Introduction“The First Bad Year”

In that time, the year of our Lord 1334, famine arose in the land, so that the measure of wheat in some places sold for 60 sous and in others 100. And even so, there was a great mortality of men because of the various infirmities and tribulations that they suffered, for which reason many fortifications and [other] places lay abandoned. And likewise there was much dissent and discord among men, one against the other.¹

So reads a small section of a chronicle written by the fourteenth-century Catalan friar Bartomeu de Canals. Another Catalan chronicler briefly interrupted a terse year-by-year reporting of events to lapse into verse for the year 1334, stylistically underlining the pathos of the famine year: “In the year one thousand three hundred thirty / four, the country withered and the people starved. / They could not get bread, so they scrounged for grasses and seeds: /from these things people ate, so cruelly did the famine strike them.”² A third chronicler, this one from the city of Girona, was more succinct: “In the year 1333, there was a shortage of all foodstuffs, and among ourselves we called this ‘the first bad year.’”³

These references to extraordinary prices, strange diets, sickness, high death tolls, and abandoned castles and villages will resonate with anyone familiar with medieval Europe's Great Famine: a cycle of harvest failures that ravaged the lands north of the Alps and the Pyrenees from 1315–1317. This northern famine may have killed 5 to 10 percent of the population in some areas where it struck, less from starvation than from the illnesses and opportunistic infections that often accompany malnutrition.⁴ Likewise, just as historians of medieval Europe, in general, have used the Great Famine to mark the beginning of a century of crisis that would include warfare, schism in the Catholic Church, and the Black Death, for much of the twentieth century, Catalan historians have pointed to the “first bad year” as a starting point for the region's late medieval decline—a century and a half that featured repeated outbreaks of plague, warfare on land and at sea, social unrest, and economic collapse.⁵

More recently, however, histories of food and famine in medieval Catalonia have moved away from examining the 1333/1334 famine as a turning point, focusing instead on how both grain and grain shortages in the early fourteenth century fit into broader historical contexts, including histories of urban provisioning, charity, religion and morality, social class, and medieval culture writ large.⁶ Scholars who study grain as it relates to later medieval Barcelona, in particular, have taken advantage of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’ vast expansion in municipal documentation to situate the region's famines in terms of a broad range of political, economic, and social contexts, and the past decade or so has seen the emergence of several key studies of late medieval famines in Catalonia and the broader Mediterranean as catastrophes formed at the confluence of climate change, politics, economics, and culture.⁷

This is not, however, a book about famine—or at least not primarily so.⁸ Rather, it is a book about the city of Barcelona itself, one that uses the events of the bad year of 1333/1334 as a window onto the many lives of one late medieval city. From its beginnings as a small Roman colony established during the reign of Augustus and settled by veterans of Rome's wars in Cantabria, Barcelona passed through both Visigothic and Muslim hands before being annexed by the Carolingians in 801. The city began its rise to regional prominence shortly thereafter, first as the seat of one of the group of counties that the Carolingians had established as a Spanish March on their southern border, then, beginning in the late tenth century, as the political center of an independent Catalan territory consolidated from several post-Carolingian counties. Over the course of the central Middle Ages, the count-kings of the house of Barcelona would use both marriages and conquests to expand their domains beyond Catalonia into first Aragon, then the Balearics and Valencia, leaving Barcelona as one “capital” among many in the broader composite monarchy known as the Crown of Aragon. During this same period, the city grew in both wealth and influence in its own right. By the end of the thirteenth century, it was home to somewhere around thirty thousand people, a center of shipbuilding for the realm's maritime ventures and of finance for its monarchs, a busy commercial hub where the land routes of Catalonia met the trade networks of the Mediterranean, a diocesan seat of the Catholic Church, a thriving center of craft production and labor migration, and home to Catalonia's most populous Jewish community.⁹

