Ossamenta

Posted by Jonathan Jarrett

https://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2026/06/02/knowing-better-than-them-diplomatic-judgement-at-santa-ceclia-delins/

http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/?p=18739

(Note: this post was all ready to go on Sunday night when I drifted onto Academia.edu for no very good reason and found an exactly relevant article that seriously affected some of what was here. If it looks a bit scrappy now, that is me trying not to do a full rewrite and delay things further… Hopefully it’s not evident though!)

I have, at times, been known to claim that I’m an expert in diplomatic. That’s not diplomacy, or diplomatic history, but an older, I’d even say original sense of the word, from which we also get "diploma" and so on, and it basically means the forensic study of charters. It’s canonical, maybe even right, to give the invention of the word to a seventeenth-century monastic scholar by the name of Jean Mabillon, whose monastery had been accused of basing its foundational claims on forgeries. Mabillon set to the defence of their documents, but in order to do so had to set out a method for the "discrimen veri ac falsi", loosely "telling the true from the false", which he did, in a six-part tome called De re diplomatica that provoked much immediate dispute, largely from the scholar who’d claimed their documents were crook.¹ But this arguably founded the discipline of charter studies. And when I say that, I mean that bits of Mabillon’s work were still being set as teaching material when I got my formal training in dealing with charters, such as that was, in 1999.² There’s a lot in those six books and not all of it is gold (or indeed known to me), but Mabillon’s core concern and methods remain important for charter scholars to this day.

Étienne Jahandier Desrochers, Dom Jean Mabillon, Prêtre religieux bénédictin de la Congrégation de St Maur (1707×1741), licensed under CC 0 International from the Musée Carnavalet, Paris

Now, in my own stuff, I actually don’t have to worry about forgery too often; I’m much more worried about whether the documents were true rather than just authentic, if you see the difference. That is not least because forgeries just aren’t very much of what survives from Catalonia: by way of example, in the volumes of the Catalunya Carolíngia that I cite so much which cover the counties of Osona and Manresa there are 1893 authentic documents registered and 10 forgeries, so less than 1%.³ Girona and Urgell are worse, I seem to recall, but it’s never a huge number. Still, it does come up: I’m on record saying that the foundation documents for my pet nunnery are fairly obviously tenth-century reconstructions, which everyone working on them knows but seems to like to ignore, and my next likely publication includes a tenth-century inventory which is actually a twelfth-century invention, pardon the pun.⁴ But going through the Barcelona volumes of the Catalunya Carolíngia as I was a while back brought me up against an unusual case, a document which was considered to be a forgery in the period but whose editor thinks is not. It is a donation of a church to the monastery of Santa Cecília d’Elins by Count-Marquis Borrell II of Barcelona, Girona, Osona and Urgell, and his wife Countess Ledgarda, which is why I was interested, it’s from 971, if it’s genuine, and I was in the same archive as it only a few months ago had I but done the work to realise.⁵ But I didn’t, so I don’t have a photo, which would obviously help here.

Now, it matters to me whether this document is genuine or not mainly because that is the difference between whether Borrell and Ledgarda actually thought it was important to give this church to Elins and whether they in fact owned this church and held it with the rights that they transfer, or whether Elins, as later owners of that church in an unclear or insufficient fashion, decided that Borrell’s and Ledgarda’s names were the right ones to attach to a grant of it, perhaps because they had indeed given it on different terms, or given something else. It should be noted at this point that the archive also contains three other grants from Borrell and they are, at least, really peculiar, so someone certainly knew who he and his wife were, but that could be borrowed from this document if it’s real… So it tells me something whatever it is, but I’d like to know what. However, I’m also just curious about the logic of the argument here, because in general, forgery detection is not something the Middle Ages was great at, and if it was obvious enough for them I feel it ought to be obvious to us. That said, if there was ever a time to find diplomatic experts in the Middle Ages, early eleventh-century Catalonia is one: the super-scribe Bonhom whom I mentioned three posts ago copied up the old laws about document forgery and how it might be detected, and his own documents are littered with warnings about things which might look dodgy, such as additions between the lines, changes of ink and so on, in order to assure future readers he really had done everything that was in the text.⁶ Mabillon didn’t know Bonhom’s documents as far as I know, but equally Bonhom was not alone; he’s just my local extreme example. Mabillon was not generating his methods from first principles, is my point; he had predecessors.

