Expedición de Catalanes y Aragoneses al Oriente:
Fué batalla muy terrible y sangrienta, y duró mas el alcance y el matar, que el vencimiento; porque en siendo muerto el Duque, y empantanadas las primeras tropas de la caballería, hubo gran desorden en lo restante del exército enemigo, con que fué facil el rompelle. Ganada tan señalada […]

Dido and Hengist are remembered as early heroes of isoperimetry for having solved the challenge of maximising the area of a land grant made to them by stringing together strips of oxhide and using the resulting closed superthong to trace, respectively, a semi-circle at Carthage and a full circle at Kaercorrei.
What was news to […]

Manuel Capdevila occasionally comments here but now has his own blog, Revised Catalonia History, whose goal is to remedy what he believes is the deliberate obfuscation of the Glorious History of the Catalan Nation and its Contribution to Civilisation and create a correct, Catalan-centric view.
One of his early claims is that the English paper […]

Guy of Warwick is the original of the soldier-saint Guillem de Varoic in Tirant lo blanc, as Wikipedia surely soon will say. I almost drowned near where he fought the giant Colbrand as a consequence of too much water without and cider within. I hope Xavi will be wary of him.

I rather like the idea of going up the M6 one day and finding an elephant where Manchester used to be.

Apparently the four corners of a square reel used in this Huesca village in hemp yarn production represent four horses bound for France. I wonder which horses these were: those that awaited the Duke of Calabria, when he sought with three others to flee the court of King Ferdinand of Aragon, or others? (If folksy […]

Given the spectacular contribution of Iberian merchants to the spice trade, why is it that none of my local friends will go anywhere near a lamb vindaloo?

Andrew Scull digs up and burns Foucault in the TLS:
Foucault’s account of the medieval period fares no better in the light of modern scholarship. Its central image is of “the ship of fools”, laden with its cargo of mad souls in search of their reason, floating down the liminal spaces of feudal Europe. It is […]

Interesting bit in a NYT review of David Crystal’s The Fight For English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (buy: USA/UK) (via Conversational Reading):
Crystal is … especially good on the Middle Ages. When printing came to Britain in 1400, English was a merry old mess. Choices had to be made, he says, and typesetters […]

Here’s why I had a bugger of a time trying to imitate with compass, ruler and pencil the more complex designs I dug up after my first trip into parts Islamic. And it’s got a name that’s new to me and a whole host of experts, it has. (Via Stefan Geens, and do read the […]

Look more like subtitles to me, some of em. (Via Unze Toal)

Another strange French trial: Following his master’s death in 1371, Aubry de Montdidier’s dog showed unremitting hostility to his master’s comrade, Richard de Macaire. Charles V ordered the two to fight, and the dog won, thus proving de Macaire’s guilt. (Cyclopedia of Universal Biography, via Google Books)

This is a translation of part of the chapter on Romance languages in Marius F Valkhoff’s 1943 study of De expansie van het Nederlands. The text is annotated–probably excessively and untidily so–with [additional or contrasting information] and [???] where Valkhoff has clearly found something I haven’t.

Neither an aficionado of la Tomatina in Buñol nor a shooting victim in Millersburg, Ohio, but a follower of the doctrines of Thomas Aquinas:
Si hun religios es bon thomatista, a tot sera bastant a satisfer. Per ço, nostre senyor Deu, ans que vingues esta saviesa en sent Thomas, ja li anava davant per profecia e […]

The 1390 slaughter of Barcelonan Jewry, natural disaster and ritual combat constitute today’s Libro verde items. The following bizarre anecdote from R Coltman Clephan’s excellent and ridiculously cheap The Mediaeval Tournament combines all three:
In La Vie de Bertrand Du Guesclin is an account of a singular legal duel between Jews, named Daniot and Turquant, which […]

Here from Braudel (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II/El Mediterráneo y el mundo mediterráneo en la época de Felipe II) is some context for today’s Libro verde item on the fall of Barcelona to Juan II’s great beasts:
At the end of the fourteenth century, the Mediterranean belonged to its […]

The public brothel opened in Cañet street in 1452 by Simon Sala with a licence from the king (see today’s front page Libro Verde excerpt) seems to have been public in the sense of being licensed and providing a service to all and sundry rather than having been publicly owned and run. Here’s more from […]

From John Drummond Hay, Morocco and the Moors: Western Barbary, Its Wild Tribes and Savage Animals (1861):
There are descendants of the Moorish families of Granada now residing in Tetuan and Fas [Fez], who still preserve the keys, and it is said also the title-deeds, of the houses of their Mauro-Spanish ancestors, in the hope that […]

An excerpt in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1835, translated by the excellent Louisa Stuart Costello, for whom the gents very sensibly made an exception:
If I must fly thee, turn away
Those eyes where love is sweetly dwelling,
And bid each charm, each grace decay,
That smile, that voice, all else excelling;
Banish those gentle wiles that won me,
And those […]

From Ibn ‘Abdūn’s rulebook for Seville market, translated by Bernard Lewis: “Truffles should not be sold around the mosque, for this is a delicacy of the dissolute.” (Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources, ed Olivia R Constable) There’s no reason to believe this ties in with the prohibition on the use of […]

David Millán on the crisis facing Don Pasqual Maragall i Mira, glorious successor of Jaume/Jaime/James I of Aragon.