This book is, of course, far from the first attempt at a history of medieval Barcelona. Although early modern and modern antiquarians and archivists mined the medieval sources to construct their own narratives of the city, the contemporary historiography of Barcelona may be said to have begun with the Catalan historian Francesc Carreras i Candi, who devoted the entire fifth volume of his monumental six-volume Geografía General de Catalunya to the city.¹⁰ Carreras i Candi wrote his work in the first decades of the twentieth century at a time when Barcelona was undertaking a modernization effort that involved both demolition and reconstruction in the urban core; his study of Barcelona thus contains a great deal more of the city's medieval urban geography than the work of his early modern predecessors. His background as both a native of Barcelona and a supporter of Catalan regional autonomy within the Spanish state led him to assert his home city's centrality to the development of Catalonia as a distinct politico-cultural entity and to emphasize the medieval repute of Barcelona in particular as “head and homeplace [cap i casal] of Catalonia.”¹¹ This exceptionalist narrative lay largely quiescent during the four decades of the Franco dictatorship, which suppressed regional identities as it enforced its Castilian nationalist program, but reemerged in the 1970s with the work of Agustí Duran i Sanpere, whose Barcelona i la seva història echoed the position of Carreras i Candi when he (Duran i Sanpere) wrote that “the city of Barcelona, which was cap i casal of Catalonia since days of old, continues to be … the heart and mind of a vast territory.”¹² A decade and a half later, another prolific historian of the city, Carme Batlle i Gallart, portrayed Barcelona as the king's clear favorite and, of all the cities of Catalonia, the one best positioned to take advantage of the historical currents that defined the Crown's Catalan possessions in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.¹³ By the end of the twentieth century, the American scholar Stephen Bensch, author of the most influential English-language history of medieval Barcelona to date, could assert that “history has made Barcelona the heart of Catalan identity.”¹⁴

This idea of Barcelona as a special place within Catalonia has lingered in the background of most histories of the city. Certainly, Barcelona's actions during the medieval period suggest that the city believed in its own specialness and not without some justification. Yet Barcelona was also part of many networks that extended beyond the municipality itself, and while historians have sometimes had trouble fully shaking the exceptionalist narrative, they have also worked to connect their histories of Barcelona to broader historiographic conversations. Scholars writing in both Catalan and Castilian in the decades since the 1970s have variously focused on the interface between urban and royal government, the city's urban landscape and social dynamics, its connections with the Mediterranean, relations between the city's Church and its faithful, its economic life, and the lived experience of both its women and the members of its Jewish community.¹⁵ English-language scholarship on the city has been more limited, especially in comparison with other cities of the medieval Mediterranean. But even here, scholars have approached Barcelona's history in the context of broader historical movements, such as the rise of patrician urban governments, the role of Christian religious institutions, and the study of interfaith dynamics in religiously plural urban environments.¹⁶

All of these histories have added considerably to what we know about medieval Barcelona. But each of them provides us with only one piece of the puzzle, as if we were looking at the city through a keyhole. By focusing on a single year, this book attempts to draw together what have, up until now, been relatively distinct approaches to the history of the city, using the 1333/1334 famine not as an object of study in and of itself but rather as the frame for a portrait of the city as a whole. One obvious reason to focus on a year like this one is the increase in documentation that calamity tends to produce. But famine and shortage provide more than just a convenient trove of historical records. Food geographers have noted the many ways that food weaves its way through the social, political, economic, and cultural fabrics of any given time or place.¹⁷ Medieval Barcelona's food system connected the city's local, regional, and Mediterranean geographies, even as it bound together its rulers and ruled, its merchants, artisans, and laborers, its religious and secular authorities, its donors and recipients of charity, its insider and outsider groups. Food thus provides an ideal lens through which to view the whole of a society. This is never truer than at a time of famine when a food system's deep roots and broad branches are most visible. The economist Amartya Sen has noted the role of human action or inaction (e.g., poor distribution networks, government intervention, or warfare) in turning shortages into famines, while Cormac Ó Gráda has shown how crime, social disruptions, political upheavals, and the economic consequences of speculation and hoarding that arise from famines undermine the cohesion of the societies that suffer them.¹⁸

