Authoring the Past: History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia

By Jaume Aurell

Authoring the Past surveys medieval Catalan historiography, shedding light on the emergence and evolution of historical writing and autobiography in the Middle Ages, on questions of authority and authorship, and on the links between history and politics during the period. Jaume Aurell examines texts from the late twelfth to the late fourteenth century—including the Latin Gesta comitum Barcinonensium and four texts in medieval Catalan: James I’s Llibre dels fets, the Crònica of Bernat Desclot, the Crònica of Ramon Muntaner, and the Crònica of Peter the Ceremonious—and outlines the different motivations for the writing of each. 

For Aurell, these chronicles are not mere archaeological artifacts but rather documents that speak to their writers’ specific contemporary social and political purposes. He argues that these Catalonian counts and Aragonese kings were attempting to use their role as authors to legitimize their monarchical status, their growing political and economic power, and their aggressive expansionist policies in the Mediterranean. By analyzing these texts alongside one another, Aurell demonstrates the shifting contexts in which chronicles were conceived, written, and read throughout the Middle Ages.

The first study of its kind to make medieval Catalonian writings available to English-speaking audiences, Authoring the Past will be of interest to scholars of history and comparative literature, students of Hispanic and Romance medieval studies, and medievalists who study the chronicle tradition in other languages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Mar 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226032344

Book preview

Authoring the Past

History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia

JAUME AURELL

The University of Chicago Press • Chicago and London

JAUME AURELL is associate professor in the Department of History and dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Navarra, Spain.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03232-0 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-03232-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03234-4 (e-book)

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities toward the publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Aurell i Cardona, Jaume.

Authoring the past : history, autobiography, and politics in medieval Catalonia / Jaume Aurell.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03232-0 (cloth : alkaline paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-03232-9 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Historiography—Spain—Catalonia—To 1500. 2. Catalonia (Spain)—Historiography. 3. Catalonia (Spain)—Kings and rulers—Biography—History and criticism. 4. Catalan prose literature—To 1500—History and criticism. 5. Gesta comitum Barcinonensium. 6. James I, King of Aragon, 1208–1276. Llibre dels fets. 7. Desclot, Bernat. Llibre del rei en Pere. 8. Muntaner, Ramón, d. 1336. Crònica. 9. Pedro IV, King of Aragon, 1319?–1387. Cronica de Sant Joan de la Penya. I. Title.

DP302.c619a87 2012

946.702—dc23

2011032942

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART 1: HISTORICAL WRITINGS AND HISTORICAL AUTHORS

1 Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium as Genealogy

2 King James I and His Chivalric Autobiography

3 Bernat Desclot: The Historian and His Chronicle

4 Ramon Muntaner: Ruler, Knight, and Chronicler

5 King Peter’s Llibre and Royal Self-Representation

PART 2: THEORIES AND INTERPRETATIONS

6 The Shift in Historical Genres

7 The Dawn of Catalan Autobiography as Chronicle

8 The Authorial Logic of the Historical Text

9 Catalan Chroniclers and Poetic License: History, Epic, Fiction

10 The Emergence of Political Realism

Conclusion

Notes

Index of Names

Acknowledgments

During its long itinerary, this book has benefited from the generous help of many colleagues and friends. The book’s origin dates from about 1998, when I moved from the University of Barcelona to the University of Navarra and, simultaneously, from the study of Mediterranean merchant culture to medieval historiography. Gabrielle M. Spiegel enthusiastically supported this shift in my research field, and she has always been generous in her advice as she revised my drafts, always giving me insightful comments and suggestions. I can only hope that my gratitude might somehow be equal to the extent of her kindness.

Much of my understanding of the nature and possibilities of the interdisciplinary work between historians and scholars of literature comes from my participation in interdisciplinary research projects on the connections between history and autobiography, directed by Rocío G. Davis at the University of Navarra from 2003. I am aware that the problems raised by a study that attempts to cross the boundaries of several disciplines are never easy to solve. Yet this experience gave me the tools to deal with the methodological and critical issues involved. In addition, she knows that I will never forget her generous, exigent, and meticulous revisions of my drafts, which have made this book possible.

