CHAPTER 6Preacher, Prohom, Prince

The Friar's Tale (December 1333)

Bernat Despuig's argument from the pulpit about the ills of Barcelona's social order was, in part, the product of his own particular context as both a member of a mendicant order and a resident of a thriving commercial city, and illustrates one dimension of ideas about wealth, poverty, and social status in later medieval Barcelona. By the time that Brother Bernat delivered his incendiary sermon, his religious order, the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel, more informally known as the Carmelites, had been part of Barcelona's religious landscape for several decades.⁶ The Cistercian order could still lay claim to Catalonia's most important religious communities: Santes Creus, Poblet, and Santa Maria de Vallbona all had ties to the royal family in the thirteenth century.⁷ But that same century was also a period of rapid expansion of new forms of monasticism focused on voluntary poverty, especially in urban centers like Barcelona. In addition to its community of Carmelites that had been established in 1292, Barcelona was home to Catalonia's first houses of Franciscans (1211), Dominicans (1219), and Augustinian friars (1309), as well as a short-lived house of the Brothers Penitent of Jesus Christ (also known as the Friars of the Sack) founded in 1260 and closed between 1293 and 1295. Barcelona's female religious also took up the mendicant life in the century leading up to the famine year as donors founded important Franciscan communities for women in the city: Santa Clara, established in 1233 on the edge of the city's waterfront district, and Santa Maria de Pedralbes, founded a short distance outside the city in 1321 by King James II's fourth wife, Elicsenda de Montcada (d. 1364), who retired there in her widowhood, eventually becoming the community's abbess.⁸

The voluntary nature of the poverty that characterized mendicant orders like the Carmelites is a reminder that the definition of poverty in the Middle Ages was different from what it is today. The poor whom the city's charities served tended to be artisans, laborers, and even merchants whom age, widowhood, or disability had brought below their station, rather than true paupers who, if able-bodied, were often portrayed as simply not wanting to work.⁹ Writing several decades after the 1330s, Franciscan author Francesc Eiximenis recommended that cities issue official licenses to those claiming poverty so that prospective donors might distinguish between deserving beggars and criminals or vagabonds who were only pretending to be poor in order to collect alms under false pretenses. If people gave money to these false poor, he argued, they would only spend it stuffing themselves with food or gambling in taverns, blaspheming all the while.¹⁰ This idea that unregulated charity could be a source of urban disorder may have been the impetus for the late 1333 council ordinance that fined Barcelona residents who gave out alms from their door and suggested that charitable donations instead be given “to the shamefaced poor”—likely a reference to the city's institutional parish charities, which distributed aid to the “deserving poor” among their parishioners.¹¹ The famine-year council was not opposed to charity generally; in fact, it specifically earmarked any flour or bread confiscated from bakers perpetrating fraud for donation to the poor.¹² But the council's approach as a whole was similar to the one Eiximenis would articulate decades later—that unregulated private almsgiving would only encourage the worst elements in urban society.¹³

While Eiximenis grouped paupers and vagabonds together as a threat, the later medieval Church more generally tended to regard poverty as part of the divine order rather than as a societal ill to be eradicated. Poor people figured prominently in medieval hagiographies as recipients of charity or miracles or as narrative devices used to demonstrate the sanctity of a holy man or woman. Mendicants and medieval theologians alike tended to present care of the poor in terms of what Adam Davis has called an “economy of salvation,” emphasizing spiritual and sometimes material rewards for charity.¹⁴ According to Eiximenis, “The poor who are truly poor should remain [in society] and none should molest them. Because God has placed them in the community so that the rich and those who have them in their care might have the chance to give alms and redeem their own sins.”¹⁵ The mendicant orders of fourteenth-century Barcelona, like the one that Bernat Despuig belonged to, were not seeking to eradicate poverty in absolute terms. Rather, they sought to instill in the minds of the city's fortunate the idea that the God-given purpose of their wealth was a Christlike care for the poor, encouraging potential donors to think of the poor less as objects of contempt and more as opportunities for their own salvation.

Barcelona's well-off residents did have ample institutional avenues for demonstrating this sort of donor-centered charity. The city of Barcelona, like most cities in the fourteenth century, was home to a patchwork of charitable institutions, each designed to deal with a specific form of poverty. One important group of charitable institutions was Barcelona's many hospitals. Hospitals were generally founded with the idea of providing spiritual and (basic) physical care to foreigners or marginal members of urban society who lacked local personal networks to provide for them when they fell ill.¹⁶ Several of Barcelona's small hospitals, each accommodating one to two dozen people, were located in the raval just outside the city's western wall: a cathedral hospital dating to around 995 and later absorbed into a new hospital founded in 1229 by one of the cathedral canons; another, founded by cathedral canon Pere Vilar (or Desvilar) in 1256 and dedicated to Sant Macià; a third, known variously as Sant Llàtzer or the Casa dels malalts, originally founded in the twelfth century to house lepers.¹⁷ Also outside the city's main population center was the hospital that Berenguer Canet and his wife Pereta founded in the first quarter of the thirteenth century at the Augustinian community of Santa Eulàlia del Camp outside the northeastern edge of the city's thirteenth-century wall.¹⁸ Not all hospital founders, however, thought in terms of monastic isolation. The wealthy citizen Bernat Marcús established his hospital just along the road leading from the city's old northeastern gate in the mid-twelfth century, just as the eastern suburb was taking off around it.¹⁹ The same district was even livelier around 1300 when the honrat Pere Desvilar (not to be confused with the thirteenth-century cathedral canon mentioned above) founded a hospital dedicated to Saints Martha and Peter near the shoreline on the eastern edge of the city's busy waterfront district.²⁰ Another consciously urban hospital was envisioned by King Peter the Great's queen Constance (r. 1276–1285), who left money in her will to found a hospital near the Franciscan convent of Framenors where the southwestern end of the thirteenth-century wall met the sea.²¹ And though we have precious little information about it, we know that Barcelona's Jews maintained their own hospital, probably located in or near the call, in the heart of the medieval city.²²

Where Barcelona's hospitals provided basic care to poor invalids, often from the margins of society, the cathedral almonry dealt with food aid in particular. Founded in the twelfth century, Barcelona's Pia Almoina distributed simple meals to the poor, funded by the rents from both urban and rural properties that had been donated to the almonry in particular.²³ Yet that institution was never designed to meet the food needs of all the city's poor even in normal times, much less in a crisis year like 1333/1334. While there seemed to be no upper limit to the number of poor who received charitable food aid during the Lenten season, the daily year-round meals that the almonry provided were limited by what the incomes from the donations to the almonry could finance. Records from 1317 show that the almonry served 178 meals each day that year. This number would increase over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but at its medieval peak, it still served only 288 daily meals for a city of upwards of thirty thousand inhabitants.²⁴ There was also the matter of who received this aid: donors to the cathedral almonry frequently attached conditions to their donations, specifying that they fund meals for family members, students, or both. When the donations did allow for meals for paupers, these tended to be linked to specific occasions, such as funeral or death anniversaries of the donor, rather than the regular daily meals that the almonry served up.²⁵ As a final consideration, a significant percentage of the almonry's revenues went not directly to food costs but to fund clerical benefices related to the institution and the masses and anniversaries that the individual donors specified in their bequests.²⁶ In other words, the almonry tended to function as an instrument of social replication rather than one aimed at the alleviation of absolute poverty.

If parts of the charitable landscape of medieval Barcelona underlined and enforced borders between socioeconomic groups, other parts suggest a more concrete engagement with the specific poverty of one's neighbors. The collection boxes that Barcelona's parish churches maintained, and the collectors they occasionally sent around, illustrate a community dimension to care for the poor. A wealthy woman or man might donate lands to the almonry or even found a hospital, but an artisan or laborer could also participate in charity by contributing a coin to alleviate poverty among their own neighbors—and, of course, for the good of their own soul. Parish charity was a major source of direct aid in many later medieval cities: in Valencia, parish charities helped to provide dowries for laboring-class women, while in Paris, trios of trustworthy parishioners were selected to distribute donations to the parish's poor and infirm.²⁷ In Barcelona, the parish of Santa Maria del Mar, home to both wealthy merchants and humble dockworkers, seems to have been the first to formalize the collection and distribution of alms, probably sometime in the final quarter of the thirteenth century, but by 1344, all of Barcelona's urban parishes had a system for collecting and distributing alms to needy parishioners.²⁸ Medieval Barcelonans also engaged in more direct acts of charity, often over the protests of the Council of One Hundred. Some donated bread and flour from their own doors or at the informal collection stations that the city's begging orders sometimes set up at the grain mills.²⁹ Members of reasonably well-off households gave out Christmas donations to the poor and to their servants alike, and relatives of a recently deceased person might distribute coins to beggars at their door or along the route of the funeral procession.³⁰ Even household servants had to be cautioned not to donate bread or flour that belonged to their employer without his or her knowledge.³¹ At least one of Barcelona's many hospitals shows signs of this more personalized relationship with the city's poor. When Canon Pere Vilar founded his hospital dedicated to St. Macià, he specified that it should give preference in admissions to retired mariners.³² Vilar does not say why, but it is easy to imagine that the donor class in a city where fortunes were nurtured by a relationship with the sea might have a greater awareness of the physically demanding work of the people who labored on these ships and of how age or injury might easily put an end to their productive lives.

