Another Prince of Cooks!

This post reaches a long way back, and not just because I stubbed it to write up in July 2012. Some of you may remember when I posted my so-far-last From the Sources post in August 2011 that the relevant charter contained, as well as all kinds of interesting details about managing frontier settlement, a signature by a figure identified as a ‘prince of cooks’, “princeps coquorum”, whose name was apparently Guallus.¹ Another editor, working with a copy of the document that spells the name “Guadallus princeps cocorum”, presumably defective, prefers to read “princeps cotorum”, which he sees as a version of “princeps gotorum”, ‘prince of the Goths’, but I think it is safe to say that our conclusion was that this is special pleading.² Although it dealt with territory, as it put it, “in the extreme far limits of the marches”, the transaction is said to have been done in Barcelona, and two counts and two bishops were there, presumably therefore at the palace, so a head cook somehow getting in on the witness list didn’t seem an impossible thing to happen just the once.³ Except now I know it happened twice.

Centro solar de Odeillo – Minube.com. So, at any rate, says the site I borrowed this picture from, which is that of a slightly different means of contact with the heavens than the church that was here in my period, the Solar Research Centre of Odeillo… This is the location of the property concerned in today’s key charter, apparently.⁴

In July 2012 as part of the final work for my “Comparing the Earliest Documentary Culture in Catalonia”, I went very quickly through the earliest documents in the edition of the charters of the monastery of Sant Sadurní de Tavèrnoles, which as it happens is where the charter mentioned above is from.⁵ And, what do you know, in a donation there in the year 815 by Count Fredol of Toulouse of a church he’d built in honour of SS Cristòfor & Hilari de Segremorta, among the again quite grand witnesses there with the count at Llívia, is a “Rainallus princeps coquorum”.⁶

One big problem with piecing together connections here is that both of these documents are known to use only from a cartulary of the thirteenth century. Not only does this mean that we don’t have the originals, but it also means that the copyist of one document had probably also seen the other. If the title was in one and a similar title was in the other (though what?) it could have got amended, or indeed (a point in limited favour of Udina’s ‘prince of the Goths’) if the scribe had trouble with Visigothic script he may have amended to this in both cases from something else, and a c-t confusion is very possible in that case. But there’s also problems with contamination from other sources. One that surprised me when I started web-searching just now is that such a person is supposed, in the Book of Jeremiah yet already, to have destroyed Jerusalem in the service of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, and Gregory the Great spent quite a while explaining how this was about fleshly desire overwhelming the holy and so on, a pity given that the current view seems to be that the texts of the Bible that have “princeps militiae” here are probably the better ones and that a mistranslation through the Greek seems to be behind the variation.⁷ Now an Urgell scribe of either 815 or 973 could easily have read either Jeremiah or Gregory’s Moralia, and in fact the latter is probably more likely given the evidence we have from library catalogues, but it’s still not really a positive association, is it?⁸ Not the kind of person you would want endorsing your pious donation. So I’m not inclined to buy this however obvious it looks in terms of source.

Dukes aren’t what they used to be… and whoever is selling these hats is not doing so online. Where else do they think they’ll find really geeky cooks?

You may remember last time, though, that I did know of one other case of this phrase where a head cook was actually meant. Now actually there are loads, once you start digging, although they are almost all Roman or eleventh-century, but there is one in particular, to a chap called Gunzo who was given this title by the poet Ermold the Black while he was singing the praises of King Louis the Pious of Aquitaine (781-814), by then Holy Roman Emperor (814-840) but here appearing much more as the conqueror of Barcelona (801) and hero of other Catalan-side endeavours.⁹ I couldn’t see how that made sense as a possible source for a charter of 973, but it’s much less of a leap to wonder about an association to one of 815…

So, what would be needed to make this work? To start with, we have to make a fairly basic assumption: Louis did have a cook called Gunzo and this title was used of him. If we can accept that, the following things become possible:

1. Count Fredol of Toulouse and Bishop Possedoni of Urgell, both involved in the 815 charter and both people who had attended Louis’s court—the grant is made for the benefit of Louis’s soul and he is spoken of in terms brimming with expressed devotion—would probably have known of and perhaps even been fed by Gunzo;
2. Fredol, in setting up his own court in Cerdanya (because the charter describes him as ‘in session at my city of Llívia’, “sedente me in civitate mea Livia”), might have wished to imitate this regal affectation and thus entitled his own chief cook, Rainall;¹⁰
3. Rainall got to witness this donation, which was maybe even done over dinner with Bishop Possedoni one evening;
4. a hundred and fifty-eight years later, Count-Marquis Borrell II of Barcelona, Girona, Osona and Urgell made a big grant to the same monastery, and he did so again at a meeting (or perhaps dinner) with two of his bishops (including Guisad II, Possedoni’s many-times-successor at Urgell, as it happens) and a cook, Guadall, was also present and got to witness;
5. a scribe at Sant Sadurní de Tavèrnoles, needing to write up quite the largest grant they’d had from a count for a while, then went back through the other big grants they had and found the 815 charter, and, thinking this a grand thing to repeat, stuck this title on Guadall, who otherwise might have been recorded by name only,
6. and thus we have our charter.

