I once told Professor Wendy Davies, no less, when she was threatening to get into Catalan charters as well as those from further west, that all the weirdest stories came from the archive of the near-Barcelona monastery of Sant Cugat del Vallès. I suspect this is probably being quite unkind to some other archives – have I ever told you all about Ramio’s and Julio’s bread dispute, for example? Doesn’t look like it – but there is still a bit of a concentration of oddity in the Sant Cugat documents.¹ In so far as I can explain it, it might be because Sant Cugat got a very early royal grant of rights over a whole swathe of frontier lands that were still at that point beyond local control, and unexpectedly remained so for a century plus, so that when they finally did start running sheep through them and suing people who tried to stop them, the resulting documents expose a lot of the border strategies the people they now met were using to get by in that fairly dangerous world.² That explains how we get things like the story of Hisnabert’s tower, which I told here long long ago, but I’m not sure it explains this one, which I found during my 2021 attempt to get through the newly-published Barcelona-area documents featuring Count-Marquis Borrell II.

The hero of this story, then, is a guy called Ramio, a different Ramio I’m pretty sure, this one of els Gorgs in Vallès, whom we know mainly from his will, which exists as a 13th-century copy in Sant Cugat’s cartulary.³ It was declared in December 985, a date which turns out to be significant. I forget how I came across this one, as Borrell II isn’t in it, but I guess someone else was I then wanted to track down. I’ve had a very quick look for Ramio in other documents, but his property was so widely-scattered that a focus is quite hard to discern. He was a wealthy man, indeed, and it might be worth setting out his bequests just to show what that means in this context. So this was all being done at the chapel of Santa Eulàlia outside Sant Cugat, which is only mentioned in this will so was probably pretty tiny. In there were squeezed two priests, a judge, four named witnesses and a more general crowd, and then three sworn witnesses came to testify that Ramio had appointed three different people his executors for if he died. None of the executors appear to have been able to be present, though only one is said to be dead, so that’s odd, but reasons for it emerge. Anyway, these were the bequests that Guitesèn, Salomó and Fruià swore that they remembered Ramio telling those guys to make, with as you will see varying levels of recall:

1. 10 mancuses of "cooked" gold to redeem an unnamed alod that someone called Guiu had in pledge from him;⁴
2. an alod at Gorgs itself, in Barberà (Barcelona county), to go to Sant Cugat;
3. an alod at el Congost, Sadurà or Valldaneu, I presume big enough to bound on all three of those settlements, which are miles to the north up near Ripoll, also to go to Sant Cugat, with a pair of oxen and their harness but less the alod that was Dacó’s;
4. a modiata of vineyard and a piece of land at Sevedà (in Osona county) to Santa Maria de Seva;
5. a half-modiata of land next to Rimilà’s alod, not said where, for Rimilà;
6. houses, yards and gardens and a vineyard, again not said where, to Sant Pere de Rodes (in yet another county), less the bit around the bridge (what bridge? Not said);
7. the piece around the bridge, to Santa Maria de Ripoll;
8. an alod in Cervià (in Girona) to the cathedral of Sant Pere de Vic;
9. an alod in Villalba (in Barcelona) to Sant Miquel and Santa Eulàlia de Barcelona; the latter of these is the cathedral but I think this is the last mention of Sant Miquel, and I personally don’t know what happened to it or whether it was perhaps a separate church on the same site which got built in;
10. an alod in Maresme (Barcelona) to the nun or religious woman (deo vota) Quintilo for her life, and then to Sant Pere de les Puelles, Barcelona’s nunnery;⁵
11. an orchard at les Arcs in Barcelona proper, to Santa Maria Tresvics;
12. a cow, four sheep, a goat and kids, an irco (from context, a hog?) and a sow, a bed and bedclothes and some cookware to a woman named Òria, along with half a modio of grain from the new harvest and 7 quarts of wine;
13. a cow, five sheep with lambs, and a sow to Salomó;
14. two sheep to Fruià;
15. all other sheep and pigs and one cow to be given to the poor;
16. his bread and wine, including the new stuff coming, to be given to the poor or the priesthood;
17. one pensa of silver to Odó his executor (named as Ató, if at all, at the beginning of the document, but see next entry);
18. half a pensa of silver to Ató;
19. all his crockery to the churches to which he’d given the relevant alods;
20. and two pesas (probably the same as pensas, which is a much less usual spelling) for himself to fund a trip to Rome on pilgrimage.⁶