Those who gave charity, whether by contributing a coin to a parish collector or founding a hospital, may have been, in part, motivated by their own spiritual self-interest, but they also saw the poor not just as abstractions but rather as Bernat Despuig saw them, as suffering neighbors in need of aid. When this sense of civic connection coincided with the surge in need in 1333/1334, the rhetoric of preachers like Despuig would have seemed especially compelling. The city leaders may have been focused on growing urban unrest, but the famine was also taking a physical toll on the city's population. According to one seventeenth-century source, “in the year 1333 there were great shortages and sicknesses, so that in little time more than ten thousand people died.”³³ Other early modern sources report much the same thing: after describing the famine in terms of surging grain prices and shortages, one reports that “there was in this same year of 1333 also a great mortality in Barcelona, and within a short time ten thousand people died.”³⁴ These references to famine-related sickness and death in Barcelona that year come from early modern antiquarians writing well after the fact and so must be taken with a grain of salt. In particular, the suspiciously round number of ten thousand dead—roughly a third of the city's population at the time—should be read with a great deal of skepticism. The underlying message of these early modern sources is, however, clear: the people of Barcelona were suffering as no person then living had ever experienced.

It was in this fraught atmosphere that Brother Bernat was called upon to deliver his sermon. One can imagine that the councilors, hoping for words of consolation, listened in mounting horror as the friar flung out the one accusation that would be certain to inflame the already-high tensions in the city—that the city's already wealthy leaders were hoarding grain to profit themselves. But while the councilors were dismayed, they probably would not have been surprised, as this was not the first time that Brother Bernat had attached himself to a topic that seemed almost calculated to displease the city's ruling classes. On one earlier occasion, he had concluded a Sunday sermon in the parish church of Sant Miquel by saying that the citizens should pray that God grant the king and his men victory against the Muslims. This would have been fine had he not gone on to say that God would not take this sort of interest when the king fought against other Christians—at a time, the councilors noted, when the king was at war with the “iniquitous” Genoese. It is worth noting, however, that in 1333 the councilors only formally complained about this earlier sermon in the context of what was, for them, the much more important issue: that Bernat had all but invited the city's suffering population to rise up against their governing officials and the ruling elite more generally. The subprior of Bernat's house had already confined him to the convent and punished him for his excesses. But the council wanted more, urging the provincial leader of the Carmelite order, Berenguer Petri, to expel Bernat from the ecclesiastical province of Hispania altogether.³⁵ It is likely that the councilors, in their letter to Petri, linked the two offensive sermons in order to support their argument that the Bernat situation needed to be treated as a pattern of reckless behavior that merited a serious response. But it is also possible that they genuinely saw the friar's seditious sermon against the king and his allegations of greed and corruption among the city's leaders as two parts of a single broader threat to the social and political order.

Brother Bernat may have seen the alliance between merchants and councilors as the source of the city's ills, but his attitude was far from universal, even among members of the mendicant orders. Pointing to the fact that the largely urban mendicants depended on merchant wealth for financial support, Lester Little has argued that, rather than decry a profit economy or the socioeconomic inequities that went hand-in-hand with that system, the mendicants supplied “a revised moral theology that approved of money-making in certain, carefully defined circumstances.”³⁶ Francesc Eiximenis notably singled out merchants as one of the few groups among the elite who were most beneficial to a city: “because neither knights nor citizens who live from rents bother with great acts of charity; only the merchants are the great alms-givers and the great fathers and brothers of the republic, especially when they are good men of good conscience.”³⁷ But Eiximenis, who was writing in the 1380s in the wake of a famine that would be even more severe than the bad year of 1333/1334, also took care to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate merchant activities: the merchant who hoarded grain to intentionally provoke shortages in order to drive up the price so they could make an unreasonable profit “has become a speculator and, as a consequence, must be condemned as such.”³⁸

It was this sort of unethical behavior by merchants and their ilk that Bernat Despuig had been railing against in his sermon. As noted in chapter 1, the council ordinances regularly addressed hoarding and were even more vigilant and punitive than usual in shortage years like 1333/1334.³⁹ But the friar's sermon suggests that he saw an additional dimension to the problem—the fact that the merchants and the municipal leaders who regulated them were often the same people. Eiximenis divided a city's residents into three groups or “hands” in a system that had less to do with how much wealth one had than with where that wealth came from. The “greater hand” (mà major) included some members of the minor aristocracy, but in the cities, this group consisted primarily of honrats, those non-noble urban elites whose wealth came from investments and rents on their urban or rural properties (honors). Next for Eiximenis came the “middle hand” (mà mitjana), merchants and professionals like jurists and notaries whose income came from their own (nonmanual) labor and who tended to be relatively prosperous. At the lowest end of the urban social scale came the “lesser hand” (mà menor), the artisans and laborers that made up the bulk of a city's population. Eiximenis was dubious about the political agency of this last group. He acknowledged that they, like the more transient members of an urban population, such as messengers, pilgrims, foreign merchants, and the freed and enslaved people who occupied the very bottom of the social hierarchy, were necessary to the good working of a city.⁴⁰ But while he acknowledged their utility and even necessity, he probably thought of their political capacity the same way he regarded that of rustics (pagesos): their poverty meant that they were habituated to look after only their own well-being and so were incapable of thinking of the greater good; they should, thus, never be put in a position of public authority because they would only abuse it to serve their own interests.⁴¹

Eiximenis borrowed the rough outlines of his social hierarchy from Aristotle.⁴² But had he wanted confirmation, he could have easily found it in the structure of Barcelona's municipal government. In 1333/1334, the Council of One Hundred (which numbered 106 that year) included twenty-six artisans and nine members of the “middle-hand” professions. But the vast majority of members of the council that year, as always, were honrats.⁴³ Men of this status also monopolized the inner council of five magistrates, which, over approximately the first half of the fourteenth century, was occupied by members of only sixty-four families, some of whom provided councilors for a dozen or more of those years.⁴⁴ Some families of the honrats on the council were connected to the local minor aristocracy by marriage, but most, like the Marquet family of chapter 3, had built their wealth on a combination of investment incomes and direct mercantile activity.⁴⁵

With such a lopsided representation of rentiers and merchant-investors in the ranks of city government and especially among the ruling magistrates, it is little wonder that Brother Bernat assumed corruption behind the city's shortages. Barcelona's councilors for that year were themselves vigilant against fraud but focused their scrutiny on the city's food trades rather than within their own ranks. Already in the summer of 1333, the council was targeting bakers, specifically directing them to offer bread that was not only the correct weight but also “appealing and wholesome” (bell i bo). The council appointed some of its own number as ad hoc inspectors of the city's bakeries, fining violators and destroying any bread that failed to meet the standard.⁴⁶ By January of the following year, the councilors were being much more specific about the types of marketplace fraud they were apparently seeing. Consumers who were willing to go to the trouble of baking their own bread could economize by purchasing low-grade flours made from grains other than wheat or barley, and the council acknowledged the emergency situation by allowing bakers to offer bread made from mixtures that included millet, spelt, and sorghum in addition to the usual wheat and barley loaves. But the council also levied a 10-sou fine on bakers who were caught baking bread from rice or chickpea flour, and any baker who tried to pass off loaves made with these flours as pure wheat or barley bread would be fined 20 sous.⁴⁷ Council-delegated investigators that year submitted a report on market fraud to the council, encouraging it to have loaves inspected both before and after cooking to ensure that bakers were not skimming from the flour that had been given to them to make bread and then selling the stolen flour.⁴⁸ Flour sellers also came under greater surveillance and faced a fine of 100 sous per offense if they were caught adulterating flour sold as pure wheat or barley with lower-grade materials.⁴⁹

Overall, the food-related ordinances of 1333/1334, formerly concerned primarily with regulating commerce and taxation, came to focus on the more important priority of keeping a steady and wholesome supply of grain and bread in the city, and the council showed its seriousness by sending its agents around to do spot inspections rather than relying on accusers from the community to come forward to report infractions of the ordinances. The fact that these regulations set such high fines on fraud at the consumer end of the supply chain suggests that the councilors were as aware as any modern politician that problems in the supply of a basic commodity could result in popular backlash. In Bernat Despuig's eyes, however, it was moral rot that was the real source of the city's ills. His judgment of the city and its leaders stemmed in part from his specific background as a member of one of the city's mendicant orders. But it also reflected the social and economic divisions in Barcelona at the beginning of the fourteenth century when poverty was taken as a matter of course, and charity was as much a performance of status and piety as it was a serious attempt to alleviate suffering. The Barcelona that Bernat Despuig saw as he looked out from the pulpit that Christmas was a city marked by the same societal divisions that Francesc Eiximenis would outline decades later. But where Eiximenis would see inevitability and even a divine hand in the social order, Brother Bernat saw a social system shot through with corruption, one in which a self-dealing ruling elite could use their political position to profit themselves, leaving the many below them to suffer for their sins.

