CHAPTER 5The Bride

Communities

Both the beginning and the end of Bonadona's marriage were rooted in the city's Jewish community, so it is fitting that our search for her Barcelona begin here. In one sense, the borders of the Jewish community, like the borders of the city itself, can be defined by its walls. Jews were part of the resettlement of Barcelona in the wake of the devastating raid led by the Cordoban chancellor and military commander al-Mansur in 985, settling not only throughout what was at that time a relatively small urban core but also in the suburbs and the rural Barcelona plain.¹² By the thirteenth century, however, the city's Jews had increasingly concentrated themselves in the northwest quadrant of the original late-antique walled precinct just to the west of the cathedral. Commonly referred to as the call, this approximately five-acre area would eventually be walled and equipped with gates that the community could apparently open or close at its own discretion.¹³

Bonadona's Barcelona was not limited to the confines of the original call or even to the smaller neighboring call menor that the city's Jews had expanded into by the late thirteenth century.¹⁴ She and her family were among the Barcelona Jewish families—not numerous but far from rare—who lived outside the call's borders.¹⁵ Bonadona's in-laws, on the other hand, like the majority of Barcelona's four thousand or so Jewish residents, lived in this city within a city.¹⁶ There, they could depend on the presence of their coreligionists and on the facilities that were central to their religious practice, including their own butcher shops, ovens, and a house dedicated to instruction in religious law, as well as the baths that the community maintained just outside the call major near the Castell Nou gate and, well outside the medieval city itself, the Jewish cemetery that gave its name to the hill of Montjuïc. But the heart of Barcelona's Jewish settlement was its network of synagogues. Barcelona's main synagogue was located near the center of the call major, but as the community's population grew, so did the number of synagogues. By the late fourteenth century, the call major was home to at least three, with an additional one located in the call menor.¹⁷ These facilities were more than the center of the Jewish community's spiritual life; they were also hubs of civic life where the hazan, the official who presided over important ceremonies, read out important community announcements ranging from election results to royal decrees to sentences of excommunication.¹⁸

Bonadona was also part of Barcelona's aljama, the institutional counterpart to the more tangible physical structure of the call. In the Crown of Aragon, as in other places in Iberia and beyond, the Jews of any given city or town organized themselves into administrative bodies that elected or appointed their own officials to govern internal matters and to liaise with the Christian royal and municipal governments. The monarchs, for their part, had organized the various Jewish aljamas into collectas: multi-community regions responsible for raising the funds for royal taxes.¹⁹ But despite this fiscal consolidation from above, each of these aljamas operated independently. In the early fourteenth century, the Barcelona aljama was run by a three-member panel of secretaries (neëmanim) who regulated internal community matters and apportioned tax liability for the collecta as a whole. Judicial authority lay in the hands of the aljama's judges (beruim), who had jurisdiction over internal cases and could punish serious offenders with excommunication, exile, or even corporal or capital punishment, though the latter two required ratification by royal courts and the punishment (which the king had the power to commute to exile) had to be carried out by royal officials.²⁰

The city that Bonadona belonged to, while in part demarcated by the physical boundaries of the calls and the administrative reach of the aljama and collecta, could also be defined by broader geographic parameters. As the daughter and niece of men with business connections beyond the city, Bonadona would have been aware of how Jewish Barcelona, like the city as a whole, was enmeshed in webs of association that spanned the region and even the broader Mediterranean.²¹ Strong personal and professional connections existed between the Jewish communities of Catalonia, Valencia, Mallorca, and southern France, and Catalan Jews, especially those from Barcelona, were active as traders in the ports of Iberia, Sardinia, Sicily, North Africa, and even the Levant.²² This geographic reach is, at times, visible in records of run-ins that Barcelona's Jews had with authorities while abroad. In 1302, for example, three Barcelona Jews were charged with having insulted a Christian priest and other persons while in Alexandria.²³ And in 1305, eight Jewish traders were named among a group of eighteen merchants or merchants’ agents who had been caught taking part in an illegal trading mission to the Mamluk sultanate. The charges specify the home city for only one of these merchants, Vidal Bonsenyor of Tortosa. But the fact that the patron of the ship in question was a member of Barcelona's Marquet family, together with the fact that the pardon for these merchants was negotiated by three citizens of Barcelona, makes it likely that many of the merchants who took part in this illicit voyage, including the other Jews on board, hailed from Barcelona.²⁴

While Barcelona's Jewish community, like the city as a whole, was well-integrated into the broader networks of the Mediterranean region, some of its deepest and most durable bonds were with the Jewish communities of southern France.²⁵ These connections—not just economic but also personal and familial—made Barcelona a primary destination for French Jews who crossed the Pyrenees as refugees from persecution and expulsion. When France's King Philip IV (r. 1285–1314) expelled the Jews from his realms in 1306, Aragon's King James II issued privileges to several Crown aljamas, allowing each to accept a predetermined number of refugee families in exchange for large cash payments from the aljamas to the royal treasury. The most expansive of these privileges went to the aljama of Barcelona, which purchased the right to take in up to sixty new families.²⁶ The population of Barcelona's Jewish community would increase again in the 1320s with the arrival of a second wave of Jewish refugees fleeing the persecutions of the so-called Shepherds (Pastoreaux) in the south of France.²⁷ Not all of these refugees stayed permanently in Barcelona, some opting instead to apply for royal permission to relocate to other Crown cities shortly after arriving.²⁸ Perhaps some of these families had relations or professional connections in other cities. Perhaps they found something stifling in the Barcelona aljama's tightly controlled political climate. Or perhaps, as part of a group of sixty Jewish households added to the three-hundred-plus families already there, some of the new residents simply wanted a less crowded community in which to rebuild their lives and livelihoods. But even after some of the new families had moved on, Barcelona's aljama in the first third of the fourteenth century would have been a much more populous place than it had been in previous decades, its residents a notably more visible—and, to Christian eyes, more foreign—presence within the city at large.

The Jewish community where Bonadona spent her young life in the 1320s and 1330s would have thus been both crowded and cosmopolitan. It was also as socioeconomically heterogeneous as the larger city in which it was embedded, and Bonadona's ties by blood and by marriage would have brought home to her the distinctions of both wealth and status between her family and the other members of her community. The largest proportion of Bonadona's Jewish neighbors were made up of artisans of one sort or another: shoemakers and leather and textile workers, metalsmiths who made everything from simple tableware to fine silver and gold ornaments, and even sculptors of marble and carvers of Sardinian coral.²⁹ While Bonadona's own relatively privileged upbringing meant that she herself probably did not have to work for wages, she would have been aware that other Jewish women and girls were part of the city's broader labor market, working in occupations ranging from moneylending to the textile trade to wet-nursing and domestic service in both Jewish and Christian households.³⁰ The community also had its poor, as evidenced by a handful of charitable institutions, including private and public almonries and a facility that offered care to the indigent sick and infirm.³¹

Bonadona would have encountered coreligionists from most of these walks of life as she grew to young womanhood. Given her family's relative prosperity, she may have even known some of them as servants in her household. But her marriage to Astrug Cresques would draw her into the much more exclusive world occupied by the families who held the levers of political power within her community.³² The Cresques were part of the small circle of families who dominated the aljama's secretarial office in the early fourteenth century. Bonadona's father-in-law, Cresques Astrug (whose name documents sometimes give as Cresques Abaniri or Abamari), served as secretary at least once, in 1302, and her husband's maternal grandfather, Cresques Enoch, was secretary at least three times: in 1316, 1326, and 1330.³³ Other members of the community's politically connected class were employed by the Crown itself—even as royal bailiffs, the officials in charge of the king's fiscal affairs at the local level. It was not, in fact, until 1283–1284 that King Peter II/III, under pressure from his nobles and needing their support in the face of an impending French invasion, officially excluded Jews from the office of royal bailiff together with all public posts that could have given them fiscal or judicial authority over Christians. But even after this point, Jews continued to serve in other important court posts, especially as diplomats, translators, scribes, and interpreters.³⁴

If Bonadona's new family was part of a politically powerful elite within the Jewish community, her family of origin represented a secondary elite of wealth, a group of families within Barcelona's Jewish community who were prosperous but not politically powerful. The wealth of many of these women and men, like that of their counterparts among the city's Christian population, was often built on commerce, either through direct involvement as merchants or indirectly as investors in trading ventures, especially in luxury goods like silk, furs, leather, spices, and occasionally books.³⁵ The documents surrounding Bonadona's divorce litigation tell us nothing of her maternal lineage, but both her father and uncle had financial dealings that extended at least as far as Cervera.³⁶ The extent of the Sollem Cohen family's wealth is hinted at by a document that suggests they were able to provide Bonadona with a substantial dowry. In May 1330, Bonadona's future husband, Astrug Cresques, agreed to purchase a home in Barcelona's call major from his maternal grandparents, Cresques Enoch and Reina, for the sum of 5,000 sous. Astrug paid his grandparents 1,000 sous up front, promising to pay the remaining 4,000 once his promised bride had reached the age of twelve, at which time he could marry her and collect her dowry.³⁷ While Bonadona's dowry may not have accounted for the entire 4,000 sous, it is at least possible: Bonadona's uncle Solomon cosigned the note on the house, obligating himself financially, likely as the member of Bonadona's family responsible for delivering the dowry that would be passed on to Astrug Cresques's grandparents in payment of the debt.³⁸