I will come back to the pilgrimage bit, but just to take stock there, that is land across three or four counties (depending what you think the Ripollès was at this point), all apparently close enough to operating homes that they had crockery in. Who knows where he actually lived? I suspect that the fact that the els Gorgs property comes first only relates to the fact that it was closest to the church the ceremony was in, rather than because it was his 'first' property. Some of the land, the Ripoll estate especially, looks as if it was pretty extensive, too. The specified money isn’t a huge amount – it would probably only have bought another smallish estate all together – but having that much liquid cash or bullion around is a marker of some substance all the same. But there is also the possibility that by the time this was carried out, he didn’t have as much (or had more), because even without the information which follows, one can see that there was some time over which this all panned out. It was long enough, for example, for one of his original executors to die, the other two perhaps to become unable to travel, and one of the planned sworn witnesses (Odó, who was obviously being paid for something) to be replaced (by Ató, I assume). But in fact we do know a bit more about timescale, because the document goes on to tell us what he did with his wealth, which turns out to be, travel. I think it’s probably fairest just to translate this bit entire, as best I can:

“And those two pesas which are mentioned in his testament for the selfsame abovesaid founder Ramio, he took to the house of Saint Peter when he travelled there. And once he had ordained all these things, he went to Córdoba, where he walked around (ubi ambulabat), and after he returned from there he lived some years and never changed his will, neither by witnesses nor by written order. And with this same will he went into the city of Barcelona to guard it with the other dwellers in that county, at the same time that it was besieged by the Saracens and was taken on the 8th Ides of July. If he was killed there, things remain just as he ordered or the law requires, and if he was taken alive from there as a captive, and should afterwards have changed his will and ordered it according to the law, just as it shall have pleased the Lord, let it be thus.”

So here the shoe drops, although everybody present must have known the story already: Ramio was one of the unlucky defenders of Barcelona on the day it fell to the attacking army of al-Mansur, and his fate was not known, I guess "missing presumed dead".⁷ Perhaps he was still alive and could come back; but they obviously didn’t think it was worth waiting to find out. This will had been made for entirely different purposes, though, for a trip to Córdoba that he was apparently able to conduct in peacetime with no special purpose; he just "walked around" and came back, and subsequently apparently went to Rome on pilgrimage as well.⁸ But maybe ten years after the will was made and he’d done his walking round Córdoba, maybe more, Córdoba came back to get him. So quickly could the worm turn in this world of two-plus cultures. And given that I do have this paper about military service to finish some day, it’s nice to have yet another example of the few people we can see actually doing it being really quite well-off. But in the meantime, here is evidence, apparently, of a tenth-century tourist!

1. Ramio’s and Julio’s bread dispute is in 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, doc. no. 1575, and I will happily write about it if anyone wants, though I don’t have a picture of it, which I really should have got when I had the chance.

2. See Josep M. Salrach, "Formació, organització i defensa del domini de Sant Cugat en els segles X-XII" in Acta historica et archaeologica mediaevalia Vol. 13 (Barcelona 1992), pp. 127–173, online here.

3. Ignasi J. Baiges i Jardí and Pere Puig i Ustrell (edd.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum VII: el comtat de Barcelona, Memòries de la Secció Històrica-Arqueològica 110 (Barcelona 2019), 3 vols, doc. no. 857.

4. I once thought that this "cooked gold" is stuff that had been melted down to assure its purity – see Jonathan Jarrett, "Currency Change in Pre-Millennial Catalonia: Coinage, Counts and Economics" in Numismatic Chronicle Vol. 169 (London 2009), pp. 217–243, on JSTOR here, at pp. 234-235 – but I now think it’s more likely that it was coinage tested for colour in a flame, which is a non-destructive form of assaying.

5. Deo vota didn’t strictly mean "nun" in this era, for which there were other words like sanctemonialis; instead it was more usually a laywoman living a religious life privately. See Montserrat Cabré i Pairet, "«Deodicatae» y «Deovotae»: la regulación de la religiosidad femenina en los condados catalanes, siglos IX-XI" in Angela Muñoz Fernández (ed.), Las mujeres en el cristianismo medieval: imágenes, teóricas y cauces de actuación religiosa, Colección Laya 5 (Madrid 1989), pp. 169–182.

6. On pesas see Jarrett, "Currency Change", p. 226, and refs there.

7. See Gaspar Feliu i Montfort, La presa de Barcelona per Almansor: història i mitificació. Discurs de recepció de Gaspar Feliu i Montfort com a membre numerari de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica, llegit el dia 12 de desembre de 2007 (Barcelona 2007).

8. Pilgrimage to Rome had become quite fashionable among the pre-Catalan wealthy since around 960, but we know this mainly from the wills people made before going. I can’t right now locate any discussion of this, however, sorry.