CHAPTER 2The Captain

Becoming a Mediterranean City

By the time that Galceran Marquet appeared on the scene in the early fourteenth century, Barcelona's ships were an established presence, even a dominant one, in the western and central Mediterranean. But this state of affairs had been a fairly recent development. For much of the tenth and eleventh centuries, the waters off Iberia's Mediterranean coast had been dominated by Andalusi Muslims: first the caliphate of Cordoba, then coastal taifas like Tortosa and Denia.⁴ The breakup of the caliphate in the early eleventh century gave several Christian-ruled port cities the opportunity to enter the contest for military and commercial dominance in the western Mediterranean, and by the end of the following century, Pisa and Genoa, in particular, would be vying with each other for control over Corsica, Sardinia, and the Ligurian coast.⁵

Barcelona's own Mediterranean beginnings were modest. For most of the city's comital period, its maritime traders had stuck almost exclusively to regional cabotage trade—that is, small, shore-hugging hops in medium-sized vessels concentrating on the coastline between Collioure and Tarragona, with further forays to Narbonne, Montpellier, Marseille, and sometimes the near Ligurian coast. The city's trade during this period was based on redistribution of goods from the Catalan interior: trains of pack animals traveling along the inland routes that converged at Barcelona carrying cargoes of wool, leather, metalwork, and agricultural products as well as more profitable trade goods such as saffron and textiles to be resold in other ports of the northwestern Mediterranean. In turn, Barcelona merchants imported and resold spices, sugar, dyes, and alum (used for dye-fixing in textiles) that they had purchased at cabotage stops where merchants from further afield had brought them.⁶ The twelfth century also saw Barcelona's first ventures into the world of Mediterranean commerce beyond the cabotage routes of the northwestern Mediterranean, beginning with its participation in a Pisan-led attack on the Balearic islands from 1113–1115.⁷ Even though the joint campaign ultimately failed in its effort to permanently dislodge either the Muslim emirs who ruled the island or the corsairs who menaced shipping in the western Mediterranean, Barcelona's role in the campaign had lasting significance for the city: Count Ramon Berenguer III (r. 1097–1131) rewarded Barcelona for its contribution by exempting the city from a new tax on ships. This was the first of what would be many royal privileges that spurred Barcelona's maritime development beyond the cabotage routes of the northwestern Mediterranean coastline.⁸

Merchants and shipowners were not the only ones who would profit from the city's growing maritime orientation. Barcelona's Mediterranean presence relied on and supported a growing population of both skilled and unskilled laborers who worked in the city's shipbuilding industry. To construct a single ship, a master shipwright (mestre d’aixa or “master of the adze”) would hire and oversee a small battalion of craft specialists and day laborers, from the sawyers who transformed trees from the forests of the Collserola and the pre-Pyrenees into planks, to the carpenters who worked the fitted pieces and built the hull, to the calafats who sealed the finished hull to make it watertight. The economic impact of the shipbuilding industry also reached into Barcelona's artisan neighborhoods, where independent workshops contracted with the master shipwrights to produce the rigging, sails, and oars needed to outfit a ship.⁹ Thus, by the end of the twelfth century, Barcelona had started to become a Mediterranean city in an economic sense, if not a territorial one: home to a small but thriving community of traders who profited from Barcelona's geographic position at the nexus of inland trade routes and the sea as well as to a sector of artisans and laborers whose livelihoods revolved around building and outfitting the ships that made this trade possible.

If Barcelona had started to become a Mediterranean power in economic terms during the twelfth century, then the Crown of Aragon did so in a geopolitical sense during the thirteenth. The first major step in the Crown's Mediterranean expansion came during the reign of James I, who, perhaps influenced by the crusading spirit of his times or perhaps just looking to make a mark as he emerged from a long minority, conceived a plan to take the Balearics from their Muslim rulers. In 1229, the young king began campaigns to conquer first Mallorca and Menorca between 1229 and 1231, then Ibiza in 1235. These islands, together with the northern Catalan counties of Roussillon and Cerdanya and lordships in Montpellier, would be organized as a “Kingdom of Mallorca” that would temporarily pass to a cadet branch of the family from James's death in 1276 until 1349.¹⁰ Later in the thirteenth century, the marriage of James's son Peter to Constance, the last scion of Sicily's Hohenstaufen dynasty, put the Crown in a position to further expand its Mediterranean possessions by laying claim to Sicily, at that time ruled by Charles of Anjou. After rising up against the resident Angevin officials in the violent 1282 revolt known as the Sicilian Vespers, the commune of Palermo named Peter (who by that time had been crowned Peter II/III of Aragon) and Constance as king and queen of Sicily. But this was only the beginning of the conflict, not its end. Anjou and Aragon were now at war, with the Sicilians mostly allied with the latter and France and the pope supporting the former. By November of 1282, King Peter found himself excommunicated, his lands under interdict, and his home coastline under attack by his own younger brother, James II of Mallorca (r. 1276–1311), who had allied with the French against him. The struggle dragged on until 1285, when both Peter and Charles of Anjou died, and the throne of Sicily passed to Peter's second son James, whose older brother Alfonso—now King Alfonso II/III of Aragon (r. 1285–1291)—had inherited the Iberian lands and titles. When Alfonso died in 1291, James inherited not only the Crown lands but also the war with France and incurred his own papal excommunication when he refused to cede Sicily to his younger brother Frederick as stipulated in Alfonso's will. Only with the ascension of Pope Boniface VIII (r. 1294–1303) was a settlement reached: the 1295 Treaty of Anagni specified that James II would cede Sicily to Frederick and marry Blanche of Anjou; in exchange, the pope would lift James's sentence of excommunication and the Angevins would give up their claim to Sicily.¹¹

Barcelona played a key role in both of these thirteenth-century Mediterranean expansionist ventures, and the royal privileges it gained in exchange set the city on a path to a more significant maritime presence. Even though Barcelona was neither the oldest nor most topographically suitable port along the Catalan coastline during the central Middle Ages, by the thirteenth century its location at the intersection of inland and Mediterranean routes had combined with its growing shipbuilding industry to render it the city best equipped to provide the monarchs with the fleet necessary to launch the Crown as a Mediterranean territorial power. The importance of Barcelona's Mediterranean orientation to the monarchs’ ambitions was made manifest when the kings chose the city as the site for their royal shipyards (drassanes). What had been an open-air shipbuilding operation on the shore below the city's southern gate in the early thirteenth century grew during the second half of that same century in response to Barcelona's commercial expansion and the Crown's territorial one. Construction began on a more permanent shipyard during the reign of Peter II/III, and while funding came in fits and starts over the course of the following century, it would eventually be enough to see the completion and expansion of a permanent structure just outside the southwestern edge of the city's fourteenth-century walls, even as shipbuilding continued in the construction area on the shore.¹²

The funding of the royal shipyards is a clear indication of the symbiotic relationship between the Crown and the city when it came to Mediterranean expansion, but it was only one of the ways that Barcelona saw tangible benefit in return for its support of the monarchs’ Mediterranean ventures. One concession by James I to the city's merchants, prohibiting Florentines, Lombards, and Sienese from establishing permanent commercial bases in the city, seems to have been largely symbolic, honored more in the breach than in the observance.¹³ Of much more durable benefit to the city's merchants was James I's permission to establish a merchant-led institution that would allow the city to regulate its own maritime commerce. Historians generally trace the founding of Barcelona's Consolat de mar (Consulate of the Sea) to January 1258, when James I granted the merchants of Barcelona's waterfront neighborhood the right to elect leaders from among their ranks who would devise ordinances to protect their interests and organize the defense of the district and who would levy fees to support these efforts.¹⁴ The jurisdiction of this rudimentary organization would quickly be absorbed into the newly formed city council, but the idea behind the corporation seems to have survived.¹⁵ In 1279, Peter II/III issued a similar privilege, with the major difference that the men elected to serve as consuls of the sea no longer needed to be drawn exclusively from the waterfront district but could now be merchants from anywhere in the city and would be elected with the consent of the city's merchants—a change that effectively transformed a geographically based organization into a permanent institution representing the well-being of the city's maritime commerce as a whole.¹⁶

The code of maritime law that the Consulate of the Sea developed, the Llibre del consolat de mar, would eventually be translated into multiple languages and come to form the basis for an early modern international law of the sea.¹⁷ More immediately, however, the formation of this institution, together with the many royal privileges that the city had accumulated over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, meant that by the bad year of 1333/1334, Barcelona had become a city that in many ways revolved around its connection to the Mediterranean. This was the Barcelona that the Marquet family would grow and thrive in: a center for merchants, captains, and shipbuilders, supported by legal and institutional infrastructures that set the stage for a more assertive presence in the Mediterranean.