This arrangement to underwrite Astrug Cresques's home purchase, like the marriage itself, may have been designed to put a lid on the simmering enmity between the two families. But things began to fall apart just as Barcelona's bad year was getting underway. In mid-May of 1333, Astrug Cresques borrowed 4,000 sous from his father, agreeing to repay the full amount within the year and offering as collateral the houses in the call that he had received from his maternal grandparents. The amount of the loan, identical to the amount Astrug Cresques originally owed on the house he had purchased from his grandparents, suggests that Bonadona's family might have failed to pay the promised dowry, leaving Astrug to come up with some way to pay off the debt. There are, however, several inconsistencies. First, while the original property transfer stipulated the sale of a single house, the agreement between Cresques and his father makes reference to multiple houses in the call. More crucially, this second document makes no mention of any financial obligation still owed on the houses in question, characterizing them instead as a gift from Astrug's grandparents.³⁹ Regardless of whether the money Astrug Cresques borrowed from his father was intended for Cresques and Reina, they apparently never received payment of the initial loan because, on June 5 of that year, Cresques Enoch's agent Vital Mosse approached Bonadona's uncle Solomon and demanded payment of the 4,000 sous he had cosigned for.⁴⁰

At this crucial juncture, Astrug Cresques was nowhere to be found. Sometime after receiving the loan of 4,000 sous from his father in mid-May, Astrug had departed Barcelona, leaving both his debts and his young wife behind.⁴¹ The fallout from this apparent abandonment highlights the role that gender played in Bonadona's experience of the layered communities she inhabited. Throughout Catalonia and in the northwestern Mediterranean more generally, most Jewish women's lives centered on home and family, part of a broader gender dynamic that emphasized male dominance.⁴² Bonadona's experience of having to convince her husband to divorce her rather than the other way around is one illustration of the patriarchal structure of medieval Jewish marriage. So, too, is the fact that, under certain circumstances, such as infertility, men could petition the royal courts for permission to take a second wife.⁴³ On the other hand, recent scholarship has pointed out the many ways in which medieval Jewish women could exercise agency within this broader structure, including taking action to end an unhappy marriage and set up a financially stable second act in their lives.⁴⁴ Rabbinical authorities generally discouraged men from being away from home for more than a year, so although Astrug Cresques had been gone only about a month when Bonadona's father came before the royal officials for the first time, Bonadona eventually could have petitioned the Jewish courts to sue on her behalf if her husband's absence from the marital household continued. Jewish women could also plead for intervention on the grounds of impotence, excessive violence or cruelty, habitual infidelity, or religious apostasy.⁴⁵ A Jewish woman who wanted her husband to divorce her could even force the issue by making herself into a “rebellious wife”—refusing to have sex with her husband or to perform household duties, or both—although doing so would entail forfeiting at least part of the financial settlement provided for in her marriage contract.⁴⁶

The fact that the negotiations and litigation surrounding Bonadona's marriage and divorce were all handled by the men in her life does cast some doubt on whether historians’ recent arguments for Jewish women's agency applied to her case. But it is important in this regard to note that Bonadona was very young at the time of her divorce litigation, probably somewhere between twelve and fifteen years old. Her world would have broadened as she grew older, presenting her with more opportunities for personal and financial agency. Widows were the most economically active group among Jewish women, especially when acting as guardians for minor children and administrators of estates left to them by their husbands, positions that invested them with the sort of legal and economic power most often associated with men. But even as a married woman, Bonadona would have taken an active role in the operation of her new household and any businesses associated with it, either on her own or with the aid of procurators. Married Jewish women in Catalonia were, in fact, active in several areas of economic life, including property ownership, moneylending, and artisan and provisioning trades—albeit often in partnership with their husbands or male relatives.⁴⁷

Bonadona was also, like many Jewish women, an agent of connectivity. Just as Bonadona's marriage had likely been designed to heal a rift between two families within the city, Jewish women's marriages could bind Barcelona's Jews to their broader Mediterranean community. Exogamous marriage was relatively common among the Jewish communities of the northwestern Mediterranean, especially between Barcelona's aljama and those of southern France.⁴⁸ In one case from 1298, James II granted a safe-conduct to Astrug Vidal, a member of Barcelona's aljama who was returning from Montpellier after having traveled there to marry Dolça, the daughter of Samuel Saccall. The royal safe-conduct allowed Astrug security for both himself and his new bride, as well as for the dowry of 6,000 sous that they were bringing back to Barcelona with them.⁴⁹ Alliances like these tended to work for the benefit of the male relations of the women involved rather than for the brides, who found themselves separated from family networks that provided not only emotional support but also protection for their assets.⁵⁰ But while some of Barcelona's Jewish women, like Dolça, seem to have been only passive participants in these intercommunal ties that their marriages helped to forge or strengthen, others actively drew on and reinforced connections beyond Barcelona's borders. In 1295, the Barcelona aljama granted special permission for the widow Avigata to acquire a piece of real estate in Mallorca's call and to travel to Mallorca to arrange her daughter's marriage in person.⁵¹ It may be that Avigata—an uncommon name among Catalan Jewish women—was herself originally from Mallorca and had, like Dolça, relocated from her home to Barcelona on the occasion of her own marriage. As a widow, however, she was able to draw on connections well outside the Barcelona aljama to negotiate a marriage for her daughter, just as someone else may have previously used her marriage to reinforce connections between the two communities.

Bonadona's silence in the documents makes it impossible to know where she fell on the spectrum of agency embodied by these two Jewish women from Barcelona. In fourteenth-century Barcelona, where widows were the only Jewish women who regularly engaged in public economic or legal activities without a male relative as a partner, a wife like Bonadona, one with no husband, might well have sought a way out of her marriage.⁵² On the other hand, the divorce may not have been Bonadona's idea at all. Other Jewish women in neighboring Catalan towns and throughout medieval Iberia had made a life of situations like hers, taking charge of households, finances, and even marriage arrangements while their husbands traveled, often for long stretches of time.⁵³ It was, after all, Bonadona's father, not Bonadona herself, who brought his daughter's case before the royal courts. In doing so, he may have seen himself as protecting his young daughter, no different from the many other Jewish men who remained engaged in the lives of their betrothed or newly married female relations and who actively defended their interests before, during, and (if necessary) after a marriage.⁵⁴ It is also possible that Bonadona's father and uncle had their own reasons for trying to end the union, reasons that had nothing to do with Bonadona's interests or her personal happiness. The fact that her father lodged his petition with the royal courts only days after the Cresques family had insisted that her uncle make good on the financial obligation he had cosigned for suggests that the men of Bonadona's family were acting at least in part in their own interests, attempting to put an end to what had become a financially inconvenient partnership.⁵⁵

Whatever the reason behind the divorce proceedings, the fact that Astrug Cresques had left town and showed no sign of returning any time soon complicated efforts to end the marriage. While some rabbinical authorities allowed a third party to deliver a decree of divorce if a husband was away for an extended period, the Barcelona rabbis at this time required a husband to divorce his wife in person.⁵⁶ The leaders of Barcelona's aljama do not seem to have offered Bonadona any assistance in this regard, possibly due to the Cresques family's political influence or maybe because Astrug's travels—the documents of this case do not say where he went—took him beyond the reach of the aljama's authority. Either way, Astrug Cresques's absence meant that Bonadona's divorce, normally a matter entirely internal to the Jewish community, was going to enmesh her in the larger structures of Christian authority in which Barcelona's nominally independent Jewish aljama was embedded.

The “Royal Treasure”

When Bonadona's family found themselves unable to track down Astrug Cresques, they turned to the king, whose authority over the city's Jews extended beyond the reach of the leaders of Barcelona's aljama. Catalonia had long been peppered with quasi-independent seigniorial and ecclesiastical territories whose lords claimed jurisdiction in legal and fiscal matters concerning the Jews living in their territories. Over the course of the thirteenth century, however, the kings of Aragon had used a combination of litigation, trades, and outright purchases to bring more of the Crown's Jewish communities into their orbit. By the time Bonadona's case surfaced in the 1330s, the majority of the Crown's Jewish residents fell under the king's direct jurisdiction: they were, by law and custom, servi regis, “servants [or slaves] of the king”; they, and the income to the Crown they represented, constituted a “royal treasure.”⁵⁷