Most modern theories surrounding famine assume market capitalism and/or a strong central state with the ability to effectively control food distribution, so the medieval case is far from a perfect fit. Still, the theoretical literature on famine is helpful, as it emphasizes the contingent forces that govern how famines are formed and how they play out. Adam Franklin-Lyons has characterized late medieval famines (as opposed to the era's less severe and semiregular shortages) as “the late stage of a number of interlocking crises” for which bad weather was only the trigger, as widespread crop shortfalls combined with war, hunger-driven migration, market panics, and breakdowns in public order.¹⁹ In the case of Barcelona in 1333/1334, the main contingent factor was a maritime conflict with Genoa, as sporadic but persistent raids on shipping developed into a full-blown war between the two cities from 1331 to 1336, making it difficult for Barcelona to transport grain from its regular Mediterranean sources.²⁰ But Barcelona's ability to import grain in the 1330s would also be influenced by the ebb and flow of papal and royal embargoes on trading with the Mamluk sultanate, as well as by how well the city could manage relations with its neighbors in the grain-producing regions of the broader Crown of Aragon.²¹

Food and famine thus present historians with the means to weave together several strands that made up the historical city. This approach does, however, come with its own set of challenges. The first of these is geographic scale. Food geographies are, like all geographies, constructs defined by a set of practices that play out at both institutional and individual levels, with any given food system composed of not one network but several overlapping ones, ranging from the global to the regional to the hyper-local. But scaled geographies are not just macro- or microcosms of one another. Each one is the product of interactions that take place in a specific register (e.g., political, economic, cultural), which renders the distinctions between these geographies, as Neil Smith has put it, as “not so much between places as between different kinds of places.”²² Although each chapter of this book focuses on a single one of Barcelona's geographies (e.g., local/regional/Mediterranean), none of these versions of the city exists in isolation from the others; it is, in fact, the connections between them that lend each of them meaning.²³ In addition to questions of geographic scale, any book that bills itself as “a year in the life” must confront the issue of chronological scope. This book focuses on Barcelona in the bad year that the city experienced between summer of 1333 and spring of 1334, but Barcelona's experience of this famine year was the culmination of other short-, medium-, and long-term historical processes and structures. Looking at the city through its food systems by focusing on a single year while contextualizing that year within these larger chronological frames requires imaginative flexibility but also allows us to more clearly see how the various ways of being a city intertwine to make up the whole.

If variables of space and time present the potential researcher with an array of possible Barcelonas, then the layering of the two on top of each other multiplies the possibilities until every choice seems potentially a wrong one, each portrait of the city foreclosing too many others. This very problem is one that scholars of the broader premodern Mediterranean have lately been grappling with by adopting an actor-centered approach to the analysis of this historical space. Annliese Nef has argued against conceiving of Mediterranean spaces as “natural,” suggesting, rather, that we examine how a variety of actors contributed an array of practices that shaped space in different ways.²⁴ Peregrine Horden has applied similar thinking to the Mediterranean city in particular, which he suggests should be conceived of as a “meshwork of convoluted lines and traces” made up of interactions, human and otherwise, in which the area within the city's walls connects seamlessly with a larger zone extending from the city's immediate suburbs to its agricultural hinterland and beyond; “the city,” as it emerges from this approach, is merely the name we give to the area where the meshwork is somewhat denser due to the greater number of interactions.²⁵ Damien Coulon has proposed something similar for Barcelona, in particular, arguing that the city was the center of qualitatively different commercial, political, and religio-cultural networks, and the system formed between these networks emerged from connections between individual historical actors.²⁶ Behind these historians and others, we might picture the influence of anthropologist and sociologist Bruno Latour, who imagined a world full of actors of varying types, a world in which even inanimate objects might lack intent but still have agency—that is, the ability, in and of themselves, to make a difference, to “authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on”—and that following these actors allows us to step out of our own predetermined constructs of what makes a meaningful spatial or chronological frame for analysis and to see their world as they themselves experienced it.²⁷