It would be rather nice for someone I know if there were a translation into one of the Romance dialects of Under der linden, but I don’t think there is, and I’m not that far. People probably weren’t as sensitive to lime pollen back then. (I do like Craig E Bertolet’s jealous husband translation, although […]

The rest is not, unfortunately, about the upcoming regional elections but about youth and love.

In a romance from Almansa on the La Mancha-Levant borders:

Someone told me once that the best brothel in Spain, ever, was a mythical one run in medieval Valencia by one Rei Arlot under licence from the King of Aragon. The reality is slightly more predictable: King Harlot was the popular name given to the government official charged with regulating prostitution, and the office was […]

It doesn’t really matter whether Columbus was that posterior construct, Catalan, or not; the Mings got there first, using trained otters.

It seems slightly unfair that the Spanish are giving Dan Brown such a hard time re his ignorance of Seville, given the low standard of historical accuracy set by many Spanish historical novels (and history books, for that matter). A couple of years back I struggled through a Catalan effort that had medieval peasants […]

From El llibre de tres (“The book of three”):
Tres plers són en aquest món: beure en taverna, jaure en bordell e cagar en prat.
Or:
Three are the pleasures this world us doth yield: to drink in a tavern, to screw in a brothel, to $hit in a field.
The edition currently available of this late C14th parody […]

I had an interesting chat (ie I listened) with someone the other night about the social position of musicians in the Middle Ages. I didn’t really buy his idea of the musician as The Other–at least not in Spain–but what he told me about Moorish and Jewish musicians in Christian society (as opposed to, for […]

Here’s a cautionary tale from Alonso de Villegas’ Fructus sanctorum y quinta parte del Flossanctorum (1594):
Gauberto Fabricio of the Order of St Bernard writes that in 1386 [Peter/Pedro/Pere IV] of Aragon took away various possessions of the cathedral church of St Tecla in Tarragona. Although the clergy protested, they were unable to prevent the mischief.
Now, […]

I know it’s stupid, but when Catalan writers refer to the “el Beat Ramon Llull”, I always think of Mr Llull as a saintly motorcyclist rather than an almost saintly (beat = “blessed”) medieval scholar. (Llull is notorious for having bought a Moor in order to learn Arabic and then worked him so hard […]

The claim by jokers like Jordi Bilbeny that whatever contains the odd Catalanism must have been written by a Catalan is obviously and completely ridiculous because it ignores a basic truth of the Mediterranean littoral: that multilingual jostling and experimentation has been going on here for as long as people have had horses, boats and […]

Hordes of otherwise quite sensible people here spend acres of time (makes sense to me) worrying about whether their sacred language is being polluted by others. Francisco de Sales Mayo was so generous as to extend his concern to Caló, which he claimed had suffered adulteration at the hands of the authors of early nineteenth […]

Following on from my favourite sangoma (if ancestors are virtual, why haven’t they got websites?), here’s a denunciation of our favourite crucifee, read up a rainy mountain this weekend:
Doncs, mira primer ab falsos miracles
com són tots los pobles per ell alterats.
Rompent de la llei los grans tabernacles,
als nostres rabins ha fet grans obstacles,
als seus prometent […]

Sarkozy’s going to need to look for some soon, but I fear that the current Parisian definition is the guy with the newest fridge. The earliest mention I’ve found here also floats in on a wave of urban violence:
It is in the anxious and transforming 15th century that we begin to discover forms that appear […]

I just read Beth Marie Kosir’s interesting paper on the British codpiece and thought I’d have a quick look through some Spanish stuff. The Hispanic bragueta (I guess it comes from the French braguette, which is actually not a combination of baguette and bragas, “knickers”) seems to have been used first (in the late 15th […]

I’ve bumped into a number of Moorish poet-princes, but I’d never heard of poet-princess Wallada bint al-Mustakfi (994-1091). There’s a sensible, sourced account (in Spanish) here, and then there’s this. I had my doubts about Wijdan al shommari, and thought I’d be able to nail him/her on the basis of his/her (?) version of a […]

Someone has been trying recently & kindly to hammer into my thick skull the nature and depth of early Irish ties with Iberia. Here’s a bleeding chunk from a piece called The City of the Tribes: Italian Memories in an Irish Port in a recently cited James Joyce anthology (Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings):
The lazy […]

Mediaeval local legal codes, fueros, all contain passages like the following, taken from the Fuero de Bejár (1290s):

Sez Lucio Vicente López in Recuerdos de viaje (1881). This is apparently in part due to the Normans having invaded without women, thus enabling the maintenance of The Saxon Character. I think he’s wrong: Winchester is suspiciously continental, while Romsey had Ethelflaeda, who sang psalms while skinny-dipping in the Test.