likely in response to a report by council-appointed market inspectors who were finding price gouging as well as fraud, such as instances of people who claimed hunger in order to receive charitable distributions of flour only to turn around and resell it at the inflated market rates.¹³⁰ Controlling prices also meant more closely regulating the city's usually thriving retail economy, principally by forbidding the city's revenedors from forestalling—that is, intercepting and purchasing (or accepting on commission) any grain, flour, or bread in the territorium that was already on its way to the city's market. Unlike resellers of other foodstuffs who could be fined 20 sous for buying up premarket goods, resellers of grain, flour, and bread faced a fine of 1,000 sous or loss of their right hand.¹³¹

The council ordinances of 1333/1334 tell the story of a city whose inhabitants were growing increasingly desperate for food. Higher grain or flour prices would have cost consumers twice: once at the point of purchase and again when they cooked their bread, since the city's ovens charged a percentage of the loaves or their corresponding cost.¹³² Another sign of the deepening crisis in Barcelona's food system was a January 1334 ordinance punishing with a day in prison anyone caught stealing bread, bread dough, or flour within the city or on the roads leading into it, a measure that indicates that petty theft of food had become a concern as the famine went on.¹³³ That same month, the council included flours made from rice or chickpeas in its price control ordinances for flour and forbade bakers from mixing rice or legume flour into the wheat flour they used to make their loaves, which suggests that Barcelonans had begun to turn to these materials of last resort to make their bread.¹³⁴ The desperation of the city's residents was made evident in February 1334 when the arrival of a single ship loaded with grain from Castile occasioned a spontaneous celebration “with candles and crashing of cymbals and a great tumult.”¹³⁵

Over the year between the summer of 1333 and late spring of 1334, the leaders of Barcelona did what they could to ameliorate the effects of the shortages in the city—a scene that was playing out in cities and towns throughout the western Mediterranean. But market ordinances were far from the only way that cities like Barcelona and their residents responded to the famine. The following chapters examine some of these responses, which range from diplomacy to theft to violence. The distinct stories that emerge from Barcelona in this period paint a picture of how one city responded to crisis in its food system. But they do more than that. Individually, the following chapters illustrate the workings of several distinct Barcelonas: the city that was the center of a Mediterranean-wide commercial network, the one that was a territorially expansionist maritime power in its own right, the dominant city in a broader federated monarchy, the city as a site of interfaith encounter, and the city as a social body where tensions between status groups and political factions occasionally erupted into violence. Each of these Barcelonas had its own story, none of which existed in isolation from the others. The work of the chapters to come is to follow each of these individual threads, taking note of the versions of the cities that each represents on its own, all the while being attentive to the fabric of the city that emerges as they gradually weave together.

_________________

1. Gaspar Feliu, “La demografia baixmedieval catalana: estat de la qüestió i propostes de futur,” Revista d’historia medieval 10 (1999): 16–29; see also Joan F. Cabestany i Fort, “Els fogatges, font per a l’estudi de la topografia econòmica i social de la Barcelona del segle XIV,” in VIII Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón. La Corona de Aragón en el siglo XIV (Valencia: Sucesor de Vives Mora, 1969), 1.2:133–39.

2. AHCB, Consell de cent, Fogatges 5, front flyleaf, verso (1389).

3. Daniel Lord Smail, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), esp. 1–10.

4. David Bell and Gill Valentine, Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat (London: Routledge, 1997), esp. 12–19. For the phenomenon of network folding, see John Frederick Padgett and Walter W. Powell, “The Problem of Emergence,” in The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, ed. John Frederick Padgett and Walter W. Powell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 11–25.

5. Eduard Riu-Barrera, “Barcelona entre els segles V i XI, de la desurbanització a la formació d’una capital,” Barcelona quaderns d’història 18 (2012): 113–14; David Nicholas, Urban Europe, 1100–1700 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 68–70; Michael Wolfe, Walled Towns and the Shaping of France: From the Medieval to the Early Modern Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 3–17.

6. Alessandro Ravotto, “La muralla romana de Barcelona, una empresa de finals del segle III,” Quarhis 10 (2014): 140–62; Philip J. Banks, “El creixement físic de Barcelona, segles X–XIII,” Barcelona quaderns d’història 8 (2003): 15–16; Francesc Carreras i Candi, Geografía general de Catalunya, vol. 5, Ciutat de Barcelona (Barcelona: Albert Martin, 1913), 93, 109–13, and 296–302; Riu-Barrera, “Barcelona entre els segles V i XI,” 116–29. For the shift from viscounts to veguers, see Stephen Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 1096–1291 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 128–35.

7. Francesc Caballé and Eloi Castells, L’estructura urbana del Call de Barcelona: una aproximació (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona; Museu d’Història de Barcelona, 2015), 9–15; Josep Baucells i Reig, Vivir en la edad media: Barcelona y su entorno en los siglos XIII y XIV (1200–1344) (Barcelona: CSIC, 2004), 2:1709–21; Carreras i Candi, Geografía general de Catalunya, 5:490–94.

8. See this book, chapter 5.

9. Pere Ortí Gost, Renda i fiscalitat en una ciutat medieval: Barcelona, segles XII–XIV (Barcelona: CSIC, 2000), 76–82 and 101–105; Albert Cubeles i Bonet, “Poder públic i llançament urbanístic en el segle XIV,” Barcelona quaderns d’història 8 (2003): 42–44; Carreras i Candi, Geografía general de Catalunya 5:303–307 and 339–49. See also n.22 of Cubeles i Bonet, where the author addresses the widespread attribution of the thirteenth-century walls to James I. For the broader context for this wall-building movement, see Kathryn Reyerson, “Medieval Walled Space: Urban Development vs. Defense,” in City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 89.