The Marquets and the Mediterranean

Although Galceran Marquet could trace his ancestors in Barcelona back at least to the eleventh century, the Marquet family's ascent to prominence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries paralleled their city's emergence as a Mediterranean power and mirrored the way that Barcelona's Mediterranean identity would take shape at the intersection of merchant mobility and royal territorial politics.¹⁸ Some of the family's early wealth came from investments in landed property within the city. In the mid-thirteenth century, however, various members of the Marquet family began to invest as shareholders in merchant ships. In many of these cases, they headed these ships’ ownership associations, meaning it was their duty to arrange profit-making ventures and potentially even to serve as captains themselves.¹⁹ This combination of resources and naval experience propelled one member of the family, Ramon Marquet (1235–1302), into multiple naval commands during the reign of King James I and eventually into the vice admiralty during King Peter II/III's reign. In this position, Ramon would patrol the Catalan coastline on the lookout for ships that the Angevins had launched in retaliation for Peter's annexation of Sicily.²⁰

But the real transformation of the Marquets from a state of moderate prosperity and renown at the beginning of the thirteenth century to being one of the city's most prominent families by that century's end came with the marriage of Ramon Marquet's brother and Galceran's great-uncle Bernat (d. 1257) to Elisenda Roig, a member of a prosperous merchant family who brought into the marriage both landed property and a dowry of over 500 morabetins (4,500 sous). The couple would later consolidate their joint wealth with both Bernat's inheritance upon his father's death and a supplemental inheritance that fell to him when his brother Pere, who had been their father's universal heir, died without issue in 1253. Add to this the fact that Elisenda would herself become an heiress when her brother died in the 1240s, and by the 1250s, the couple had amassed a substantial joint fortune that allowed them to invest extensively in both shipping and urban real estate, including purchasing a home for themselves on one of Barcelona's old-money blocks in the city's up-and-coming eastern suburb.²¹

Despite their growing wealth and prominence, the members of the Marquet family were typical Barcelona elites in that they showed little interest in joining the ranks of the nobility.²² With the exception of only one branch of the extended family, the Marquets tended to marry their sons to daughters of important and wealthy but nonnoble families. This is not to say that the Marquets and families like them lived like modest burghers or that they were “proto-capitalists,” reinvesting all their income in profit-making ventures. From most outward appearances, the family lived like nobles, with heads of household usually employing one or two squires in addition to numerous domestic servants, both enslaved and free. By the late thirteenth century, various family members possessed houses in the fashionable carrer Ample (Broad Street) that ran parallel to the shoreline near the open-air shipyards—so many, in fact, that contemporary documents sometimes referred to that portion of the thoroughfare as “Marquet Street.”²³

While they did not seek to ascend to the nobility, the Marquets did leverage their wealth to join Barcelona's political elite. In this, their careers serve as an example of the substantial overlap between the city's merchant and shipping interests and its political class. In 1258, Bernat Marquet's brother Miquel (d. ca. 1260) served on the city's very first municipal council.²⁴ The family rose further in the city's political hierarchy over the subsequent decades, with several of its members serving on the Council of One Hundred's executive committee of twenty-five, its electoral twelve, and, by the fourteenth century, the city's inner council of five ruling magistrates. As such, the Marquets were part of a relatively small group of families that rotated in and out of the magistracy, forming part of what Stephen Bensch has called “a shifting constellation of prominent families formed and reformed through wealth, royal patronage, and ties to allies and associates throughout the Western Mediterranean.”²⁵

It was into this quintessentially Barcelona family that Galceran Marquet was born around the turn of the fourteenth century, son of Vice Admiral Ramon's son Bernat Marquet and Ferrera Sabater, daughter of a wealthy family whose members occasionally served as city magistrates.²⁶ Galceran was not the first-born among his five brothers but became his father's heir when his older brother Bonanat, for unknown reasons, ceded his place and his inheritance to his younger brother, bypassing his own sons in so doing and thereby giving rise to years of litigation between the two branches of the Marquet family. In 1323, Galceran received an inheritance from his mother (herself heiress to a large part of the Sabater family fortune), who had made Galceran her universal heir. The year after that, Galceran's paternal and maternal fortunes were combined with that of his new wife, Blanca (a.k.a. Blanqueta) Albanell, who brought a massive 40,000-sou dowry to their marriage.²⁷

Although a double inheritance and an advantageous marriage would make him a wealthy man, a large part of Galceran's life and fortune, like that of his extended family and the city of Barcelona itself, was tied to the sea. Around the time he married, Galceran began to invest some of his inheritance (and likely his new wife's dowry) in merchant ventures, captaining ships that he chartered out to merchants trading in the eastern Mediterranean or using them to lead corsair expeditions to plunder ships belonging to declared enemies. Marquet was not, unfortunately, always as scrupulous as he might have been in discerning legitimate from illegitimate targets and was the object of more than one legal complaint from political allies whose ships he had attacked.²⁸

Marquet's willingness to cross legal lines also extended to making prohibited stops in the ports of the Mamluk empire. In the decades following the fall of Jerusalem to the Ayyubids and their allies in the late twelfth century, various popes had issued decrees banning trade in certain prohibited items with the Muslims of the eastern Mediterranean. This culminated in the 1291 decree of Pope Nicholas IV (r. 1288–1292) banning trade in “arms, horses, iron, lumber, foodstuffs, or any other merchandise in Alexandria or other places in the domains of the Saracens of Egypt” (emphasis added).²⁹ Merchants from throughout the Mediterranean had long winked at these prohibitions in order to turn a greater profit in the world of long-range Mediterranean commerce. One early fourteenth-century treatise on the broader Mediterranean conflict with the Muslims, written by French Dominican Guillaume Adam, pointed the finger at Catalans, Pisans, Venetians, and Genoese traders whom he described as “merchants of hell” for trading weapons or weapons-building knowledge with the Mamluks; he recommended that these smugglers face exile and confiscation of goods by their home governments, with the proceeds going to aid the Holy Land.³⁰ The papal treasury records of the first half of the fourteenth century corroborate this assessment of the widespread nature of this sort of smuggling, noting fines for illicit commerce with the Mamluks paid by merchants from cities throughout the northwestern Mediterranean as well as by those hailing from several Italian cities. But Barcelona merchants were particularly notorious as leaders in what was a fairly widespread practice, accounting for roughly half of the smuggling fines paid to the papal treasury.³¹

Numerous members of the broader Marquet clan appear—many of them multiple times—in conjunction with embargo violation, either as shipowner-captains or as traders.³² Galceran Marquet himself would be caught and fined for illegal trade with Muslim merchants at least twice: once in 1326, when he attempted to launder his illicit purchases by changing ships in Trapani, and again in 1329, this time using Naples as an intermediate port.³³ By this time, the Crown had negotiated with the papacy the right to collect the fines for embargo violation, which it set at two sous per lliure of the cargo's value.³⁴ The fact that Galceran, like other smugglers in his family, was a repeat offender, suggests two conclusions. The first of these is that the royal authorities may have seen a benefit in levying a sort of “smuggler's tax” but imposing no further consequences on even repeat offenders like Galceran Marquet or his relations. Second, and more importantly to people like Marquet and his partners, was that these royal fines still left smugglers with 90 percent of some very substantial gains, which made these illegal voyages too profitable not to continue.

The authorities may have had an additional motive to turn a blind eye to Marquet's illegal ventures in the early 1320s, namely, his financial contributions to provisioning the fleet that was about to embark on a campaign to conquer the island of Sardinia.³⁵ The circumstances surrounding the Crown's takeover there provide a valuable illustration of how the expansion of both city and Crown in the decades around 1300 might be best analyzed in light of multiplayer Mediterranean coalitions rather than in terms of an empire directed outwards from a city or kingdom. Sardinia in the thirteenth century was divided into four small territories whose rulers, known as “judges,” came primarily from powerful Pisan or Genoese families. In 1297, Pope Boniface VIII had granted Sardinia and Corsica to the Crown of Aragon's King James II as papal fiefs, ostensibly as a reward for James's continuing military services in defense of the papacy, as well as part of the negotiations that had persuaded James to abandon his claims to Sicily in favor of his younger brother Frederick.³⁶ But there was also a substantial element of self-interest in the pope's “gift” to the Crown: Boniface saw a way to use a new ally—James—to help him remove a political threat—Genoa—from its position controlling the waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea near the Papal States. Furthermore, the papacy did not actually hold the islands in question at the time that Boniface ceded them to James, so it would be up to the king to capture them, enlarging the scope of papal fiefs in the process. In 1323, after James had spent years carefully building up alliances, a fleet consisting in large part of ships from Barcelona and under the direction of the twenty-four-year-old Crown Prince Alfonso set sail; in a little over a year, the invasion force had brought a large portion of the island under the Crown's control.³⁷

If the thirteenth-century conquests had been directed by monarchs motivated by a mixture of crusading mentality and dynastic and territorial concerns set within the broader political entanglements of the Mediterranean and made possible by the resources and labor of the city of Barcelona, then the conquest of Sardinia in the early fourteenth century signaled a shift in whom these conquests were for. In some ways, the capture of Sardinia fits neatly into the narrative of a Mediterranean expansion driven by royal policy and conducted according to the territorial logic that characterized the Crown's thirteenth-century conquests. But possession of Sardinia would be a mixed legacy for the Crown, whose hold would always be both incomplete and troubled.³⁸ The real beneficiaries of this conquest would be not the Crown as a whole but the Barcelona merchants who profited from the special trading privileges that the city had received in return for the substantial aid it had provided in building and crewing the fleet. This was the Barcelona that Galceran Marquet and his family were emblematic of—a city that approached the Mediterranean not as the monarchs saw it, as a territory to be conquered and claimed, but rather as nodes in a network that existed to facilitate commerce that transcended borders.

The conquest of Sardinia coincided with Marquet's lucrative marriage to Blanca Albanell, and his aid in provisioning Barcelona's fleet would have done much to burnish a young man's reputation as an up-and-comer with a sense of civic responsibility. A few years later, Marquet would be playing a more direct role in the city's Mediterranean military ventures through his participation in the war with Genoa, a conflict that further muddies the waters as to whose Mediterranean presence—the Crown's or the city's—this really was. As noted previously, Genoa and the Crown had been allies at the time of the former's early Mediterranean expansion in the twelfth century. But relations had grown strained as the Crown made its own territorial moves in the central Mediterranean, and the invasion and occupation of Sardinia proved to be the final straw for Genoa. Although the Crown did not rule the whole island in the wake of the initial conquest, its presence, and especially the influx of Barcelona's merchants to the island's southern port cities, posed a threat to Genoa's own commercial bases and networks there. Almost immediately after the Crown had completed its takeover of the south and east of Sardinia, Genoa began to attack Catalan shipping around the island; by 1326, the Genoese were targeting Catalan ships throughout the Mediterranean, including in Catalan waters.³⁹ Barcelona's proportionally large presence among the Catalan merchants operating out of Sardinia meant that this harassment hit that city's ships particularly hard. In 1330, the Council of One Hundred sent messages to King Alfonso III/IV (r. 1327–1336) proposing an armada against the Genoese. The king was absorbed in planning a joint venture with the king of Castile to attack Nasrid Granada, but he granted Barcelona permission to raise an armed fleet at its own expense to mount counter-attacks, noting that other affected cities such as Valencia, Tortosa, and Tarragona might participate if they wished.⁴⁰

In the short run, giving Barcelona permission to raise its own fleet might seem just a polite way for Alfonso to communicate a lack of interest in fighting a war for the benefit of one city. But his response, which in essence granted one of his subject cities permission to form its own political coalitions, also points to a turn in Barcelona's Mediterranean identity, one in which the city itself drove an expansionist program for its own benefit rather than merely aiding in and benefitting from the Mediterranean policies of its monarchs. This sort of city-centered agency would not have been unusual in the context of some other Mediterranean cities where urban sovereignty was the norm. The city-republic of Venice, for instance, had for centuries made and enforced its own maritime policies on everything from trade agreements to colonization to war against rival powers.⁴¹ Other cities formally acknowledged the sovereignty of their political overlords but in practice usually operated fairly independently, with domestic and most foreign policy in the hands of city magistrates or councils.⁴² Barcelona, on the other hand, was a city directly subject to a monarch whose Council of One Hundred theoretically governed only affairs internal to the city. Yet, in the matter of Genoa at least, the city in the 1330s seemed to be making tentative moves toward a more self-interested presence in the Mediterranean.

One of the principal agents of this more assertive Barcelona in the 1330s was Galceran Marquet himself. We know little of Marquet's life during the eight or so years between his involvement with the Sardinian expedition and Barcelona's entry into open hostilities with Genoa, except that the records of his fines for illicit commerce in Mamluk ports illustrate that he had used that time to gain wealth and experience as a merchant captain. But the beginning of the war with Genoa launched him, like his city, as a force to be reckoned with in the Mediterranean. In 1331, the Council of One Hundred appointed Marquet (together with Bernat Cespujades) as vice admiral of Barcelona's fleet.⁴³ The office of admiral itself was traditionally assigned to a member of the nobility—in this case, Guillem de Cervelló, who also served as lieutenant procurator general of Catalonia for Crown Prince Peter during his minority.⁴⁴ But it was Marquet who personally led the fleet. One of his early accomplishments in this position was the capture of the Genoese ship Sant Climent, which he persuaded a small group of investors to arm for corsair warfare against the Genoese—a move that illustrates the unclear boundary between the public actions of the city and its agents and the private initiatives of its captains.⁴⁵ Marquet's intent may have been to add insult to injury by using Genoa's own captured ship against them. But this sort of maritime harassment of enemy shipping played out in tandem with more conventional military tactics: the summer of 1331, the same year that Marquet was using the Sant Climent to conduct council-authorized raids on Genoese shipping, a joint Barcelona-Mallorca fleet blockaded the city of Genoa itself, eventually moving on to sack Chiavari to the south and Porto Venere to the north before retiring to Sardinia to continue to harass Genoese shipping in the Tyrrhenian Sea. The following summer saw Genoa turn the tables by attacking Barcelona in its own territory, sending a squadron of galleys into Catalan waters to loot and sometimes burn ships, stopping to attack the Balearics before heading home.⁴⁶

By the time famine and shortages combined with war in the second half of 1333, King Alfonso had gotten involved in the conflict with Genoa, directing Crown cities to provide resources rather than simply inviting them to do so.⁴⁷ When Murcia objected that it should not have to fund a war that primarily benefitted Barcelona, Barcelona's council countered by insisting that the war they were fighting against Genoa was to the advantage of all, its benefits extending even to the Castilians, the Mallorcans, and the French, all of whom the Genoese had been attacking.⁴⁸ On the whole, however, the conflict, even now with more direct royal involvement, might best be described as a coalition effort, with Barcelona very much in the lead and standing to benefit most directly.

Famine and War in the Mediterranean

We might leave our story of Barcelona's status as a “Mediterranean city” there, with the city in the process of becoming a more active player in its own right on the Mediterranean stage, albeit with the backing of its monarchs. This Barcelona model is but one of the variety of ways that Mediterranean cities engaged with the space of the sea in the later Middle Ages: from cities like Venice or Ragusa, which created and maintained their own Mediterranean networks as independent or quasi-independent political entities, to Alexandria, a city that was, by the fourteenth century, subordinated to the authority of the Mamluk emperors, to Marseille, whose merchants had established their own networks in the northern Mediterranean but whose long-distance trade connections were, in large part, an outgrowth of the city's status as an embarkation point for pilgrims and crusaders.⁴⁹ But just as the history of the Marquet family in the previous section illustrates how the various strands of the Mediterranean identity of an individual or family cannot be easily pulled apart, the actions of Galceran Marquet and Barcelona's Council of One Hundred during the famine year demonstrate how those same entangled Mediterranean identities applied to the city as a whole.