This book has benefited from my long periods of research in the library of the University of California, Berkeley, where I studied modern historiography and learned much from the advice of Anthony Adamthwaite and Martin Jay. During two research visits to the University of California, Los Angeles, I also enjoyed and learned from my conversations with Patrick Geary, Zrinka Stahuljak, and Lynn Hunt. I remember those summers at UCLA with joy, particularly because of Teófilo Ruiz and Robert Rosenstone, whose warm friendship and intense conversations made the place feel like home.

Thomas Bisson, Paul Freedman, and Adam Kosto epitomize three different generations of American scholars devoted to the study of medieval Catalonia. Their brilliant work has contributed to the better knowledge of medieval Catalonia in a larger context. I have always thought that the best way to approach medieval European local subjects is to combine the erudition of local scholars with the broader theoretical and methodological range offered by American and other foreign academics. These three historians embody this very fruitful approach. I thank them for their always generous support and advice and for welcoming me to Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, respectively. I only regret not treating Paul’s cats with the care they deserve.

During the last part of the writing of the book, and particularly for the chapter devoted to the political theory and the practice of royal coronations, I have benefited from the advice of some political philosophers, such as Montserrat Herrero, and early modern historians such as Peter Burke and particularly Pablo Vázquez Gestal.

Medieval Catalan historiography has been practiced by Catalan scholars who, during the twentieth century, firmly settled the foundations of the field. Researchers of the next generations will always appreciate the amazing work of Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer, Ramon d’Abadal, Ferran Soldevila, Miquel Coll i Alentorn, and Martí de Riquer. Though I never met these scholars, I perceive the echo and continuity of this invaluable tradition during my frequent conversations with José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, Martin Aurell, Alfons Puigarnau, and Stefano Cingolani.

Most of my research was conducted at the library of the University of Navarra, in Pamplona, Spain. The amazing quality and number of its resources and the professional excellence of its personnel have provided the best context for my work. At the same time, I have benefited from conversations with my colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Navarra, particularly Ignacio Olábarri, Julia Pavón, and Álvaro Fernández de Córdova, and the philosopher Alejandro Llano.

To work with the University of Chicago Press is to encounter an exigent but unforgettable example of professionalism. My deepest thanks go to Randy Petilos: he knows better than anyone the difficulties of this project, and for that reason I will always appreciate his commitment to the project from the beginning. I also want to thank the anonymous readers’ incisive criticism, practical comments, and sharp suggestions.

Finally, I greatly appreciate the unflagging support of my parents during the long process of writing this book. I have always believed that their love for culture, books, history, and tradition was their best legacy to us, one that my brother, Martin, and I have taken to heart as medievalists. To them, and to my sister Raquel, I dedicate this book.

›››‹‹‹

Earlier versions of portions of chapter 3, 6, and 7 appeared as From Genealogies to Chronicles: The Power of the Form in Medieval Catalan Historiography, Viator 36 (2005): 235–64; Autobiography as Unconventional History: Constructing the Author, Rethinking History 10 (2006): 433–49; La Chronique de Jacques Ier, une fiction autobiographique. Auteur, auctorialité et auctorité au Moyen Âge, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 63 (2008): 301–18; and Medieval Historiography and Mediation: Bernat Desclot’s Representations of History, in Representing History, 1000–1300: Art, Music, History, ed. Robert Maxwell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 91–108.