This book builds on these ideas about actors and their networks to construct a portrait of later medieval Barcelona, with each chapter organized around the viewpoint of a single individual or small group of related individuals drawn from the records of the city's rich and varied medieval archives. Because the scales of these stories differ in kind as much as in size, each of the following chapters necessarily employs its own distinct analytical framework. Each also requires its own type of sources. In the following chapters, I draw on varying combinations of municipal and royal correspondence, notarial records, urban ordinances, inquests, and chronicles. While constraints of space preclude featuring every voice, the variety of source types I have employed allows for a diversity of perspectives that I hope readers will find, if not exhaustive, then at least representative enough to be illuminating. In the following pages, I allow each actor to chart their own course and then follow their traces—their contexts, backstories, and webs of association, as well as their experience of the famine year itself—to see what their Barcelona looked like. While each of the Barcelonas that emerges from these narratives presents a “true” picture of the city, none of the chapter protagonists is omniscient. The borders and contours of the city shift depending on whose eyes we see it through. Yet over the course of the chapters, the individual narratives frequently intersect and sometimes briefly intertwine with each other, allowing us to see how no single version of the city stands on its own. The Barcelona that emerges from these combined narratives is an entity defined not only by the ties that bound together individuals and groups in a given network but more importantly by the way these networks entangled to produce the historical space we call “the city.”

If we are focusing on the city in a year of famine, it makes sense to first follow the food—more specifically, the grain. If we imagine a spectrum of potential actors, with human beings full of agency and intent at one end and inert objects that do no more than bear the intent of human actors at the other, then Barcelona's grain inhabits the middle ground: it lacks intent but carries the ability to forge connections, even if only intermittently. Like any human actor, Barcelona's grain traced its own pathways through the city. Following the grain as it moved from the Mediterranean shoreline to marketplace to the shops of millers and bakers and eventually into the hands and homes of the city's residents provides us with a first general overview not only of Barcelona's urban geography but also of some of the complexities that later chapters will explore in greater depth: the dynamics of the urban labor force, the economics and logistics of provisioning a maritime city, the role of the municipal council in regulating urban food trades, and the force of culture in shaping the place of grain in the medieval diet. The chapter concludes with the arrival of the famine and what the early measures of Barcelona's leaders suggest about the webs of interactions that made up the city.

The protagonists of the next two chapters take us beyond the city walls to introduce a Barcelona that existed as part of a broader Mediterranean geography. Chapter 2 follows Galceran Marquet, scion of a sprawling family of naval captains and merchant-investors, whom Barcelona's ruling Council of One Hundred had named vice admiral only two years before the famine. During the bad year of 1333/1334, Marquet led the fleet as it scoured similarly depleted Mediterranean markets for grain, all while fighting an escalating conflict at sea with the city of Genoa. Galceran Marquet's Barcelona was a city that existed at the intersection of municipal politics and maritime economics. This city's prosperity and position, like Marquet's own, were tied to its place at the center of a Mediterranean network built, on the one hand, by the city's merchants and shippers and, on the other, by the territorial ambitions of kings. Following Marquet in his dual roles as merchant-captain and agent of the municipal government (as well as his occasional forays into illicit commerce) reveals a Barcelona that drew on a maritime logic of mobility and connectivity to construct its own unique identity as a Mediterranean city.