But this story can be retold. And like any story, it changes meaning depending on who is doing the telling, revealing other ways to see the city and to assign blame when crisis struck.

Pere Juyol in the Marketplace (April 1334)

Events of a few months after Bernat Despuig's sermon show that the councilors’ talk of “great unrest” and “grave danger” in the city was more than mere rhetoric. As the winter of 1333 turned to the spring of 1334, the rumor of a grain profiteering conspiracy among the council members began to gain more traction in the city. On April 15, as the full council was in session at the Dominican convent of Santa Caterina, a disturbance broke out only minutes away by foot at the plaça del Blat. Pere Juyol, a cloth dealer (draper) and one of the members of that year's Council of One Hundred, recalled that day's events this way:

In the year of the great shortage, the lord councilors who were in the council at that time requested that I serve as overseer of the grain market, without at any time providing me a wage or salary or payment of any kind. And it came to pass one Wednesday when the Council of One Hundred was in session, and at which I was present, that some people entered the council chamber saying the following words: “Lords, your help is needed in the square, because there is a great disturbance and fighting because no one is there to measure out grain, and if no one does anything something very bad is going to happen.” And immediately, the honorable Arnau Bernat, who was at that time one of the councilors, said to me and in the presence of the council, “Mister Juyol, go there and get a better report of what is happening so the council can decide what to do about this.” And I, Pere Juyol, wanting to be obedient to the council despite the great danger, went to the market square and seated myself at my table to take oaths that those who were buying grain were doing so in the way that the council had ordained due to the great shortages that were going on…. But there was in the market square such a great riot and fighting and turmoil that I had to flee and hide myself for fear of death.⁵⁰

Where Brother Bernat, were he present, might have seen this incident as a straightforward conflict between the city's wealthy and powerful on the one hand and a suffering populace on the other, Pere Juyol's experience gives us another way to view Barcelona's social structure and the conflicts that could arise within it. In Juyol's retelling of that day's events, we see not just a division between haves and have-nots but also divisions within Barcelona's ruling elite. A person like Pere Juyol might have several overlapping social identities in this moment: a member of the city's governing body, a cloth dealer protecting his home and possessions, a civil servant duty-bound to carry out the magistrates’ orders but lacking the wealth and connections that would place him in the inner circle where the most important decisions were made. Where Bernat Despuig had seen a division between high and low, Juyol's story shows us a more complex social structure, one in which any of an individual's multiple identities—both those claimed personally and those assigned by others—could mean as much as the status of one's birth.

When violence broke out in the grain market in April 1334, the councilors had two relatively recent historical precedents to illustrate to them what it meant for Barcelona's population to rise up against the wealthy and powerful. The first of these incidents was the 1257 murder of Bernat Marquet. Between 1236 and 1257, Marquet and his wife, Elisenda Roig, had amassed a joint fortune by investing their inherited wealth in shipping and urban property, thereby setting the Marquet family on its way to financial and political prominence. The couple's growing wealth allowed them, among other things, to purchase land and houses in the city's burgeoning waterfront district. The couple treated most of these purchases as investments to be leased out, but they retained one property to build a residence for themselves in a good street near the alfòndec—an address that would proclaim their status while keeping them close to the shipping business that had made them wealthy. At a time when old and new families were competing with one another for shares of this up-and-coming neighborhood and the wealth and status it represented, this incursion by a parvenu may have sparked a violent backlash: in 1257, a crowd stormed the Marquet home, looting and burning it to the ground and stoning Bernat to death in the street.⁵¹

While this first violent incident has the feel of a pointed political message between factions within Barcelona's elite, the 1285 uprising led by Berenguer Oller was more clearly a revolt against royal authority. According to the thirteenth-century chronicler Bernat Desclot, Oller was a man of low birth, a demagogue who had used both persuasion and force to win over “all of the little people of Barcelona” to do his bidding. Over the weeks leading up to Holy Week of 1285, Oller and his followers despoiled the city's churches of their properties and incomes. Oller's plan, according to Desclot, was set to culminate on Easter Sunday when he would deliver the city into the hands of King Philip III of France (r. 1270–1285), who was, at that time, mounting his own attacks on Catalan territories in response to King Peter II/III's takeover of Sicily three years earlier. Upon hearing of Oller's activities in and rumored future plans for Barcelona, the king cut short his visit with the Aragonese cortes and returned to Catalonia, setting up camp just outside the city on Holy Saturday. When Oller and several of his confederates rode out to meet the king, they were immediately arrested, and on Easter Sunday, the king pronounced the sentence: Oller would be dragged through the streets tied to a mule, his confederates following in procession with nooses hanging around their necks, all the way up to the hill of Montjuïc where they would be hanged.⁵²

Historians in the middle part of the twentieth century tended to read both of these disturbances in terms of social conflict in an age of rapid demographic and economic expansion that Barcelona enjoyed in the middle decades of the thirteenth century.⁵³ Yet the lines of alliance and enmity were substantially more complex than straightforward class analysis can account for. As Stephen Bensch has noted, “The cracks in Barcelona's social edifice did not follow straight, horizontal class fissures but, in the manner of fine lines in aging porcelain, spread like a spider's web in all directions.”⁵⁴ Oller may have owed part of his success to his ability to combine the political restiveness of the city's “middle hand” with the economic needs of a wave of suburban and rural poor, who had come flooding into the city in the wake of a bad harvest year and whose desperate mood had been stoked by rumors of grain hoarding in a city that had taken on the atmosphere of a siege on the eve of the French invasion.⁵⁵ But Bensch has shown how both the marina residents involved in the Marquet assassination and the artisans and petty merchants who supported Oller were linked with members of one or another of the patrician families that monopolized the very highest levels of political authority and economic privilege in the city. These incidents were thus, at least in part, manifestations of conflict within the city's elite that spread out along the threads of patronage/clientage spanning the city.⁵⁶

Pere Juyol is another example of how social identity in a medieval city like Barcelona was anything but clear-cut and how an individual's actions could be read as either asserting or challenging the terms of that identity within the larger cultural frame of Barcelona's social and political stratification.⁵⁷ Juyol appears in the documents as one of the city's prohoms, which signifies that he had attained a certain level of respectability, though not one equivalent to the honrats who served as the city's ruling magistrates. His appointment as grain market supervisor was not only an extra responsibility but also an extra measure of his reputation among his fellow councilors—especially notable given that this was at least the second time in a single decade that his colleagues had named him to the post.⁵⁸ The sources touching on the grain market uprising of 1334 also refer to Juyol as a draper—a broad occupational category of people who worked in numerous aspects of Barcelona's cloth trade. Some drapers had wealth, investments, and business or marriage ties that connected them with the investors and rentiers who made up the city's executive council.⁵⁹ But the term also encompassed the small-scale cloth purchasers and retailers, both Jewish and Christian, who sometimes invested in trading voyages on a medium scale, a few hundred sous at a time, but whose main personal connections were with Barcelona's artisans rather than with its great merchant-investors.⁶⁰

The ambiguity of Pere Juyol's professional identity as a draper encapsulates some of the complications that his story introduces into our understanding of Barcelona's medieval social structure and, specifically, how political and social hierarchies do not always neatly map onto either each other or Eiximenis's “three hands” division of late medieval society. Whether Juyol was personally closer to being a merchant or an artisan (and a reference he later made to his workshop suggests that he may have been the latter), he understood the social gap that separated him from the magistrates. When he gave his account of his actions during the marketplace riot, he opened by expressing “the most reverence and honor that I can demonstrate” for the “lord councilors” and recalled his wish “to be obedient to the council” despite the danger he knew to be awaiting him in the marketplace. Juyol's careful choice of language and self-presentation reveals his awareness that the gulf between himself and the magistrates was social as well as professional. He refers to Arnau Bernat, one of that year's magistrates, as “the honorable Arnau Bernat,” while reporting that Bernat addressed him as “en Juyol”—the “en” appended to his name a signal of familiar respect but not an honorific.⁶¹ These forms of address may have been ritual language, akin to referring to a judge as “Your Honor” in a modern courtroom. But such verbal rituals are given meaning by the social and cultural contexts in which they are uttered. Juyol's position was marked by liminality: as a draper, he may have been relatively prosperous and enjoyed a certain degree of social status, and his position on the Council of One Hundred would have lent him further prestige. But although he was a part of the city's government, he was not important enough to be one of its leaders, and his ability to influence events was limited.

Juyol was aware of his position in the pecking order and knew it was his duty to obey the magistrates for the good of the city. But where Juyol saw himself as an obedient civil servant and a man of the middle, the people assembled in the marketplace identified him as Friar Bernat Despuig might have a few months earlier—as an instrument of a city government that was allegedly profiting from the suffering of its people. Standing before the councilors several years after the riot, Juyol recounted what happened after he fled the grain market:

And even then [the people gathered in the grain market] were bringing torches and wood and would have burned my home, but the Lord God in his goodness did not will that this should come to pass. And likewise, it pleased God that I was able to get my cloth out of the workshop and the clothing out of the house, and from there I hid it in a different place … and all my companions and I hid ourselves in another place until it was all over.⁶²

At this point in the story, it is clear that the crowd had identified Juyol as, if not the author of their misery, then at least a representative of those who were.

