As well as providing some good photos, summer 2021 was about the last time I was able to do any serious work on Catalan charters, which is of course my whole big thing. (Not being able to do much since then is more or less why I’m not at the IMC this year, since a number of people have asked about that; nothing fresh to present…) The form that work took was a methodical chomping through the final volumes of the immense Catalunya Carolíngia project, those for the medieval county of Barcelona, looking for Count-Marquis Borrell II, its joint or sole master from 945 to 993 CE. This is the part of Catalonia I know least well, but I had tried to look in all the archives I knew about. Still, the team who did the Catalunya Carolíngia had better access and more time to look; it was inevitable there would be stuff in there I hadn’t found, and maybe I was lucky it was only twenty-odd documents. Some day I will also be able to finish this job, but as it is the summer ended with me about two-thirds of the way through and that’s roughly where things remain. But, point of this post, some of them were pretty odd.
I think this is where our charter used to live, in the Palau Can Falguera near Sant Feliu de Llobregat. Its new residence is more forbidding.
The charter that gives us our title is one of the odd ones, nearly not even found by the Catalunya Carolíngia team (it has no. 674bis, because they had their numbers fixed already), and it survives only through an 1163 transcript in a private archive (which you see above) that was later gathered into the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón.1 The basics of it are not too odd: in late March 977, Borrell sold an alod, an estate, near Ullastrell to a guy called Otsèn for 140 solidi, which is quite a lot and suggests it was a good few acres. However, almost every step you can take from there is slightly unusual. Borrell had the land from one Guitard Berazà, which is just an odd name. Surnames or bynames are still unusual in tenth-century Catalonia, though Borrell’s world contained several important Guitards and that may be why the scribe specified; but I’ve never seen "Berazà" before and wonder if it’s a very early Romance patronymic genitive, son of Bera, like Díaz would come to signal "son of Diego" in Castilian, a direction Catalan didn’t in the end go. But also, whoever he was, we are told that he in turn got the land from Otsèn. The document doesn’t say it’s the same Otsèn both times, but usually land charters here would only give the tenure history one step back; that this time they gave two does suggest to me that the reader was supposed to understand the link. So why Otsèn would, if that were right, have had to sell up and was now able to buy back again (as well as why Guitard didn’t hold onto the land for very long) would all be nice to know. Otsàn does occur twice otherwise, once before and once after, both in documents from this archive, which suggests to me that he was very local; we only see him when this specific area is visible.2 In the former of these he is one of a small group of people selling land to a Guitard, which fits; and Guitard is said to be a vicar (which here is a secular title, basically meaning someone who runs a castle for the count, and a castle is mentioned in the boundaries of our main document). But he isn’t given his odd byname and the land has different boundaries, so this isn’t the matching jigsaw piece. Still, if a vicar was involved it would explain why Borrell might be in the loop, and it has me wondering if it’s one of those three-pointed sales I wrote about years back.
The CatCar team who did the digital version of the edition place this document's properties here. I don't know how they did so – the network of rivers and rivulets in the bounds may be telltale if you work on it? – but I'm glad I have an excuse not to try!
But the oddities don’t end there, and one of them is really useful (not the one I got the title from though; I’m saving that till last). As with most land charters in most places, this one gives the boundaries of the property, which run:
"on the part around in the little river which they call Masurgus; on the northern part on the street that leads everywhere or on the vine which was the late Lleopard’s or on the clearing that was the late Guadamir’s from the southern part indeed it bounds on the road that goes everywhere; from the west it lies next to the street or on the term of Ultrera or on the waste land of Quintila or of Ansoald."3
This already gives one an impression of the land, part wild country, two properties abandoned after their owners’ deaths, and a weirdly dense street pattern even though apparently only one route out. But this may be misleading, because the charter then goes on to specify four more pieces of property that are included, and the first two’s boundaries run thus:
"at the part around on the torrent which runs thence from the castle [told you]; on the north and on all the other parts on the same abovesaid alod [i. e. the main property already outlined]. And another piece which is above Athanagild’s house similarly bounds on all sides on the abovesaid alod."4
So OK, let’s sketch that. Obviously we don’t know what shape these land slices were, and even though they are conventionally given four sides that doesn’t make them square or even rectangular, especially in this country, but the logic of the description is that they can be thought of that way, so diagrammatically we are being told something like this.