Even before the first real shortages began to affect Barcelona's grain supply in the summer of 1333, grain procurement was already very much on the minds of the city's councilors. The memory of the campaign to take Sardinia in the 1320s would have been fresh enough for the councilors to know that grain and provisioning would be one of the major expenses of any war at sea. When they presented Guillem de Cervelló with the fleet's orders for a joint Catalan/Mallorcan campaign against Genoa in 1331, the council anticipated that, after stops to do battle in Savona and to patrol the Sicilian coastline for evidence of the Genoese arming more ships, the fleet would repair to Sardinia to restock the ships with “bread”—likely bescuyt rather than fresh bread given the impracticality of frequent provisioning stops while at war.⁵⁰

As the war dragged on, the need to manage this crucial resource became more urgent. In December 1332, the councilors of Barcelona instructed the Catalan consul in Sardinia, Berenguer Carbonell, to sell whatever bescuyt he had on hand and to use the proceeds to buy good wheat to have a fresh batch made. The council also told Carbonell that he should have a sample sent to him so he could personally ensure that it was better than what they had gotten the previous year, specifically that it was “well-cooked and well-leavened, and not gone hard as a rock”; in January, when Carbonell had acquired the product, the councilors again reminded him to check its quality.⁵¹ Provisioning was also part of the councilors’ strategic planning several months later in the summer of 1333, when they arranged for the Mallorcans to supply the joint fleet with 300 quintars (31,200 pounds) of bescuyt, while Barcelona, for its part, attempted to arrange for a fresh supply to be awaiting the fleet once it arrived in Cagliari.⁵²

But obtaining grain from Mediterranean sources had already become difficult by that summer, as the city's wartime grain needs coincided with both drought and flooding in the Italian peninsula, which prompted shortages throughout Italy that increased regional demand for central Mediterranean grain.⁵³ In 1333/1334, the major Crown-controlled Sardinian ports of Cagliari and Iglesias themselves became net importers of grain, bringing in 3,000 starelli (about 150,000 dry liters or just over 2,000 quarteras) from the Crown-allied judgeship of Arborea in the west of the island and requesting another 10,000 starelli from Sicily.⁵⁴ The local authorities in Cagliari had also instituted an embargo on all grain exports from that city's port, including shipments that Barcelona's fleet was depending on for bescuyt. The embargo prompted the Council of One Hundred to remind the municipal leaders of Cagliari that the fleet's work against the Genoese was as much for their benefit as it was for Barcelona's and to urge them to allow the city's merchants to leave with the grain they had purchased.⁵⁵

Even in good harvest years, warfare had the power to disrupt a city's grain supply: invading armies could seize or destroy grain crops in the field, and military operations could divert food resources away from urban markets.⁵⁶ But Barcelona's conflict with Genoa showed how famine itself could be turned into a weapon of war. Like Barcelona, the city of Genoa had a Mediterranean presence built on the control of sea lanes and port access, which meant that both sides were well aware of the damage that could be done by disrupting the free transport of grain.⁵⁷ In June 1333, the judge of Arborea sent word to King Alfonso that an armada of thirty to forty galleys had departed Genoa at the feast of St. John, with one portion of the fleet destined for Catalan waters and the other headed off to patrol the sea around Sicily with the aim of capturing Catalan ships loaded with grain.⁵⁸ This was not the first time that blockades had been used to cut off supply lines in this conflict: as noted above, ships from Barcelona and its allies had blockaded the port of Genoa in 1331, and the following year, the city of Genoa had sent out its own galleys to impede grain shipments coming into Barcelona from Sicily and its other Mediterranean sources.⁵⁹ Blockades like these did double duty in the context of the weather-related shortages throughout the Mediterranean that year, denying Barcelona's fleet a means to reprovision while simultaneously weakening the city at home by severely restricting the flow of grain from one of its most important Mediterranean sources.

Much of the council's strategy in this year of famine and war centered on its deployment of Galceran Marquet, whose own multifaceted maritime identity embodied the equally fluid nature of his home city's Mediterranean presence. The council had reappointed Marquet as vice admiral in 1333 and again in 1334, placing him at the head of a joint fleet that included ships from the kingdoms of Mallorca and Valencia.⁶⁰ But though he was reappointed to continue his prosecution of the war with Genoa, Marquet's labors from the summer of 1333 through the spring of 1334 were increasingly taken up with escort duty for Mediterranean grain shipments on their way to the city. An early sign of the council's shift in mission for its vice admiral came in late June 1333. Marquet had taken the Barcelona fleet, together with six ships from Mallorca and Valencia, to Sicily to provide a military escort for grain ships returning to all three cities. The council ordered him to continue in this manner and provide any aid necessary to all grain ships so that they might return safely with their cargoes.⁶¹ Further letters from the councilors to Marquet show that his efforts to secure safe transport of grain ranged all over the Mediterranean. But they also suggest that he was not working nearly quickly enough for the council's liking: a letter dated July 5, 1333, finds the council anxiously inquiring when it might expect the grain ships’ arrival. The councilors’ tone with the hero of the armada had sharpened since the previous month, as they professed to be “astounded” that the ships had not arrived. Was he delaying for some reason? If so, then he needed to send the ships immediately upon receipt of the letter because the city was, in the councilors’ words, in “grave danger.”⁶²

Marquet's deployment as a military escort for grain shipments illustrates that, already by the summer of 1333, the council had become alarmed at what the shortages, combined with warfare, portended for the months to come and that it was willing to pull its vice admiral from active prosecution of offensive operations if there was a chance that his redeployment could benefit the city's food supply. Such benefits might only be marginal, however, as the armed escorts themselves would consume more of the city's already scarce grain resources, thereby exacerbating the problem they had been designed to solve. In a time of widespread shortage, diverting even a relatively small quantity of grain to a major naval operation could eliminate the already narrow margin between survival and starvation in the city. The desperation of Barcelona's food situation is further demonstrated by the fact that, despite the extra outlay of grain required, the councilors continued sending Marquet on escort duty well outside the normal sailing season. The late fall and winter months would have brought the usual bad weather conditions that generally limited—although never completely halted—sailing on the open Mediterranean.⁶³ Indeed, after one last set of letters in late September regarding a final mission to Sicily to secure grain for the city, the council's correspondence on Mediterranean grain missions goes quiet for several months, during which time it concentrated its efforts on obtaining grain from sources in the Catalan interior.⁶⁴ But the crisis in the city was apparently grave enough that Marquet found himself deployed once again in the first weeks of 1334, providing armed escort for ships braving the hazardous winter seas in search of Mediterranean grain. We do not know the exact date that this new enterprise set sail, but it was likely sometime in mid to late January because, by February 15, the council was already growing impatient, writing to Marquet to remind him—as if he needed reminding—of the situation in the city, where grain had grown prohibitively expensive and could only be found with great effort.⁶⁵

Marquet's activities both before and after this radically shortened winter hiatus illustrate how two types of Mediterranean identity for the city of Barcelona—one as a hub of commerce; the other, more tentative, as a contributor to the Crown's territorial projects in the Mediterranean—intertwined during the famine year. The council's deployment of the vice admiral also shows how these two identities could, at times, come into conflict. Food crisis had prompted Barcelona to enlist the aid of other cities for the armed protection of grain shipments, including negotiations with Mallorca in June 1333 to arm fourteen galleys and join ships from Barcelona and Valencia for an expedition to protect the grain shipments that would be taking sail from Sicily at the end of October.⁶⁶ Marquet had met with the captains of the Mallorcan and Valencian fleets in Cagliari in mid-August to coordinate their plans. At this meeting, they had agreed that the Valencian and Mallorcan ships would patrol the waters off Genoa while the Catalan ships made their way home with the grain. The Council of One Hundred seemed content to allow Marquet to take the lead on strategy, but King Alfonso apparently had other ideas. On August 31, 1333, the council recruited ship captain Antoni Astruch to deliver a message to Marquet, who was by then making his way back to Barcelona along the Provençal coast. The king, having been briefed on the latest developments, now wanted the ships of Barcelona, Valencia, and Mallorca to meet up at Mahón, where they would receive pay to keep them at sea until October, departing from there to continue the search for grain. The councilors informed Marquet that his mission had changed and concluded their letter to him in a way that had by this point become routine, emphasizing the urgent necessity due to the great shortages in the city.⁶⁷ A similar collision of royal politics and urban provisioning strategy occurred in February 1334: only a week after the council had written to prod Marquet to deliver the grain quickly to avert the mounting crisis in the city, it was writing to cut the mission short and recall him and the grain ships he was escorting to the city, having gotten news from Marseille that the Genoese were also ready to risk the winter seas and were at that moment assembling a flotilla of fifteen ships to send against Marquet.⁶⁸ At the same time, the councilors wrote to their counterparts on the council of Mallorca, asking them to help reinforce the joint fleet with additional ships, emphasizing the danger to both cities if the Genoese were allowed to gain the upper hand.⁶⁹

Marquet's experience with these shifting orders reflects the ambiguity surrounding the question of whose Mediterranean presence—the city's or the Crown's—was at stake in this war with Genoa. But it would not do to forget that Marquet was also a Mediterranean actor in his own right, one whose activities often blurred the lines between public and private action, mirroring the hybrid Mediterranean identity of Barcelona as a whole. At some point in the early summer of 1333, Marquet had captured a shipload of grain, intending to have it delivered to Barcelona. Instead, the ship's cargo had been sold off by Mallorca, whose leaders pleaded the great need in the city—an action provoking objections by Barcelona's council that its city should have a share of the proceeds.⁷⁰ In early September of that same year, a letter from the council mentions a shipment of wax that Marquet had acquired somewhere during his voyages for the city and that he was apparently planning on bringing back to Barcelona to sell.⁷¹ Together, these cases illustrate the blurring of lines between the Mediterranean orientation of the shipowner/sea captain, the merchant, the naval soldier and agent of the city, and even the corsair—none of which were mutually exclusive occupations.