10. Albert García Espuche, La ciutat del Born: economía i vida quotidiana a Barcelona (segles XIV a XVIII) (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona; Museu d’Història de Barcelona, 2009), 31–33; Enric H. March, El rec comtal: 1.000 anys d’història (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona; Viena Edicions, 2016), 21–27 and 55–63; Tomás López Pizcueta, “Estudio de un patrimonio urbano: la Pia Almoina de Barcelona en los siglos XIII–XIV,” Acta historica et archaeologica mediaevalia 18 (1997): 443–46.

11. Historians’ estimates of Barcelona's population during this period have ranged between twenty thousand and forty thousand inhabitants. Barcelona has several “hearth surveys” (fogatges) for the final third of the fourteenth century. Using these to estimate population for the 1330s, however, requires extrapolating backward over several major demographic shocks (Feliu, “La demografia baixmedieval catalana,” 16–30). I have chosen instead to extrapolate forward from the estimate for the city's population around the year 1280; see Banks, “El creixement físic de Barcelona,” 11–33, esp. 31.

12. Salvador Claramunt, “La formació del raval de la rambla,” in El Pla de Barcelona i la seva història: actes del I Congrés d’Història del Pla de Barcelona, celebrat a l’Institut Municipal d’Història, els dies 12 i 13 de novembre de 1982 (Barcelona: Edicions de la Magrana: Institut Municipal d’Història, Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1984), 193–202; López Pizcueta, “Estudio de un patrimonio urbano,” 447.

13. Pere Ortí Gost, “El municipi de Barcelona i les parròquies del sue entorn al segle XIV,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 31 (2001): 33–48; López Pizcueta, “Estudio de un patrimonio urbano,” 441–49; Carme Batlle i Gallart, “Notícies dels habitants de Santa Eulàlia de Provençana pels volts del 1300,” Finestrelles 6 (1994): 102–11; Pere-Jordi Bassegoda i Musté, Huerto y viñedo de Barcelona: la guerra de los laudemios: contribución al estudio de la historia del urbanismo de la ciudad condal (Barcelona: Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona, 1971), 6–7.

14. Bruniquer, Rúbriques, 4:119.

15. 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), 145; Carreras i Candi, Geografía general de Catalunya, 5:324.

16. Usatges, 58 (p. 77).

17. Ortí Gost, Renda i fiscalitat, 65. This relationship between Barcelona and outlying towns and villages would change in the late fourteenth through mid-fifteenth centuries, when many nearby population centers, most lying beyond its traditional territorium, became carrers of Barcelona, in which the smaller town paid an annual fee and participated in Barcelona's military levies in exchange for being under the protection and jurisdiction of Barcelona's laws, royal privileges, and immunities. Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, El carreratge a Barcelona: l’associació dels municipis a l’Edat Mitjana (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1999).

18. Josefa Mutgé i Vives, “L’abastament de peix i carn a Barcelona, en el primer terç del segle XIV,” in Alimentació i societat a la Catalunya medieval (Barcelona: CSIC, 1988), 109–15.

19. See, for example, AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 4v (December [5–13] 1323) and 8, 34r–v (September 15, 1324); Llibre 10, 7v (December [18?] 1326); Usatges, 58 (p. 77).

20. Antoni Riera Melis, “Jerarquía social y desigualdad alimentaria en el Mediterráneo noroccidental durante la Baja Edad Media. La cocina y la mesa de los estamentos populares,” in La alimentación mediterránea: historia, cultura, nutrición, ed. F. Xavier Medina and R. Alonso (Barcelona: Icaria, 1996), 91–94; Juanjo Cáceres Nevot, “La participació del consell municipal en l’aprovisionament cerealer de la ciutat de Barcelona (1301–1430)” (PhD diss., Barcelona, University of Barcelona, 2007), 62–66.

21. Usatges, 10 (p. 67).

22. Adam Franklin-Lyons, Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 22–23; Carole Puig, “L’apport de l’étude du stockage à notre connaissance de la conjoncture alimentaire de 1300 (Languedoc, Catalogne),” in Les disettes dans la conjoncture de 1300 en Méditerranée occidentale, ed. Monique Bourin, John Drendel, and François Menant (Rome: École française de Rome, 2011), 161–64; Riera Melis, “Jerarquía social,” 97–98; Alfio Cortonesi, “Self-Sufficiency and the Market: Rural and Urban Diet in the Middle Ages,” in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Jean Flandrin and Massimo Montanari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 268–70.

23. Bruno Laurioux, Manger au Moyen Âge: pratiques et discours alimentaires en Europe aux xive et xve siècles (Paris: Hachette, 2002), 51–58; Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 187–200; Antoni Riera Melis, “‘Tener siempre bien aprovisionada la población.’ Los cereales y el pan en las ciudades catalanas durante la Baja Edad Media,” in Alimentar la ciudad en la Edad Media, ed. Beatriz Arizaga Bolumburu and Jesús Ángel Solóranzano Telechea (Nájera: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos; Ayuntamiento de Nájera, 2009), 48–54; and Riera Melis, “Jerarquía social,” 89–92.

24. LCM chap. 145; Pinuccia F. Simbula, “Note sull’alimentazione a bordo delle navi catalane nel basso medioevo,” in Actes: Ir Col·loqui d’Historia de l’Alimentació a la Corona d’Aragó: Edat Mitjana (Lleida: Fundació Pública Institut d’Estudis Ilerdencs, 1995), 2:261–66; Daniel Duran Duelt, “L’alimentació a les embarcacions comercials catalanes durant l’edat mitjana,” in Actes del III Congrés d’Història Marítima de Catalunya Barcelona, 22, 23 i 24 de novembre de 2006 (Barcelona: Museu Marítim de Barcelona, 2008), 6–13.