To my brother Rafa

Introduction

Interest in medieval historiography among historians and literary critics has increased considerably since the 1970s, heightening the interdisciplinary nature of the field through the blending of critical methodologies. On the one hand, since historians have never been more inclined to reflect upon the nature of their discipline, the analysis of medieval historical writing has offered them a rich area of experimentation for the theory and practice of their own activity. On the other, literary scholars have been fascinated by the analysis and interpretation of historical genres, which has given them the opportunity to deal with crucial aspects of their discipline, such as the relation between reality and fiction, the transmission and reception of legends, the evolution from Latin to vernacular languages, and the analysis of the concepts of authority and authorship.

The paradigms of the New Medievalism and the New Philology evidence this shared interest in medieval historiography. They have succeeded, in particular, in privileging interdisciplinary fields in their analyses; in engaging the material context of authorship, scribal practice, and readership; in examining medieval manuscripts in their context; and in renewing ways of thinking about the differences between oral and written discourses. They have also emphasized the opposition of popular to learned practice and the forms within which these modes allow an individual or a community to shape memory, history, and biography and to engage diverse literary and historical genres, from annals to genealogies, hagiographies to personal stories, autobiographies to chronicles.¹ The newness in this medievalism lies in its insistence that the language of texts must be studied not simply as a discursive phenomenon but also as a part of the dynamic of textual language within the manuscript matrix. Importantly, this approach calls our attention to both language and manuscript within the social context and networks they inscribe—a proclivity that connects these medievalist trends to the parallel early modernist practice of the New Historicism.²

Considering the renewed interest in medieval historiography in current scholarship—created in part by the hegemony of cultural over social and economic studies since the 1980s—and aware of the richness of Catalan literature, I began to explore medieval historical writings, after having spent a few years analyzing the merchant culture of medieval Barcelona. I was drawn to the continued interrelations between historical and fictional Catalan writing, which seemed incompatible in the Middle Ages. When Catalan historical literature rose in popularity, fictional writing seemed to decline, and vice versa: we consider the golden age of historiography as the period from the mid-twelfth to the end of the fourteenth century, while the rise of fiction occurred from the mid-fourteenth to the fifteenth century.

In effect, the rise of Catalan historiography, the focus of this book, begins with the Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium (1180–84) and ends with King Peter the Ceremonious’s (Pere el Cerimoniós) autobiography (1375–83). During this period, the power of historical discourse in Catalonia was strong enough to stifle the emergence of the kind of imaginative/fictional writing popular in neighboring countries such as France and England. There is, for instance, no Catalan version of texts such as the many legendary narratives connected to the Arthurian cycle that appeared in France and England. Indeed, fictional writing began to attain popularity in Catalonia only when fifteenth-century accounts such as Tirant lo Blanc or Curial e Güelfa assumed the place occupied by historical texts—the Cròniques—until that time.

As a consequence, at the end of the Middle Ages, historical texts were used in Catalonia as models by writers of fictional prose. Characters and stories from the chronicles of Ramon Muntaner and Bernat Desclot, among others, were creatively revised centuries after their publication. For example, the fictional protagonist of Tirant lo Blanc, Joanot Martorell, follows the same path as Roger de Flor, the historical chevalier Almugavar of Ramon Muntaner’s chronicle, and dies in Adrianopolis, the same town where Roger de Flor was killed.³ Thus, historical and imaginative heroes share the same destiny: they cannot enjoy the glory of military triumph or the satisfaction of the love of the princess. The legends recounted by Desclot at the beginning of his chronicle—particularly that of the Good Count of Barcelona—were appropriated by the author of the Curial e Güelfa. Apart from using specific historical passages, Tirant and Curial reveal the imprints of Muntaner’s and Desclot’s accounts in their structures. The historical accounts of James I the Conqueror (Jaume el Conqueridor), Desclot, and Muntaner become imaginative narrations in Tirant and Curial. Indeed, just as thirteenth-century Catalan chroniclers prosified the heroic and poetic models of the Provençal jongleurs, fifteenth-century fictional authors borrowed historical models from Catalan chroniclers. ⁴