Santa Cecília d’Elins, the origin of our charter of today, as it stood in the early 1980s, much altered by later use as a farmhouse; photo by Joan-Adell Gisbert from Maria Lluïsa Cases i Loscos and Adell, "Santa Cecília d’Elins", in Jordi Vigué (ed.), Alt Urgell. Andorra, Catalunya Romànica 6 (Barcelona 1992), linked through

Mabillon distinguished two sorts of criteria for judging documents, intrinsic and extrinsic. In the former category went its own features, such as is it in the right script and language for its claimed date and place? Is it an original or a copy? Basically, does it look right? In the latter go the factors which are not visible in the document itself, but require outside validation: are the actors historically known, could they have been there at this time, and so on? When Elins 20, CC8 594 or whatever we want to call it, failed its test, in 1024, it was on extrinsic grounds: it is signed by Bishop Guisad II of Urgell, and it seems that the prosecution compared it to other documents with his signature and declared that it didn’t match. If the trial was being held at the cathedral of Urgell, as seems likely – the useful article didn’t make this clear and the document isn’t online– they would certainly have had some examples to use.⁷ But Ramon Ordeig, who edited it for the Catalunya Carolíngia, also had a good few examples and he thinks it’s fine, and that furthermore Guisad’s successor, the cunning Bishop Sal·la, also signs as the archdeacon he then was, and we have lots of examples of his signature and this one also matches.⁸ So Ordeig passes the document as an authentic original (which is good, because the digital version of the Catalunya Carolíngia, all I had access to at point of drafting, annoyingly doesn’t include the forgeries so I’d have struggled to write this if he’d condemned it).

Now, at this point we should mention the context of that hearing, because I think it’s relevant.^8bis Y’see, it wasn’t just this document the Bishop of Urgell, none other than warrior conqueror and simoniac saint Bishop Ermengol (no relation to Count Ermengol I or indeed II, the latter of whom was presiding), was out to contest. His case was that the monastery held its tithes illegitimately, because the counts did not have the right to grant them. The monastery therefore brought out all its charters of Borrell and indeed one of Ermengol I, which all variously concerned the same group of properties, one being granted three times over, and Bishop Ermengol condemned them all as forgeries. Climent Miró, from whose article I got this detail, doesn’t explain on what grounds they were condemned, though in all cases I could think of some reasons, but it can’t have been Guisad II’s signature which was the problem for all of them, as he didn’t sign the others and was indeed long dead by the time of the last one. But Ordeig doesn’t mention the falsification process with the others, so I don’t know.^8ter In any case, as well as claiming these grants were false, Bishop Ermengol also claimed prior right by virtue of the consecration act of his cathedral, from 839, which gave the tithes of these areas to the cathedral fair and square. Now, trouble is, that act is also a forgery, though the scholarship has never really settled on when it’s from and it’s all too common to see people using it in demographic arguments anyway.^8quater So it’s possible that the bishop overswore the poor monks with a document he might only recently have had made up, or that his predecessor (also his uncle) had; or it’s also possible that they put their own dossier together in a hurry when he came on a visit and said tough things about possession of tithes, and that everyone came to the trial with fake documents. Anyway, the warrior bishop won, but Ordeig, and for that matter Miró, think the accusation was groundless.