The Barcelona of chapter 3 is, like the one of the previous chapter, a city bound not by its walls but rather by the reach of its ships. This chapter shows us the city from the outsider perspective of a group of merchants from Lisbon, who were captured while purchasing grain for their city and were forced to divert their cargo to Barcelona. The captives’ story draws in Barcelona's city council, the kings of Aragon and Portugal, the grain ports of the central Mediterranean, and the networks of pirates and corsairs prowling that sea, sometimes covertly or sometimes openly supported by their home cities. The travails of the Portuguese merchants as they sought justice, first from Barcelona's local authorities and later from the Crown of Aragon's king, show us a city, still Mediterranean in scale, but this time approaching the sea in a way that more closely mirrored the territorializing ambitions of its monarchs than it did the mobility/connectivity-based approach of its captains and merchants. In contrast to the borderless logic that animated the city of chapter 2, the Barcelona experienced by the Portuguese captives was a city that employed both law and lawlessness in an attempt to draw borders on the sea, calling into question the conceptual boundaries between state and nonstate actors and between subject and sovereign cities.

Chapter 4 turns back to land to explore Barcelona's identity as a component part of the larger political community of the Crown of Aragon. This chapter follows a group of interrelated members of the ruling house of Barcelona: King Alfonso III/IV (r. 1327–1336); his wife and queen, Eleanor; his younger brother John, archbishop of Tarragona; and Peter, his eldest son and heir. The Crown of Aragon in the fourteenth century was what some historians have called a “plural monarchy,” with different members of the royal family exercising various forms of sovereign power, each one balancing the interests of important cities like Barcelona against those of their broader constituencies. As Barcelona's councilors sought to import grain from the Catalan interior, they found themselves looking to these exalted individuals to resolve their conflicts with other cities and towns subject to their authority. Through the eyes of these four members of the Crown's ruling family, we see Barcelona as a city that existed in the space between self-governing urban corporation and component part of a larger territorial entity, one in which the relationship between the city, its neighbors, and the forces that governed them all was, even in the fourteenth century, as much the product of fluid one-to-one relationships as of institutional structures.

Chapter 5 returns to the city within the walls to follow the story of a young Jewish woman named Bonadona. As Barcelona's councilors contended with both neighbors and allies to bring grain to the city, Bonadona was enmeshed in a different sort of conflict as she attempted to free herself from her marriage. The intersectional nature of Bonadona's position as both a woman and a member of a religious minority community rendered her Barcelona distinct from those of both the city's Christian women and her male coreligionists, even as it partook of both. Much of her story plays out to the side of the famine and its attendant struggles, illustrating how she and the people around her moved in multiple and overlapping communities of their own, from the local Jewish aljama to the regional network of Catalan and southern French Jewish communities to the jurisdictional community between Crown Jews and the king. But Bonadona's story has an important local context as well, one that reveals the ways that Barcelona's Jews existed as a part of the city as well as apart from it. Bonadona's Barcelona was a diverse place where women and men maintained regular social and economic relationships across confessional lines. But the porosity of these boundaries could heighten tensions in a city where Jews’ membership in the urban community was always contingent on the changing attitudes of the city's royal officials, its municipal government, and its populace—and even more so at a time when royal policies for famine relief had increased tensions between Jews and Christians in the city.

Chapter 6 follows a group of actors who stood at the center of events as tensions over city-wide shortages erupted into violence. Bernat Despuig (or des Puig) was a preaching friar who publicly proclaimed that the shortages in the grain markets were the result of a conspiracy among Barcelona's leaders, who were allegedly intent on lining their pockets even as the city around them starved. Pere Juyol was a middle-tier member of the city's Council of One Hundred and its appointed market supervisor when, a few months later, talk of conspiracy and corruption boiled over into a brief but violent uprising against the city's leaders. The stories of Despuig and Juyol—and later of Crown Prince Peter as he dispatched forces to calm the city—illustrate the complexities of Barcelona as a socio-economic unit. The Barcelona of Juyol, Despuig, and Prince Peter was a fabric woven together of the elites, laborers, artisans, and urban poor who wound their way around the city's sites of charity, through the streets where the city's disenfranchised or marginal residents were ready to rise up against its political and economic elite, all the way to the chambers of the city council where that same elite debated the best way to maintain order. But where Bernat Despuig saw a city divided between an elite who governed and a populace who suffered under their rule, Juyol's Barcelona was one in which a single individual was bound through various personal, professional, and political ties to multiple overlapping identities, while Peter, viewing the chaos from outside, saw a city in which an unruly populace represented a threat to both good order and royal authority within the city.

This final chapter is also a microcosm of the book as a whole. Just as narratives of the riot differed according to the contexts and perspectives that produced them, so too can none of the chapters in this book be considered a definitive story of the city in its year of crisis. Each actor lends us his or her (or its) own unique perspective, directing our gaze toward the city that each one knew best. In the following chapters, frames of time and space combine and recombine in different configurations in order to create those “different kinds of places” that are variously political, economic, social, cultural, and material. Each of these individual Barcelonas could serve as the basis for a book of its own, as could the Barcelonas of other individuals and groups who appear only in the margins of many of the stories in the chapters to follow. But only by considering them together do we gain the richer portrait of the city that none of them can provide on their own.

FIGURE 1. Administrative divisions of Barcelona, 1389. AHCB, Consell de Cent, Fogatges 5 (1389), front flyleaf, verso.

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1. Bartomeu de Canals, Opusculum [fragment]. BC, ms. 1904, 2r, col. 2.

2. “Chronicon Ulianense,” in España sagrada. Tomo XXVIII: el estado de la Iglesia Ausonense, hoy Vique, ed. Enrique Flórez, Manuel Risco, and Rafael Lazcano (Madrid: A. de Sancha, 1774), 335.

3. “Diversa kalendaria de gestis retroactis temporibus factis maxime in Episcopatu Gerundensi: ex codice Carbonelli,” in España sagrada. Tomo XLIV, tratado LXXXII: de la Santa Iglesia de Gerona en su estado moderno, ed. Enrique Flórez, Antolín Merino, and José de La Canal (Madrid: Don José del Collado, 1826), 394.

4. William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 15–23. For opportunistic ailments, see Jordan, The Great Famine, 117 and 142–44; Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 109–21. For a general overview of the fourteenth century in terms of climate-related crisis, see Bruce M. S. Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

5. Carme Batlle i Gallart, La crisis social y económica de Barcelona a mediados del siglo XV (Barcelona: CSIC, 1973); Claude Carrère, Barcelona 1380–1462: un centre econòmic en època de crisi (Barcelona: Curial, 1977); Pierre Vilar, Catalunya dins l’Espanya moderna (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1986), 2:147–48.

6. For urban provisioning, see 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): 649–91; and Sebastià Riera i Viader, “El proveïment de cereals a la ciutat de Barcelona durant ‘el mal any primer’ (1333): la intervenció del Consell de cent i de la Corona,” in Història urbana del pla de Barcelona: actes del II Congrés d’Història del Pla de Barcelona (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1989), 1:315–26. For charity, see Tomàs López Pizcueta, “El ‘mal any primer.’ Alimentación de los pobres asistidos en la Pia Almoina de Barcelona, 1333–34,” 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), 2:613–23. For food (including grain) and social class, see 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), 81–107. And for food, morality, and culture, see Josep Hernando i Delgado, “Els moralistes i l’alimentació a la Baixa Edat Mitjana,” in Alimentació i societat a la Catalunya medieval (Barcelona: CSIC, 1988), 271–94; and F. Xavier Medina, “Alimentación, dieta y comportamientos alimentarios en el contexto mediterráneo,” in La alimentación mediterránea: historia, cultura, nutrición, ed. F. Xavier Medina and R. Alonso (Barcelona: Icaria, 1996), 21–44.