In this discussion, I distinguish historical from fictional texts, not because I believe that they are different in form (they are not), but rather because their authors’ distinct purposes—to narrate the reality of the past in the historical, and to recreate imaginative stories in the fictional—shape the content. Further, this distinction is perfectly compatible, as we see in Catalan historiography, with the presence of certain invented characters or episodes in the chronicles, or the use of oral legends and epic poems as historical sources. In spite of this blend of historical and fictional stories, which I deal with specifically in chapter 9, the truth claimed by the chroniclers marks their difference from fictional genres such as epic and romance, even those whose content is dependent upon extratextual facts. The assertions of truthfulness and accuracy that abound in the prologues of the Catalan chronicles signal a desire for a new form of historical discourse, distinct in content, style, and oral and fictional sources from the epic and romance. In the Catalan chronicles’ prologues, history defines itself as a discourse distinguished by its commitment to historical fact.

This process of the fusion of narrative strategies by historical and fictional writers made me consider the enormous rhetorical and cultural power of historical texts in medieval Catalonia and encouraged me to engage the connection between the genres. I realized that some contextualization was required in order to understand the emergence of Catalan historiography and its use as a model by later medieval Catalan fictional literature. To be sure, the political configuration of medieval Catalonia underwent a radical transformation in the mid-twelfth century, at the time of the first expansion of Catalan historiography by way of narrative genealogies. As a result of their bold dynastic policy, the counts of Barcelona inherited the Crown of Aragon. This strategy transformed the counts of Barcelona into kings of Aragon beginning with Alfonse the Chaste (Alfons el Cast) in 1162. These kings inherited two important political centers—Catalonia and Aragon. After stabilizing their territory, they initiated a Mediterranean expansion that soon gave them other territories such as the kingdoms of Valencia and Majorca. Seeking to legitimate their new position, their growing political power, and their aggressive policy of expansion, the new count-kings deployed the strategy of writing historical texts in the form of genealogies and chronicles.

The need for a recontextualization of historical texts has been emphasized by scholars of the New Historicism since the 1980s. This led me to search for the moment of inscription of the historical texts. I have always tried to use the earliest version of each historical text analyzed—the one closest to the moment of inscription. I hope that this approach has protected me from the perils of anachronism in the analysis of the texts, well denounced by new medievalists and new philologists. To focus on the moment of inscription has also allowed me to think about the ways in which the historical world is internalized in the text and its meaning fixed. This process of inscription (or the fixing of meaning) is not to be confused with written in the traditional sense of recorded. Rather, it represents the moment of choice, decision, and action that creates the social reality of the text, a reality that exists both inside and outside the particular performance of the work, through the latter’s inclusions, exclusions, distortions, and stresses.⁵ Fortunately, in the case of medieval Catalan historiography, we can often precisely fix not only the chronology of the first version of the historical text but also the period of its formation and even, in some exceptional cases, such as King Peter’s autobiography, the stages of its production.

MAP 1. Catalonia in the twelfth century. Courtesy of Dick Gilbreath, University of Kentucky Cartography Lab.

MAP 2. Catalonian and Aragonese expansion into the Mediterranean in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Courtesy Dick Gilbreath, University of Kentucky Cartography Lab.

In addition to these points, my interest in the moment of inscription of historical texts develops from my concern with the function of their authors, located at a crucial position between the texts and their contexts. I believe that authors play an active and, importantly, a conscious role. Clearly, I do not agree completely with the notion of the death of the author posited by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. I appreciate the work of the new philologists, who stress the active role of the audience in the creation of literary conventions and in the shaping of literary genres, and also the rich debates around the rules of the transmission of manuscripts.⁶ Nevertheless, without denying the validity of these other approaches, my interpretation of Catalan medieval historiography privileges the author rather than the reader or listener, authorship rather than audience, the emergence of historical genres rather than their reception.