Bishop Saint Ermengol’s reputation has of course only grown over time, as the word ‘saint’ there suggests. This is his memorial, in Urgell Cathedral’s museum. The gold plaques commemorate his various deeds and miracles. Image by Patalín, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This, for me, opens up a really interesting question that is as much ethical as it is methodological, which is: where do we get off claiming to know more about the Middle Ages than the people we study who lived in it? An answer is that while we can never be as immersed in their world and environment as they were, equally the hundreds of years of compiling and interpreting evidence since then means that we have been able to check, verify and just know things that they could not. In this instance, for example, if we assume that there was sincere diplomatic evaluation going on at that hearing, I’m sure that the people making the judgement call on Elins 20 had seen a fair few charters, and likely several of them also written some. But it would have been hard for that fair few to have been more than the high hundreds for any individual unless they had systematically visited other archives and then gone through them, whereas probably no person alive now or then has seen as many Catalan charters as Ramon Ordeig has, because of how much work he’s done on the Catalunya Carolíngia. Even I, who have probably only seen dozens of the real things, have probably read the texts of more such documents than any of the people who were at that hearing had (largely because of Ordeig publishing them). Also, and specifically, it is likely that Ordeig has seen and, importantly, could immediately compare, more copies of Guisad’s signature than the people of 1024 could, because he could get photographs together, whereas they would have been relying on what could be found in the archive, presumably more than there is now but not necessarily indexed in a way that made them easy to find for this purpose. To exemplify, I know of 40 documents which feature Guisad II. I can’t straight away tell you which ones of those are originals, though probably most of them, or of those which bear his signature, but I can tell you that only 15 of any of them are from Urgell cathedral’s archive, and some, like this very Elins one, probably only got there later than 1024. (I’m not going to give references here if that’s OK; apart from anything else, he can now be looked up in the CatCar database, which will get you a more accurate count anyway.) At the very least then, our comparative set is probably not much worse than was available then, and it may even be better, not least because of involving documents to which neither side of the dispute had access. And adding Sal·la’s signature as a validation check is a smart idea and one they apparently didn’t have in 1024; admittedly, as said, Bishop Ermengol was Sal·la’s nephew, so whether that would be a neutral sample might have been questioned, but it still helps the case for authenticity. Added to all of which, while people of eleventh-century Barcelona and Urgell certainly had some good ideas about how to check for forgery in charters, it would be nice to think that Mabillon’s systematized treatise and then the subsequent three centuries of accumulating scholarship gave us a slightly better toolkit with which to do these appraisals then they could have had, and that we’re not just perpetually engaged in catch-up with what used to be known.

So one might ask, what’s your problem, Jarrett? Why not accept the judgement of the man most expert? Well, at first it was just my basic disinclination to accept that we know better than a hearing full of contemporaries who knew the scene and the archives of the time better than we can. But to be fair, that there was a dispute at all already meant that someone didn’t like what this charter said and had a reason to attack it. Even if we didn’t know the fuller context, we would already have reason to doubt that the people calling, "forgery!" were disinterested seekers of truth. So again, aren’t we in a better position? But there is another extrinsic problem that Ordeig hasn’t considered, which is the date. That date is 6th January 971, to us, and "mense ianuarii, VIII idus eiusdem mensis, anno XVII regnante Leutario rege, filio Ludoici" to them, id est, "the month of January, 8th Ides of the same month, in the 17th year of the reign of King Lothar, son of Louis". Now, this is intrinsically fine, but nonetheless extrinsically it must be wrong, because in January 971 Borrell was in Rome trying to get one of his other bishops promoted to a metropolitan by the pope; I’ve written about it.⁹ So he could not have been in Urgell granting churches to people. Admittedly, the dates of that voyage have been disputed, largely because it bears on the appointment as Bishop of Girona of Miró III Bonfill, also Count of Besalú, but such an engaging figure in the record that those who have worked on him have generally preferred to see him as honest and canonical in his doings. But because of my actual research, always a surprise to me these days, I can tell you what perhaps no-one else can, that Borrell doesn’t appear in Catalonia between June 970 and October 971, except in this document; and in fact, both his June 970 and the preceding May 970 appearances are also dodgy copies from monasteries in the county of Urgell, though I’m not sure that can be more than coincidence.¹⁰ So at least something is wrong with Elins 20. And once something is wrong, any interpretation either works on the basis that it’s forged, or we’re choosing the "mistake" whose fix works out best for our preferred ideas.