The councilors’ account of that day's events, set down in a letter written to King Alfonso only a day after the fact, paints a similar picture of an irrational mob driven to violence against the city's governing authorities. In their appeal to the king for aid, the councilors noted that they had not dared try to bring the city under control themselves, emphasizing how the crowd had been targeting the councilors in particular:

With great pain and bitter hearts, we relate to Your Magnificence that, instigated by the devil and following the lead of iniquitous and malevolent persons, on Friday the fifteenth of the month of April, a great excitation and turmoil arose in Barcelona against the councilors of that city, because the grain that had recently arrived in the city was not being sold at a price that the people wanted. And when the veguer of the city tried to stop them from doing as they wished, they rose up against him so that he had to flee to avoid being killed. And certain people, out of their right minds, came to the home of Arnau Bernat, councilor of the city, and forcibly invaded it, and … everything that was in that home they took away with them until nothing remained. And in addition, they killed a horse they found there and broke jars full of wine, and the great amount of wine therein was poured out and lost. And leaving that house, they went to the home of Bernat de Marimon, citizen of Barcelona [and councilor the previous year], which they similarly stormed and invaded, and took away everything they found there. And they did this all in the light of day but dispersed when night came on. And for this reason, the city is in a terrible state.⁶³

The details of the councilors’ report to the king might be read as simply picking up where Juyol's story left off. But in some important ways, it is a different story altogether, one in which the councilors appropriate Juyol's account, subtly weaving in new details to create a plot line more useful to their purposes. Where Juyol's account hinted at a nuanced social dynamic, the council's plea to the king represents the violence in the city as a more straightforward rulers-versus-ruled conflict, with the ruled portrayed as notably irrational. Perhaps more significantly, the councilors do not mention Juyol at all in their letter to the king. There is a story of an official vainly struggling to keep order and eventually driven to flight, but instead of the council's market supervisor, the official in this role was the king's veguer.

Placing the veguer at the center of the action makes a certain amount of sense in the context of medieval Barcelona: in the absence of a municipal police force, the veguer, as the local arm of royal justice and aided by salaried (and armed) guards who were charged with carrying out the veguer's orders and administering punishments, was the official best positioned to maintain order within the city.⁶⁴ Maintenance of peace within the city was actually a collaborative effort between city and king, and each side expected the other to hold up its end of the bargain. Only three months before the riot, the councilors had written to King Alfonso, protesting that the veguer assigned to the city had been ordered to attend the king in Aragon, which thereby deprived the city of its representative of royal justice and raised the danger of serious unrest in the city—unrest, the councilors warned, that might well spread to all of Catalonia if not stopped immediately.⁶⁵ The veguers, for their part, expected not only the council but citizens themselves to take part in the maintenance of the peace by acting as first responders when a disturbance broke out. Although the municipal ordinances regularly prohibited the carrying of any weapon more dangerous than a utility knife within the city walls, they also required all Barcelona residents to maintain a weapon in their homes and workshops on pain of a fine of 10 sous. Should a citizen hear the sounds of a violent disturbance, they were to immediately grab their weapon and follow the sound of the fighting, using whatever force might be necessary to subdue the malefactors until the veguer or his guard could arrive.⁶⁶ By the 1320s, the city had installed chain barriers at some of the city's gates and major streets that could be raised to slow down or corner anyone trying to escape. The maintenance of these mechanisms was the responsibility of the neighborhood residents, as was giving chase—anyone who did not spring into action to suppress a disturbance would be fined 20 sous.⁶⁷ Guests at inns were exempted from this obligation, but the city's day laborers were required to carry a weapon to the worksite in case they needed to put down a brawl or other violent disturbance.⁶⁸

Ordinances like these that required citizens to help pacify urban violence date back to the earliest surviving volumes of the council records and repeat with slight variations most years, indicating that the city considered the maintenance of public order to be, at least in part, a communal responsibility.⁶⁹ But citizen involvement in quelling a disturbance was only ever meant to be a stopgap measure until the veguer's guards could arrive. In this context, it is likely that the veguer, whose court was located in the Castell Vell just above the plaça del Blat, would, indeed, have been on the scene not long after the disturbance broke out in the grain market that April day. But by writing the veguer into Juyol's role as one of the primary targets of that day's violence, the councilors were, in essence, taking the crowd's message to the council and rewriting it for a royal audience in a way designed to prompt the king to action. Although Juyol was not of the same social standing as the magistrates, the attack on him was, like the subsequent lootings of the homes of Arnau Bernat and Bernat de Marimon, an attack on the authority of the city's governing class. By placing the veguer at the center of the narrative, the council transformed the meaning of the violence into an attack on royal authority.⁷⁰ Chapter 5 showed how King Alfonso was disposed to see attacks on his officials as attacks on royal jurisdiction itself. The Barcelona councilors’ inclusion of the veguer suggests that they were aware of the symbolic weight of an attack on a royal official and were actively manipulating the discourse. Emphasizing the attack on the veguer while leaving out Juyol entirely was meant to persuade the king that not just the city but also his own royal authority was at stake. The royal response, when it came, seems to be based on this version of events. But that same response would evolve in ways that the councilors could not have anticipated.

The Prince and the City (1334–1338)

When royal aid did arrive, it came not from King Alfonso, who was far away in the Aragonese city of Teruel at the time, but from his son, the fourteen-year-old Crown Prince Peter. At the time that the riot broke out in Barcelona, Peter was still in residence about one hundred miles away in Lleida. As noted in chapter 4, the city of Lleida was experiencing its own problems with grain supply at the time: the neighboring grain-growing region that usually supplied the city had been the target of buyers from throughout Catalonia whose other sources had literally dried up, leaving Lleida itself with less of the grain it normally depended on to feed its own citizens.⁷¹ Prince Peter does not seem to have been personally affected by the local shortages. As late as April 1334, he ordered 50 cafices (approximately 140 quarteras) of grain for the use of his household.⁷² These large purchases do not, however, mean that Peter was unaware of the shortages around him. At the time he received word of the violence in Barcelona, he had been negotiating with Lleida's bishop, Arnau Sescomes, and the city's political leaders to get grain reserves distributed to towns in the diocese that had been especially hard-hit by the famine.⁷³

But the news from Barcelona prompted the prince to temporarily set local affairs aside. Over the course of the evening on Sunday April 17 and the following Monday morning, Peter received letters from various officials in Barcelona informing him of what was transpiring in the city and urgently requesting his aid. He responded right away, writing a flurry of letters on April 18 to several of his officials and advisors, as well as to the councilors of Barcelona themselves. The prince assured both the councilors and the veguer that he planned to make his way to the city himself “within a few short days” with two purposes in mind: first, to use his authority as crown prince and procurator general of Catalonia to restore order in the city; and second, to help bring the instigators to justice.⁷⁴ In the meantime, he ordered both his lieutenant Guillem de Cervelló and the advisor (and former veguer of Barcelona) that his father had sent him, Pere de Santcliment, to travel to the city ahead of him and act in his name to find and capture those responsible for the violence.⁷⁵ Almost as an afterthought, he wrote to his father to lay out his plans. Explaining that he knew how important the stability of Barcelona was to his father's rule, he asked for the king's blessing for the operation, reassuring him that, with the passage of the few days it would take him (Peter) to recover from the slight fever he was suffering at the moment, and with Guillem de Cervelló already in place, the city would have calmed down enough that there would be no danger to the prince's person when he arrived to take charge of the investigation.⁷⁶ Alfonso endorsed these plans, authorizing his son to go to Barcelona to restore calm and bring royal justice to the perpetrators.⁷⁷

Peter seems to have been sincere in his intention to travel to Barcelona, confidently informing officials in the city that he would be there in a few days and asking his uncle John, archbishop of Tarragona, to send his personal physician to attend him so he could depart for Barcelona as soon as possible.⁷⁸ Whether prevented by illness or by other matters, the prince would not actually arrive in Barcelona until mid-September.⁷⁹ The hunt for the perpetrators, however, continued in his absence, and its first results were not long in coming. Only a week after the violence had broken out, Peter was congratulating Guillem de Cervelló on the arrests his team had made and authorizing him to begin an official inquest. Cervelló was to commandeer whatever local resources or personnel he needed to aid him in his efforts. At the same time though, the prince advised Cervelló to take care in his investigation and to have his delegates do the same: any guilty verdicts, he emphasized, needed to be clear and obvious.⁸⁰ It is unclear whether Cervelló took this latter part of the prince's response to heart. A week later, when the prince wrote him again to acknowledge the news that the inquest had already found several people guilty and had them hanged at the various approaches to the city, he asked Cervelló to hold off on judgments of any of the other alleged rioters who had been imprisoned, once again stating his intention to be in the city soon to personally take charge of the investigation.⁸¹