The litigation surrounding Bonadona's divorce was only the latest chapter in a long history of internal disputes that had pulled the Crown's monarchs into the factional infighting within the Barcelona community.⁵⁸ Bonadona would have been too young to remember, but her father, as he brought his daughter's case before the royal courts, would have surely recalled another recent encounter between Barcelona's Jewish community and royal authority, one that had shaken the aljama's political structure to its foundations. In 1327, certain members of the Barcelona aljama had complained to King James II that Astrug Cresques's grandfather, Cresques Enoch, and the other secretaries of the aljama had been apportioning individual tax liabilities in a manner that was both unfair and corrupt. The king initially ruled in favor of the secretaries, who had claimed that the accusations were just a ploy for the plaintiffs to go digging around in their account books to find other malicious accusations to make.⁵⁹ But by mid-August of that same year, James had become convinced that there would be no tranquility in the community until its sitting leaders were gone. Only seven weeks after his initial ruling and less than three months before his death, the king declared a new form of organization for the aljama, deposing its secretaries, over-secretaries, judges, and tax collectors and ordering immediate elections to name new officers. Once that had been done, the aljama would reorganize itself according to new articles (capitula) that James and his councilors (possibly in consultation with the protest faction) had devised, “inserted in the present privilege in the vulgar tongue in order that, any interpretation or elaboration having been forestalled, they will be clear to all.” Among numerous other reforms, the new constitution granted election oversight to a council of thirty aljama members and spelled out the mechanisms for assessing individual responsibility within the collecta for paying the king's taxes. As a final step, James ordered that the community pronounce an official ban on anyone who transgressed these new ordinances: no Jew would be allowed to pray within four alnes (approximately twelve feet) of violators, nor contract marriage with them or anyone of their line, nor could offenders be buried in the Jewish cemetery.⁶⁰

Although Bonadona would have still been a little girl when all this was going on, she might have been old enough to sense the tension in her small community. The Barcelona dispute and the new constitution it spawned were part of a wave of internal reforms that had swept through the various Jewish communities of the Crown of Aragon in the decades around 1300 as Jews not belonging to their respective aljamas’ ruling elites agitated for greater participation in communal government.⁶¹ The Barcelona community seems to have been particularly conflict-prone: in an exasperated aside to the preamble to the Barcelona document, King James complains of how often he has been required to personally step in and settle that community's internal disputes.⁶² It is quite possible that the 1327 dispute would have reached Bonadona's own home. As a family on the outside of the circles that dominated high office within the aljama, the Sollem Cohens would have had a stake in challenging the status quo, and their relative prosperity would have made the tax apportionment issue, in particular, a relevant one. Add to this the fact that the Cresques family's accusations against Astrug Sollem Cohen regarding weapons—accusations that he had characterized as defamatory—had arisen not long after these protests, and it is reasonable to suppose that Bonadona's own father had been part of the faction protesting the secretarial regime before the king.

For all that King James declared that he issued the new constitution jointly with “our dearest firstborn [sic], the illustrious Prince Alfonso,” the future king does not actually seem to have been directly involved in any way. A postscript added to the chancery register copy of the new constitution makes it clear that it was not until almost two weeks later that James sat down to write Alfonso a short note explaining what he had done, only then troubling to send his son and heir a full copy of the order that bore his name.⁶³ This after-the-fact notification may not have disturbed Alfonso, who overall seems to have been more interested in military campaigns than the administrative and diplomatic wrangling that was his father's strong suit. But Alfonso began to take greater notice of Barcelona's Jewish community, in particular when he became king and needed its resources to finance his wars both in the peninsula and in the Mediterranean, and this closer attention would soon have an impact on the community's finances. In January 1333, several Catalan aljamas pleaded poverty in the face of frequent and often extraordinarily large financial subsidies that Alfonso had been demanding from them, a burden made greater when some of their neighbors relocated to ecclesiastical or seigniorial jurisdictions to avoid paying, thereby leaving fewer families to shoulder a greater burden of the royal exactions.⁶⁴

The fiscal strain on the aljamas would have been made worse by the famine itself. Although the royal records do not speak of the direct effect that the famine had on Barcelona's Jewish community, we can assume that Bonadona and her family, like her Christian neighbors, would have already been financially stretched thin by the famine-related shortages and price increases, which were entering a new, more severe phase during the winter months of 1333. Around the same time, in November 1333, in an attempt to determine how much revenue he could extract from the Jews under his jurisdiction, Alfonso ordered Ferrer de Lillet, bailiff-general of Catalonia, to work with the local bailiffs to set up a special registry for Jewish property. The registry—which he implemented in Aragon and Valencia as well—went beyond mere calculations of cash on hand, extending to commercial goods ranging from furs and silk to bread, wine, oil, and even instruments of financial obligation. Material wealth left unreported to the registry after three months would be subject to confiscation; debt instruments or contract obligations not bearing the registry's seal would be declared invalid and thus financially worthless. Alfonso even took into account the personal and business connections that extended beyond the borders of any particular Jewish community by inserting a provision requiring Jews who fell under seigniorial or ecclesiastical jurisdiction to report any money or debt instruments they had received from the king's Jews, citing a widespread rumor that Barcelona's Jews in particular had been placing their goods with friends and relations who lived in areas outside royal jurisdiction in order to shelter their wealth from the royal audit.⁶⁵

The relative privilege of both the Cresques and Sollem Cohen families may have allowed them to weather some of the higher prices. But either family may also have participated in some of the acts of resistance to the king's audit that took place that winter, as Jews from throughout the Crown filed protests and requests for extensions before royal officials.⁶⁶ This widespread stalling, combined with the relocation of many Jewish families to aljamas outside royal jurisdiction in order to avoid having to register their wealth, would eventually prompt Alfonso to fold the registry, acknowledging the “great damage to Our court, and nuisance to its aljamas” that his decree had caused.⁶⁷ But this would not happen until 1335. In the meantime, the royal response to famine itself was making life difficult for the Crown's Jews in other, less direct ways. In the summer of 1333, right around the time that Bonadona's father first brought her case before the royal courts, the king began to receive reports from his subjects in agricultural regions throughout the Crown that the harvest shortfalls had left them unable to pay their debts. In response, the king ordered his royal officials to temporarily suspend their enforcement of any private debts.⁶⁸ In granting these temporary extensions, Alfonso specified some exceptions: dowries, real estate sales, and testamentary bequests, among others. But most significant here is Alfonso's stipulation that these temporary pauses in debt collection only applied to debts owed to Christians. Because Alfonso depended on money he could collect from the Crown's Jewish communities, he allowed Jews to continue to collect on debts even while all other collections were frozen.⁶⁹

These royal policies may have made little impression on Bonadona in late 1333, preoccupied as she must have been with her divorce and, if she had not returned to her natal home, with provisioning the husbandless household she was now mistress of at a time when there was little grain to be had. But she could not have failed to note the growing tension between Jews and Christians in the city. In contrast to what would take place later, during the plague pandemic of 1348, the Christians of Catalonia did not blame the Jews for bringing the famine. They did, however, resent the fact that their Jewish creditors could still legally collect on their debts during what was otherwise a general moratorium. Throughout the Crown, Christian debtors began to refuse to pay, and local royal officials seemed in no hurry to enforce their obligations.⁷⁰ In early 1334, the Barcelona aljama, its members now stretched to the financial breaking point by a combination of royal taxes and famine, and faced with inaction on the part of royal officials, sent emissaries to Teruel to plead their case before the king in person.⁷¹ Whether the aljama's representatives made their appeal to the king's compassion, to his coffers (the incomes from the Barcelona collecta alone sometimes approached the total owed by all the other Catalan collectas combined), or just to his attachment to having his orders followed, they appear to have been convincing.⁷² On March 1, the king wrote to one of his officials, Joan Garcès, asserting that the Jews of Barcelona had nothing left with which to pay their many expenses and informing Garcès that he wanted Barcelona's veguer to appoint judges to hear the Jews’ cases against their Christian creditors.⁷³ A week later, he granted the aljama permission to issue high-yield bonds (violaris) to pay for the most recent round of subsidies.⁷⁴ And on March 10, 1334, the king wrote to both the veguer and the bailiff of Barcelona. Referencing the “great harm” done to Barcelona's Jewish community by Christians who were refusing to pay their debts, Alfonso ordered his officials in that city to enforce payment and to hear any legal disputes using summary procedure to speed the resolution. He further ordered royal officials throughout his lands to revoke any extensions of debts owed to the Jews of Barcelona, as such extensions would have been contrary to the privileges enjoyed by that aljama in particular.⁷⁵

It is likely that Alfonso's aid to Barcelona's Jews was part of a larger deal struck at this same meeting. Less than two weeks later, Alfonso would demand a staggering 100,000-sou subsidy from the Barcelona collecta.⁷⁶ But even as the king addressed this one source of interfaith tension, another of his policies designed to protect his “royal treasure” during the famine year continued to undermine relations between the Crown's Christian and Jewish subjects. In February 1334, Alfonso issued an emergency royal policy that allowed Jews under his jurisdiction to defer payment on debts they owed to Christians so that they could pay the subsidies he needed for his wars; this gave rise to numerous appeals for relief on the part of Christian debtors.⁷⁷ In one apparently personal case, the king granted an exemption solely on the basis of a debtor's service in the campaign to annex Sardinia in the 1320s—the very expedition that Alfonso himself had led to victory when he had been crown prince.⁷⁸ But most cases were more straightforward, with Alfonso ruling in favor of Christians who could prove that the debts were owed for wages or simple purchases or that the debtor in question was “oppressed by poverty.”⁷⁹

It was at this moment of high tension between financially desperate Jewish and Christian neighbors that Bonadona's case moved into a new stage before the royal courts. While the Jews’ jurisdictional and fiscal relationship with the Crown may have made them a “royal treasure,” the events of the famine year show how that relationship did not exist in a bubble. The Jews of Barcelona could turn to the king for protection during the famine year, but that protection came at a price—literally but also figuratively, in terms of the resentment that it provoked among the city's Christian population. Bonadona's marriage, a matter that should have remained between families within the aljama, was about to become entangled in the push and pull not just of community and family relations or even the broader fiscal and legal ties that bound her community to the king but also of the ways that those various relationships were complicated by the famine-year tensions between Jews and Christians within her city.

