The Crown of Aragon

The archives of the medieval Crown of Aragon, which embraced the regions of Valencia, Catalonia, and the Balearic Islands as well as possessions in Sicily and southern Italy, preserve a rich collection of inventories, accounts of auctions, and other lists of household goods. These records, typically written in Catalan or Valencian with some passages in Latin, have featured prominently in scholarship from the region for decades, although they are at present not widely known to scholars working on other European areas. The collection published on DALME offers a small sample of the riches available in the region's notarial, municipal, and capitular archives.

The political roots of the late medieval Crown of Aragon can be traced to the marriage between Petronilla of Aragon and Raymond-Berenguer IV of Barcelona in 1137. Upon the abdication of Petronilla's father in 1137, Ramiro II of Aragon, the Mediterranean county of Barcelona and the Pyrenean kingdom of Aragon united as the medieval Crown of Aragon. Throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Crown of Aragon expanded throughout the Mediterranean, first incorporating the Kingdoms of Majorca and Valencia, later conquering Sicily, Sardinia, and Naples, and even making titular claims to the Duchies of Athens and Neopatria in Greece. The political entity was “a composite monarchy,” where each kingdom retained its own laws and institutions, with the "Cortes" or parliaments being the best expression of local governance. This political structure was later inherited by the Spanish Monarchy and maintained until the eighteenth century

The second half of the fourteenth century was a period of decline for the Aragonese kings, and the fifteenth century witnessed the end of Barcelona's dynastic house and the ascension of the Castilian house of Trastámaras. This new dynasty revitalized the Crown politically, with significant political accomplishments, including the sack of Marseille in 1423 and the conquest of Naples in 1442. Furthermore, this dynasty led the union with Castile, which formed the Spanish Monarchy in 1469.

As is true elsewhere in the Mediterranean, medieval household inventories and auction accounts from the Crown of Aragon were often composed by public notaries. Beginning in the fourteenth century, notaries often kept separate registers for different types of transactions, such as books of land transfers (llibre de vends), testaments (llibre de testaments), procurations (llibre de procures), and more. While scattered registers of inventories and auctions for high-status individuals survive beginning in 1389, notaries in Barcelona did not begin dedicating specific registers to inventories and auctions until the 1430s. Throughout the fifteenth century, notaries throughout the Crown of Aragon produced hundreds of such registers, leaving behind an extraordinary corpus of documents for studying late medieval material culture in the western Mediterranean.

The current collection features records from Barcelona and Valencia and includes scattered records from other towns and cities throughout the region. Since the laws governing the succession of estates favored the production of post-mortem inventories, we have many inventories detailing the estates of individuals from all walks of life, ranging from wealthy merchants to poor freedwomen. It was common in the Crown of Aragon for heirs to auction off goods that were either unwanted or that could be liquidated to meet pressing financial needs. For this reason, accounts of objects sold at auction are especially common among the region's records. In many cases, such accounts immediately follow the inventory of the pertinent estate, making it possible to determine which goods the decedent's heirs kept and which they sold.

Several hundred registers of inventories and auction accounts remain scattered throughout the notarial archives of the former Crown of Aragon, containing thousands of inventories and auctions. A primary goal of the team is to develop a more random sample from the archives of Barcelona and Valencia and to add more records from other cities and towns as well as the countryside. The DALME team, in cooperation with Historical Pharmacopeias, a research project collecting lists of medicaments, has identified several inventories of late medieval apothecary workshops that are in the process of being published.

As the capital of Catalonia and the de facto capital of the Crown of Aragon for much of its history, Barcelona experienced remarkable economic growth beginning in the thirteenth century. This prosperity appears vividly in its various archives' vast wealth of notarial records. DALME provides a glimpse into this richness: nearly one hundred documents come from six notarial registers housed at the Arxiu Històric de Protocols de Barcelona (AHPB). The notary Simó Carner accounts for over forty inventories and thirty auctions at present.

Barcelona’s notarial records frequently offer two or more documents deriving from a single estate. Postmortem inventories and auctions are the most common, but on occasion, the records also include appraisals of the value of the remaining objects. The collection describes the assets of individuals from a broad range of social statuses, including artisans such as tanners, shoemakers, and tailors, as well as professionals like surgeons and notaries, alongside lower clergy and nobility. Even the lives of formerly enslaved women are documented within these records, providing a unique window into the city's complex social fabric.

In the later Middle Ages, the Kingdom of Valencia formed part of a greater federation known as the Crown of Aragon. These records appear in the city's local archives: the Arxiu del Regne de València and the Archivo de Protocolos del Real Colegio-Seminario de Corpus Christi de València. The best estimates suggest that thousands of post-mortem inventories from the later Middle Ages remain unstudied in these archives. Like the corpus of inventories and auction accounts from Barcelona, the extant Valencian inventories also represent individuals from various social statuses, including many married women and widows. Local scholars, such as José Sanchis Sivera, have fruitfully used post-mortem inventories as a source of everyday life in medieval Valencia for well over a century. Nevertheless, historians have only studied a fraction of the vast sea of extant records. These documents continue to serve as the basis for ongoing research projects, including doctoral dissertations and scientific projects that benefit from government grants.

Owing to Sardinia's complex political history, sources for later medieval Sardinian history can be found not only in the archives of the island but also in Italy and Iberia. Before 1323, the island was divided into the four kingdoms (giudicati) of Calari, Arborea, Torres and Gallura, and connected with Genoese and Pisan interests. From 1323, Sardinia became part of the Crown of Aragon, and later joined the great Mediterranean Commonwealth controlled by Barcelona. Inventories are typically found in notarial registers and associated charters. Although notaries appear to have been common on the island, few notarial registers have survived from the medieval period; only eight are extant from the fifteenth century and all pertain to Cagliari. Along with the inventories of private households, consisting primarily of post-mortem inventories, there are several patrimonial lists deriving from public and ecclesiastical institutions.

The inventories in the Crown of Aragon collection have been edited following these principles.

• Abbreviations, in most cases, have been silently expanded, including currency units.
• Capitalization has selectively added to personal names, place names, and other words normally capitalized following modern conventions.
• Periods have been introduced to help demarcate object phrases but otherwise only a minimal amount of punctuation has been added.
• Line breaks in the original are reproduced in the edition.
• Object lists are transcribed in full, with the exception of property locations, which have only been selectively transcribed. Other elements of the record that do not list objects, such as the record of any court actions that precede the inventory, have been selectively transcribed, and paraphrases occasionally introduced to indicate the nature of those actions.

The inventories from Valencia in the current collection were collected and edited by Juan Vicente García Marsilla and Antonio Belenguer González, researchers from the Departament d'Història Medieval i Ciències i Tècniques Historiogràfiques of the Universitat de València. Pablo Sanahuja Ferrer and Ryan Low edited the inventories and auctions from Barcelona, with contributions by Rowan Dorin. The records in the Cagliari subset of the Miscellaneous Inventories collection have been contributed by Dr. Giuseppe Seche of the Università degli Studi di Cagliari. Other records have been edited by Lluis Sales y Fava and Mathis Fourès. We have also republished inventories originally edited by previous scholars.