›››‹‹‹

On the basis of these theoretical paradigms—the deployment of the methodologies of both historiography and literary criticism, the differences between historical and fictional texts and the recognition of their interaction, the necessary contextualization of historical texts, the focus on the moment of inscription rather than on the later versions of the texts, and the emphasis on the creative role of the authors rather than on audience reception—I will focus on five of the most representative texts of Catalan medieval historiography: the Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium, its first version written between 1180 and 1184; the Llibre dels fets (Book of Deeds) or Crònica de Jaume I, written between 1244 and 1276; Crònica de Bernat Desclot, written between 1283 and 1288; Crònica de Ramon Muntaner, written between 1325 and 1328; and the Llibre (Book) or Crònica de Pere el Cerimoniós, written between 1375 and 1383.

In my process of selection, I have considered the exemplary status of these texts for the interpretation of key concepts in medieval historiography and literature, concepts I will focus on in the second part of the book. I will examine the evolution of historical genres, the practice of autobiography in the Middle Ages, questions of authority and authorship, the relationship between history and fiction, and the links between history and politics as reflected in the historical texts. In addition, the five chronicles I analyze have traditionally been included in the canon of medieval Catalan literature. Although I posit that they have specific characteristics that differentiate them from fictional texts, it is useful to read these historical texts in their general context in order to perceive the thematic links and formal interrelations between fictional and historical writing of the period, as I do in chapter 9.

My approach is based on the reading of the earliest extant versions of the primary sources as established by the scholarly work of Catalan scholars such as Ferran Soldevila, Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer, Manuel de Montoliu, Miquel Coll i Alentorn, and Martí de Riquer, who published their major studies on Catalan medieval historiography in the middle of the twentieth century, establishing a solid foundation for the field.⁷ In addition, in the 1970s and 1980s, American scholars such as Thomas Bisson, J. N. Hillgarth and Robert Burns completed the editing and interpretation of the corpus of classical works of Catalan chronicles, providing the field with an international perspective that encouraged scholars to give a more comprehensive theoretical scope to their research on Catalan historiography.⁸ Later scholarship by Catalan and Italian historians and literary critics such as Josep Maria Salrach, Joan-Pau Rubiés, Martin Aurell, Josep M. Pujol, Stefano Cingolani, Stefano Asperti, and the critical edition published by Jordi Bruguera expanded the valuable work of earlier historians.⁹

After examining the paradigms established by these scholars, I realized that certain aspects of Catalan medieval historiography needed further consideration, particularly those that promoted a comparative analysis with other European historical traditions and engagement with more recent methodological approaches to medieval historiography. These approaches allow us to deal more comprehensively with issues such as the evolution of historical genres, the place of autobiography in the medieval approach to the past, the balance between authority and authorship, the interaction between history and fiction, and the relation between history and politics.

My interest in these theoretical issues also developed from my awareness of the limited reception and dissemination of the corpus of medieval Catalan historiography in the international academic community. This might be explained in part because of the Catalan language; while many of these texts are now available online, only a few have been translated into English.¹⁰ This is particularly unfortunate if we compare this reception to that of other medieval European traditions, such as the French, English, Italian, German, or even the peninsular Castilian.¹¹ Another benefit of a broader reading of medieval Catalan historiography derives from the richness of its texts, which include a narrative genealogy, two autobiographies (one by a knight-king and the other by a precocious Renaissance prince), and two testimonial chronicles (one by an official of the Royal Chancellery and the other by a citizen-solder-ruler). Apart from the variety of genres, there is also a variety of languages (from the Latin of the annals and genealogies to the Catalan of the chronicles), contexts of production (from the monastic annals and genealogies to courtly chronicles), and strategies and objectives (from the genealogical Gesta’s desire to legitimize the dynasty of the counts of Barcelona to the chronicles’ function of justification of political and military expansion of Aragonese kings).