The Bride and the Bailiff

Bonadona's life, marriage, and ongoing divorce litigation have so far revealed two of the worlds she moved in—one created by the overlapping local and regional Jewish communities, another by the relationship between the Crown's Jews and the king. But neither world existed in isolation from the city. Barcelona, as Bonadona would have experienced it, comes into sharper focus as her case came before the court of the bailiff. The royal bailiffs had begun as little more than the kings’ rent collectors, supervising the royal properties in their respective bailiwicks. By the late twelfth century, however, they oversaw a significantly broader portfolio of responsibilities, most notably, jurisdiction over any civil cases that touched on royal properties and finances. Their obligations to the royal fisc also meant that the bailiffs were the royal officials who heard most cases involving Jews living in their bailiwick.⁸⁰ But while they worked on behalf of the monarchs, the bailiffs of Barcelona were also bound by oath to the city's Council of One Hundred and operated within the city's social and cultural climate. Barcelona's bailiffs tended to be drawn from the same leading urban families that filled the ranks of Barcelona's council rather than from the ranks of the local minor landholding aristocracy, as was more typical of the veguers.⁸¹ Thus, Bonadona would find her fate in the hands of an official who stood at the nexus of Jews, city, and Crown, and of a court where local dynamics of the city could penetrate into its Jewish residents’ experience of royal paternalism.

During the year-plus that Bonadona's case wound its way through the royal courts, the bailiff of Barcelona was a man named Bernat Llobet. Llobet had been one of the king's scribes when Alfonso appointed him bailiff in January 1333 to replace Pere des Palau, a man with a background as a jurist who had been one of Barcelona's five ruling magistrates in 1323, and who had served his first term as bailiff of Barcelona in late 1325.⁸² Unlike the majority of his predecessors, however, Llobet may have lacked previous experience in city government, as his name does not appear in any of the surviving lists of either the five city magistrates or the broader Council of One Hundred for the first third of the fourteenth century. He may have been a novice to judicial administration as well: in his appointment letter, Alfonso instructed Llobet to coordinate with either the bailiff-general of Catalonia or his lieutenant to get himself up to speed on the Constitutions of Catalonia so that he might uphold them.⁸³

This apparent lack of experience on the part of a key official might have been one of the reasons that Bonadona and her father encountered so many difficulties in their attempts to compel Astrug Cresques to return to Barcelona. As Astrug Sollem Cohen moved his daughter's case from the Jewish community into the royal justice system, his first stop was Catalonia's vice-procurator general, Guillem de Cervelló.⁸⁴ Cervelló routed the case to Llobet, directing him to fetch Astrug Cresques back to Barcelona to face a joint commission of Jewish and Christian jurists who would rule on Bonadona's case. But when Bonadona's father presented a copy of Cervelló's order to the bailiff, Llobet refused to enforce it, citing a safe-conduct he had issued to Cresques upon his departure. This rejection sent Bonadona's representatives back to the royal courts in July of 1333, this time to bring their appeal to King Alfonso himself. The king confirmed that Cervelló had been aware of this safe-conduct, had revoked it when he issued the order, and had notified Cresques of the change. Alfonso made note of all of this in his own letter to Llobet, reinforcing Cervelló's original order that Cresques be detained and brought back to Barcelona.⁸⁵

Llobet's apparent disinterest in attending to Bonadona's case might have stemmed from the knowledge that his official responsibility to protect the king's “royal treasure” could make him the target of anti-Jewish hostility that had been rearing its head in the city over the past several years. In the summer of 1330, some local students had been caught throwing stones at a group of Jews whom the bailiff at the time, Berenguer de Capellades, had been escorting to the church of Sant Just (located about a five-minute walk from the call major) to swear an oath with a group of Christians. In his letter ordering Barcelona's council to find another appropriate location in which to have these oaths sworn, King Alfonso emphasized the contempt for royal authority that the rock-throwers had shown by targeting the bailiff.⁸⁶ The king had to step in again only a few months later, in November 1330, when members of the Barcelona aljama lodged a protest about the numerous daily indignities that the local population had been subjecting them to, both in their homes and in the public roads, noting, in particular, the rock-throwing that was part of this campaign of harassment. This time, Alfonso ordered his officials to arrest and prosecute anyone who was found to have participated in these attacks, once again framing this danger to Jewish life and limb primarily as an insult to his own jurisdiction: “as said Jews are under Our special protection and custody.”⁸⁷

The king may have been at least somewhat justified in viewing the situation in Barcelona through the lens of a servi regis relationship. David Nirenberg has argued that similar rock-throwing attacks on both Jews and the royal bailiffs protecting them were part of an “antiroyalist carnival” and that “the ability to protect dependents was evidence of power, while infringements on that protection were a defiance of that power.”⁸⁸ But regardless of any potential symbolic import, Bonadona and her coreligionists surely experienced these incidents primarily as terror attacks on their community. This impression of their Christian neighbors as an increasingly hostile Other would have only been reinforced when, in that same year of 1330, the Council of Tarragona aimed to harden the boundaries between the two faiths by forbidding Christians living throughout the archdiocese from everything from sharing convivial meals with their Jewish neighbors to attending Jewish weddings and burials and even standing as sponsors at circumcisions.⁸⁹

Bonadona may have struggled to reconcile both the physical and legislative attacks on her community with the more usual relations with her Christian neighbors. Despite a growing interfaith tension since the recent waves of immigration, the Jewish and Christian communities of Barcelona in the early fourteenth century had generally interacted freely with one another, eating and drinking together as well as doing business with each other.⁹⁰ Members of the two faiths also interacted in the world of labor: Barcelona's lawmakers in the 1330s mention Jews without distinction alongside Christians in municipal ordinances regulating the city's commercial brokers, silk dyers, textile merchants, and porters.⁹¹ Christian residents of Barcelona, especially those living in the parish of Santa Maria del Pi where the calls were located, also reported associations that would have been considered less culturally acceptable: a Jewish woman and her daughter who served as fortune tellers for both Jews and Christians and Jews who, under the cover of bringing goods for sale, entered the homes of Christians for sexual assignations.⁹² Even in the city's closely regulated meat industry, there was a remarkable degree of fluidity between the two communities, as Barcelona's Christians patronized the Jews’ secondary meat market located outside the gates of the call major, purchasing meat that the Jewish regulators had rejected on ritual grounds.⁹³ But while this sort of casual daily interaction was a part of young Bonadona's experience of her city, so too was the recent increase in petty harassment that her community had been enduring in the last few years, which ranged from dumping garbage, human waste, or the straw used to absorb it at the gate of the Jewish quarter to the more recent incidents of stoning of the city's Jews.⁹⁴ As a young woman, Bonadona may have found her trips outside the home curtailed or received stern warnings from her father to exercise heightened caution in her encounters with Christian neighbors.

Bonadona and her coreligionists may or may not have been reassured by the Council of One Hundred's many orders forbidding these specific forms of harassment.⁹⁵ But municipal regulations like these should not be interpreted as some civic attempt to construct an urban society built on a foundation of harmonious interfaith pluralism. In the first place, most of these ordinances were passed in collaboration with the bailiffs, who were motivated by their own charge to safeguard the king's Jews (and the income they represented). It is also important to read these ordinances in the context of the council's concern with urban disorder more generally. Other council ordinances from around the same time suggest that the rock-throwing that the Jews experienced was part of a more generalized problem in the years leading up to Bonadona's case, as gangs of young men and boys pelted each other and passers-by in the streets, along the Rec Comtal, at the city gates, and in the city's grain market, even scaling the walls of the convent of Santa Clara to target the nuns inside.⁹⁶ Likewise, the council's anti-dumping ordinance noted the proximity of the calls to the plaça de Sant Jaume, and specifically to the porticos where the city's scribes-for-hire maintained their stalls, opening up the possibility that it was concern for commerce rather than for the Jews that motivated the council in this case.⁹⁷

Whether incidental or intentional, whatever protections these ordinances offered Barcelona's Jews must be balanced against other evidence that suggests that the councilors, far from trying to promote some medieval version of multicultural tolerance, were deeply invested in enforcing a public Christian supremacy. The city's leaders had, since at least the beginning of the century, been trying in vain to get the city's Jews to abide by their own version of the sumptuary laws that had long been a prominent feature of ecclesiastical legislation: a 1303 Barcelona ordinance required Jews to wear a distinctive hooded cloak while in the city, on pain of a fine of 30 sous or thirty days in prison; Jews too poor to afford a full cloak would be permitted to simply wear a yellow hood and cowl and would be fined only 5 sous for noncompliance.⁹⁸ The Council of One Hundred's position on this issue hardened, if anything, as time went on. A 1313 version of this sumptuary legislation required Jews to wear a red or yellow identifying badge the width of a palm on the outer layer of their clothing and increased the penalty for violators who could not pay from imprisonment to whipping.⁹⁹

Flocel Sabaté, pointing out the prominence of other municipal regulations from around the same time that punished blasphemy, gambling, pimping, and other moral transgressions, has suggested that sumptuary ordinances such as these were part of a broader drive on the part of Catalonia's local governments to shape their cities in a manner pleasing to God.¹⁰⁰ Certainly, many of Barcelona's ordinances concerning its Jewish residents seem to have been designed to cast Jews as daily visual reminders of the triumph of Christianity. Bonadona would never have known a time when she was not required by her own city's law to either kneel in submission or hide herself indoors when one of the Christians’ priests passed by bearing the Eucharist. The fact that Barcelona's council felt it necessary to include a provision in this ordinance, passed in 1303, forbidding any Christian from refusing a Jew shelter in their inn or workshop (though not their homes) in such circumstances suggests that, already by the early 1300s, the council was anticipating Christian resistance in some quarters and that beneath the casual daily interfaith interactions flowed an underlying current of animosity waiting to come to the surface.¹⁰¹ By Bonadona's day, the rock-throwers and trash-dumpers among Barcelona's Christian citizens, far from feeling chastened by their municipal government, may have envisioned themselves as its agents in enforcing Christian supremacy. Ordinances from the 1320s that seemingly did no more than hold Jews to the same restrictions as their Christian counterparts by forbidding them from opening their shops for business or working on Sundays or Christian holidays betray their real intent to create a visual rhetoric of Christian supremacy by adding that any work that Jews did on these days should be done indoors and not “in view of Christians nor in a manner that any Christian might see.”¹⁰²

The timing of these latter regulations, however, suggests that this increased interest in regulating the city's Jews was, at least in part, a Christian backlash against the recent waves of French Jewish refugees settling in the city.¹⁰³ Miri Rubin has argued that medieval municipal leaders made a distinction between “neighbors” and “strangers” that grew sharper toward the end of the Middle Ages. The two groups could be defined in relation to their relative distance from a center of full civic inclusion; thus, “strangers” could include not just travelers but also resident foreigners, women—and Jews.¹⁰⁴ In Barcelona, in particular, the early fourteenth century would have seen the Jewish community suddenly increase in both size and foreign-ness. The second wave of French refugees in the 1320s would have included many Jews who had undergone forced conversion at the hands of the Pastoreaux before they fled, and some of these new immigrants took the opportunity of their resettlement in Catalonia to return to Jewish observance. The ambiguous religious status of these new residents drew the eye of the papal inquisition to communities in Barcelona and beyond, where inquisitors levied financial penalties not only on the converts but also on whole Jewish communities like those of Tarragona and Montblanc that encouraged or even facilitated reconversions.¹⁰⁵ The anxiety that this situation prompted in Barcelona, in particular, is evident in municipal ordinances dating from the height of the influx of French refugees, which forbade the city's conversos from entering the calls or the house of any Jew living anywhere in the city, on pain of a fine of 20 sous or twenty days in prison.¹⁰⁶

In short, at the time her case came before the bailiff, Bonadona would have been experiencing a city in which the interweaving of day-to-day conviviality with background hostility had begun to shade into an atmosphere of very real danger, which the controversy over famine-related debt deferments would soon rachet up yet another notch. The bailiff hearing her case, positioned as he was at the intersection of royal governmental authority and municipal aspirations to collective civic piety, and needing to preserve public order (not to mention his own skin) in encounters between the city's Christian and Jewish inhabitants, would have been conscious of the mood in the city. But there are also indications that Bernat Llobet's own sympathies may have been more aligned with the restrictive measures of the city council or even with the open hostility of the rock-throwers than with the Jews he was charged with protecting. Only a few months into his tenure as bailiff, the king began to receive complaints from the Jews of Barcelona that Llobet had been abusing his authority by judicially harassing them, treating them with contempt, exhausting them and their purses with litigation, and even arresting them and holding them for days without informing them of the charges. The Jews emphasized that, although it was the bailiff's job to defend them against violence, he was, in fact, the main instrument of their persecution, contrary to the obligations of his office and contrasting with the approach of his predecessors. Whether Llobet's actions were truly novel is debatable. What is certain is that the king took his Jewish subjects at their word because he wrote to Llobet in late July of 1333, relaying the complaint and ordering him to correct his behavior.¹⁰⁷

Despite frequent complaints and royal rebuke, Llobet hung onto his job through the end of Alfonso's reign.¹⁰⁸ This meant that he was still the royal official charged with the welfare of Barcelona's Jews in October 1334 when Bonadona's father once again sought royal aid in bringing Astrug Cresques back to Barcelona. This time, however, Sollem Cohen went over the bailiff's head, taking his daughter's case directly to Prince Peter, newly arrived in the city after his long convalescence in Lleida.¹⁰⁹ Peter would have had a special interest in the affairs of Barcelona's community, as Alfonso had granted his heir the proceeds arising from litigation or any other exactions imposed on the Jewish aljamas of Barcelona, Girona, and Teruel and their respective collectas, in order to replace the incomes he had lost when Alfonso transferred some of Peter's properties to his infant son Ferdinand.¹¹⁰ The prince thus would have been acutely aware of the personal stake he held in the working relationship between Barcelona's Jewish community and the Crown when he directed Bernat Llobet to impose financial sanctions against Astrug Cresques and his goods and to order all the aljamas of Catalonia to pronounce a sentence of excommunication against Cresques until he appeared before the courts to resolve the matter. That fall, Llobet finally began to assemble the commission of Jewish judges who would work together with the Christian jurist Bartomeu de Amerio on Bonadona's case. Thus it was that, in October of 1334, half a year after the shortages in the city had ended and over a year after Astrug Sollem Cohen had first brought his daughter's case before the royal courts, the prince, acting as procurator general of Catalonia, confirmed Bernat Llobet's appointments to the panel of judges and authorized the group to proceed in their investigation.¹¹¹

Bonadona's tale ends here, with a question mark and without us ever once hearing her voice. We know that her father continued to look after the welfare of his family in a climate of growing hazard for the Jews of Barcelona. In 1341, he petitioned the diocese of Barcelona for a license to hold a full synagogue ritual for the wedding of his nephew (or possibly his grandson), stating that he feared the consequences of holding a ceremony that would include a reading from the Torah outside the call without episcopal permission.¹¹² Barcelona Jews with the surname Cresques continue to appear in the records down to the 1391 attack on the call.¹¹³ As for Bonadona, we do not know the results of her case beyond the fact that she and her father were still fighting for her divorce after the larger crisis of the city's food supply had abated. Her relatively common first name makes her difficult to trace in the records without knowing whom she later married, if she ever did.

Bonadona's experience of Barcelona would be easy to overlook amid all the better-documented civic dramas in this year of crisis, dramas protagonized by the rulers, council members, admirals, and merchants whose lives were more directly connected to the city's attempts to deal with the growing shortages. Lives like Bonadona's, by contrast, surface only briefly, then sink out of sight, seemingly with little impact beyond the parties directly involved. Yet her story is a crucial thread in the urban fabric, as it brings together several issues that characterized the relationship between Barcelona and its Jewish community during the famine year. Bonadona's world was marked by intersectionality: she experienced the city not just as a Jew or as a woman, but as a Jewish woman. Her marriage and divorce gave her a front-row seat to the tangle of competing claims of authority, both official and unofficial, that Barcelona's Jews had to navigate on a daily basis. Her life and the lives of her coreligionists may have been largely ordered by the internal dynamics of Barcelona's Jewish community and, secondarily, by the will of the king, but their experience of the city they lived in was also conditioned by specific events of the early fourteenth century, from the waves of French Jewish refugees to the famine and its economic fallout.

Bonadona may remain in many ways unknowable, but stepping into her life opens up a new way to know the city. The fact that local royal officials exercised jurisdiction over Barcelona's Jews removed those Jews from a direct legal relationship with the city in which they lived. But those same officials were directly embedded in the fraught relationship between the city and its Jewish residents, and that fact could not help but have an effect on Bonadona's life and on the Barcelona that she knew. The city as Bonadona would have experienced it was a mirror of her own personal situation—a tangle of conflicting claims to authority and marginal or contested membership in overlapping communities, surrounded by sometimes unreliable or self-interested partners and protectors, and punctuated by occasional moments of intense confrontation. Barcelona's Jews may have been the crown jewel of the monarchs’ “royal treasure,” but royal authority over Barcelona's Jews during the famine year existed in the form of a largely absent king whose famine-year policies toward the Jews were short-sighted at best, a teenaged crown prince as procurator general, and a bailiff who seemed hostile to the Jewish community's concerns. Tracing the thread of Bonadona's story through its brief appearances in royal, municipal, and notarial records reveals a Barcelona where women and men maintained regular social and economic relationships across confessional lines and where individuals and families were connected well beyond the borders of the city. But these same porous boundaries could heighten tensions, especially in a city where the Jewish population had recently grown in both size and foreign-ness, and where many Christian litigants saw famine-year debt relief measures as favoring the Jews to the detriment of the Christian population. Municipal authorities did offer Jews some protections from harassment and physical violence from their Christian neighbors. But such protections were largely incidental, born out of a desire to preserve civic order rather than out of any special concern for the Jews themselves and offset by other regulations that reinforced the ideology of Christian supremacy promoted by Church councils; this created a fertile climate for outbursts of anti-Jewish violence in the city.

By the end of the fourteenth century, the precarious relationship between Barcelona's Jewish and Christian populations would collapse, and the large and vibrant (if conflict-prone) Jewish community of Barcelona would face near annihilation. But long before that happened, the city leaders’ ability to preserve order would be tested by the famine itself—a test that would draw in the whole community and, like Bonadona's case, would illustrate the wide range of ways that the variety of individuals and groups who made up Barcelona's population did or did not belong to the city.

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1. ACB, Notaris 25, 121r–v (June 5, 1333). Although this document is dated 1333, it refers to the earlier agreement of a loan agreement undertaken in 1330 with Bonadona's anticipated dowry as security.

2. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 555 (October 5, 1328).

3. Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004), 231–40; Sarah Ifft Decker, “Jewish Divorce and Latin Notarial Culture in Fourteenth-Century Catalonia,” in Boundaries in the Medieval and Wider World: Essays in Honour of Paul Freedman, ed. Thomas Barton et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 39–40.

4. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 458, 65r–v (July 25, 1333); this document includes a transcription of the earlier letter, dated June 11 of that year.

5. Aside from Yitzhak Baer's classic two-volume A History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1961), see Maya Soifer Irish, Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile: Tradition, Coexistence, and Change (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2016); Thomas W. Barton, Contested Treasure: Jews and Authority in the Crown of Aragon (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015); and Mark Meyerson, Jews in an Iberian Frontier Kingdom: Society, Economy, and Politics in Morvedre, 1248–1391 (Leiden: Brill, 2004). A notable exception is Elka Klein's Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).

6. Elka Klein's Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power remains the most thorough study in any language of the Barcelona aljama in the pre-1291 period; also crucial for this period is Robert Chazan, Barcelona and Beyond: The Disputation of 1263 and Its Aftermath (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). For the period between 1348 and 1391 in Barcelona, see Anna Rich Abad, La comunitat jueva de Barcelona entre 1348 i 1391 a travès de la documentació notarial (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 1999). Jaume Riera i Sans has published numerous articles on the Jews of Catalonia during the period between 1291–1348, a few of which focus on the Jewish community of Barcelona in particular. These, however, tend to be on relatively narrow topics rather than providing a picture of those Jews’ relations with the Christian-ruled city. Valuable information on the period can also be found in David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Paola Tartakoff, Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250–1391 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). While both books take in the Crown of Aragon as a whole, Barcelona and its community appear frequently throughout.

7. Beyond the ever-growing body of work on the Jewish women of medieval Girona published by the research and writing collaborative of Alexandra Guerson and Dana Wessell Lightfoot, see 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); Elka Klein, “Public Activities of Catalan Jewish Women,” Medieval Encounters 12, no. 1 (2006): 48–61; Renée Levine Melammed, “The Jewish Woman in Medieval Iberia,” in The Jew in Medieval Iberia, 1100–1500, ed. Jonathan Ray (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies, 2011), 257–85; Anna Rich Abad, “Able and Available: Jewish Women in Medieval Barcelona and Their Economic Activities,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 6, no. 1 (2014): 71–86.

8. Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 37.

9. Susan McDonough, “Moving Beyond Sex: Prostitutes, Migration and Knowledge in Late-Medieval Mediterranean Port Cities,” Gender & History 34 (2022): 401–19; Valerie L. Garver, “Girlindis and Alpais: Telling the Lives of Two Textile Fabricators in the Carolingian Empire,” in Writing Medieval Women's Lives, ed. Charlotte Newman Goldy and Amy Livingstone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 155–72.

10. Wendy Anne Warren, “‘The Cause of Her Grief’: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England,” Journal of American History 93 (2007): 1031–49; Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14; Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (New York: Random House, 2022).

11. Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power.

12. Jordi Casanovas, “Propiedades de judíos en el territorio de Barcelona durante los siglos X–XII,” Anuari de filologia (Secció E: estudis hebreus i arameus) 15 (1992): 99–108.

13. Yom Tov Assis, The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Community and Society in the Crown of Aragon, 1213–1327 (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997), 202; Francesc Caballé and Eloi Castells, L’estructura urbana del Call de Barcelona: una aproximació (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona; Museu d’Història de Barcelona, 2015), 9–14; José María Millás Vallicrosa and Francisca Vendrell Gallostra, “La aljama judaica en Barcelona (aljama, qahal, call, ayuntamiento): su organización jurídico-administrativa, su vida económica y religiosa,” Miscellaneoa Barcinonensia 16 (1967): 9–11.

14. Elka Klein, ed., Hebrew Deeds of Catalan Jews, 1117–1316 (Barcelona; Girona: Societat Catalana d’Estudis Hebraics; Patronat Municipal Call de Girona, 2004), 74–88; Josefa Mutgé Vives, La ciudad de Barcelona durante el reinado de Alfonso el Benigno (1327–1336) (Madrid: CSIC, 1987), 152–54.

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), 2:1720.

16. ACB, Notaris 25, 121r–v (June 5, 1333). For source of the overall population estimate, see Baucells i Reig, Vivir en la edad media, 2:1714, where he also notes that this number would have increased in 1306 when King James II allowed up to sixty Jewish families who had been expelled from France to settle permanently in Barcelona's community.

17. David Romano, “La aljama de judíos de Barcelona en el siglo XIV,” in De Sefarad: los judíos de la Corona de Aragón en los siglos XIV–XV, ed. Angelina García and Joan Lerma (Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, 1989), 46–47; Caballé and Castells, L’estructura urbana del Call de Barcelona, 7–9. While the baths remained a Jewish facility, the right to collect their revenues had passed into Christian hands by the beginning of the thirteenth century; Assis, Golden Age, 222–23.

18. Assis, Golden Age, 137–39; Jaume Riera i Sans, “La Sinagoga Major dels jueus de Barcelona en la tradició documental,” Estudis històrics i documents dels arxius de protocols 20 (2002): 13–22. The precise location of the synagogue itself within the larger block is a matter of some controversy; see Jaume Riera i Sans, “La Sinagoga Major dels jueus de Barcelona. Proposta de localització,” Butlletí del Col·legi oficial de doctors i llicenciats en filosofia i lletres i en ciències de Catalunya 9 (1997): 60–71; but also Eduard Riu-Barrera, “La falsa sinagoga de Barcelona,” L’Avenç 270 (June 2002): 78–79, and Caballé and Castells, L’estructura urbana del Call de Barcelona, 7–8.

19. Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 1:215–19; Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 143–48; Mutgé Vives, La ciudad de Barcelona, 146–47. By 1300, Barcelona sat at the head of a collecta that included the major communities, such as Vilafranca, Tarragona and Montblanc, as well as several more minor ones. Assis, Golden Age, 179–85.

20. Romano, “La aljama de judíos de Barcelona,” 47–51; Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 128–31 and 143–61; Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 1:215–19; Millás Vallicrosa and Vendrell Gallostra, “La aljama judaica en Barcelona,” 11–13.

21. Most fundamentally, see S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, vol. 1, Economic Foundations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), esp. 44–47, 164–86, and 211–14; see also Olivia Remie Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 85–96.

22. Eliyahu Ashtor, “The Jews in the Mediterranean Trade in the Later Middle Ages,” Hebrew Union College Annual 55 (1984): 161–65; Stephen Bensch, “A Jewish Merchant in Romania: Isaac Llobell of Barcelona,” in A l’entorn de la Barcelona medieval: estudis dedicats a la doctora Josefina Mutgé i Vives, ed. Manuel Sánchez Martínez, et al. (Barcelona: CSIC, 2013), 143–45; Rebecca Lynn Winer, “Marriage, the Family and the Family Business: Links Between the Jews of Medieval Perpignan and Girona,” in Temps i espais de la Girona jueva: actes del simposi internacional celebrat a Girona, 23, 24 i 25 de Març de 2009, ed. Sílvia Planas i Marcé and Lídia Donat Pérez (Girona: Patronat del Call de Girona, 2011), 246–51.

23. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 199, 95r (June 24, 1302).

24. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 203, 36v–37r (June 8, 1305).

25. Danièle Iancu-Agou, “Relaciones entre las comunidades judías del Languedoc-Provenza y de Cataluña en la Edad Media,” in Granada 1492–1992: del Reino de Granada al futuro del mundo mediterráneo, ed. Manuel Barrios Aguilera and Bernard Vincent (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1995), 157–82; see also Pinchas Roth, “Regional Boundaries and Medieval Halakhah: Rabbinic Responsa from Catalonia to Southern France in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” Jewish Quarterly Review 105 (2015): 72–98.

26. William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last of the Capetians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 200–213 and 233–36; Iancu-Agou, “Relaciones,” 166–73. For Barcelona's privilege, see ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 203, 189v (August 13, 1306). For contrast, Girona and Lleida each received (or purchased) licenses to accept ten new households, Montclús took four, and a handful of other refugee households settled in smaller communities in Solsona, Besalú, Castelló de Empúries, Banyoles, and Valls; Iancu-Agou, “Relaciones,” 166–67.