Prince Peter's new note of caution may have been prompted by nothing more than a young prince's general sense of unease at the rapidity of the trials and executions that were being carried out in his name. But the prince might have been responding to more concrete rumors that the investigation itself was roiling the city in a way that was no less dangerous to royal authority than the initial riot had been. By late May, a protest from Barcelona's council would make its way to King Alfonso in Teruel, alleging that the man Cervelló had appointed to lead the investigation, one Master Rodrigo Diaz, had authorized his agents to use torture when questioning the suspects they had detained and had not allowed them any defense. These tactics, the councilors asserted, were not only contrary to normal procedure in criminal cases but also in violation of the privileges and customs pertaining to the city, not to mention the general constitutions of Catalonia.⁸² As it happens, one of the locals swept up in Diaz's investigation was the market supervisor, Pere Juyol. According to Juyol's account, presented about five years after the riot, Master Rodrigo had imprisoned him and had eventually determined that he should be fined 50,000 sous for the responsibility he bore in the affair when he abandoned his post to flee for his life. The council attempted to intervene but only managed to get the fine reduced to 20,000 sous. As the day approached when he would either have to pay the fine or be thrown in prison, and as Master Rodrigo and his staff troubled him daily, Juyol worked feverishly, hiring lawyers and notaries to draw up official documents and plead on his behalf. In the end, he totaled up the cost: a fine of 200 lliures (4,000 sous) plus his legal expenses, for a total of about 300 lliures (6,000 sous).⁸³

The council members couched their objections to the course that the inquest was taking as a defense of the city's privileges against an individual judicial appointee who was abusing his position. Peter, however, would later come to see Barcelona's protests to the very aid that they had requested within the context of a larger pattern of resistance to royal authority. In 1337, the year after he became king, Peter would launch a full-scale investigation into complaints about the conduct of Barcelona's councilors. The inquest document runs to over eighty folios and makes reference to things that happened “six or seven years ago,” “seven or eight years ago,” and “about twelve years ago,” indicating a broad investigation into rumors of systemic corruption within the municipal government.⁸⁴ Among the various accusations of embezzlement, abuse of power, and resistance to royal jurisdiction, two sets of charges stand out as directly relevant to the uprising of 1334 and what it says about the social dynamics of Barcelona in the famine year. According to the first of these sets of accusations, the famine-year councilors had cut secret deals with certain grain merchants, holding back supply so the grain could be sold at shortage prices, with the councilors skimming off a share of the artificially inflated profits. This set of charges even found a way to account for Galceran Marquet's mission to bring grain from Sicily: “following the road of fraud they had set out on,” the councilors had indeed sent Marquet on a mission to bring back Sicilian grain, but this was only to give the public impression they were taking decisive action in a shortage when they actually had an abundance of grain hidden away in the small towns of Barcelona's exurban parishes.⁸⁵

It is unclear from the wording of this particular accusation whether Marquet was supposed to have been an accomplice or was merely an unwitting prop in the alleged plot, but this particular charge against the council gained little traction. Of the many witnesses questioned in the preliminary inquest, only four spoke to this charge in particular, and while all four said that they had heard these rumors, none believed that they were true. Nicholas Sunyol, a tailor who had been on the council's twenty-five-member executive committee that year, objected that the council had been doing everything in its power to bring grain to the city.⁸⁶ The merchant Bernat Serra argued that any apparent self-dealing could be explained by the fact that the council and Marquet had financed the grain voyage up front, so they would have needed to pay themselves back for their expenses.⁸⁷ Another witness, the merchant Francesc Eymeric, said that he not only doubted the charges but, in fact, believed the exact opposite, largely because Galceran Marquet featured among the accused.⁸⁸ Apparently, it beggared belief that any rumor of corruption involving the hero of the armada could be true. Peter, as king, seemed to feel the same way about Marquet, who was one of only a small handful of the public figures named in the charges whom the new king did not bar from office while the investigation was ongoing.⁸⁹

Less fortunate was Guillem de Nagera, one of the city's five magistrates in 1333/1334, whose appearance in the corruption inquest offers further insight into the complicated social and political dynamics of the city in the early fourteenth century. Nagera stood accused of having taken advantage of the shortages and his position on the council to incite violence against one of the city's merchants when he had been one of the five ruling magistrates during an earlier shortage year in 1324/1325:⁹⁰

The aforesaid Guillem de Nagera did, at the time he was a councilor or a member of the council, plot with certain others that a certain rustic should come from outside in the time of the shortage and the bad year, and should cry throughout the city that the merchant Bernat Serra had monopolized and set up a private warehouse of grain and had messengers who were going through the streets passing out grain that had been brought to the city. And they did this falsely, so that people would riot and destroy the home and goods of Bernat, who was not culpable in any of this.⁹¹

The witnesses brought in for questioning were less certain of these particular allegations. Francesc Eymeric said that he had heard it said that a certain peasant had told the subveguer of Barcelona, Berenguer Basset, that Bernat Serra was giving away grain, or having it given away in his name, and that the same person who told him this had also said that the peasant in question had been doing this precisely to stir up violence against Serra. But Eymeric claimed to have heard nothing about Guillem de Nagera being behind it all.⁹² Even Bernat Serra himself was not ready to accuse Nagera. According to Serra's testimony, Ramon Ricart, one of Nagera's fellow magistrates on the council the year of the incident, had told Serra that he and the other councilors had heard that Serra had been giving away grain that he had brought to the city and warned him that this could cause great danger. Serra had denied the accusation, but Ricart replied that he had the information from Berenguer Basset, who later confirmed to Serra that he had heard the story from a certain peasant who had come from outside the city and had said that Serra had been handing out grain in various locations in Barcelona's outlying parishes. Serra again denied the charges, but it was only when the full Council of One Hundred sent two of its representatives to ask around in the towns in question and found out that Serra had no grain in those places that the matter was finally dropped. As far as Guillem de Nagera's role in the whole thing, Serra had heard a rumor that he had been involved but claimed to have no firsthand knowledge.⁹³

At the heart of the accusation against Nagera in 1324/1325 and the ones against the 1333/1334 council more generally lay the idea that personal ambitions and vendettas among the city's elite had caused a dangerous erosion of public order in time of crisis. Worse yet, from King Peter's point of view, was the possibility that these same factions were stirring up resistance to royal authority: in addition to inciting violence against his political enemies, Guillem de Nagera, together with fellow 1333/1334 council member Ferrer de Manresa and other confederates in the municipal government, stood accused of having traveled far and wide throughout Catalonia urging people to resist the authority of King Alfonso and his officials.⁹⁴ This, according to the allegations, was part of a larger pattern of behavior on the part of Barcelona's ruling elite dating back to well before the 1333/1334 bad year. One charge from that year, in particular, accused the council of having skimmed tax revenues meant for the construction and arming of ships for the war against Genoa. But probably most disturbing of all to the new king were the allegations that the council had resisted or ignored the authority of the royal veguer and bailiff and that anyone who thought to denounce the councilors before the royal courts would find themself in prison—or, according to one accusation, would be pulled out of the veguer's prison and illegally executed in order to silence dissent. In this way, the charges alleged, the councilors ruled the city by fear, and no one dared to oppose them.⁹⁵

In the end, after considering the witness testimony, the arguments for the defense, and the handful of royal privileges that the defense lawyers provided to support their case, the royally convened inquest acquitted the councilors of all charges of fraud and corruption.⁹⁶ As crown prince, Peter had believed that the disorder was the fault of a discontented rabble: he refers to it at one point in 1334 as unrest inter populares—that is, arising among the city's humbler residents.⁹⁷ But a few years later, he seems to have changed his mind as to who was to blame. Even dismissed, the charges of the 1337/1338 inquest reveal that Peter, now king, was ready to at least consider that the roots of Barcelona's disorder might be found among the city's own governing officials. Where Pere Juyol's world was one in which a single individual was bound through various personal, professional, and political networks to multiple identities, Peter's view of the city ultimately had more in common with that of Bernat Despuig, for whom the lines between antagonists were clear. But where Despuig had seen a city divided between an elite who governed and a populace who suffered under their rule, and Prince Peter had seen the same division inverted, with the lower orders cast as the villains, Peter's view of Barcelona after he became its king was one in which the whole city—both its unruly populace and its internally squabbling rulers—stood arrayed on one side, with the king, and royal authority more generally, on the other.

Epilogue: Remembering a Riot

The meaning of the violence that erupted in Barcelona's grain market on April 15 of that bad year continued to be contested for centuries.⁹⁸ The Barcelona chronicles compiled soonest after the event in the later fourteenth century tend to note the 1333/1334 famine only briefly, paying particular attention to grain prices in the city but with no mention of the violent uprising or the arrests and punishments that followed.⁹⁹ The first chronicler to note that day's violence was Joan Francesc Boscà, whose late fifteenth-century Memorial històric confines itself to noting in passing that a riot had taken place because of the famine and that the perpetrators had sacked the homes of Arnau Bernat and Bernat de Marimon, “leaving nothing.”¹⁰⁰ Only somewhat more expansive are the early seventeenth-century Rúbriques of city government secretary-turned-chronicler Esteve Bruniquer:

In the time of the council elected in 1333 [which would have served into 1334], there was a great grain shortage in Barcelona, and one day there erupted in the grain market square a great brawl and riot because no grain was being sold, for which reason they wanted to set fire to the house of Pere Juyol, whom the city had given charge of the market. And the king opened an investigation, and to avoid going to prison, [Juyol] paid a fine. And on February 11, 1339, the city decided to award Juyol 200 lliures in damages.¹⁰¹

Bruniquer's account of this incident is brief, and his focus on the experience of Pere Juyol, in particular, likely reflects the broader aim of his collection as a whole to chronicle the history of the city's administration and institutions.¹⁰² Like Boscà, Bruniquer does not find it important to name particular agents responsible for that day's violence.