25. Bridget Ann Henisch, Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 2–15.

26. Eiximenis, Dotzè, chap. 133.

27. Jaume Riera i Sans, “La conflictivitat de l’alimentació dels jueus medievals (segles XII–XV),” in Alimentació i societat a la Catalunya medieval (Barcelona: CSIC, 1988), 303.

28. Josefina Mutgé i Vives, “L’abastament de blat a la ciutat de Barcelona en temps d’Alfons el Benigne (1327–1336),” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 31 (2010): 655; Franklin-Lyons, Shortage and Famine, 19–20; Cáceres Nevot, “La participació,” 49.

29. See this book, chapter 4.

30. 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, Els cereals i el pa en els països de llengua catalana a la baixa edat mitjana (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2018), 265–68; Josefina Mutgé i Vives, “Trigo sardo en Barcelona durante el reinado de Alfonso el Benigno,” in VIII Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón. La corona de Aragon en el siglo XIV (Valencia: Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad, 1973), 3.2:235–37; Cáceres Nevot, “La participació,” 48–52; Antoni Riera Melis, “Barcelona en els segles XIV–XV, un mercat internacional a escala mediterrànea,” Barcelona quaderns d’història 8 (2003): 67–74. For James's privilege regarding Sicilian grain, see AHCB, Consellers, Miscel·lànea 2/1, no. 8(February 18, 1286).

31. See this book, chapter 2.

32. Silvia Orvietani Busch, Medieval Mediterranean Ports: The Catalan and Tuscan Coasts, 1100 to 1235 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 27–61 and 135–41; Ramon Julià Brugués and Santiago Riera Mora, “Evolució geomorfològica del barri de la Ribera en èpoques històriques,” Quarhis 10 (2014): 89; Marcel Pujol, La construcció naval a Catalunya a l’Edat Mitjana (Barcelona: Base, 2012), 83–85; Mikel Soberón Rodriguez, “El port baixmedieval de la ciutat de Barcelona: una visió des de l’arqueologia. L’escullera de 1477 i la troballa d’un vaixell tinglat,” Quarhis 6 (2010): 139–42.

33. Busch, Medieval Mediterranean Ports, 127–34.

34. Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, “El comerç català a la baixa edat mitjana,” Catalan Historical Review 5 (2012): 162–72; Riera Melis, “Barcelona en els segles XIV–XV,” 68–69.

35. See, for example, ACB, Notaris 92, 129v–130r (August 13, 1328) and 142v–143v (August 26, 1328); Notaris 93, 29r–34r and 49v–57r and 72v–77v (April–May 1334) [multiple dates]; see also Sarah Ifft Decker, The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women's Work in Medieval Catalan Cities (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 123–24; and Daniel Duran Duelt, “Icons and Minor Arts: A Neglected Aspect of Trade between Romania and the Crown of Aragon,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 105 (2012): 31.

36. José Hinojosa Montalvo, “Ciudades portuarias y puertos sin ciudades a fines de la edad media en el Mediterráneo occidental,” in Tecnología y sociedad: las grandes obras públicas en la Europa medieval (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, Departamento de Educación y Cultura, 1996), 269–73.

37. Claude Carrère, Barcelona 1380–1462: un centre econòmic en època de crisi, trans. Hermínia Grau de Duran (Barcelona: Curial, 1977), 1:84–86.

38. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 7, 41v (August 6, 1322); 9, 21v (August 8, 1326); 10, 22r (December 9, 1327); and 12, 37v–39r ( [July 31?] 1333).

39. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 22r (February 1, 1324).

40. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 37v–38r (July [31?] 1333) and 11, 37v ([undated ordinances] 1330–1331); LCM no. 154; Charles Dufourcq, La vie quotidienne dans les ports méditerranéens au Moyen Âge: Provence, Languedoc, Catalogne (Paris: Hachette, 1975), 193–212.

41. Mutgé i Vives, “L’abastament de peix i carn,” 110–15. Although individual fishmongers could apply for a royal permit to sell their wares from tables and baskets outside the fish market in the thirteenth century (Ortí Gost, Renda i fiscalitat, 119–20), by the 1330s the council was at least attempting to clamp down on the practice (AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 36v–37v [July 31, 1332]).

42. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 9, 26r (January 18, 1326).

43. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 2, 9v–10r (January 2, 1311). This and other similar council ordinances refer to two types of provisioning shacks: barraques de vi and barraques de cebes. While it is possible that these latter really were just what the name advertised—“onion shacks”—medieval Barcelonans’ tendency to use synecdoche in place-names (e.g., the plaça dels cols or “cabbage square” for the vegetable market), combined with waterfront workers’ need for a quick and inexpensive meal (as evidenced by the existence of a carrer de malcuinat in roughly the same neighborhood even today), suggests that these barraques de cebes might have offered a wider range of food than a grilled onion or two for their customers to wash down with the fare of the wine shacks.

44. For gambling in the barraques, see AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 22r (February 1, 1324). For the later reputation of the barraques, see Teresa María Vinyoles Vidal, “Joncars, barraques, pastors, i pescadors. La marina de Barcelona al segle XV,” in Expansió urbana i planejament a Barcelona, ed. Joan Roca i Albert (Barcelona: Proa, 1997), 32–33, and La vida quotidiana a Barcelona vers 1400 (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1985), 122.

45. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 22v (February 1, 1324); 7, 22v (January 2, 1322); and 1, 6v (December [9?] 1301).

46. Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 6–8.

47. Ortí Gost, Renda i fiscalitat, 112–18; Salvador Sanpere Miguel, Topografía antigua de Barcelona: Rodalía de Corbera (Barcelona: Henrich, 1890), 1:18–20; Carme i Batlle, “La Alhóndiga, centro comercial de Barcelona, durante el siglo XIII,” in Oriente e Occidente tra Medioevo ed età Moderna: studi in onore Geo Pistarino (Genova: Glauco Brigati, 1997), 61–71.

48. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 9, 59v (July 30, 1258), and Reg. 15, 107v (June 17, 1268).

49. Francesc Xavier Florensa i Puchol et al., “La fase baix medieval del jaciment arqueològic del carrer Sant Honorat, 3 (Barcelona),” in Intervencions arqueològiques 2002–2006: espais urbans. Actes del III congrés d’arqueologia medieval i moderna a Catalunya (Barcelona: Associació Catalana per a la Recerca en Arqueologia Medieval, 2007), 216–25.

50. Temporary storage was limited at first to eight days, a limit that the council of 1327 extended to ten days and then to twenty. Cáceres Nevot, “La participació,” 206. For the casa dels pallols, see Sanpere Miguel, Topografía antigua de Barcelona, 85–86.

51. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 26r (April 12, 1333).

52. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 4, 13v ([December 29?] 1316).

53. The expense involved in buying up the blocks of houses that lay between the two plazas delayed the actual commencement of demolition and construction until 1351. Montserrat Marsiñach Tirvió, “Urbanisme i societat a Barcelona a mitjan segle XIV: la plaça del blat,” in Història urbana del pla de Barcelona: actes del II Congrés d’Història del Pla de Barcelona, vol. 1 (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1989), 121–27; and Joan F. Cabestany i Fort, “Una primera reforma urbana a Barcelona: la plaça del Blat (1351),” Cuadernos de arqueología e historia de la ciudad 17 (1977): 141–54.

54. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 10, 26r–v (December 6, 1327) for carters.

55. Daniel Duran Duelt, “An Arrested Community: Christians of the Girdle in Fifteenth-Century Barcelona,” Medieval Encounters 22, no. 4 (2016): 397; J. Vives Miret, Historial del gremi de bastaixos de capçana i macips de ribera de la duana de Barcelona: segle XIII–XX (Barcelona: [n.p.] 1933), 11–14; Coral Cuadrada Majó, “Barcelona (ss. XIV–XV): migracions, demografia i economia,” in El món urbà a la Corona d’Aragó del 1137 als decrets de Nova Planta: XVII Congrés d’Història de la Corona d’Aragó / Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón, ed. Salvador Claramunt Rodríguez (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2003), 1:325–26.

56. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 10, 30v (December 6, 1327) and 34v (June 9, 1327); 12, 21r–v (December 7, 1332).

57. Vives Miret, Historial del gremi de bastaixos, 13–14.

58. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 7, 17v (December [5?] 1321) and 12, 22r (December 7, 1332). This impression is reinforced by the number of ordinances that the city passed in the 1320s targeting beggars, and foreign beggars in particular; see AHCB, Llibre del consell 8, 25r (March 21, 1324) and 34r (September 15, 1324); 9, 17v (December [likely 2–5] 1325), and 10, 18v (December [likely 18] 1326). See also Adam Franklin-Lyons and Marie A. Kelleher, “Framing Mediterranean Famine: Food Crisis in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona,” Speculum 97, no. 1 (2022): 70–75; María Piedad Espitia Molina, “Pobreza y caridad en el barrio de la Ribera, siglo XIV–XV,” Ex novo: revista d’història i humanitats 3 (2006): 67; and Miri Rubin, Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 25–49. The fifteenth-century Council of One Hundred would eventually restrict the occupation of porter to Christians; see Capmany 1:395–96; see also Teresa María Vinyoles Vidal, “La vida quotidiana de la gent de mar a la baixa edat mitjana,” in Arqueología nàutica mediterrànea, ed. Xavier Nieto, Miguel Angel Cau Ontiveros, and Cati Aguer (Girona: Museu Arqueologia de Catalunya, 2009), 589.

59. Philip J. Banks, “‘Burgus,’ ‘suburbium’ and ‘villanova’: The Extramural Growth of Barcelona before A.D. 1200,” in Historia urbana del Pla de Barcelona: actes del II Congrés d’Història del Pla de Barcelona celebrat a l’Institut Municipal d’Història els dies 6 i 7 de desembre de 1985, vol. 2, ed. Ana María Adroer i Tasis (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona; Institut Municipal d'Història, 1989–90), 116–23; Albert Garcia Espuche, La gent del carrer Montcada: una història de Barcelona (segles XIII a XVIII) (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2020), 1:16–20 and 50–51; Vinyoles Vidal, “La vida quotidiana de la gent de mar,” 587–89; Marta Putelli, L’urbanistica di Barcellona medievale (Cerveteri: AltrEdizioni, 2012), 55–56; Espitia Molina, “Pobreza y caridad,” 67; Carme Batlle i Gallart and Teresa María Vinyoles Vidal, Mirada a la Barcelona medieval des de les finestres gòtiques (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 2002), 63–64; David Igual Luis, “Immigration and Urban Neighbourhoods in the Crown of Aragon (14th–15th Centuries),” (paper, 12th International Conference on Urban History: Cities in Europe, Cities in the World, September 3–6, 2014), 3–4 [cited with permission from the author], https://www.academia.edu/8256305/Immigration_and_Urban_Neighbourhoods_in_the_Crown_of_Aragon_14th_15th_Centuries_. The prominent neighborhood presence of the noxious industries named above is also attested in the many urban ordinances that delineate how and when members of these professions might use the neighborhoods’ waterways; see, for example, AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 28v (June 7, 1324) for sausage-makers and offal butchers, and AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 19v–20r (December 7, 1332) for dyers and leatherworkers.