The Council of One Hundred and the city it governed approached the Mediterranean with an outlook that mirrored the fluidity and flexibility of individuals like Marquet, whose networks they were appropriating to serve the city's needs in a time of interwoven crises. But the skills and connections provided by such people were not the whole of how Barcelona engaged with the Mediterranean: the city also relied on the infrastructure that the Crown monarchs had built up in the process of their earlier territorial expansion. In situations such as these, the council drew on another set of strands in the web of Mediterranean connections: the network of overseas consulates that had sprung up throughout the Mediterranean during the thirteenth century. Consuls simultaneously acted as representatives of their home government in a foreign land and as liaisons between the merchants who passed through or resided in foreign cities and those cities’ governmental or legal authorities.⁷² The consuls for the majority of James I's reign hailed from maritime cities throughout the Crown of Aragon: as late as January 1268, King James invested two merchants from Montpellier (at the time, part of the Crown realms) with the authority to travel to Alexandria and name a consul there, that is, to act with the same authority that the king himself would have possessed.⁷³ But by August of 1268, the balance had shifted to Barcelona, as James granted the Council of One Hundred the right to name overseas consuls in Byzantine territory or “in whatever other places that Barcelona's boats or ships sail to” and forbade the royal officials assigned to Barcelona from interfering with the council's decision.⁷⁴ By the end of the thirteenth century, with the exception of a few major trade ports in North Africa that were still royal appointments, “Catalan” consuls were in large part Barcelona's consuls, a fact that underlined the dominance of Barcelona's merchants in the Crown's Mediterranean domains.

Barcelona's leaders drew on the infrastructure of this consular network to bridge the political gap between cities and foreign rulers. In 1333, the Council of One Hundred wrote to the consuls in the Sicilian port city of Trapani in June and in Cagliari in August and September, charging them to work with rulers in their respective locales to make sure that the fleet would encounter no barriers to reprovisioning when it arrived.⁷⁵ The council also used the consuls to forge direct connections with political partners who might have been more likely to build a relationship with King Alfonso than with one of his cities, which suggests that the merchant/mariner logic of connection and mobility was not the only map of the Mediterranean the councilors were comfortable employing. The consuls proved handy, for example, in negotiating with Sardinia's Catalan governor Ramon de Cardona to lift the embargo he had imposed for the island's ports of Cagliari and Iglesias and to let Barcelona export “one or two ships” loaded with grain in the summer of 1333. Unlike Marquet, Ramon de Cardona was not one of the council's agents; he was a member of a Catalan noble house who owed his position as governor to the king.⁷⁶ This exalted position did not prevent Barcelona's council from writing to him directly, but it did call for reinforcements: on the same day they wrote to Ramon, Barcelona's councilors wrote a second letter to the consul in Cagliari, Berenguer Carbonell. Half a year earlier, the council had been calling on Carbonell to help arrange for bescuyt for the fleet. Now, it turned to him as the city's ambassador, asking him to intercede with both the governor and the municipal council of Cagliari to confirm that their ships would be allowed to leave with any grain they were able to purchase.⁷⁷

While continuing to work through the consuls to advance its interests, Barcelona's Council of One Hundred also tried its hand at forging more direct ties with territorial sovereigns. That this sort of active participation in political network-building in the Mediterranean only began to take place late in the winter of 1334, after the shortages in the city had been worsening for months, suggests how uncharacteristic an action this was for Barcelona's leaders. On February 15, 1334, the same day that they wrote to Marquet about his delay in sending updates on the progress of his winter mission, the councilors dispatched pairs or trios of envoys to Sicily's King Frederick, Queen Eleanor, and Crown Prince Peter, as well as to Frederick's chancellor, Peter of Antioch; in Sardinia, another group of envoys was sent to Judge Hugh of Arborea as well as to the Catalan governor of the island's Crown territories, Ramon de Cardona. The council instructed its envoys to secure as much grain as they could as quickly as they could, for the situation in Barcelona had become so dire “that delay of one day is like that of a year.”⁷⁸ Significantly, the letters of introduction that the councilors wrote for these envoys to present to their royal and noble correspondents demonstrate the councilors’ awareness of the asymmetry between themselves and the parties with which they were attempting to negotiate. These letters open with ritual statements of either fellowship or supplication not contained in correspondence with the council's own envoys or even with fellow cities, followed by descriptions of the dire shortages in Barcelona and the assertion that the city was resting its hope in the recipient. Only then do the councilors introduce their envoys and plead that the royal or noble recipient grant them a favorable hearing.⁷⁹

A further indication of the councilors’ awareness of the gap between their city's reach and its grasp when it came to being taken seriously as a negotiating partner in a Mediterranean context is visible in the suggestion that their correspondents might choose one of the city's envoys to hold at court as a hostage for Barcelona's full payment of the price of the grain purchase they were attempting to negotiate, so that the purchase could make its way to Barcelona even while the funds were still being raised.⁸⁰ While hostages had long been used as guarantees of fidelity of friends, enemies, and subordinates, or as leverage to prompt political negotiations or even espionage, in the central and later Middle Ages they were increasingly used to guarantee financial transactions.⁸¹ Looking at Barcelona's use of hostages through the lens of network-building in an asymmetric political context suggests a slightly different utilization of this tool of foreign policy. Barcelona's interactions with sovereigns in Sicily and Arborea, as well as with the royally appointed governor of the Crown of Aragon's territories in Sardinia, are the only times where we see the offer of hostages as part of Barcelona's grain dealings in the famine year. Such an extraordinary step may be a sign of the increasingly desperate situation that the city found itself in by February 1334. But the offer of hostages was also a tool that Barcelona's leaders could use to help compensate not only for a financial shortfall but also for the inherent imbalance between themselves and the rulers of the territories they were attempting to negotiate with.

Barcelona's council used both consuls and hostages to weave new strands into the web of Mediterranean connections built by individuals like Galceran Marquet. But to refer to the result as “Barcelona's Mediterranean network” is somewhat misleading. In Barcelona, what looked like a single network was actually an agglomeration of smaller ones, both short- and long-term, each based on agreements between individual merchants and shipowners and anchored and supported by the broader political map that the monarchs had created through their treaties, marriages, and conquests in the Mediterranean.⁸² We might add to this web the micro-networks of the ship ownership corporations and the marriages between Barcelona families like the Marquets who maintained an interest in the Mediterranean. Networks such as these were not static things; rather, they were constantly being formed, altered, broken up, and rebuilt by their members in ways that blended the personal, the political, and the economic.⁸³ The strands in the Mediterranean-facing networks—plural—that the city depended on were largely generated by individual actors for their own personal utility and thus did not, properly speaking, “belong” to the city. What we see instead is a moderately stable system produced by fluid layers of individual relationships that were centered in the city of Barcelona but that did not emanate from that city's leadership. This lack of central control was not necessarily a weakness. Thomas Kirk has argued for Genoa that the lack of a consistent organizing principle from the center lent that city a useful degree of flexibility in its approach to the Mediterranean.⁸⁴ The same was likely true for Barcelona: the Council of One Hundred did not construct the city's Mediterranean networks on its own, but the ties between Barcelona's merchant and shipping families and its governing council meant that the city government could draw on those networks more or less at will in times of crisis. During its bad year, Barcelona gathered up the economic and political threads spun by both merchants and monarchs, braiding them together in the same way that individual agents like Marquet did for their own Mediterranean identities as military and merchant captains. The final product of this appropriation and recombination of preexisting economic and political connections remained infused with the borderless sensibilities of the city's merchants and mariners, even as it employed the broader political infrastructure of the monarchs to whom it was subject.