Other chronicles written around the same time as Bruniquer's tell a slightly different version of the story. According to the anonymous author of the late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century Anals [sic] consulars de la ciutat de Barcelona, a riot broke out during the famine year when several people “from outside the city and men of the sea” grew angry with the merchants and the councilors. This account reports a mob forming at the grain market, then moving on to loot the homes of Arnau Bernat and Bernat de Marimon “until nothing remained but the bare walls,” then melting away as night came on, with some of the perpetrators escaping on ships that were in the harbor that evening. A few days later, Guillem de Cervelló arrived and launched an investigation of some one hundred people who were being held in the cells of the Castell Nou, eventually sentencing ten of them to hang in pairs at the entrances to the city.¹⁰³ This version of events is repeated nearly verbatim in another early seventeenth-century manuscript but with one significant alteration: the author of this second account underlines the upending of the social order by asserting that many of the city's honrats had been caught up in the royal officials’ hunt for the perpetrators and were thus among the one hundred who had been thrown into cells in the Castell Nou.¹⁰⁴

These two accounts, while more detailed than either of the late medieval chronicles or that of Bruniquer, should be read with a healthy dose of skepticism, compiled as they were a couple of centuries after the fact by chroniclers who had probably themselves lived through decades of food shortages and concomitant social unrest that plagued Barcelona during the late sixteenth century.¹⁰⁵ By the time this version of the market uprising was written down, it had acquired a new shape. Juyol has disappeared from the tale, as have the breaches between council factions and any potential plotters within the council itself. In fact, both of these early seventeenth-century chronicles report that, before attacking the homes of Arnau Bernat and Bernat de Marimon, the mob had first contemplated targeting Guillem de Nagera and Ferrer de Manresa—the very two councilors accused in 1337 of having been at the center of the supposed plot to use rumors of hoarding and price-gouging to undermine both their personal enemies and royal authority in the city. Centuries after their alleged plot, Nagera and Manresa had been transformed from instigators of one manifestation of civic disorder into victims of another, one that the chroniclers unequivocally blame on outsiders and transient or marginal members of Barcelona's society—or, more startlingly, in a third nearly identical account from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, on “all the people” (tot lo pople).¹⁰⁶ Royal authority may have been absent at the time of the violence—all three of these later chronicles note that the veguer was nowhere to be seen during the riots—but after the fact, it is a royal vice-procurator, working in concert with the members of the Council of One Hundred, who is the agent of swift justice. The story that these early modern chroniclers want to tell is one of municipal and royal authorities working together to prevent the city's unruly population as a whole from threatening public order.

When we read these early modern versions of the story, it is less useful to judge them on their accuracy relative to the medieval documents than to observe that each is the product of one civic imaginary among many. Pere Benito i Monclús and Joan Maltas i Montoro have argued that the similarities between the early modern chronicles, some of which borrow verbatim from each other, suggest that these chroniclers treated each other's work as nearly as authoritative as the contemporary sources themselves.¹⁰⁷ But these similarities only serve to highlight the small but significant differences that show the various chroniclers acting not just as antiquarians but as historians, filtering the events of the past through their own present, balancing a desire to be faithful to the historical record with a need to produce a narrative that would be both relevant and useful to their own times. Pulling apart the versions of that day's events as reported by later chroniclers helps us appreciate how each story of the city told by this chapter's medieval narrators was rooted in the vantage point of each protagonist's individual position within the city's social order. For the Carmelite friar Bernat Despuig, the picture was simple: drawing on mendicant ideas about the proper use of wealth, Brother Bernat saw a city divided between a corrupt ruling oligarchy and the poor and middling classes they exploited. Pere Juyol's city was one in which the lines were not so clear-cut and where an individual might be simultaneously a loyal servant of the city and a member of its ruling institutions yet socially distinct from and subordinate to the group of men who held the real levers of power. This latter group of men, for their part, presented their own vision of the city, one in which local officials stood arrayed together with the king against the forces of urban disorder from below. Finally, while Crown Prince Peter had initially viewed the conflict as one between the upper and lower orders, King Peter soon came to see a city that, undistinguished by classes, constituted a potential threat to royal authority as well as to itself.

Each of these perspectives presents its own distinct vision of Barcelona's social fabric. But one thread runs through all the accounts of that day's violence and its aftermath: although the urban food system extended beyond the city walls to encompass grain sources from Catalonia and the wider Mediterranean, the various observers whose stories are told in this chapter located the source of the problem within the city itself. The primary targets of the rioters were current and former magistrates, which suggests a public perception that the city's misery was caused less by an act of God than by the actions of their governing officials. Peter, too, would eventually come to at least entertain the notion that the councilors had used the crisis to serve their own personal and political interests while the city collapsed around them. Only Juyol and the council itself saw the members of the municipal government as agents of order doing their best to provide food for the populace under impossible conditions. But all understood one thing—the famine had brought to light just how tenuous the threads holding Barcelona together were and how easily the social fabric of the city could come unraveled.

_________________

1. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 49r (January 4, 1334).

2. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 75v–76r (April 16, 1334); Joan Maltas i Montoro, Caresties, fams i epidèmies a Catalunya: de la conquesta de Sicília a la Pesta Negra (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2022), 221.

3. AHCB, ms A-1, 18v–19r (ca. 1600–1650).

4. Most notably, the influential synthetic account by Carmen Batlle y Gallart, La crisis social y económica de Barcelona a mediados del siglo XV (Barcelona: CSIC, 1973), 47–50.

5. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50 (1971): 76–136; Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 152–88. For religious violence in the Crown of Aragon, in particular, see David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); for food riots, see Amy Bentley, “Reading Food Riots: Scarcity, Abundance, and National Identity,” in Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe since the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Scholliers (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 179–93; esp. 180–82.

6. Jill R. Webster, Carmel in Medieval Catalonia (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 1–9.

7. Joan Fuguet i Sans, El císter: el patrimoni dels monestirs catalans a la Corona d’Aragó (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1998), esp. 7–12; brief historical overviews of each community at 41–42 (Poblet), 71–75 (Santes Creus), and 95–97 (Vallbona).

8. Josep Baucells i Reig, Vivir en la edad media: Barcelona y su entorno en los siglos XIII y XIV (1200–1344) (Barcelona: CSIC, 2004), 159–60; Joan Boda and Genis Samper, Catalònia religiosa: altes històric; dels orígens als nostres dies (Barcelona: Claret, 1991), 111–19; Lluís G. Feliu, “El monestir dels Frares de La Penitència de Jesucrist de Barcelona,” Analecta sacra tarraconensia 10 (1934): 45–51; Anna Castellano Tresserra, Pedralbes a l’edat mitjana: història d’un monestir femení (Barcelona: Ayuntament de Barcelona, Institut de Cultura: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1998), esp. 25–74 for the role of Queen Elicsenda.

9. Michel Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 2–5; James Brodman, Charity and Welfare: Hospitals and the Poor in Medieval Catalonia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 20.

10. Eiximenis, Regiment, chap. 21.

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

12. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 28v–29r and 34v (January 12, 1334).

13. By the second half of the fourteenth century, it is clear that the city's leaders would be linking the poor—especially the foreign poor—with danger to the city, as the council passed increasingly draconian ordinances against beggars, grouping them with other undesirables to be expelled from the city. See Adam Franklin-Lyons and Marie A. Kelleher, “Framing Mediterranean Famine: Food Crisis in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona,” Speculum 97, no. 1 (2022): 71–73.

14. Adam J. Davis, The Medieval Economy of Salvation: Charity, Commerce, and the Rise of the Hospital (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 33–70; see also Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages, 57–69; Jon Arrizabalaga, “Asistencia, caridad y nueva ética de la responsabilidad colectiva ante la salud y la pobreza en el espacio urbano occidental del Antiguo Régimen,” in Ciudad y hospital en el Occidente Europeo, 1300–1700, ed. Teresa Huguet-Termes et al. (Lleida: Editorial Milenio, 2014), 29–31.

15. Eiximenis, Regiment, chap. 21.

16. For general information on the Christian hospitals of medieval Barcelona, see Brodman, Charity and Welfare; Baucells i Reig, Vivir en la edad media, 1537–68; Carme Batlle i Gallart, L’assistència als pobres a la Barcelona medieval (s. XIII) (Barcelona: Dalmau, 1987), 22–60; and Uta Lindgren, Bedürftigkeit, Armut, Not: Studien zur spätmittelalterliche Sozialgeschichte Barcelonas (Münster: Aschendorff, 1980), 11–23. For the nature of care in medieval hospitals more generally, see Davis, The Medieval Economy of Salvation, 244–73.

