2 - MAKING AGREEMENTS

Summary

Close to 1,000 of the written agreements that Catalan scribes identified as convenientiae have survived in various forms down to the present day. The earliest such document, as seen in the previous chapter, is a highly complex treaty between two counts, involving issues of castle tenure, inheritance, alliance, commendation, and security. These themes continued to predominate in convenientiae. But many written agreements dealt not with the fate of entire counties, but with the disposition of a single castle, or even a tiny plot of land. Solidi were numbered not in the hundreds, but in single digits. The actors were not counts, but simple monks, or reasonably well-off peasants. In the minds of scribes, the agreement between Berenguer Ramon I and Ermengol II was of the same species as the following document of 1076:

This is the agreement (convenientia) between the woman Adelaida and her son Amat and the woman Ermengarda and her son-in-law Geribert, and Ramon Dalmau. They promise him that they will not sell or pledge to any man or woman the whole alod that they have in Montjuïc or whatever they now ought to have, unless to the aforesaid Ramon Dalmau, if he wishes to receive (it). If, however, he does not wish to receive it, let it be permitted to them to do whatever they wish.

Why did they draw the connection? What was an agreement in eleventh and twelfth-century Catalonia?

In attempting to address such questions, we must confront an unwieldy mass of evidence.