After the famine ended, the council rewarded Galceran Marquet's service to the city by electing him as one of the city's five magistrates.⁸⁵ His reputation was such that, when the 1337 royal inquest that this chapter began with included him among the possible collaborators in the council's alleged grain-profiteering schemes, he was one of only a small handful of prominent citizens named in the charges whom King Peter III/IV allowed to continue holding public office while the trial was ongoing.⁸⁶ One of the two witnesses who spoke directly to Marquet's possible role in the scandal, Bernat Serra, defended the captain's actions by asserting that, if Marquet had taken a profit, it was only appropriate since he had paid for the grain up front and provided the ships to transport it—an expectation, in other words, that there would be no separation or conflict between Marquet's role as agent of the city and his other identities as shipowner-captain and merchant.⁸⁷

Galceran Marquet was his generation's most prominent member of a sprawling extended family for whom economics and politics had long intertwined. His actions in the Mediterranean between the summer of 1333 and the spring of 1334 were an extension of what he and his family had always done: seamlessly blend roles as shipowner-captains, military commanders, merchants, corsairs, and even smugglers. Over the course of his documented life, Galceran Marquet, like many members of his family, cultivated various types of networks—public and private, large and small, economic and political—and his activities in the Mediterranean, both before and during the famine year, illustrate how these various networks supported one another. In this way, Marquet's approach toward the Mediterranean was a microcosm of that of Barcelona more broadly, where boundaries between economic and political action could blur as the council used all the resources at its disposal to forge a relationship between the city, its merchants and leading families, Crown possessions and consulates, and foreign allies.

During the famine year, Marquet deployed all his Mediterranean identities primarily—though not exclusively—as an agent of his city, a fact that reveals how much Barcelona depended on networks that were constantly being created and recreated by others. As Barcelona's ships struggled to bring grain to their city in the midst of both Mediterranean-wide harvest shortfalls and a war at sea, the city's leaders attempted to exert more active control over these networks and even tried to develop some of their own more asymmetric political connections by making direct appeals to foreign rulers. Barcelona was not constitutionally like the Italian city-states that sometimes stand in for “the Mediterranean city”: it was a commercial powerhouse like those cities, but politically it was part of a broader Crown, subordinate to a monarch with whom it exchanged funding and ships for tax exemptions and privileges of limited self-government. Its Mediterranean identity was based in the trade routes, consulates, and ports (including its own) that connected with inland commercial networks, operating in a shared space in which it sometimes incurred the enmity of other cities with ambitions of their own. The intertwined stories of Galceran Marquet and his city during the famine year allow us to see Barcelona's identity as a Mediterranean city as more complex than just a place at the center of an economic empire. Marquet's activities on behalf of his city, as well as that city's use of the sea's overlapping networks of merchants, captains, and consulates, illustrate the multiple ways that a city might extend its dominion by creatively combining connections forged by others. All of these sets of connections—and, more importantly, the way they intertwined to reinforce one another—made up Barcelona's Mediterranean identity, one that tended to operate according to its captains’ and merchants’ logic of mobility and borderlessness, even while depending on the territorial map belonging to its monarchs. Yet, as the next chapter will illustrate, Barcelona's leaders were also attempting to position their city as a Mediterranean territorial power in its own right.

_________________

1. AHCB, Plets i processos 4 (1337–1338), 8r–10v; mention of Marquet at 8v. For further on this inquest, see this book, chapter 6.

2. Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, “Projecció exterior,” in Història de Barcelona, vol. 3, La ciutat consolidada, ed. Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó (Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, for the Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1992), 355–91; Antoni Riera Melis, “Barcelona en els segles XIV–XV, un mercat internacional a escala mediterrànea,” Barcelona quaderns d’història 8 (2003): 65–83; Pere Benito i Monclús, “El rey frente a la carestía: políticas frumentarias de estado en la Europa medieval,” in Políticas contra el hambre y la carestía en la Europa medieval (Lleida: Milenio, 2018), 39; Denis Menjot, “Defender la ciudad medieval contra el hambre: abastecimiento y políticas anonárias,” in Abastecer a cidade na Europa medieval (Lisboa: Instituto de Estudos Medievais [IEM], 2020), 164; Charles Dufourcq, L’expansió catalana a la mediterrània occidental: segles XIII i XIV (Barcelona: Vicens-Vives, 1969); Jocelyn N. Hillgarth, The Problem of a Catalan Mediterranean Empire 1229–1327 (London: Longman, 1975). While both Dufourcq and Hillgarth examine a “Catalan Mediterranean” more broadly, the role of Barcelona in particular is central to both of their analyses.

3. For networks as an analytical tool for the history of Barcelona, see Damien Coulon, “Barcelona en las redes mercantiles marítimas y terrestres del gran comercio en la Baja Edad Media,” Barcelona quaderns d’història 18 (2012): 147–64; and Maria Elisa Soldani, “Barcelona, el Mediterráneo y las redes mercantiles italianas en la Baja Edad Media,” Barcelona quaderns d’història 21 (2014): 185–99. For networks and Mediterranean cities more generally, see the essays in Damien Coulon, Christophe Picard, and Dominique Valérian, eds., Espaces et réseaux en Méditerranée, vi^e–xvi^e siècle (Paris: Éditions Bouchène, 2007).

4. Christophe Picard, Sea of the Caliphs: The Mediterranean in the Medieval Islamic World, trans. Nicholas Elliott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), 117–30 and 153–58; Olivia Remie Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 29–51; Travis Bruce, “Piracy as Statecraft: The Mediterranean Policies of the Fifth/Eleventh-Century Taifa of Denia,” Al-Masāq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 22 (2010): 235–48.

5. 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), 119–20; Hillgarth, The Problem of a Catalan Mediterranean Empire, 17–19; Steven Epstein, Genoa & the Genoese, 958–1528 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 40–47; David Abulafia, A Mediterranean Emporium: The Catalan Kingdom of Majorca (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4–7; Silvia Orvietani Busch, Medieval Mediterranean Ports: The Catalan and Tuscan Coasts, 1100 to 1235 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 125–27.

6. Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, “El comerç català a la baixa edat mitjana,” Catalan Historical Review 5 (2012): 159–60; Antoni Riera Melis and Gaspar Feliu Montfort, “Activitats econòmiques,” in Història de Barcelona, vol. 3, La ciutat consolidada, ed. Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó (Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, for the Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1992), 180–84; for the Mediterranean grain trade in particular, see Juanjo Cáceres Nevot, “La participació del consell municipal en l’aprovisionament cerealer de la ciutat de Barcelona (1301–1430)” (PhD diss., University of Barcelona, 2007), 49–51; Bruno Anatra, “Dall’unificazione aragonese ai Savoia,” in La Sardegna medioevale e moderna, ed. John Day, Bruno Anatra, and Lucetta Scaraffia (Turin: UTET, 1984), 221–24; Josefa Mutgé i Vives, La ciudad de Barcelona durante el reinado de Alfonso el Benigno (1327–1336) (Madrid: CSIC, 1987), 64–68; and Riera Melis, “Barcelona en els segles XIV–XV,” 70–74. By the famine year, the city had also become a net importer in the trans-Mediterranean slave trade, with traders purchasing enslaved Greeks, Slavs, and Central Asians from Venetian or Genoese intermediaries to resell in Barcelona. See Stephen Bensch, “From Prizes of War to Domestic Merchandise: The Changing Face of Slavery in Catalonia and Aragon, 1000–1300,” Viator 25 (1994): 65–75; and Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, “Esclaus i lliberts orientals a Barcelona. Segles XIV–XV,” in De l’esclavitud a la llibertat: esclaus i lliberts a l’Edat Mitjana, ed. Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol and Josefa Mutgé i Vives (Barcelona: CSIC, 2000), 167–68. Decades after the famine year, Barcelona's enslaved war captives would include Sardinians taken as prisoners in their uprising against the Crown. See Josep Maria Madurell Marimon, “Vendes d’esclaus sards de guerra a Barcelona, en 1374,” in VI Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón (Madrid: Arges, 1959), 285–89.

7. Vicente Salavert y Roca, Cerdeña y la expansión mediterránea de la Corona de Aragón, 1297–1314 (Madrid: CSIC, 1956), 1:53; Busch, Medieval Mediterranean Ports, 125–26.

8. Capmany 2:doc. 1.

9. Antoni Riera Melis, “La construcció naval a Catalunya a les vespres dels grans descobriments geogràfics (1350–1450),” Revista d’historia medieval 3 (1992): 58–72; Arcadi Garcia i Sanz and Núria Coll Julià, Galeres mercants catalanes dels segles XIV i XV (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 1994), 77–80; Marcel Pujol, La construcció naval a Catalunya a l’Edat Mitjana (Barcelona: Base, 2012), 93–103, 130–32, and 144–49; Marcel Pujol Hamelink, “El mestre d’aixa en la construcció naval i la navegació a la Catalunya baix-medieval (segles XIII–XV),” in Tripulacions i vaixells a la Mediterrania medieval: fonts i perspectives comparades des de la Corona d’Arago, ed. Roser Salicrú i Lluch (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2019), 247–80.

10. Abulafia, A Mediterranean Emporium, 4–17. For more on the kingdom of Mallorca, see this book, chapter 4.

11. Hillgarth, The Problem of a Catalan Mediterranean Empire, 22–31; Steven Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 228–71; Salavert y Roca, Cerdeña y la expansión mediterránea, 1:55–62 and 111–13. For papal documents of excommunication and interdict of King Peter II/III, see Tilman Schmidt and Roser Sabanés Fernández, eds., Butllari de Catalunya: documents pontificis originals conservats als arxius de Catalunya (1198–1417), 3 vols. (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2016), 1: no. 467 and 468.

12. Albert Estrada i Rius, La Drassana Reial de Barcelona a l’alta edat mitjana: organització institucional i construcció naval a la Corona d’Aragó (Barcelona: Museu Marítim de Barcelona, 2004), 167–91; Riera Melis, “La construcció naval,” 57–60; Garcia i Sanz and Coll Julià, Galeres mercants catalanes, 77; Riera Melis and Feliu Montfort, “Activitats econòmiques,” 184–86; Pujol, La construcció naval, 86–89.

13. Capmany 2:doc. 17. This privilege was confirmed by James II in 1326; see Capmany 2:doc. 118. Contrast with the situation in Venice, which, in the same period, welcomed merchant ships from its commercial rivals in Italy as well as from subject cities like Zara; see Frederic C. Lane, Venice: Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 62–63. For lax enforcement of the Barcelona privilege, see Ferrer i Mallol, “Projecció exterior,” 377–78.

14. LCM vol. III.2 (Diplomatari), doc. 1 (pp. 9–10).

15. Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, “Sobre els orígens del Consolat de Mar a Barcelona el 1279 i sobre el cònsols d’Ultramar a bord de vaixells: un exemple de 1281,” Anuario de Εstudios Μedievales 23 (1993): 141–43; LCM vol. III.1 (Estudi jurídic), 256–57. For the original 1258 ordinances of the prohoms of the Ribera, see Capmany 2:doc. 14. Stephen Bensch has argued that the foundation of the original corporation of the Ribera district, coming as it did the same month and year as the foundation of the Consell de cent, was less a reward for services rendered than a measure to bring some institutional control to a district that was the source of growing tensions between ambitious families; see Stephen Bensch, “Poder, dinero y control del comercio en la formación del régimen municipal de Barcelona,” Barcelona quaderns d’història 4 (2001): 57.

16. Capmany 2:doc. 28.

17. Montagut i Estragués, “El ‘Llibre del Consolat de Mar’ y el ordenamiento jurídico del mar,” 217. For a full discussion of the Llibre del consolat de mar and its impact, see this book, chapter 3.

18. For a prosopographical introduction to the sprawling Marquet family and their activities, see Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, “Una família de navegants: els Marquet,” in El “llibre del consell” de la ciutat de Barcelona, s. XIV: les eleccions municipals, ed. Carme Batlle i Gallart (Barcelona: CSIC, 2007), 135–267.

19. Ferrer i Mallol, “Una familia de navegants,” 141–48. For duties of the heads of ships’ ownership corporations in general, see LCM vol. 1, nos. 47 and 61; Garcia i Sanz and Coll Julià, Galeres mercants catalanes, 256–61 and 287–91.

20. Ferrer i Mallol, “Una familia de navegants,” 158–65; Marina Mitjá, “Los Marquet y sus naves,” Divulgación histórica de Barcelona 10 (1959): 71.

21. Ferrer i Mallol, “Una família de navegants,” 142–43; Stephen Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 1096–1291 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 336–38. For a more detailed treatment of Bernat Marquet's rise and fall, see this book, chapter 6.

22. Bensch, Barcelona and Ιts Rulers, 350–73.

23. Ferrer i Mallol, “Una família de navegants,” 138–39.

24. Ferrer i Mallol, “Una família de navegants,” 146–48.

25. Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 177 and 345–46.

26. Albert Garcia Espuche, La gent del carrer Montcada: una història de Barcelona (segles XIII a XVIII) (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2020), 2:469 and 486; Bruniquer, Rùbriques 1:26–31. Regarding Marquet's birth year, and pace Ferrer i Mallol, who places Galceran Marquet's birth year around 1308–1309, citing a funeral inventory for Galceran's father Bernat in the 1318 notarial registers that gives Galceran's age as eleven (“Una família de navegants,” 214), another document from 1318 lists Galceran's age at the time as “less than 25 years but more than 15,” (ACB, Notaris 16, 27r–v [March 31–April 12] 1318), confirming that he would have been born somewhere between 1293 and 1303. Given that it would have been unusual to delay eight years after Bernat's death to produce a funeral inventory, combined with the fact that 1318 would have been a year that Galceran was in the midst of inheritance litigation over his assumption of his older brother Bonanat's legacy (Ferrer i Mallol, “Una família de navegants,” 191), it is likely that the inventory in the 1318 registers is a copy of an earlier document originally drafted around the time of Galceran's father's death in 1310 and recopied in 1318 to support the litigation. This dating would make Galceran eleven years old at the time of his father's death in 1310, which fits within the range of the April 1318 document and would place his birth year at 1299. His attestation to having attained the age of twenty in a 1324 document related to his marriage (Ferrer i Mallol, “Una família de navegants,” 218) would make the date closer to 1303, but this could have been a statement of legal capacity: an affirmation Galceran was at least twenty and was therefore competent to take the financial actions outlined in the document.

27. Ferrer i Mallol, “Una família de navegants,” 191–93, 197, and 218.

28. Ferrer i Mallol, “Una família de navegants,” 214–16.

29. Ernest Langlois, ed., Les registres de Nicolas IV: recueil des bulles de ce pape, publiés ou analysés d’après les manuscrits originaux des archives du Vatican (Paris: E. Thorin, 1886), no. 6784; 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): 245–52. For a general survey of the papal embargo, see Stefan Stantchev, Spiritual Rationality: Papal Embargo as Cultural Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), esp. 41–89 and 117–62.

30. William of Adam, How to Defeat the Saracens, ed. and trans. Giles Constable (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2012), 27–29 and 35.

31. Damien Coulon, “La documentation pontificale et le commerce avec les musulmans,” in Les territoires de la Méditerranée (xi^e–xvi^e siècle), ed. Annliese Nef (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 169–71.

32. For details on the royal embargo and the Marquet family's involvement in smuggling in violation of it, see Marie Kelleher, “The Family Business: Royal Embargo and the Shippers, Captains, and Smugglers of Barcelona's Marquet Family,” in Merchants, Pirates, and Smugglers: Criminalization, Economics, and the Transformation of the Maritime World (1200–1600), ed. Thomas K. Heebøll-Holm, Philipp Höhn, and Gregor Rohmann (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2019), 57–74.

33. Ferrer i Mallol, “Una família de navegants,” 215.

34. Coulon, “La documentation pontificale,” 173; Mutgé i Vives, La ciudad de Barcelona, 109–12. The cost of these fines would have been shared out among the merchants participating in the voyage. In addition, there appears to have been a second type of fine: a flat fee of about 200–250 sous levied on noninvolved captains whose ships were found carrying illicit cargo; see Kelleher, “The Family Business,” 68–69.

35. Ferrer i Mallol, “Una família de navegants,” 215.

36. Butllari vol. 1, doc. 577; Salavert y Roca, Cerdeña y la expansión mediterránea, 1:114–20, and 2, doc. 21; Antara, “Dall’unificazione aragonese ai Savoia,” 191–95; Francesco C. Casula, La Sardegna aragonese (Sassari: Chiarella, 1990), 75–88; John Day, “La Sardegna e i suoi dominatori dal secolo XI,” in La Sardegna medioevale e moderna, ed. John Day, Bruno Anatra, and Lucetta Scaraffia (Turin: UTET, 1984), 55–58.

37. Antara, “Dall’unificazione aragonese ai Savoia,” 195–98; Casula, La Sardegna aragonese, 96–125 and 134–36; Hillgarth, The Problem of a Catalan Mediterranean Empire, 32–34. For a detailed description of James's negotiations and alliance-building after the end of Boniface's pontificate in 1303, see Salavert y Roca, Cerdeña y la expansión mediterránea, 1:238–537.

38. Antara, “Dall’unificazione aragonese ai Savoia,” 199–224; Carme Batlle, Història de Catalunya, vol. 3, L’expansió baixmedieval (segles XIII–XV), ed. Pierre Vilar (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1988), 53–54.

39. 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), 448–50.

40. 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): 232–33; see also Mitjá, “Barcelona y el problema Sardo,” 450.

41. Lane, Venice, 31–43 and 67–85; Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 93–96; Irene B. Katele, “Piracy and the Venetian State: The Dilemma of Maritime Defense in the Fourteenth Century,” Speculum 63, no. 4 (1988): 867–78.

42. Lovro Kunčević, “The Maritime Trading Network of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century,” in The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300–1600 (New York: Routledge, 2017), 141–42; Alma Poloni, “Politics, Institutions, and Society in Pisa during the Communal Era (Late Eleventh to Late Fourteenth Century,” in A Companion to Medieval Pisa, ed. Karen R. Mathews, Silvia Orvietani Busch, and Stefano Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 140–50.

43. Capmany 1:152.

44. Capmany 2:doc. 126; see also ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 505, 274r–v (February 23, 1331), in which King Alfonso notes the joint appointment. For the office of admiral belonging to the nobility, see Ferrer i Mallol, “Una familia de navegants,” 216.

45. Ferrer i Mallol, “Una família de navegants,” 214–16; Mutgé i Vives, “El consell de Barcelona,” 249–50; Marina Mitjá, “Galceran Marquet en la armada barcelonesa de 1330 a 1335,” Divulgación histórica de Barcelona 10 (1959): 78–80.

46. Mutgé i Vives, “El consell de Barcelona,” 240–43; Antara, “Dall’unificazione aragonese ai Savoia,” 219–20.

47. Mutgé i Vives, “El consell de Barcelona,” 242–44.

48. Mutgé i Vives, “El consell de Barcelona,” 236.

49. Crouzet-Pavan, Venice Triumphant, 93–96; Monique O’Connell, “Venice: City of Merchants or City for Merchandise?,” in The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300–1600, ed. Wim Blockmans, Mikhail Krom, and Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz (New York: Routledge, 2017), 103–20; Kunčević, “The Maritime Trading Network of Ragusa (Dubrovnik),” 142–44; Georg Christ, “Collapse and Continuity: Alexandria as a Declining City with a Thriving Port (Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries),” in The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300–1600, ed. Wim Blockmans, Mikhail Krom, and Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz (New York: Routledge, 2017), 121–40; Thierry Pécout, “Marseille: A Supporting Role,” in The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300–1600, ed. Wim Blockmans, Mikhail Krom, and Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz (New York: Routledge, 2017), 193–202.

50. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 11, 86r–87r v (July 5 [?], 1331); Daniel Duran Duelt, “L’alimentació a les embarcacions comercials catalanes durant l’edat mitjana,” in Actes del III Congrés d’Història Marítima de Catalunya Barcelona, 22, 23 i 24 de novembre de 2006, ed. Congrés d’Història Marítima de Catalunya (Barcelona: Museu Marítim de Barcelona, 2008), 4–13 and 18–19; and Bruno Laurioux, Manger au Moyen Âge: pratiques et discours alimentaires en Europe aux xiv^e et xv^e siècles (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 2002), 180–82.

51. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 48r–v (December 10, 1332) and 55r (January 20, 1333).

52. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 76r and v (August 31, 1333), the latter document noting that the fleet was expecting to pick up 1,000 quintars—about 104,000 pounds—of bescuyt from Cardona when it reached Sardinia.

53. See this book, chapter 1.

54. Anatra, “Dall’unificazione aragonese ai Savoia,” 221–24.

55. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 56v–57r (February 6, 1333).

56. Adam Franklin-Lyons, Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 168–71; William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 19–21; Philip Slavin, Experiencing Famine in Fourteenth-Century Britain (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), 30–32; see also several excellent essays in Pere Benito i Monclús and Antoni Riera Melis, eds., Guerra y carestía en la Europa medieval (Lleida: Milenio, 2014).

57. Gabriella Airaldi, “Genoa and Barcelona: Two Hypotheses for a ‘Global’ World,” in Shipping, Trade and Crusade in the Medieval Mediterranean: Studies in Honour of John Pryor, ed. Ruth Gertwagen and Elizabeth Jeffreys (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 223–28.

58. Mutgé i Vives, “El consell de Barcelona,” 243–44.

59. Mitjá, “Galceran Marquet en la armada barcelonesa,” 80; Ferrer i Mallol, “Una família de navegants,” 216.

60. Mutgé i Vives, “El consell de Barcelona,” 251; Ferrer i Mallol, “Una familia de navegants,” 217. By this time the Catalan contingent of the fleet that Marquet was in charge of also included contributions (ships or money) from other coastal Catalan cities that Alfonso had pressured to join the effort in early 1332. ACA, C, reg. 537, 67v (January 16, 1332).

61. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 69v–70r (June 23, 1333).

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

63. Ferrer i Mallol, “Una familia de navegants,” 216; Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 142; Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 248.

64. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 82r–v (September 22–23, 1333); for details of the council's winter-season attempts to purchase grain from Catalan sources, see this book, chapter 4.

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

66. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 68v–69r (June 22, 1333).

67. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 77r and v (August 31, 1333).

68. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 61v–62r (February 24, 1334).

69. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 61r–v (February 24, 1334).

70. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 71v–72r (July 6, 1333).

71. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 78v (September 3, 1333).

72. Daniel Duran Duelt, “Consolats nàutics, consolats ultramarins i altres formes d’organització nauticocomercial en l’àmbit català,” in Jaume I: commemoració del VIII centenari del naixement de Jaume I, ed. Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2011), 2:747–61; Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, “Les consulats catalans de Tunis et de Bougie au temps de Jacques le Conquérant,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 3 (1966): 470–71; Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 6–8 and 133–38.

73. Capmany 2:doc. 20.

74. Capmany 2:doc. 23.

75. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 70v (June 23, 1333) for Sicily; 76v (August 31, 1333) and 82v (September 22, 1333) for Sardinia.

76. Diccionari biogràfic (Barcelona: Albertí, 1966), 1:454.

77. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 73r (July 6, 1333). Barcelona would be less successful in its negotiations with Ramon de Cardona that winter as the shortages worsened: seven months later, the governor was again preventing Barcelona's ships from leaving the island with grain, this time from the port of Oristano; AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 62v–63v (February 26, 1334).

78. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 55r–v (February 15, 1334).

79. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 55v–56r (February 15, 1334).

80. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 55r–56r (February 15, 1334).

81. Adam J. Kosto, Hostages in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 78–129.

82. 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), 1:24–29; Maria Elisa Soldani, “Tra reti internazionali e spazio urbano. Forme mercantili di comunicazione, solidarietà e gestione degli affari nel Mediterraneo occidentale bassomedievale,” in Espaces et réseaux en Méditerranée, vi^e–xvi^e siècle, ed. Damien Coulon, Christophe Picard, and Dominique Valérian (Paris: Éditions Bouchène, 2007), 1:81–109.

83. Paul Douglas McLean, The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 7–16.

84. Thomas Kirk, “The Republic of Genoa and Its Maritime Empire,” in Empires of the Sea: Maritime Power Networks in World History, ed. Rolf Strootman, Floris van den Eijnde, and Roy van Wijk (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 167–70.

85. Bruniquer, Rúbriques, 1:31

86. AHCB, Plets i processos 4 (1337–1338), 1v.

87. AHCB, Plets i processos 4 (1337–1338), 40v.