60. Bonaventura Bassegoda i Musté, El templo parroquial de Santa María del Mar (Barcelona: Imprenta Farré y Asensio, 1920), 21–30; José Martí i Bonet and Josep Maria Marquès Planagumà, Historia de las diócesis españolas, vol. 2, Barcelona, Terrassa, Sant Feliu de Llobregat, Gerona (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2006), 155–56; Juan Ainaud de Lasarte, José Gudiol, and Frederico Pablo Verrié, La ciudad de Barcelona: catálogo monumental de España (Madrid: CSIC, 1947), 115–19; Carreras i Candi, Geografía general de Catalunya, 5:451–52; Putelli, L’urbanistica di Barcellona medievale, 51–54; Sanpere Miguel, Topografía antigua de Barcelona, 14.

61. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 35r–36r (July [31?] 1333). That some of Barcelona's streets may have been unusually filthy is suggested by a tax ordinance from 1330/1331 that notes in passing the wooden-soled galoshes made by Barcelona's cobblers that innkeepers kept on hand to sell to any of their guests caught unprepared. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 11, 18r–v ([undated ordinances] 1330–1331)

62. Cristina Borau, Els promotors de capelles i retaules a la Barcelona del segle XIV (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2003), 175–76; Josefa Huertas Arroyo, Mikel Soberón Rodríguez, and Antoni Fernández i Espinosa, “Urbanisme i artesanat al quarter de Sant Pere de la Barcelona medieval,” Quarhis 7 (2011): 166–91.

63. Josep Mas, Notes històriques del bisbat de Barcelona, vol. 13, Antigüetat d’algunes esglesies del bisbat de Barcelona (Barcelona: Tipografia Católica Pontificia, 1921), 170–77.

64. Joan Boda and Genis Samper, Catalònia religiosa: altes històric: dels orígens als nostres dies (Barcelona: Claret, 1991), 111–19.

65. Ainaud de Lasarte, Gudiol, and Verrié, La ciudad de Barcelona, 93–99; see also AHCB, Llibre del Consell 9, 22v (March 17, 1326).

66. Pere Ortí Gost, “El Consell de cent durant l’Edat Mitjana,” Barcelona quaderns d’història 4 (2001): 33–36; Carme Batlle i Gallart, “El ‘Llibre del consell’: font de coneiximent del municipi i de la societat de Barcelona del segle XIV,” in El “llibre del consell” de la ciutat de Barcelona, segle XIV: les eleccions municipals, ed. Carme Batlle i Gallart (Barcelona: CSIC, 2007), 31–46; Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 314–16. For the early presence—and rapid disappearance—of the influence of the aristocracy in the city, see Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, “‘Honrats,’ ‘mercaders’ et autres dans le Conseil des Cent au xiv^e siècle,” in La ciudad hispanica durante los siglos XIII al XVI. Actes del coloquiio celebrado en La Rábida y Sevilla del 14 al 19 de septiembre de 1981 (Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1985), 2:1388–89, and Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 135–46.

67. In 1369, the council relocated into a dedicated hall that had been built for them within the city's late-antique walled enclosure near the church of Sant Jaume. Agustí Duran i Sanpere, Barcelona i la seva història (Barcelona: Curial, 1972), 279–83; Ainaud de Lasarte and Verrié, La ciudad de Barcelona, 264–67. For the council's criers, see AHCB Llibres del Consell 7, 41r–v (August 6, 1322) and 9, 22v (March 17, 1326), which notes that the council was called to a special session by a herald with a horn, “as is the custom, meeting in the common room that is at the monastery of the Friars Preachers.”

68. For markets in general, see Putelli, L’urbanistica di Barcellona medievale, 62–63. For specific markets: see AHCB, Llibre del Consell 10, 28r (December 6, 1327) for the flour market; Josefa Mutgé i Vives, La ciudad de Barcelona durante el reinado de Alfonso el Benigno (1327–1336) (Madrid: CSIC, 1987), chap. 1, n.22 for the game market; Carreras i Candi, Geografía general de Catalunya, 5:382–83 and 849 for the vegetable market; and AHCB, Llibre del Consell 7, 38v–39r (June 28, 1322) for the fruit markets.

69. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 17v (December 7, 1333).

70. Ortí Gost, Renda i fiscalitat, 434–36, and “El forment a la Barcelona baixmedieval: preus, mesures i fiscalitat (1283–1345),” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 22 (1992): 393–401.

71. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 9, 16r (December [2–5?] 1325); see also Francisco Sevillano Colom, “De la institución del mustaçaf de Barcelona, de Mallorca y de Valencia,” Anuario de historia del derecho español 23 (1953): 529. The supervision of the market is a bit unclear during the transition period between 1323–1325. An ordinance from September 1324 names the veguer as the person to whom these market informants needed to take their information (AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 32v–33v [September 15, 1324]), even though nine months earlier the jurats had elected Pere Juyol and Pere de Avellano as cosupervisors of the grain market (AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 3v [December 10] 1323). It is also worth noting in passing that rather than the fine levied by the council, the veguer punished noncompliant measurers with loss of office and porters with whipping. As a royal agent, he would have had the authority to administer either corporal or capital punishment that the later council-appointed market supervisors lacked.

72. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 11, 41r–v ([undated ordinances] 1330–1331).

73. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 11, 55v ([undated ordinances] 1330–1331).

74. AHCB, Consellers, Imposicions 3, 3r (September 27, 1333).

75. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 10, 27v–28r (December 6, 1327); and 11, 41r and 90r ([undated ordinances] 1330–1331).

76. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 2, 42v (August 4, 1313); 7, 18r (December [4?] 1321) and 22r (January 2, 1322); 8, 32v–33v (September 15, 1324); and 9, 15r (December [2–5?] 1325).

77. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 1, 80v (January 4, 1303); and 9, 15r (December [2–5?] 1325).

78. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 1, 30v (May 12, 1302) and 80r (January 4, 1303); and 2, 10r (January 2, 1311) and 37v–38r (March 13, 1313).

79. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 1, 30v (May 12, 1302).

80. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 33r–v (September 15, 1324).

81. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 9, 20v (August 8, 1326).

82. Ainaud de Lasarte, Gudiol, and Verrié, La ciudad de Barcelona, 321–22; Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 32–33, 59–61, and 128–35; Carreras i Candi, Geografía general de Catalunya, 5:267–70; Pere Català i Roca, Els castells catalans (Barcelona: R. Dalmau, 1967), 1:516–28. The mix of prisoners is indicated by the December 1295 privilege issued by Jaume II in which he decreed that twice a year on Candlemas and Palm Sunday, when the procession of the episcopal clergy passed beneath the Castell Vell gate, all prisoners held there would be released and absolved of their penalties—except for those in prison for the high crimes of treason, blasphemy, sodomy, counterfeiting, or deliberate homicide. AHCB, Consellers, Miscel·lànea 1, no. 19, 1r (December 11, 1295). It is unclear whether this amnesty applied to prisoners in the Castell Nou as well.

83. Anna Maria Adroer i Tasis, El palau reial major de Barcelona (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1979), 15–30; Ainaud de Lasarte, Gudiol, and Verrié, La ciudad de Barcelona, 241–53; Duran i Sanpere, Barcelona i la seva història, 251–65.

84. Joaquim Miret i Sans, “Itinerario del Rey Alfonso III de Cataluña IV en Aragón, el conquistador de Cerdeña,” Butlletí de la Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona 5, no. 35 (1910): 114–23.

85. Carreras i Candi, Geografía general de Catalunya, 5:229–34; Ainaud de Lasarte, Gudiol, and Verrié, La ciudad de Barcelona, 243–48.

86. Sebastián Puig y Puig, Episcopologio de la sede barcinonense: apuntes para la historia de la iglesia de Barcelona y de sus prelados (Barcelona: Balmes, 1929), 232, and doc. 102, pp. 458–60; Baucells i Reig, Vivir en la edad media, 2:918–19.

87. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 11r (December [5–13?] 1323); 9, 14r–v (December [2–5?] 1325); 10, 17r–v (December [18?] 1326), 26r (December 6, 1327), and 34r (June 9, 1327); and 11, 16r–v and 44v–45r ([undated ordinances] 1330–1331).

88. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 30r (June 9, 1324); and 9, 17v–18r (December [2–5?] 1325).

89. Ortí Gost, Renda i fiscalitat, 435.

90. Ortí Gost, Renda i fiscalitat, 295–307; and “L’explotació d’una renda reial: els molins del rec comtal de Barcelona fins al segle XIII,” in Estudios sobre renta, fiscalidad y finanzas en la Cataluña bajomedieval (Barcelona: CSIC, 1993), 243–73; Mutgé i Vives, La ciudad de Barcelona, 30–33.

91. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 1, 7r (December [9?] 1301).

92. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 7, 23v (January 2, 1322).

93. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 21r–v (January 12, 1324).

94. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 4, 21r (August 4, 1317). Like the grain market, the flour market had its own tax collection system; see Jean Broussolle, “Les impositions municipales de Barcelone de 1328 a 1462,” Estudios de Historia Moderna 5 (1955): 58–59; Ortí Gost, Renda i fiscalitat, 441–42.

95. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 4, 21r (August 2, 1317).

96. Ortí Gost, Renda i fiscalitat, 202–44; Mutgé i Vives, La ciudad de Barcelona, 28–30; Asunción Blasco Martínez, “El horno del Call de Barcelona em 1331,” in Actes: Ir Col·loqui d’Historia de l’Alimentació a la Corona d’Aragó: Edat Mitjana (Lleida: Fundació Pública Institut d’Estudis Ilerdencs, 1995), 2:989–99.

97. Ortí Gost, Renda i fiscalitat, 222–23; AHCB, Llibre del Consell 7, 33v–34r (April 1, 1322). The nature of the oven tenders’ work also exempted them from the city's curfew: municipal ordinances acknowledged that the work of oven-operators, together with that of butchers, fishermen, boatmen, and dyers and tanners (who could only dump their industrial waste in the lower Rec before the city was awake and about) required them to be out before daybreak; see AHCB, Llibre del Consell 1, 4v (December [9?] 1301) and 76v (December [19–22?] 1302); 2, 4v (December [8?] 1310) and 31v (December [14?] 1312); 4, 5v (December [29?] 1316); 8, 7v (December [5–13?] 1323); 9, 8r (December [2–5?] 1325); and 10, 9r (December [18?] 1326) and 34r (June 9, 1327).

98. For regulations mandating daily operation, see AHCB, Llibre del Consell 7, 17v (December [4?] 1321) and 43v (November 10, 1322); 8, 28r (April 26, 1324); and 10, 34v (June 9, 1327); for Sunday/holiday restrictions, AHCB, Llibre del Consell 1, 6v (December [9?] 1301) and 81r (January 4, 1303); for operations during the celebrations of the conquest of Sardinia, AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 31v–32r (June 9, 1324).

