Liber feudorum maior (12th-13th centuries)

The Great Book of Feuds

This cartulary is a compilation of documents relating to the feudal relations of the kings of Aragon and the counts of Barcelona in the High Middle Ages. According to its prologue, it was presented to King Alfonso the Chaste or the Troubadour (1162-1196) by its compiler, the dean of Barcelona Cathedral, Ramon de Caldes. It contained 941 documents, not counting some later additions, of which 499 made up the first book and 442 the second book.

Most of them were dated in the 11th and 12th centuries, and represented the titles of domain and sovereignty of the counts of Barcelona, ​​later kings of Aragon, both in present-day Catalonia and in the counties of Roussillon and Cerdanya and in Occitania: alliances, betrothals, wills, castle commissions, infeudations, oaths of homage, etc. It was also decorated with many miniatures, some of them full-page, illustrating the text.

The Original Codex

Originally, it consisted of two large parchment volumes with 498 and 404 folios respectively, about half of which had no written text. Both were preserved complete until the end of the 18th century. At an undetermined date and for reasons that have not been clarified, the cartulary was dismantled, and most of the folios were lost.

Thanks to the complete old indexes, it was possible to identify and recover the text of many of the missing documents, preserved in originals or copies from the ACA and other archives. In 1945, F. Miquel Rosell published the complete edition of a large portion of the documents, leaving only about 150 writings unidentified.

The Liber feudorum maior preserved today is a single volume bound in parchment in 1945 and constitutes a compilation of the fragments found in 1807 (89 folios) and the findings of 1945 (27 folios).

The Miniatures

The codex is richly decorated with miniatures depicting feudal scenes of swearing allegiance, executed by two artists in the Romanesque tradition, possibly at the beginning of the 13th century.

The first artist conceived the scenes based on enthroned kings and kneeling vassals with quadrangular or polylobed structures. His style is geometric, without volume, and with some red and gold details, and blue backgrounds. The second artist presents a greater variety of colours and decorative resources, as can be seen in the details of the drapery, the gestures, and the schematic architectural representations that frame the scenes.

Document in PARES

Transcription / Spanish translation

Bibliography