17. Batlle i Gallart, L’assistència als pobres, 29–50; Brodman, Charity and Welfare, 31–33; Lindgren, Bedürftigkeit, Armut, Not, 14–15 and 20–21; Dolores Pifarré Torres, “Dos visitas de comienzos del siglo XIV a los hospitales barceloneses d’en Colom y d’en Marcús,” in La pobreza y la asistencia a los pobres en la Cataluña medieval: volumen misceláneo de estudios y documentos, ed. Manuel Riu (Barcelona: CSIC, 1980), 2:82–83; Josep Mas, Notes històriques del bisbat de Barcelona, vol. 13, Antigüetat d'algunes esglesies del Bisbat de Barcelona (Barcelona: Tipografia Católica Pontificia, 1921), 152–57; Aurora Pérez Santamaría, “El hospital de San Lázaro a Casa dels Malalts o Masells,” in La pobreza y la asistencia a los pobres en la Cataluña medieval, ed. Manual Riu (Barcelona: CSIC, 1980), 77–115; Baucells i Reig, Vivir en la edad media, 1544. Some secondary sources refer to the canon who founded St. Macià as Pere Desvilar; this may be a conflation with the honrat Pere Vilar who founded his own hospital a few decades later.

18. Lluís G. Feliu, “L’hospital de Santa Eulàlia del Camp,” Analecta sacra tarraconensia 11 (1935): 291–306; Batlle i Gallart, L’assistència als pobres, 59–60; Brodman, Charity and Welfare, 34–35; Lindgren, Bedürftigkeit, Armut, Not, 18.

19. Batlle i Gallart, L’assistència als pobres, 52–59; Brodman, Charity and Welfare, 15–17; Pifarré, “Dos visitas,” 83–84.

20. Lindgren, Bedürftigkeit, Armut, Not, 18–20.

21. Jill R. Webster, “La reina doña Constanza y los hospitales de Barcelona y Valencia,” Archivo ibero-americano: revista trimestral de estudios históricos 51 (1991): 376–81.

22. Antoni Cardoner Planas, “El ‘Hospital para judíos pobres’ de Barcelona,” Sefarad 22 (1962): 373–75; Batlle i Gallart, L’assistència als pobres, 77–80.

23. Josep Baucells, “Gènesi de la Pia Almoina de la Seu de Barcelona: els fundadors,” in La pobreza y la asistencia a los pobres en la Cataluña medieval: volumen misceláneo de estudios y documentos ed. Manuel Riu (Barcelona: CSIC, 1980), 1:17–75.

24. Baucells, “Gènesi de la Pia Almoina,” 57.

25. María Echániz Sans, “La alimentación de los pobres asistidos por la Pía Almoina de la Catedral de Barcelona según el libro de cuentas de 1283–1284,” in Alimentació i societat a la Catalunya medieval (Barcelona: CSIC, 1988), 175–77; Brodman, Charity and Welfare, 14–16.

26. Pol Serrahima i Balius, “The Almoina of Barcelona during the Catalan Civil War (1462–72): Changes and Continuities in the Conception of Catholic Poor Relief in Late Medieval Europe,” in Approaches to Poverty in Medieval Europe: Complexities, Contradictions, Transformations, c. 1100–1500, ed. Sharon Farmer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 184–92.

27. Dana Wessell Lightfoot, Women, Dowries and Agency: Marriage in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 132; Farmer, Surviving Poverty, 34–35.

28. Ana Magdalena Lorente, “El plato de los pobres vergonzantes de la parroquia de Santa Maria del Mar,” in La pobreza y la asistencia a los pobres en la Cataluña medieval: volumen misceláneo de estudios y documentos, ed Manuel Riu (Barcelona: CSIC, 1980), 153–55; Salvador Claramunt Rodríguez, “El bací dels pobres vergonyants de la parròquia del Pi de Barcelona com atenuant de la crisi ciutadana del segle XV,” in A l’entorn de la Barcelona medieval: estudis dedicats a la doctora Josefina Mutgé i Vives, ed. Manuel Sánchez Martínez et al. (Barcelona: CSIC, 2013), 207–11; Brodman, Charity and Welfare, 19–21.

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

30. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 4r (December 5, 1323); and 12, 6v (December 7, 1332) and 13, 7v (December 7, 1333).

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

32. Carme Batlle i Gallart and Montserrat Casas, “La caritat privada i les institucions benèfiques de Barcelona (segle XIII),” in La pobreza y la asistencia a los pobres en la Cataluña medieval: volumen misceláneo de estudios y documentos, ed. Manuel Riu (Barcelona: CSIC, 1980), 1:32–35; Batlle i Gallart, L’assistència als pobres, 47.

33. Bruniquer, Rúbriques, 4:319.

34. AHCB ms A-1, 19r; see also AHCB ms A-22, 4r, which reports the death toll almost verbatim.

35. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 49r (January 4, 1334).

36. Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 201–202.

37. Eiximenis, Regiment, chap. 33.

38. Eiximenis, Regiment, chap. 35; for the famine of the 1370s see Adam Franklin-Lyons, Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), esp. 147–78.

39. See this book, chapter 1.

40. Eiximenis, Dotzè, chap. 115.

41. Eiximenis, Terç, chap. 108.

42. Eiximenis, Dotzè, chap. 115.

43. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 3r–4r (November 30, 1333).

44. Carme Batlle i Gallart, “El ‘Llibre del consell’: font de coneiximent del municipi i de la societat de Barcelona del segle XIV,” in El “llibre del consell” de la ciutat de Barcelona, segle XIV: les eleccions municipals, ed. Carme Batlle i Gallart (Barcelona: CSIC, 2007), 33–36. Members of the nobility would not gain access to seats on the council until the early modern era. See Máximo Diago Hernando, “La participación de la nobleza en el gobierno de las ciudades europeas bajomedievales: análisis comparativo,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 37 (2007): 803–804.

45. Batlle i Gallart, “El ‘Llibre del consell,’” 31–42. Batlle notes that in some years, the merchants, bankers, and drapers were separated out from the honrats; in 1333/1334 they have been grouped together.

46. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 12, 41v (October 15, 1333).

47. For flour, see AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 27v (January 12, 1334); for bakers, AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 21v (December 18, 1333) and 28v–29r (January 12, 1334).

48. AHCB, Administració municipal del pa, Documents solts vol. 2, lligal 1, doc. 2 (1334).

49. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 27v and 29v (January 12, 1334). Over the course of 1334, the city became so energetic in prosecuting millers and flour sellers for suspected fraud that several of these operators appealed directly to the royal courts, which ruled in their favor and ordered the council and the royal officials to suspend or refund any fines; ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 576, 79r–v (October 25, 1334).

50. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 14, 36r–37r (January [22–25?] 1339).

51. 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 (Barcelona: CSIC, 2007), 142–44; Stephen Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 1096–1291 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 336–38, and “Poder, dinero y control del comercio en la formación del régimen municipal de Barcelona,” Barcelona quaderns d’història 4 (2001): 55–56. Also see this book, chapter 2.

52. Bernat Desclot, Crònica de Bernat Desclot, ed. Ferran Soldevila, Jordi Bruguera, and Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol. Les quatre grans cròniques, vol. 2 (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2008), chap. 133, 263–65; Philippe Wolff, “L’épisode de Berenguer Oller à Barcelone en 1285,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 5 (1968), 210–15; Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 341–45; Carme Batlle, “Aportacions a la història d’una revolta popular: Barcelona 1285,” in Estudis d’història medieval, vol. 2 (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1970), 23–25.

53. For Marquet, see Batlle y Gallart, La crisis social, 1:70–74; for the Oller revolt, see Wolff, “L’épisode de Berenguer Oller,” 219–22; Batlle, “Aportacions a la història d’una revolta popular,” 21–22.

54. Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 345.

55. Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 342–43; Batlle y Gallart, La crisis social, 36–41.

56. Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 337–45.

57. Paul Douglas McLean has examined this process for Renaissance Florence; see The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), esp. 12–33.

58. Juyol's first recorded appointment was in the conciliar year 1323/1324 (see AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 3v [December 10, 1323]), which made him the first council member to take over a responsibility that up until now had been handled by the veguer; see this book, chapter 1.

59. ACB Notaris 93, 34r (April 30, 1334) and 21, 8v–9r (March 31, 1327); Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 300–302; Carme Batlle i Gallart, “La família i la casa d’un draper de Barcelona, Burget de Banyeres (primera meitat del segle XIII),” Acta historica et archaeologica mediaevalia 2 (1981): 69–91.

60. ACB Notaris 92, 13v (June 22, 1328) and 92, 129v–130r (August 18, 1328); AHPB 6/3, 51r (February 13, 1329); AHCB, Llibre del Consell 11, 16r, 29r–v, and 36r–v (1330–1331, undated ordinances), and 12, 40v ([July 31?] 1333).

61. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 14, 36r–37r (January [22–25?] 1339).

62. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 14, 36r–v (January [22–25?] 1339).

63. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 75v–76r (April 16, 1334).

64. Jesús Lalinde Abadía, La jurisdicción real inferior en Cataluña (Corts, veguers, batlles) (Barcelona: Ayuntamiento Museo de Historia de la Ciudad, 1966), 93–96, 110–12, and 220–25; Josefa Mutgé i Vives, La ciudad de Barcelona durante el reinado de Alfonso el Benigno (1327–1336) (Madrid: CSIC, 1987), 193–94. See also AHCB, Llibre del Consell 10, 6r–v (December [18?] 1326).

65. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 52r–53r (January 26, 1334).

66. Weapons prohibitions appear within every surviving collection of council ordinances for the first third of the fourteenth century (see, for example, AHCB Llibres del Consell 1, 4r (December [9?] 1301); 7, 4r–v (December [4?] 1321); and 13, 20r (December 18, 1333). Ordinances mandating keeping weapons in the home do not appear in every set of ordinances but are frequent enough to suggest that the idea of the residents as first responders was the norm. See, for example, AHCB Llibre del Consell 1, 109v–110r and 111r–v (July 8, 1303); 8, 7r–v (December [5–13?] 1323); and 13, 25v (January 12, 1334).

67. AHCB Llibre del Consell 10, 8r–v (December [18?] 1326).

68. For the obligations of guests in an inn, see AHCB Llibre del Consell 10, 8r–v (December [18?] 1326). In what must have been recognition of laborers’ limited resources, the fine for those who either did not have a weapon or did not jump to respond was only twelve diners, or a single sou, and the council wrote in a provision that any laborer who abandoned their work to quell a disturbance would not lose their day's wages so long as they returned to the worksite once the danger had passed. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 25v–26r (January 12, 1334).

69. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 1, 109v–110r (July 8, 1303) and 111r–v (July [15–31] 1303).

70. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 13, 75v–76r (April 16, 1334).

71. See this book, chapter 4.

72. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 578, 215r (April 11, 1334).

73. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 578, 216v (April 15, 1334); and Reg. 578, 217r–v (April 16, 1334).

74. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 578, 217v–218r (April 18, 1334).

75. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 578, 218r–v and 219v (April 19, 1334). Peter's decision to send away two of his closest advisors to deal with the crisis in Barcelona may be the reason he sent a letter the same day to Miguel de Guerea, his procuratorial lieutenant in Aragon, ordering him to attend—and presumably advise—him in Lleida; ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 578, 217v (April 18, 1334).

76. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 578, 218v–219r (April 18, 1334).

77. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 529, 26v–27r (April 24, 1334).

78. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 578, 217v–218 (April 18, 1334), 221r (April 21, 1334), and 224r (April 24, 1334); see also 219r–v (April 18, 1334) for Peter's references to his own illness and the delay it was causing.

79. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 579, 43r (September 17, 1334). All told, Peter spent almost half a year, from the beginning of February through mid-August, in Lleida. When contrasted with the usual month or so that the prince spent in major royal cities, this long stay in Lleida suggests an extended illness. For Peter's itinerary as crown prince, see Daniel Girona Llagostera, “Itinerari de l’infant Pere (després Rei Pere III) (1319–1336),” Estudis universitaris catalans 19 (1934): 81–262; esp. 190–98.

80. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 578, 221r (April 22, 1333). Not all of those who were arrested for participation in that day's violence were men: Elicsenda, a widow and resident of Barcelona, was found guilty of having offered “aid and favor” to those who attacked the councilors and the veguer and was only saved by an official pardon from Peter at the urging of his paternal aunt and “dear friend,” the princess Violant. See ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 576, 72v–73r (October 10, 1334). For further pardons that Peter granted, see ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 576, 65v–66r (October 4, 1334), 73r–74r (October 17, 1334), and 108r (December 29, 1334).

81. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 578, 226v–227r (April 29, 1334). Two weeks after this letter, the prince seems to have realized that his health would not permit him to travel any time soon and authorized Cervelló to resume his inquest without his personal presence in the city; see ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 578, 242v (May 15, 1334).

82. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 488, 22v–23r (May 27, 1334).

83. AHCB, Llibre del Consell 14, 36r–37r (January [22–25?] 1339).

84. AHCB Plets i processos 4 (1337–1338). Given the broad chronological range of the charges and the fact that many of the charged individuals served on the council in multiple years, dating the individual allegations referenced within this long inquest document poses a challenge in places. This confusion of dates is especially problematic in the set of charges surrounding Guillem de Nagera and Bernat Serra (see below, note 90). I have cross-referenced the events and terms of office of named officials with mentions in other documents to determine when the events mentioned in the individual charges allegedly took place.

85. AHCB Plets i processos 4, 8r–v (1337–1338). This accusation is part of a second set of charges running from 8r–10v. A mention of Galceran Marquet as the captain of the fleet provides a terminus post quem of 1331 (see Capmany, 1:152); this, coupled with a mention of a wheat price of 40 sous per quartera, points to this charge referring to 1333/1334.

86. AHCB Plets i processos 4, 53v (1337–1338).

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

88. AHCB Plets i processos 4, 22r (1337–1338).

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

90. Folio 39v of the inquest notes that the incident between Guillem Nagera and Bernat Serra took place “at the time when Ramon Ricart, Jaume Rovira, and Galceran Carbó were councilors of Barcelona,” which would make it the conciliar year of 1331/1332 (see Bruniquer, Rúbriques, 1:31). However, the rest of the internal evidence in the document—that the incident took place during a shortage year about twelve years prior to the inquest (see Maltas i Montoro, Caresties, fams i epidèmies a Catalunya, 117–25 for the mid-1320s shortages) at a time when Berenguer Basset was serving as subveguer (see AHCB, Llibre del Consell 8, 3v [November/December 1323] and 9, 3v [November/December 1325])—points to 1324/1325 being the correct year, corroborating the conclusions reached independently by Joan Maltas i Montoro (Maltas i Montoro, Caresties, fams i epidèmies a Catalunya, 227).

91. AHCB Plets i processos 4, 7v (1337–1338).

92. AHCB Plets i processos 4, 21v (1337–1338).

93. AHCB Plets i processos 4, 39r–40v (1337–1338).

94. AHCB Plets i processos 4, 7v–8r (1337–1338).

95. AHCB Plets i processos 4, 6v–7v (1337–1338).

96. AHCB Plets i processos 4, 86r–87v (1337–1338).

97. ACA, Cancelleria, Reg. 578, 219r–v (April 18, 1334).

98. For a thorough study of the manuscript tradition on the riots and the source of my dating of the chronicles in the following section, see Pere Benito i Monclús and Joan Maltas i Montoro [as Joan Montoro Maltas], “Fams immortalitzades. El ‘mal any primer’ (1333–1334) dins l’annalística catalana de la Baixa Edat Mitjana,” in L’histoire à la source: acter, compter, enregistrer (Catalogne, Savoie, Italie, xii^e–xv^e siècle): mélanges offerts à Christian Guilleré, ed. Guido Castelnuovo and Sandrine Victor (Chambéry: Université Savoie Mont Blanc Laboratoire LLSETI, 2017), 1:503–20; esp. 516–17 for the April 15 riot. The authors of this piece adopt an integrative approach to these chronicles, in contrast with my own aim in this section to read each chronicle in its own historical context.

99. Cròniques del libre del rei en Pere [BC, ms 943, ff. 1–3], 3r; Dietari de Guillem Mascaró [in BC, ms 485, ff. 241–46], 251r.

100. Joan Francesc Boscà, Memorial històric, ed. Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó (Barcelona: Associació de Bibliòfils de Barcelona, 1977), 58.

101. Bruniquer, Rúbriques, 2:323.

102. Antoni Simon i Tarrés, Diccionari d’historiografia catalana (Barcelona: Enciclopèdia catalana, 2003), 260–61.

103. Anals consulars de la ciutat de Barcelona (AHCB ms A-359), 41–44.

104. AHCB, ms A-1, 18v–19r. Pere Benito i Monclús and Maltas i Montoro have identified the author of this chronicle as Rafael Cervera; see Benito i Monclús and Maltas i Montoro [as Montoro Maltas], “Fams immortalitzades,” 509–10.

105. Luis R. Corteguera, For the Common Good: Popular Politics in Barcelona, 1580–1640 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), ix–x.

106. AHCB ms B-81, 163–64. This chronicle is also the only one to repeat the detail from AHCB, ms A-1 about several honrats having been caught up in the post-riot dragnet—another sign that this chronicler interpreted this incident as a violent conflict between the city's leaders and an irrational populace. This chronicler also refers to Guillem de Nagera as “Galseran Nagera,” possibly conflating Guillem with the Galceran Nagera who served as councilor four times between 1284 and 1316; see Bruniquer, Rúbriques, 1:28–30.

107. Benito i Monclús and Maltas i Montoro [as Montoro Maltas], “Fams immortalitzades,” 508–10.