Although I cannot shake off my training as a historian, this variety in content and form demanded an approach that blends the methodologies associated with both history and literary criticism. This is particularly notable in the case of medieval autobiographical texts and their unique literary constructions. Not only were Kings James and Peter autobiographical chroniclers, but the chronicler-knight Ramon Muntaner also wrote autobiographically. The paradigms of autobiography and authorship theory support my integrated approach to historiography and literature. In this context, it is interesting to note that the field of medieval Catalan historiography was monopolized by historians during the first half of the twentieth century—Nicolau d’Olwer, Soldevila, Coll i Alentorn—whose prominence was surpassed by literary scholars in the 1970s, including Riquer, Cingolani, Asperti, Bruguera, Pujol, and Lola Badia. All of these scholars have done fine work, but the crucial paradigm shift from history to literary criticism in the interpretation of Catalan historiography suggests that we have reached a point at which the strict boundaries between historical and literary approaches should give way to a more organically unified perspective, not only methodologically but also institutionally.

Much recent scholarship has applied the methodologies associated with the so-called New Medievalism and postmodernism to medieval historiography. Gabrielle Spiegel, Lee Patterson, Nancy Partner, Howard Bloch, Zrinka Stahuljak, Virginie Greene, Sophie Marnette, Suzanne Fleischman, Peter Ainsworth, David Pattison, and Georges Martin, among others, proposed new approaches that have now become established paradigms for a critical reading of historical texts.¹² In general, these scholars have focused on French, Flemish, German, and English historiography, while Castilian literature and historiography have been analyzed by the new philologists, as in the intense debate around manuscript transmission—a subject particularly important to the New Philology—based on medieval Castilian literature.¹³ My reading shows that the medieval Catalan historical texts are also susceptible to the paradigms that modern and postmodern scholars have developed. Using these perspectives, we understand the ways chroniclers used autobiographical texts to promote personal or collective identity—a subject currently at the core of many historical debates.

Reading these texts gives us valuable insight into the development and use of history not only in medieval Catalonia but also in Castile, England, France, and Flanders, because their mutual influences are evident in both the genealogical phase in the second half of the twelfth century and that of the chronicles of the thirteenth and fourteenth. The connections among these different historiographical traditions seem obvious, but Catalan historians tend to consider their historiography unique and marvelous. Nevertheless, although we cannot deny the excellence and originality of many of these texts, this tendency toward isolation on the part of scholars devoted to the study of Catalan historiography should be overcome.

›››‹‹‹

The first part of the book describes and contextualizes each of the historical texts: the narrative genealogy Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium, the autobiographical Llibre dels fets of King James, the narrative chronicle of Bernat Desclot, the testimonial chronicle of Ramon Muntaner, and the autobiographical Llibre of King Peter. The five chapters of the first part are similarly structured. First, I give a brief introduction to the context within which the historical text was produced, based on the date of composition, using the first known version of the text. Second, I discuss the authorship of the texts, which ranges from the Gesta’s collective authorship to Peter’s and James’s autobiographies, to the more classical chronicles by Desclot and Muntaner. This information introduces one of the main concerns of this book: the question of authorship in Catalan medieval historiography and the ways different authors approached historical data. And, third, I summarize the content of each text, to facilitate the understanding of the more theoretical analysis of the second part of the book.

The first chapter centers on the genealogical text known as the Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium. In 1162, Alfonse the Chaste inherited both the county of Barcelona and the kingdom of Aragon, which transformed him from the count of Barcelona into the king of Aragon. Around 1180, the Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium, one of the founding texts of medieval Catalan historiography, took definitive shape. This text constructed the genealogy of the new kings of Aragon, linking them to the heroic stories of how Catalan counts drove out the Muslims and won independence from the Franks under the leadership of the legendary count of Barcelona, Wilfred the Hairy (Guifré el Pelós), providing the new dynasty with an invaluable tool for the political legitimization of its new status.