99. LCM chap. 145; Simbula, “Note sull’alimentazione,” 260–64; Duran Duelt, “L’alimentació,” 4–13 and 18–19. Catalan captains were required to provide merchants and passengers with sufficient water but nothing in the way of food; noncrew were expected to provision themselves and might, in fact, be required to “loan” the ship food from their own stores if the ship's provisions ran out (LCM chaps. 116 and 108).

100. According to one Genoese log, the expected consumption of bescuyt was about thirty ounces per crewman per day. Laurioux, Manger au Moyen Âge, 180–81.

101. Teresa María Vinyoles Vidal, “La mujer bajomedieval a través de las ordenanzas municipales de Barcelona,” in Las mujeres medievales y su ámbito jurídico: actas de las II Jornadas de investigación interdisciplinaria (Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 1983), 141–47; see also Françoise Desportes, “Food Trades,” in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Jean Flandrin and Massimo Montanari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 286.

102. Joan Maltas i Montoro, Caresties, fams i epidèmies a Catalunya: de la conquesta de Sicília a la Pesta Negra (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2022), 168. Some towns in neighboring Aragon were also reporting shortages in 1332; see ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2039 (November 6, 1332). A scattered handful of notarial documents report grain shortages in Barcelona in late 1332 and early 1333 (AHCB, Consell de cent, Manuals 2, 84r–87r (October 21, 1332) and 114r–116r (March 17, 1333), but these appear to be isolated references.

103. Franklin-Lyons, Shortage and Famine, 45–50.

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

105. Maltas i Montoro, “Caresties, fams i epidèmies,” 168–74 and 178–95.

106. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 70r (June 23, 1333) and 70v–71r (June 27, 1333).

107. Maltas i Montoro, Caresties, fams i epidèmies, 105–25; Cáceres Nevot, “La participació,” 109–17; Ortí Gost, “El forment a la Barcelona baix-medieval,” 377–423; and Riera Melis, Els cereals i el pa, 272–84. For the Mediterranean more broadly, see Pere Benito i Monclús, “Famines sans frontièrs en occident avant la ‘conjuncture de 1300,’” in Les disettes dans la conjoncture de 1300 en Méditerranée occidentale, ed. Monique Bourin, John Drendel, and François Menant (Rome: École française de Rome, 2011), 37–86; as well as several excellent essays in the same volume and in Oliva Herrer, Hipólito Rafael, and Pere Benito i Monclús, eds., Crisis de subsistencia y crisis agrarias en la Edad Media (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 2007).

108. For Valencia, see ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 554, 19r (June 21, 1333); for Aragon, see ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 459, 266r–v (October 23, 1333) and Reg. 460, 14r–v (October 23, 1333).

109. For Parma: Chronicon Parmense: ab anno MXXXVIII usque ad annum MCCCXXXVIII, ed. Giuliano Bonazzi, RIS, t. 9, pt. 9 (Città di Castello: Tipi dell’editore S. Lapi, 1902), 225. For Friuli: Juliani canonici civitatensis chronica, ed. Giovanni Tambara, RIS, v. 24, pt. 14 (Città di Castello: Tipi della casa editrice S. Lapi, 1906), 56. For Emilia-Romagna: Cipriano Manenti, “Historie (Supplemento alla Cronaca di Luca di Domenico Manenti),” in Ephemerides urbevetanae dal codice Vaticano urbinate 1745 [AA 1342–1369], RIS, t. 15, pt. 5/1 (Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1920), 429; and Chronicon Parmense, 216. For Florence: Giovanni Villani, Istorie fiorentine di Giovanni Villani, cittadino fiorentino, ed. Pietro Massai (Milan: Societá tipografica de’ classici italiani, 1802), book 11, chaps. 1–4 (7:3–39), and Arturo Bini and Giovanni Grazzini, eds., Annales Arretinorum maiores et minores (aa. 1192–1343), RIS, t. 24, pt. 1 (Città di Castello: Tipi della Casa editrice S. Lapi, 1909), 25. The flooding of the Arno was destructive enough to generate reports from far and wide; see also Chronicon Parmense, 227; and Francesco Alfonso Ugolini, ed., Annali e cronaca di Perugia in volgare dal 1191 al 1336 (Perugia: Tip. Di Salvi e C., 1962), 86–87.

110. Thalamus parvus. Le petit thalamus de Montpellier, pub. pour la première fois d'après les manuscrits originaux (Montpellier: J. Martel Ainé, for the Société archéologique de Montpellier, 1836), 347.

111. BC, ms. 943, 3r; Joan Francesc Boscà, Memorial històric, ed. Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó (Barcelona: Associació de Bibliòfils de Barcelona, 1977), 58. See also Pere Benito i Monclús and Joan Maltas i Montoro [as Joan Montoro Maltas], “Fams immortalitzades. El ‘mal any primer’ (1333–1334) dins l’annalística catalana de la Baixa Edat Mitjana,” in L’histoire à la source: acter, compter, enregistrer (Catalogne, Savoie, Italie, xii^e–xv^e siècle): mélanges offerts à Christian Guilleré, ed. Guido Castelnuovo and Sandrine Victor (Chambéry: Université Savoie Mont Blanc Laboratoire LLSETI, 2017), 1:503–20.

112. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 22v (December 18, 1333) and 28v–29v (January 12, 1334).

113. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 47r–v (December 29, 1333), 52r–53r (January 26, 1334), and 75r–v (April 13, 1334).