7. For Barcelona, see Eva Serra i Puig, “Los cereales en la Barcelona del siglo XIV” (Tesis de llicentiatura, University of Barcelona, 1967); Juanjo Cáceres Nevot, “La participació del consell municipal en l’aprovisionament cerealer de la ciutat de Barcelona (1301–1430)” (PhD diss., University of Barcelona, 2007); Pere Ortí Gost, “El forment a la Barcelona baix-medieval: preus, mesures i fiscalitat (1283–1345),” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 22 (1992): 377–423. For Catalonia, see Adam Franklin-Lyons, Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022) and Joan Maltas i Montoro, Caresties, fams i epidèmies a Catalunya: de la conquesta de Sicília a la Pesta Negra (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2022). For a broader Mediterranean context, see the contributions to several remarkable recent collections of essays: Monique Bourin, John Victor Drendel, and François Menant, eds., Les disettes dans la conjoncture de 1300 en Méditerranée occidentale (Rome: École française de Rome, 2011); Pere Benito i Monclús, ed., Crisis alimentarias en la Edad Media: modelos, explicaciones y representaciones (Lleida: Milenio, 2013); and Pere Benito i Monclús and Antoni Riera Melis, eds., Guerra y carestía en la Europa medieval (Lleida: Milenio, 2014).

8. For a detailed analysis of Barcelona's fourteenth-century famines, including the bad year of 1333/1334, see Adam Franklin-Lyons and Marie A. Kelleher, “Framing Mediterranean Famine: Food Crisis in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona,” Speculum 97, no. 1 (2022): 40–76.

9. J. Oriol Granados García, “La colònia Bàrcino: origen i estructura d’una colònia Augustea,” in Història urbana del Pla de Barcelona: actes del II Congrés d’Història del Pla de Barcelona, ed. Ana María Adroer Tasis (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona Institut Municipal d’Història, 1989–1990), 2:68–72; Stephen Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 1096–1291 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Thomas N. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 19–30.

10. Francesc Carreras i Candi, Geografía general de Catalunya, vol. 5, Ciutat de Barcelona (Barcelona: Albert Martin, 1913).

11. Carreras i Candi, Geografía general de Catalunya, 5:7–8; Antoni Simon i Tarrés, Diccionari d’historiografia catalana (Barcelona: Enciclopèdia catalana, 2003), 300–301.

12. Agustí Duran i Sanpere, Barcelona i la seva història (Barcelona: Curial, 1972), 12.

13. Carme Batlle i Gallart [as Carme Batlle], Història de Catalunya, vol. 3, L’expansió baixmedieval (segles XIII–XV), ed. Pierre Vilar (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1988), 72–73.

14. Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 23.

15. For a general overview, see Josefa Mutgé i Vives, La ciudad de Barcelona durante el reinado de Alfonso el Benigno (1327–1336) (Madrid: CSIC, 1987). For the urban landscape, see much of the work of Philip J. Banks, especially “El creixement físic de Barcelona, segles X–XIII,” Barcelona quaderns d’història 8 (2003): 11–33. For Barcelona in its Mediterranean context, see Damien Coulon, Barcelone et le grand commerce d’orient au moyen âge: un siècle de relations avec l’Egypte et la Syrie-Palestine, ca. 1330–ca. 1430 (Madrid and Barcelona: Casa de Velázquez and Institut Europeu de la Mediterrània, 2004). See also several of the essays in Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, Josefina Mutgé i Vives, and Manuel Sánchez Martínez, eds., La corona catalanoaragonesa i el seu entorn mediterrani a la baixa edat mitjana (Barcelona: CSIC, 2005). For the Christian church and its faithful, see Josep Baucells i Reig's magisterial four-volume Vivir en la edad media: Barcelona y su entorno en los siglos XIII y XIV (1200–1344) (Barcelona: CSIC, 2004). For economic life, see Carrère, Barcelona; and Pere Ortí Gost, Renda i fiscalitat en una ciutat medieval: Barcelona, segles XII–XIV (Barcelona: CSIC, 2000). For Barcelona's women, Teresa María Vinyoles Vidal's Les barcelonines a les darreries de l’Edat Mitjana, 1370–1410 (Barcelona: Fundació Salvador Vives Casajuana, 1976), while older, is still a fundamental starting point; more recently, see Carme Batlle and Marta Palomares, “La història de la dona a la Barcelona del segle XIII, segons els testaments,” Universitas Tarraconensis 10 (2018): 13–31. Finally, for Barcelona's Jews in the fourteenth century, see Anna Rich Abad, La comunitat jueva de Barcelona entre 1348 i 1391 a travès de la documentació notarial (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 1999); 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), 43–54; and a wide variety of articles by Jaume Riera i Sans.