Sketch diagrams of property boundaries of the main alod (top), piece 1 (bottom left) and piece 2 (bottom right); click to embiggen
Now, you don’t have to be a spatial genius, don’t even really need diagrams, to see quite quickly that if these two pieces have boundaries on the main alod, they’re not among the boundaries it’s given; or at least, it’s weird that these pieces of land are not referred to among those main boundaries when they’re then listed in the same document. But also, especially in the second case, how could it possibly be? The alod actually surrounded that land. The only place for these properties to be is therefore inside it. Now, that might not seem like a big deal; numerous scholars, including me, have deduced that some of the big properties they see in these documents must have encompassed subsidiary properties which were not necessarily part of them.5 It probably happened very widely. But it is pretty much unknown to me for a document to actually make that even this clear, because of course usually those subsidiary properties were not owned by the same person or included in the same sale. But here, even though these all apparently belonged to Borrell, he had not found it necessary to erase the old boundaries between big and interior holdings. You see what I mean? The alod and the pieces of land must all have been his, or he couldn’t here be selling them; but they had never been joined up. Presumably the castle too remained his, and wasn’t included in this, but it was probably also inside the alod, or that torrent would have to be crossing the alod’s boundaries (whereas I assume instead it ran into the Masurgus, which from the CatCar map would be the modern Torrent d’en Cintet I guess, somewhere between the holdings we’re seeing). So Otsèn’s land had had a comital castle stuck inside it. (It has not been found; I wonder if it was wooden.) One can see why the vicar, I guess of that castle, might have been keen to buy him out; less clear why Borrell, apparently, then bought the vicar out (or resumed the property at his death, maybe?) and sold it back to the original owner. But you might not expect to be told all this by some boundary clauses…
Still. None of this is either of what I promised you or the oddest thing about the charter, which for me is its witnesses. There are lots of these, seventeen in all including three priests and the vicar of Palofret which was quite nearby, but because of their number and because the others also include the frontier pioneer of many masters, Ennegó Bonfill (son of Sendred), I think this gathering was probably happening in Barcelona. But I’m not sure it was at Borrell’s palace, because four of the witnesses are specified as being sons of viscounts, not viscounts themselves but sons of. Specifically, we have: Ermemir son of Viscount Guadald; Llop son of Viscount Guadald; Miró son of Viscount Guadald; and Geribert son of Viscount Guitard (him again—maybe). Now these are all known people; Guadald was Viscount of Osona, Guitard of Barcelona. Ermemir and Geribert would both succeed their fathers pretty shortly, in fact Ermemir (who may actually be called viscount here; the term is in the nominative so should agree with him, not Guadald) maybe already had; the other two would not. But the daddies aren’t in the list; only the kids were present (and there’s also an Ató son of the late Terçol Guitard, unknown to me but evidently not to the gathering, as if the four vicecomital kids weren’t the only ones who for now were defined principally by who their fathers were or had been). Presumably they were of legal age, that is 14 or up, or they couldn’t legally have witnessed, so we’re talking adolescent teenagers at least; but apparently they were all together in Barcelona that day and their two fathers were somewhere else.
So my first thought was, as you see from the title, that perhaps it was one of their birthdays, or some other celebration, and all the contemporary noble kids were out to party with him. I still like that idea but of course there’s absolutely no way to tell; this is a document about Borrell and Otsèn, to an extent Guitard Berazà (perhaps so specified so that it was clear it wasn’t the viscount meant), and everyone else is just an extra whose business that day was not this. Even the actual viscounts may have been around and just busy chairing a court or committee or something; they could have literally been in the next room. What was actually happening in someone’s palace in Barcelona on the day Otsèn rocked up and offered Borrell 140 solidi to get his old lands back, we will never know. But therefore, it may as well have been a party thrown by the count for some teenage viscounts-to-be as anything else, eh?
1. Ignasi J. Baiges i Jardí and Pere Puig i Ustrell (edd.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum VII: el comtat de Barcelona, 3 vols, Memòries de la Secció Històrica-Arqueolòlgica 110 (Barcelona 2019), vol. II, doc. no. 674bis.
2. Ibid., doc. no. 573bis.
3. Ibid., doc. no. 674bis: "Affrontat hec omnia: de parte circi in riunculo que dicunt Masurgus; de parte aquilonis iniungit in ipsa strada qui pergit ubique vel in vinea qui fuit condam Leopardi vel in area qui fuit de condam Vudamiro; de meridie vero parte inlaterat in via qui pergit ubique; de hocciduo vero adherit in strada vel in termine de Ultrera sive in terra erema de Chintela vel de Ansoaldo."
4. Ibid.: "Et iterum vindo tibi alias IIII pecias de terra in supradicto terminio. Affrontat ipsa una pecia de terra: de parte circi in torrente qui exinde discurrit de castello; de aquilonis et de omnes aliasque partes in isto suprascripto alode. Et ipsa alia pecia qui est supra domum Adanagilde similiter affrontat de omnesque partes in suprascriptum alodem." The next piece is located by the house of Almondo, which looks to me like an Arabic name…
5. Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power, Studies in History New Series (Woodbridge 2010), pp. 30-35 and more concretely and wide-rangingly, Gaspar Feliu Montfort, "El condado de Barcelona en los siglos IX y X: organización territorial y económico-social" in Cuadernos de Historia Económica de Cataluña Vol. 7 (Barcelona 1972), pp. 9-31, still good despite my quibbles.
A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe 