Archives of the Mediterranean: Governance and Record-keeping in the Crown of Aragon in the Long Fifteenth Century

From the late medieval period the Crown of Aragon was at the forefront of archival innovation. Culminating in the establishment of the Royal Archive of Barcelona in 1318, this development was not, as traditionally stated, a mere imitation of external models, but the result of an innovative historical process that had its roots in local history and that reflected the structure of the Aragonese monarchy. In consequence of the later enlargement and decentralisation of the Crown – and especially after the advent of the House of Trastámara in 1414 – the Aragonese developed an extensive system for record-keeping across the Mediterranean. By focusing on what I describe as a complex archival network, this article analyses administrative developments which are generally studied separately as, instead, connected responses to similar needs across disparate and far-flung territories. The results differed in the Iberian dominions – Aragon, Majorca, and Valencia – and in the Eastern kingdoms of Sicily and Naples, with Sardinia somewhere in between. For all these differences, however, the establishment of a number of financial archives shows that this network had an especially crucial role in defending the royal patrimony in all peripheral territories of the Crown. The authorities also tried to use archives as tools for exercising pressures over local political elites, as demonstrated, for instance, by the systematic inquiry into feudal possessions and pecuniary rights instigated by king Ferdinand II in early sixteenth-century Sicily. The outcome, however, was totally unexpected.