And this is the place the fuss was about, Sant Martí de Cortiuda down south in the Solsonès, image by Isidre Blanc, own work, licensed under CC BY SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Now really, that is about as far as I can take this here. If I ever make it back to la Seu d’Urgell, I will try to get a look at this charter, but to be honest, if it looked authentic to Ramon Ordeig, I assume it will look authentic to me. Probably the easiest solution here is that the date is a mistake; it’s easy to put one too many or one too few strokes in a Roman numeral and if the scribe should have written XVI or XVIII instead of XVII then things would probably seem fine. But what still nags at me is: it looks authentic to us, but it didn’t look authentic to a bunch of actual medieval Urgellitans with lots of diplomatic experience, learned from doing. Perhaps that was indeed a stitch-up; Urgell was in the hands of powerful aristocratic interests in the 1020s and comital jurisdiction was weak. But I just don’t like the idea that we know better than them, and when in one tiny aspect I also know better than the relevant representative of "we", I find myself wanting to side with my subjects. Evidently, I identify more closely with the central and aristocractic interests at Urgell, whose documents were the first substantial sourcebase I got into with my doctoral research, than with the poor old monks at Elins, though! So I’m not finished musing here by any means, but that, of course, makes it something I can put before you all and see what you think!

1. The big work itself can be read as Jean Mabillon, De re diplomatica libri VI, in quibus quidquid ad veterum instrumentorum antiquitatem, materiam, scripturam, & stilum, quidquid ad sigilla, monogrammata, subscriptiones, ac notas chronologicas, quidquid inde ad antiquariam, historicam, forensemque disciplinam pertinet, explicatur & illustratur : accedunt commentarius de antiquis regum Francorum palatiis : veterum scripturarum varia specimina, tabulis LX comprehensa : nova ducentorum, & amplius, monumentorum collectio (Luteciae-Parisiorum 1709), thanks to the Getty Institute whose copy is in the Internet Archive here, and for studies deeper than mine here you could see what I was set when I was young, viz. David Knowles, "Jean Mabillon" in Knowles, The Historian and Character and Other Essays, edd. C. N. L. Brooke & Giles Constable (Cambridge 1964), pp. 213–238, or Peter Gay & Victor G. Wexler, "Jean Mabillon", in Gay & Wexler (edd.), Historians at Work (New York City NY 1972), 4 vols, vol. 2, pp. 161–163, but as proof anyone still cares in the twenty-first century, also Caroline Williams, "Diplomatic Attitudes: From Mabillon to Metadata" in Journal of the Society of Archivists Vol. 26 (April 2005), pp. 1–24, DOI: 10.1080/00039810500047417.

2. I got it as Jean Mabillon, "On Diplomatics", in Gay & Wexler, Historians at Work, vol. 2, pp. 164–198. Leonard E. Boyle, "Diplomatics", in James M. Powell (ed.), Medieval Studies: an introduction, 2nd edn (Syracuse NY 1992), pp. 69–101, also, is basically a systematization of Mabillon.

3. Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum IV: Els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica 53 (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols.

4. I’ve argued the case against Sant Joan’s endowment most recently in Jonathan Jarrett, "La fundació de Sant Joan en el context de l’establiment dels comtats catalans", trans. Xavier Costa in Irene Brugués, Costa and Coloma Boada (edd.), El monestir de Sant Joan: Primer cenobi femení dels comtats catalans (887-1017) (Barcelona 2019), pp. 83–107, but that wasn’t my first go. The dodgy inventory is Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. no. X.

5. Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum 8: Els comtats d’Urgell, Cerdanya i Berga, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica 111 (Barcelona 2020), 2 vols, doc. no. 594. The document was previously edited as Benigne Marquès Sala (ed.), "Els documents del monestir de Santa Cecília d’Elins (881-1198)", Urgellia Vol. 15 (Urgell 2005), pp. 9–174, doc. no. 20, which I haven’t been able to access.

6. For Bonhom, once again, see Anscari M. Mundó, "El jutge Bonsom" in Jesús Alturo i Perucho, Joan Bellès, Josep M. Font Rius, Yolanda García & Mundó (edd.), Liber iudicum popularis, ordenat pel jutge Bonsom de Barcelona, Textos Jurídicis Catalans: Lleis i costums 1/1 (Barcelona 2003), online here, pp. 101‒118.

7. The trial record is Marqués, "Els documents", doc. no. 33, which again I haven’t been able to get at, and because of its date, misses publication in the Catalunya Carolíngia.

8. Sal·la’s appearances are very numerous (I counted 71 when I did), but of those more than half are in the Urgell archive and so printed in Cebrià Baraut (ed.), "Els documents, dels anys 981-1010, de l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell" in Urgellia Vol. 3 (Urgell 1980), pp. 7–166, and the pre-1000 ones in the Catalunya Carolíngia. However, there isn’t really a focused study of the man I’d recommend more than Jonathan Jarrett, "Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia" (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2005), online here, pp. 294-308.

8^bis. Although as said in n. 7 above I can’t actually get at the text, that article I mentioned gave me this extra context, and it is Climent Miró i Tuset, "Els monestirs com a part de l’estratègia dels comtes d’Urgell en el control del territori: el cas de Santa Cecília d’Elins (881-1085)" in Annals del Centre d’Estudis Comarcals del Ripollès Vol. 25, IBIX: Col·loquis d’Estudis Transpirinencs 8 (Ripoll 2014), pp. 349–360, online here, where see pp. 356-357.

8^ter. The others are Marqués, "Els documents", doc. nos 13, 16, 17, 18, 25 & 29, of which the first four are printed as Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia 8, doc. nos 445, 467, 468 & 508, and are thus online. For extra points, tell me what’s wrong with no. 468 (Elins 17) that means it, at least, must be a forgery… Otherwise that’ll be a future blog post!

8^quater. I don’t want to try and cover all the references in this debate here at this late stage, but a recent treatment which puts Bishop Ermengol squarely in the hotseat is Carles Gascón Chopo and Oliver Vergés i Pons, "L’acta de consagració de la catedral d’Urgell: Un fals del temps del bisbe Ermengol redactat entre 1016 i 1024" in Afers Vol. 32 no. 86 (2017), pp. 191–220, on Academia.edu here. I don’t agree with everything Vergés has written but I think he’s on the mark with this one.

9. Jonathan Jarrett, "Archbishop Ató of Osona: False Metropolitans on the Marca Hispanica" in Archiv für Diplomatik Vol. 56 (München 2010), pp. 1–42.

10. The outside frames of the window are Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia 8, doc. no. 586 of June 970, surviving only in a seventeenth-century copy and almost certainly interpolated, or failing it ibid. 585 of May 970, also anachronistic and suspicious, failing which you have to go back to Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. no. 1057 of February that year, and then at the other side ibid. doc. no. 1107, while in the middle we have two papal bulls he asked for which, annoyingly, don’t carry dates, but for which we have external dating that makes January 971 most likely. In late June 971, also, an embassy arrived at Córdoba which Borrell was understood to have sent, and I don’t see how that impression could arise if he hadn’t sent it, which probably makes his return from Rome no later than March the same year. For that see Dolors Bramon, De quan érem o no musulmans: textos del 713 al 1010: continuació de l’obra de J. M. Millàs i Vallicrosa, Jaume Caresmar 13 (Vic 2000), §§425 & 426. On Miro’s appointment at Girona, apart from Jarrett, "Archbishop Ató", compare Ramon Martí, ‘Delà, Cesari i Ató, primers arquebisbes dels comtes-prínceps de Barcelona (951-953/981)" in Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia Vol. 67 (Barcelona 1994), pp. 369–386, online here, and Josep Maria Salrach i Marès, L’assassinat de l’arquebisbe Ató (971) i les lluites pel poder en els orígens de Catalunya. Discurs de recepció de Josep Maria Salrach i Marès com a membre numerari de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica, llegit el dia 30 de maig de 2018 (Barcelona 2018), sadly but predictably no longer online.

https://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2026/06/02/knowing-better-than-them-diplomatic-judgement-at-santa-ceclia-delins/

http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/?p=18739