16. For urban government, see Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers. For religious institutions, see Richard Gyug, The Diocese of Barcelona during the Black Death: The Register Notule Communium 15 (1348–1349) (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1994). For Jews and Christians in late medieval Barcelona, see Elka Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006); and Robert Chazan, Barcelona and Beyond: The Disputation of 1263 and Its Aftermath (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

17. See, for example, P. J. Atkins and Ian R. Bowler, Food in Society: Economy, Culture, Geography (London: Arnold, 2001), 4–38; David Bell and Gill Valentine, Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat (London: Routledge, 1997), 2–12.

18. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), esp. 162–66; Ó Gráda, Famine, 45–63, 78–89, and 129–58.

19. Franklin-Lyons, Shortage and Famine, 115. On the question of human agency in shortages and famines, see Franklin-Lyons and Kelleher, “Framing Mediterranean Famine,” 52–63; Pere Benito i Monclús, “Carestía y hambruna en las ciudades de occidente durante la Edad Media: algunos rasgos distintivos,” in Alimentar la ciudad en la Edad Media (Nájera: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos; Ayuntamiento de Nájera, 2009), 299–314; 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 (Nájera: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos; Ayuntamiento de Nájera, 2009), 35–36 and 299–314; and Cáceres Nevot, “La participació,” 73–79.

20. Josefa Mutgé i Vives, “El consell de Barcelona en la guerra catalano-genovesa durante el reinado de Alfonso el Benigno,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 2 (1965): 229–56; Marina Mitjá, “Barcelona y el problema sardo en el siglo XIV,” in VI Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón (Madrid: [n.p.], 1960), 447–59; John Dotson, “Venice, Genoa and Control of the Seas in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” in War at Sea in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. John B. Hattendorf and Richard W. Unger (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2003), 119–35; and Steven Epstein, Genoa & the Genoese, 958–1528 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 216–19 and 236. Bruno Anatra even refers to this as “the Hundred-Years’ War of the Mediterranean”; see Anatra, “Dall’unificazione aragonese ai Savoia,” in La Sardegna medioevale e moderna, ed. John Day, Bruno Anatra, and Lucetta Scaraffia (Turin: UTET, 1984), 219–20.

21. José Trenchs Odena, “‘De Alexandrinis’ (El comercio prohibido con los musulmanes y el Papado de Aviñón durante la primera mitad del siglo XIV),” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 10 (1980): 237–320; Franklin-Lyons, Shortage and Famine, 45–81.

22. Neil Smith, “Homeless/Global: Scaling Places,” in Mapping the Futures, ed. John Bird et al. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 99; see also Atkins and Bowler, Food in Society, 4–10.

23. Smith, “Homeless/Global,” 101.

24. Annliese Nef, “Dynamiques spatiales et économiques de la Méditerranée médiévale,” in Les territoires de la Méditerranée (xi^e–xvi^e siècle), ed. Annliese Nef (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 9–12.

25. Peregrine Horden, “Meshwork: Towards a Historical Ecology of Mediterranean Cities,” in The Mediterranean Cities between Myth and Reality, ed. Federica Frediani (Lugano: Nerbini International, 2014), 37–51.

26. Damien Coulon, “Barcelone, pôle d’impulsion de réseaux à la fin du Moyen-Âge,” in Espaces et réseaux en Méditerranée, vi^e–xvi^e siècle, ed. Damien Coulon, Christophe Picard, and Dominique Valérian (Paris: Éditions Bouchène, 2007), 1:19–39.

27. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 72.