114. Ortí Gost, Renda i fiscalitat, 435–36 and 544–46.

115. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 24v–25r (April 12, 1333). The fine had been 100 sous since January 1322, when it had increased from its original level of only 20 sous (AHCB, Llibre del Consell 7, 22r–v [January 2, 1322]). The only other time before 1333 that the council records show a 200-sou fine is 1302, the same year that they fined grain resellers a whopping 1,000 sous (AHCB, Llibre del Consell 1, 30v–31v [May 12, 1302]), which suggests that this may have been another shortage year.

116. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 22v (December 18, 1333); a reiteration of a nearly identical 1332 ordinance, see AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 20v (December 7, 1332).

117. AHCB, Administració municipal del pa, documents solts 2, lligal 1, doc. 1 (1333).

118. 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 i Monclús (Lérida: Milenio, 2018), 88–89; Maltas i Montoro, Caresties, fams i epidèmies, 185.

119. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 41r (July [31?] 1333); for a 1317 version of the ordinance, see AHCB, Llibre del Consell 4, 21r (August 2, 1317).

120. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 21v (December 18, 1333) and 34v (January 12, 1334). In 1389, the dobler was set at 15 ounces, and the dineral or dinal at half that weight (Cáceres Nevot, “La participació,” 214). Because the prices of grain fluctuated so wildly, however, this should only be used as the roughest estimate of these loaves’ weight in 1333–1334.

121. Cáceres Nevot, “La participació,” 213–14.

122. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 20v-21r (December 7, 1332); and 13, 22v (December 18, 1333).

123. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 25v (April 12, 1333).

124. Giuliano Pinto, “‘Ut in civitate copia victualium habeatur.’ Le città, i territori, le produzioni agricole (Italia, secoli XIII–XV),” in Políticas contra el hambre y la carestía en la Europa medieval, ed. Luciano Palermo, Andrea Fara, and Pere Benito i Monclús (Lleida: Milenio, 2018), 201; Denis Menjot, “Defender la ciudad medieval contra el hambre: abastecimiento y políticas anonárias,” in Abastecer a Cidade na Europa medieval (Lisboa: Instituto de Estudos Medievais, 2020), 156–57; Frederic C. Lane, Venice: Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 59; Henri Bresc, “Palermo in the 14th–15th Century,” in A Companion to Medieval Palermo: The History of a Mediterranean City from 600 to 1500, ed. Annliese Nef (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 238–39.

125. Stefano G. Magni, “Politica degli approvvigionamenti e controllo del commercio dei cereali nell’Italia dei comuni nel XIII e XIV secolo: alcune questioni preliminari,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Moyen Âge 127, no. 1 (2015): 97–98; George Dameron, “Feeding the Medieval Italian City-State: Grain, War, and Political Legitimacy in Tuscany, c. 1150–c. 1350,” Speculum 92, no. 4 (2017): 1005–15; Nicola Lorenzo Barile, “‘Formare l’annona del popolo e impedire i monopoli in tempi di carestia’: i monti frumentari in Puglia. Fonti, problemi e prospettiva di ricerca,” in I monti frumentari e le forme di credito non monetarie tra Medioevo ed età contemporanea, ed. Ippolita Checcoli and Luciano Osbat (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2015), 363–66; Paolo Nanni, “Facing the Crisis in Medieval Florence: Climate Variability, Carestie, and Forms of Adaptation in the First Half of the Fourteenth Century,” in The Crisis of the Fourteenth Century: Teleconnections between Environmental and Societal Change?, ed. Martin Bauch and Gerrit Jasper Schenk (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 184; Antonio Giusberti and Francesca Roversi Monaco, “Economy and Demography,” in A Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Bologna, ed. Sarah Rubin Blanshei (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 162–63; Menjot, “Defender la ciudad,” 170–71.

126. Maltas i Montoro, Caresties, fams i epidèmies, 200.

127. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 1, 80v (January 4, 1303); and 9, 15r (December [2–5?] 1325).

128. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 9, 15r (December [2–5?] 1325).

129. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 29v (January 12, 1334).

130. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 27v (January 12, 1334) for price controls; AHCB, Administració municipal del pa, Documents solts vol. 2, lligal 1, doc. 2, ([January?] 1334) for fraud. The presence of straw does not necessarily indicate deliberate fraud: straw, laurel leaves, and other absorbent organic matter were in wide use throughout the Islamic Mediterranean to help prevent moisture-related rot and, thus, allow for longer-term storage of grain. The use of such measures was limited in the Crown of Aragon, largely because it lowered the market value of the grain (Franklin-Lyons, Shortage and Famine, 31–32). But the wording of the market inspectors’ complaint about red rice with payla molt (“a lot of straw”) suggests that a bit of straw as a desiccant was to be expected in certain grains.

131. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 27v (January 12, 1334).

132. Pere Ortí Gost notes that, in the shortage year of 1375, oven-tenders’ percentages were temporarily adjusted to 1/30 or even 1/50, returning to the habitual 1/20 when the prices for grain and flour had lowered (Ortí Gost, Renda i fiscalitat, 222–23).

133. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 27r (January 12, 1334). A related ordinance from the same date on the verso of folio 12 punishes anyone who diverts grain or bread coming into the city from the larger territorium with an enormous fine of 1,000 sous or loss of a hand. But as this ordinance punishes sale or gift as well as theft, it seems to be aimed at preventing not petty theft but rather the practice of forestalling.

134. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 27v and 28v–29r (January 12, 1334).

135. “Crònica del racional de la ciutat de Barcelona (1334–1417),” Recull de documents i estudis 1, fasc. 2 (1921), doc. 1, p. 117.