Archive of the Crown of Aragon, Barcelona — June 1891
What follows is drawn from the accession records of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, Barcelona, for the period June-August 1891; from the published monograph of Pere Camprubí i Valls, "Marginalia and Notation Systems in Templar Documentary Practice" (Barcelona, 1893); and from the catalog entry for accession B-7741, which Pere Camprubí filed on June 19, 1891, and which remained unfollowed-up for thirty-one years.
The note suggesting further study was written in the margins of the catalog entry in Camprubí's own hand. His successor as chief archivist, appointed in 1894, was a careful and competent administrator who processed incoming materials efficiently and had no particular expertise in Templar documents. He noted the marginal suggestion. He did not act on it.
This is not a story about negligence. It is a story about how ordinary institutional life works, and how things survive inside it despite everything.
— T.M., 1961
Pere Camprubí received the package on a Tuesday in June of 1891 and set it aside until Thursday.
This was not carelessness. It was professional habit. New accessions arrived at the Archive of the Crown of Aragon on a roughly continuous basis - from private estates, from parish closures, from collectors who had died or who had decided, in the way that collectors eventually do, that their collections should outlast them. Each accession was logged on arrival, set aside in the intake area, and processed in the order received. The intake area on that Tuesday contained seventeen other items awaiting processing. Pere Camprubí worked through them in sequence, which was the only rational way to work, and he reached the package from Villeveyrac on Thursday morning.
He was forty-four years old. He had been at the Archive for nineteen years, the last seven as chief archivist, a position he had not sought and had accepted without enthusiasm because the alternative was someone who would have been worse for the collection. He was a precise man, methodical in his habits, with the particular kind of patience that develops in people who spend their professional lives handling other people's pasts. He was also, in a limited way, a scholar - he had published two monographs and was working on a third, on the notation systems used in Templar documentary practice, which was a narrow enough subject to make him one of perhaps six people in Europe who had thought about it carefully.
He unwrapped the package.
The letter from Father Bertrand was clear and well-organized. A psalter, found in the wall of the former preceptory at Mas-Dieu during renovation. Probable Templar origin given the location. Marginalia of unusual character, possibly a notation system. The diocesan archive in Montpellier had suggested forwarding to Barcelona given the collection's Templar holdings and Camprubí's known expertise.
Camprubí read the letter twice, set it aside, and examined the psalter.
It was old. Considerably older than 1307, he thought, though the binding was later - a 14th-century rebinding of a text that was probably 12th century in its present form, though elements of the text itself might be older. The vellum was good quality. The script was Carolingian with later additions in a slightly different hand. The illumination was modest but competent - small capitals in blue and red, no figurative decoration.
The marginalia were on fourteen pages. He went through them slowly.
They were not ordinary reader's annotations. He had seen enough marginal notation to know the difference between a reader's marks - underlinings, cross-references, the occasional explanatory gloss - and something else. These were systematic. The marks appeared consistently in the lower outer margin of specific pages, always in the same sequence of symbols, always in the same small and extremely precise hand. Not the hand of the main text and not the hand of the illuminator. A third hand, added later - possibly much later, possibly as recently as the early 14th century.
He recognized three of the symbols. They appeared in two other documents in the collection - a 1282 Templar administrative record and a fragment he had cataloged six years earlier from a private estate in Tarragona. He had noted them in both cases and had included them in the third chapter of his monograph in progress, where he described them as an unresolved anomaly in Templar documentary practice.
Seeing them again here - in a psalter found in a Templar preceptory wall, hidden there presumably at or before the suppression - was interesting. It was more than interesting.
He sat with the psalter for a longer time than he usually sat with new accessions.
The catalog entry he wrote for B-7741 was thorough by his own standards, which were high. He noted the physical description of the object, the probable date of composition and rebinding, the provenance as reported by Father Bertrand, the nature and location of the marginalia, and the connection to the two other documents in the collection containing the same notation system.
In the margin of the catalog entry - his own small addition to the official record - he wrote: Marginalia warrant further study. Possible connection to B-3341 and B-6108. See Camprubí III.iv (forthcoming).
He filed the entry. He shelved the psalter in the Templar materials section, in acid-free wrapping, in the correct environmental conditions. He wrote a brief note to Father Bertrand acknowledging receipt and thanking him for the careful provenance documentation.
Then he returned to his other work.
The monograph he was finishing was published in 1893. Chapter III.iv, "Unresolved Notation Systems in the Barcelona Collection," devoted eight pages to the symbols appearing in B-3341, B-6108, and now B-7741. He argued, carefully and with appropriate scholarly hedging, that the symbols represented a coherent notation system of unknown provenance, probably pre-Templar in origin, adopted by at least some members of the order for purposes he could not determine from the documentary evidence available. He called for further research.
The monograph was well-received in a narrow way. Three scholars cited it. One of them, a German historian named Brandt, wrote to Camprubí asking about B-6108, which Camprubí answered in a detailed letter. Brandt's subsequent work took him in a different direction and he did not follow up on the notation question.
Camprubí retired in 1894 due to declining health. He died in 1897.
His successor processed the intake area efficiently. The note in the margin of B-7741 - Marginalia warrant further study - was noted in the transfer documentation and then, in the way of marginal notes, was noted and not acted upon.
The psalter sat in its acid-free wrapping in the Templar materials section for thirty-one years.
In 1922 a researcher from Madrid requested access to the section for a project on Catalan ecclesiastical history. He examined seventeen documents, none of which was B-7741. He requested photocopies of two of them. He published a monograph in 1924 that did not mention Templar notation systems.
In 1931 a fire damaged the archive's east wing. The Templar materials section was in the west wing. B-7741 was not affected.
In 1936 the Spanish Civil War began. The archive was placed under the protection of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Several collections were moved for safekeeping. B-7741 was moved and returned. The catalog record was temporarily misfiled and then refiled correctly.
The psalter continued to sit.
Pere Camprubí had done everything right. He had recognized the marginalia as significant, connected them to the other documents in the collection, written careful notes, published his findings. He had done what scholars do, which is to make the information available and trust that someone, eventually, will use it.
He could not have known that the notation system he had identified was not merely a Templar documentary convention but a transmission mechanism - a way of encoding the essential argument of a document too dangerous to carry openly. He could not have known that the fourteen pages of marginalia in B-7741 represented the complete encoded text of a document written in 1244, describing the custody of something that had been passed from hand to hand for a century before Gaufred de Montbrun pressed the psalter into a gap in a chapel wall on the night of October 12, 1307.
He could not have known any of this because the information required to know it was distributed across three archives in two countries, encoded in a notation system that would not be fully decoded for another hundred and thirty years, by a man who had not yet been born when Camprubí filed the catalog entry and wrote his marginal note and went back to his other work.
The custody holds because people do their jobs carefully. The chain persists because a Catalan archivist in 1891 recognized something he couldn't explain and wrote it down anyway.
The note is still in the margin of B-7741. Marginalia warrant further study.
They do.
— T.M., 1961