One tiny problem with this is how the second scribe would know Guadall was a cook, of course, and that gets easier to solve if the dinner or meeting was actually at Urgell, not Barcelona, so that the scribe might more easily have actually been present, and for what it’s worth the extremely unusual specification of location is only in the dodgy copy of the 973 charter, not Tavèrnoles’s own.¹¹ But since the Bishop of Urgell was involved, I don’t really see any problem with that knowledge passing from Barcelona to Tavèrnoles along with whatever notes sourced the charter if the grant was in fact done in the lowlands. The very fact that the charter was at Tavèrnoles shows information went from palace to monastery, after all. As with so many of these thorny and not very significant problems, although there are lots of hypothetical steps in this solution I’m not sure any other is more elegant. And this one, if it could be accepted, would colour in a little bit of the otherwise very blank picture about how business was actually done between the powerful and influential in this period. If that was, in fact, sometimes over a meal, with servants in attendance but also trusted enough sometimes to help with things, I’m not unhappy about that at all.

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1. Cebrià Baraut (ed.), “Diplomatari del monestir de Tavèrnoles (segles IX-XIII)” in Urgellia: anuari d’estudis històrics dels antics comtats de Cerdanya, Urgell i Pallars, d’Andorra i la Vall d’Aran Vol. 12 (Montserrat 1995), pp. 7-414, doc. no. 23.

2. Federico Udina i Martorell, El Archivo Condal de Barcelona en los siglos IX-X: estudio crítico de sus fondos, Textos 18 (Madrid 1951), no. 174*.

3. Ibid.: “… in extremis ultimas finium marchas….” & “Facta huius donacionis in Barchinona civitate”.

4. I have this snippet of information from a desperate websearch to try and find the modern version of the place-name used in the charter cited at n. 6 below, which brought me against José María Gilera, “Junto a un monasterio del siglo IX se edifica un centro de investigación solar” in La Vanguardía Española, 7th August 1966, p. 30, which also records, on the basis of a paper by Miguel Oliva Prat that must be in the volume II Curso Internacional de Cultura romànica, del 10 al 30 de julio 1966, Puigcerdà: Memoria (Barcelona 1966), which I can’t get here, that the initial layout planning revealed some Romanesque stonework, a few metres of wall and some opus spicatum, that were considered too ephemeral to preserve, and so presumably got dug up and chucked away along with anything else that might have been there. Argh!

5. See n. 1 above. My work referred to here is J. Jarrett, “Comparing the Earliest Documentary Culture in Carolingian Catalonia” in Jarrett & A. Scott McKinley (edd.), Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Charters, International Medieval Research 19 (Turnhout 2013), pp. 89-126, DOI:10.1484/M.IMR-EB.1.101679.

6. Baraut, “Tavèrnoles”, doc. no. 4, though since I don’t have access to that in Birmingham I’m here using Jaime Villanueva, Viage Literario a las Iglesias de España, tomo X: Viage a Urgel (Valencia 1821), ap. V.

7. So apparently Massimo Manca, “Nabuzardan princeps coquorum: Una lezione vulgata oltre la Vulgata” in Quaderni del Dipartimento di Filologia Linguistica e Tradizione Classica (Torino) Vol. 13 (Torino 1999), pp. 491-498, though I’m not sure I’ve understood what little Google will give me of that correctly.

8. I am, admittedly, getting this through a web version of the Patrologia Latina text of the Sententiae of Taion of Saragossa (where IV.23) rather than Gregory’s actual work, but since that’s almost certainly the version anyone in Catalonia would have read, maybe that’s OK! On the access to this text in the area see Michel Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne (IX^e-XII^e siècle), Bibliothèque de la Casa de Velázquez 23 (Madrid 2003), 2 vols, II pp. 739-747. Annoying for what I argue here, by 1040 at least Tavèrnoles did have a copy of this (ibid. pp. 746, 747) but I still don’t think it’s the source here because why on earth would you do that?

9. Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowici, ed. Ernst Dümmler in idem (ed.), Poetae latini ævi carolini II, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Poetae) IV, p. 71; there is now a translation of this poem in Thomas F. X. Noble (trans.), Charlemagne and Louis the Pious: Lives by Einhard, Notker, Ermoldus, Thegan, and the Astronomer (Philadelphia 2009).

10. The Counts of Toulouse do seem to have treated at least some of their transpyrenean domains as quasi-independent princedoms, but Fredol is beyond that area here. On that, though, see Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Dels Vigots als Catalans, ed. Jaume Sobrequés i Callicoó, Estudis i Documents XIII & XIV (Barcelona 1969, repr. 1974 & 1989), 2 vols. I pp. 241-260.

11. See nn. 2 & 3 above.