TABLE 1 Chronology of kings and historical writing in medieval Catalonia

Different circumstances surround the writing of King James I’s chronicle, the subject of the second chapter, which inaugurates the tradition of Catalan historical chronicles. The first half of the thirteenth century was crucial to the political and social history of medieval Catalonia. The bases for territorial and commercial expansion in the Mediterranean were laid as a result of the collapse of the expansion to the north, into southern France, after the defeat at the battle of Muret during the Albigensian crusade. If the expansion into Provence had been based to a large extent on an effective marriage policy (a strategy well explained in the Gesta Comitum), the monarchs now found themselves obliged to bring other political and cultural mechanisms into play in order to continue their Mediterranean expansion. In this context, new models of historical writing emerged. The Llibre dels fets, written during the second half of the thirteenth century, was a response to these new political aspirations and needs. Autobiography becomes history as King James I narrates in great detail his territorial conquests and military deeds, as well as those of his knights.

The chronicle of the royal chancellor Bernat Desclot is analyzed in chapter 3. The Llibre del Rey En Pere de Aragó e dels seus antecessors passats (Book of King Peter of Aragon and of His Ancestors) was written from 1283 to 1288, after the great Catalan victory in Sicily in 1282. It narrates the history of the county of Barcelona and the principality of Catalonia from the first conquest of Majorca at the beginning of the twelfth century to the death of King Peter the Great (Pere el Gran) in 1285, focusing on the deeds of this king, one of the most celebrated of the Aragonese dynasty because of his victory against the French army and the conquest of Sicily. Desclot’s Crònica may be considered a model of renewed historiography because of its author’s professed objectivity. Desclot describes the story of the Aragonese kings realistically, giving the impression of equanimity and truth.

The fourth chapter discusses the chronicle of Ramon Muntaner. The interest of this chronicle is primarily due to the intensity of the life and the multifaceted personality of its author. Muntaner was a citizen of Valencia, a knight and politician, and a writer and soldier of the Catalan campaign to Constantinople. He wrote his chronicle late in his life, between 1325 and 1328, half a century after Bernat Desclot’s account. Muntaner’s narrative centers on the extraordinary expansion of Catalonia to Greece at the beginning of the fourteenth century. He tells us this story from the perspective of his personal experience as both royal minister and soldier. Muntaner also served as the administrator of Gallipoli, one of the Greek cities conquered by the Catalans. As a soldier, he fought in the Catalan Company, an army of light infantry under the leadership of Roger de Flor, made up of Aragonese and Catalan mercenaries—known as Almugavars—who were sent to Constantinople to help the Greeks fight against the Turks and, finally, to conquer most of Greece. The autobiographical form gives his account its dramatic and emotional style and the credibility accorded to personal experience.

Finally, a very different chronicle brings the classical moment of medieval Catalan historiography to an end, as described in chapter 5: the Llibre of Peter the Ceremonious, whose long reign (1336–87) was marked by controversy and complication. The final version of the Llibre was written between 1375 and 1386 and differs substantially from the four earlier historical texts analyzed in this book. This chronicle is the autobiography of a tormented king, encircled by military threats, troubled by the lack of internal unity in his kingdom, threatened by an important economic crisis, shocked by the epidemic of the Black Death, and, paradoxically, convinced of his providential function as the leader of an emergent modern state. The text thus reflects an era in which the old medieval structures, based on territorial and feudal conceptions of the monarchy, had to confront new political tendencies, specifically the consolidation of monarchical authority. A new historical context demanded a revised form of representing the past. Peter the Ceremonious’s autobiography is thus an example of a political treatise written by a late medieval king with the mindset of a Renaissance prince.

The second part of the book engages the theoretical and practical questions associated with the production, consolidation, and spread of these five historical texts. Based on contemporary theories of literary genre, chapter 6 analyzes the evolution of the historical genres in Catalan historiography. First, I highlight the contrast between the schematic and chronological annals and the genealogical Gesta Comitum. Specifically, I discuss the enormous potential of genealogies as a historical genre, their active role in legitimizing social and political aspirations, their ability to consolidate values in the tradition, and their