27. Jaume Riera i Sans, Fam i fe: l’entrada dels pastorells (juliol de 1320) (Lleida: Pagès, 2004); Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 43–51; Iancu-Agou, “Relaciones,” 168–69.

28. See, for example, ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 204, 35r (April 29, 1307).

29. Romano, “La aljama de judíos de Barcelona,” 53.

30. Decker, The Fruit of Her Hands, 109–12; Rich Abad, “Able and Available,” 71–86; Maria del Mar Blasco Ovejero, “La mujer judía en el ámbito laboral de la Edad Media,” in Actes del II congrés per a l’estudi dels jueus en territori de llengua catalana (Barcelona: Institut Europeu de la Mediterrània, 2005), 395–405.

31. Clara Jáuregui, “El ‘heqdeix’ a Barcelona: assistència i caritat jueva als segles XIII–XIV,” Tamid 13 (2018): 171–88; Antoni Cardoner Planas, “El ‘Hospital para judíos pobres’ de Barcelona,” Sefarad 22 (1962): 373–75.

32. Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 53–57 and 117–27.

33. For Cresques Astrug, see ACB Notaris 6, 20v (July 5, 1302). For Cresques Enoch, see ACB Notaris 90, 46r–v (July 30, 1316); Yitzhak Baer, ed., Die Juden im christlischen Spanien. Erster Teil: Urkunden und Regesten, repr. ed. (Westmead, UK: Gregg International, 1970), doc. 182 (pp. 242–43); and ACB Notaris 97, 35v–36r (September 3, 1330).

34. Assis, Golden Age, 13–16. For the 1284 decree as it applied to Barcelona, see Recognoverunt proceres ch. 98 = Privilegios no. 22.

35. Romano, “La aljama de judíos de Barcelona,” 51–53; Decker, The Fruit of Her Hands, 123–24.

36. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 925 (October 20, 1329).

37. ACB, Notaris 25, 121r–v (June 5, 1333), referring to the earlier 1330 agreement. While medieval rabbis disagreed as to whether child marriage or even betrothal was valid or even seemly, Bonadona's marriage at just over twelve years old represents the lower age limit for marriage for girls in practice. Brides this young seem to have been the exception; in neighboring Perpignan, for example, the usual age of marriage for both boys and girls in the Jewish community was around eighteen years old. Sarah Ifft Decker, Jewish Women in the Medieval World: 500–1500 CE (London: Routledge, 2022), 37–39; Rebecca Lynn Winer, Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c. 1250-1300: Christians, Jews, and Enslaved Muslims in a Medieval Mediterranean Town (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 91.

38. ACB, Notaris 25, 121r–v (June 5, 1333). 4,000 sous is well above the median cash dowry of 1,200 sous that Sarah Ifft Decker has found for Barcelona women in general in the first half of the fourteenth century, though it lines up with the average for that same community; see Decker, The Fruit of Her Hands, 30–31.

39. ACB, Notaris 25, 95v–97r (May 11, 1333).

40. ACB, Notaris 25, 121r–v (June 5, 1333).

41. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 458, 65r–v (July 25, 1333); an identical copy appears among the royal letters, dated November 20, 1333: ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2500.

42. Asunción Blasco Martínez, “Queen for a Day: The Exclusion of Jewish Women from Public Life in the Middle Ages,” in Late Medieval Jewish Identities: Iberia and Beyond, ed. Esperanza Alfonso and Carmen Caballero-Navas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 92–99. In Barcelona, this segregation may have even included a separate women's synagogue; see Romano, “La aljama de judíos de Barcelona,” 46–47; Riera i Sans, “La Sinagoga Major,” 20.

43. By Bonadona's lifetime, most rabbinical courts in the Crown were beginning to adopt the centuries-old herem of Mainz Rabbi Gershom b. Yehudah that prohibited both polygamy and divorce without the wife's consent. Moisés Orfali, “Influencia de las sociedades cristiana y musulmana en la condición de la mujer judía,” in Árabes, judías y cristianas: mujeres en la Europa medieval, ed. Celia del Moral (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1993), 79–83.

44. Alexandra Guerson and Dana Wessell Lightfoot, “The Tale of Two Tolranas: Jewish Women's Agency and Conversion in Late Medieval Girona,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 12 (2020): 344–64, esp. 350 and 355–56; Pinchas Roth, “‘My Precious Books and Instruments’: Jewish Divorce Strategies and Self-Fashioning in Medieval Catalonia,” Journal of Medieval History 43 (2017): 548–61; Sarah Ifft Decker, “Between Two Cities: Jewish Women and Exogamous Marriage in Medieval Catalonia,” Journal of Medieval History 45 (2019): 488–501.

45. Eve Krakowski, Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Female Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 241–51; Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 231–40. For rabbinical rules discouraging protracted absences, see Melammed, “The Jewish Woman in Medieval Iberia,” 268–69.

46. Roth, “‘My Precious Books and Instruments,’” 550–51; Decker, “Jewish Divorce and Latin Notarial Culture,” 39–40.

47. Alexandra Guerson and Dana Wessell Lightfoot, “Crises and Community: Catalan Jewish Women and Conversas in Girona, 1391–1420,” Tamid 14 (2019): 112–24; Rich Abad, “Able and Available,” 71–86; Blasco Ovejero, “La mujer judía en el ámbito laboral,” 395–405; Winer, Women, Wealth, and Community, 107–25. See also Cheryl Tallan, “Medieval Jewish Widows: Their Control of Resources,” Jewish History 5, no. 1 (1991): 63–74—though this latter study is primarily based on evidence from northern European Jewish communities, rather than those of the Mediterranean.

48. Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 175–81; Winer, “Marriage, Family and the Family Business,” 245–46.

49. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 196, 151r (March 1, 1298).

50. Decker, “Between Two Cities,” 481–503.

51. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 89, 60v (January 26, 1295).

52. Rich Abad, “Able and Available,” 71–79.

53. Renée Levine Melammed, “Spanish Women's Lives as Reflected in the Cairo Genizah,” Hispania Judaica Bulletin: Articles, Reviews, Bibliography, and Manuscripts on Sefarad 11 (2015): 94–103; Decker, “Between Two Cities,” 488–501.

54. Decker, The Fruit of Her Hands, 54; Winer, Women, Wealth, and Community, 93–96.

55. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 458, 65r–v (July 25, 1333).

56. Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 233.

57. Meyerson, Jews in an Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 8; Barton, Contested Treasure, 12 and 188–213. This conceptualization of Jews as servi regis may have derived from ecclesiastical claims that, due to their supposed betrayal of the Christ, Jews everywhere were servi ecclesiae or “slaves of the Church.” But kings of Aragon could also draw on Visigothic precedents and examples of neighboring kingdoms that explicitly designated Jews as “servants of the [royal] fisc.” Barton, Contested Treasure, 5–6.

58. Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona, 96–148; Assis, Golden Age, 74–75.

59. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 230, 67v–68r (June 29, 1327). For the royal confirmation of the aljama secretaries for that term, see ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 228, 70r (April 1, 1326). For the influence of several of these leadership families in the late thirteenth century, see Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 162–91 and esp. 179–80. In 1333, Alfonso ordered an investigation into the question of whether the former secretaries had ever repaid the funds in question and, if the charges were found to be true—that is, if the seven secretaries had never paid back any ill-gotten funds—they were to be removed from any office they currently held and not be allowed to hold any other (ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 463, 256r–v [May 2, 1333]). When August arrived and the Jews of Barcelona claimed that there had been no progress, the king once again wrote to Gerald de Palau, reiterating his order to find out whether the secretaries should be punished or whether the accusation itself was malicious calumny (ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2376 [August 16, 1333]).

60. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 230, 106r–107v (August 18, 1327), 106r.

61. Assis, Golden Age, 82–85.

62. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 230, 106r (August 18, 1327).

63. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 230, 106r–107v (August 18, 1327), 106r; postscript to Alfonso at 107v (September 1, 1327). The king's use of the term primogenito here can only refer to Alfonso's status as heir-apparent rather than actual birth order; he was, as noted in chapter 4, the second-born child of James II.

64. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 485, 288v–291r (January 8–13, 1333).

65. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 487, 209v–212r (November 14, 1333); the next several folios (through 217v) contain similar orders to both royal officials and to the leaders of several other aljamas throughout the Crown of Aragon.

66. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 488, 94v–96r (February 18, 1335); 94v for Barcelona in particular.

67. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 488, 94v–96r (February 18, 1335).

68. See, for example, ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 463, 195v–196r (June 13, 1333) and ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2277 (June 15, 1333) for northern Catalonia; ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2293 (June 20, 1333) for the town of Salvaterra in Aragon; ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 458, 123 terç v (August 22, 1333) for the county of Urgell; and ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 464, 48v (March 11, 1334) for Girona.

69. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 464, 48v (March 11, 1334), and Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2293 (June 20, 1333).

70. See, for example, ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 459, 212v (September 24, 1333) and Reg. 460, 96v (December 8, 1333).

71. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 464, 48v (March 10, 1334); ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2162 (March 9, 1334).

72. Assis, Golden Age, 179–84.

73. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 464, 42r (March 1, 1334).

74. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 487, 252v (March 7, 1334).

75. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 464, 48v (March 10, 1334); ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 2162 (March 9, 1334).

76. AHCB, Consell de Cent, Manuals 3, 46v (March 21, 1334).

77. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 464, 10v–11r (February 17, 1334). Alfonso had issued a similar debt extension the previous year (ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 458, 38r–v [July 27, 1333]), but the February 1334 document is the first that explicitly mentions the costs of war as a reason for his unusually large demands on his Jewish subjects in this instance. Alfonso had devised a similar carve-out for Barcelona's Jews at the time of his wedding to Eleanor of Castile, granting them a six-month extension on any debts up to 10,000 sous that they, either individually or collectively, owed to Christians, so that community members could devote their resources to paying the wedding subsidy he demanded. ACA, Cancelleria, Lletres reials, Alfons III, 821 (June 7, 1329).

78. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 458, 40r–v (July 8, 1333).

79. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 464, 87r (April 13, 1334); and Reg. 465, 190v–191r (May 15, 1334) and 271r (June 18, 1334).

80. Stephen Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 1096–1291 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 69–72; Jesús Lalinde Abadía, La jurisdicción real inferior en Cataluña (Corts, veguers, batlles) (Barcelona: Ayuntamiento Museo de Historia de la Ciudad, 1966), 125–26; Mutgé Vives, La ciudad de Barcelona, 198–202; Víctor Ferro, El dret públic català: les institucions a Catalunya fins al Decret de Nova Planta (Vic: Eumo, 1987), 123–25. The city council for 1333/1334 acknowledged the bailiff's right to collect the fines from offenses concerning the fish market, the sale of grain, the shipyards, and the Rec comtal, as well as a more general supervision of the city's marina district; see AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 32r–35r (January 12, 1334).

81. Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 321–22; José Serra Roselló, Cronología de los “veguers” de Barcelona (Barcelona: Instituto Municipal de Historia, 1961), 9–12.

82. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 507, 136v–137v (January 13, 1333) for Llobet's appointment as bailiff; AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 1r (November 30, 1323) for des Palau as councilor; and Llibre 9, 3v (December 5, 1325) for his first term as bailiff. Des Palau swore oaths as bailiff before the councilors the following year (AHCB, Llibre del Consell 10, 2v [December 18, 1326]), and again in 1332 (AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 4r [December 3, 1332]), though it is unclear whether he served other years between the two oaths, due to a five-year gap in the surviving council books.

83. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 507, 136v–137v (January 15, 1333). NB: the surviving council registers are incomplete, missing about half of the years between 1301–1334, which makes it impossible to say for certain whether Llobet had ever served on the council.

84. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 458, 65r–v (July 25, 1333, reprinting original letter from June 12, 1333). In theory, the decision to litigate an internal matter before the royal courts opened Sollem Cohen up to charges of being an “informer” (malshinut), a charge that, at least theoretically, could result in exile or death; see Elena Lourie, “Mafiosi and Malsines: Violence, Fear, and Faction in the Jewish Aljama of Valencia in the Fourteenth Century,” in Crusade and Colonisation: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Aragon (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1990), 69–72; and Millás Vallicrosa and Vendrell Gallostra, “La aljama judaica en Barcelona,” 11–13. In practice, however, Jewish men and women living in both Christian and Islamic jurisdictions throughout the Mediterranean regularly took their cases before secular courts, which offered a range of penalties and greater enforcement mechanisms, as well as a separation from internal factional disputes of the Jewish community that could swing a case one way or the other; see Rena N. Lauer, Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 111–24; Oded Zinger, “‘She Aims to Harass Him’: Jewish Women in Muslim Legal Venues in Medieval Egypt,” AJS Review 42 (2018): 159–92; Roth, “‘My Precious Books and Instruments,’” esp. 548–49.

85. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 458, 65r–v (July 25, 1333).

86. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 437 130r–v (June 24, 1330).

87. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 440 205r–v (November 11, 1330).

88. Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 222.

89. Josep Maria Pons i Guri, “Constitucions conciliars tarraconenses (1229–1330),” Analecta sacra tarraconensia 48 (1975): 346–47 (1330). The Constitutions’ use of the phrase compaternitatis vinculum in their prohibition indicates that the authors saw Christian participation in circumcision rituals as analogous to standing as godparents, something that, in their view, would have formed an unacceptable spiritual kinship. For a comparison of the role of the Christian godparent and that of the Jewish ba’al brit, see Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 65–83.

90. Baucells i Reig, Vivir en la edad media, 2:1717.

91. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 11, 1r–v, 16r, and 41v (undated ordinances, 1330–1331); this final provision also mentions Muslims among Barcelona's porters.

92. ADB, Visites Pastorals 1/1, 11v (1303), as cited in Josep M. Martí i Bonet and Leandro Niqui, Glossa a Ponç de Gualba. Visites pastorals (1303–1330) (Barcelona: Bubok, 2017), 250.

93. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 4, 18r (February 18, 1317). The council did pass numerous restrictions prohibiting Jewish butchers from selling their product at other butcher shops in the city and ruling that the Jewish butchers who operated this shop had to sell their meat to Christians at the same price as the same meat was sold at the Christian markets (see AHCB, Llibre del Consell 2, 7r [December 10, 1310]; 4, 18r [February 18, 1317]; and 13, 17v [December 7, 1333]). But these restrictions themselves may also be read as evidence that many Christians did not hesitate to purchase meat from Jewish butchers.

94. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 31r (June 9, 1324); 9, 30v (March 15, 1326); 10, 21v (July 23, 1327); and 12, 35r ([July 31?] 1333) for refuse dumping; Llibre 7, 25v (February 13, 1322) for rock-throwing.

95. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 7, 25v (February 13, 1322).

96. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 21r (December 7, 1332) and 13, 23r (December 18, 1333) for city gates; Llibre 9, 21r (August 8, 1326) for the grain market; and Llibre 6, 16r ([February/March?] 1320) for Santa Clara.

97. AHCB Llibre del Consell 10, 21v (July 23, 1327). The entrance to the call was not the only place that filth accumulated; the street of the Born near the construction site of Santa Maria del Mar seemed to be another popular dumping area. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 9, 30r (February 6, 1326 [?]); AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 35v (July 1333).

98. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 1, 93v–94r (March 22, 1303).

99. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 2, 41v–42r (May 19, 1313).

100. Flocel Sabaté, “L’ordenament municipal de la relació amb els jueus a la Catalunya baixmedieval,” in Cristianos y judíos en contacto en la Edad Media: polémica, conversión, dinero y convivencia (Lleida: Milenio, 2009), 758–75; see also Nikolas Jaspert, “El Consell de Cent i les institucions eclesiàstiques: cap a una visió comprensiva,” Barcelona quaderns d’història 4 (2001): 112–14.

101. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 1, 93v–94r (March 22, 1303).

102. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 30v (June 9, 1324), and 10, 33r–v (June 9, 1326).

103. Riera i Sans, Fam i fe, 26–31; Iancu-Agou, “Relaciones,” 168–69; Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews, 233–36; see also Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 49–50 and 66–68.

104. Miri Rubin, Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); esp. 50–70 for Jews as “strangers.”

105. Maria Josep Estanyol i Fuentes, Els jueus catalans: les seves vivències i influència en la cultura, l’economia i la política dels reialmes catalans (Barcelona: PPU, 2009), 96–97; Tartakoff, Between Christian and Jew, 117–31.

106. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 6, 6r (January 26, 1320); and 10, 33v (June 9, 1326). The council books go silent on this issue for several years (though it may have been part of some of the volumes now lost) until taking it up again in 1332 and reinforcing it in 1333. See AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 20v (December 1332) and 13, 22v (December 1333).

107. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 458, 138r–v (July 27, 1333).

108. Mutgé Vives, La ciudad de Barcelona, 206. The Council of One Hundred also had tried to get the king to remove Llobet from his post. See AHCB, Consellers, Miscel·lànea 6/5, no. 2 (April 10, 1334) and this book, chapter 4.

109. ACA, C, Reg. 571, 97r–v (October 24, 1334). In the spring of that year, the secretaries of the aljama—including one Salamó Cresques—had brought legal action against Bonadona's father for a debt of 434 sous that they said he still owed to his son-in-law; AHCB, Consell de Cent, Manuals 3, 43r (March? 1334).

110. Alfonso excluded from this grant the incomes from the Jews of Montblanc: even though it fell within the collecta of Barcelona, it lay in the domains that he had granted to Queen Eleanor at the time of their marriage. The king also inserted a provision that if he, as king, needed to levy a special subsidy from the aljamas, Peter would have the first 50,000 sous, with the rest going to the king for whatever major expense the subsidy was designed to fund. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 551, 4v–5r (April 11, 1330).

111. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 571, 97r–v (October 24, 1334).

112. ADB, Registres Communium 9, 163v (May 16, 1341); see also Baucells i Reig, Vivir en la edad media, 2:1720.

113. See references throughout Rich Abad, La comunitat jueva de Barcelona.