Agnes de Bossones or Na Bossonesa, for the Occitan Ena, the abbreviated form for Domina (Latin), was a member of the mercantile and financial elite of Montpellier.1 This book is an investigation of her experiences as they reveal networks and communities in medieval Montpellier. Agnes was visible at several intervals over 40 years (1301â1342), in both notarial and charter evidence, as the active administrator of her late husbandâs estate early on, as the owner of houses around a central urban square, as a leader in urban philanthropy, and as the testator (testatrix) of a complex will at the end of her life. A dense tapestry can be woven from the story of Agnes. We can begin with an investigation of Agnesâs family ties and the network they created. Family was the first platform for networks, and marriage an important mechanism in the construction/enlargement of connections among families.
We first meet Agnes in 1301 in connection with her defense of her late husbandâs estate. Agnes identified herself as the daughter of the late Raymundus Peyrerie, merchant, and as the wife of the late Petrus de Bossonesio (Petrus de Bossones).2 Besides her father, there was likely in her natal family a relative and contemporary, Guillelma Peyrerie, mentioned together with Agnes in 1328 in connection with urban philanthropic activity.3 Agnes never mentioned her mother, nor did she make reference to siblings in her will.
She married Petrus at an unknown date in the later thirteenth century. Marriage was one of the most important institutions affecting the status and life experience of women in the Middle Ages and one of the most important constituents of networks. A womanâs status in any premodern historical era was informed first by her family of origin and then by the family into which she married. There is no doubt that her husbandâs position was dominant in the majority of cases, though her status, if it were higher at the outset, could have potentially assisted him in elevating his.4 The status of men is usually available in the surviving documentation as the notary chose almost always to designate men by occupation or honorific title. Women were generally designated by reference to their fathers and/or husbands, without specific occupational identification. Property, one basis of status, was passed through both male and female lines.5 Women and men could inherit from their fathers, their mothers, and their children, as well as from family members on both sides.
The union of Agnes and Petrus was an elite marriage in both social and economic terms. Agnesâs father, Raymundus Peyrerie, was listed as a town consul in 1273.6 Petrus would be a consul in 1290.7 Petrusâs occupations as changer and merchant, his achievement of honorific urban noble status as a bourgeois (burgensis), his service as town consul, and Agnesâs fatherâs occupation as merchant reveal the elite status of this marital union. A likely relative of Petrus, G. de Bossones, probably Guiraudus or Guillelmus de Bossones, was consul in 1281.8 These men would have been acquainted as members of the consular elite. It was likely that the marriage match between Agnes and Petrus was established in this context.9
Changers were closely allied to the mercantile classes as specialists of finance. They were illustrious in Montpellier, much more in the image of merchant bankers than the simple moneyhandlers or moneychangers of other parts of Europe.10 They were responsible in part for maintaining the supply of credit necessary to Montpellierâs trade. Commerce and finance were closely interrelated. Both banking and international trade demanded considerable capital. The presence of 26 changers at the time of the establishment of the statutes of the changersâ guild in 1342 suggests the exclusive nature of this occupation as well as the solid financial base upon which Montpellierâs commerce was founded.11 Agnes and her husband, Petrus de Bossones, were in good company.
A womanâs marriage, accompanied by the constitution of her dowry, set her place in the economic and social hierarchy, yet she remained throughout her life closely tied to her fatherâs family, recalling the Roman gens.12 Women of Montpellier were subject to the system of dotal property that provided them with some benefits of safeguard over their property that they would theoretically recover upon the dissolution of the marriage by death or otherwise.13 The dotal regime, in which a woman brought a dowry to the marriage, emerged in the twelfth century, with the recovery of Roman law institutions, and was in place through the end of the early modern period. In Montpellier, according to the 1204 consuetudines, there was no marriage without dowry.14 The husband also brought to the marriage a donation called propter nuptias that was later replaced by an augment (augmentum), in both instances a form of bride gift. In general, the augment, which would pass to the widow, was much less substantial than the dower assigned a woman according to northern French customary law.15 There remains no specific information about Agnesâs dowry or augment, nor does the will of Petrus survive to inform us of the distribution of his estate.
Agnesâs place in the social landscape of Montpellier depended on family connections, her birth family, and the family into which she married. Petrus de Bossonesâs designation as burgensis meant that he was a member of the urban nobility of Montpellier, occupying high status in the town. Membership in the urban elite of Montpellier provided Agnes and women like her with opportunities afforded by wealth and status. Exploration of the social framework of the town will further an understanding of the dynamics of interaction among its inhabitants. Agnes and her family must be situated in the complexities of the social landscape of Montpellier in the early fourteenth century.16
The south of France contained an urban aristocracy and a rural aristocracy, the upper echelon of which often ruled towns and villages, as in the case of the Guilhem lords of Montpellier, the viscounts of Narbonne, and the counts of Toulouse.17 Initially, in the twelfth century, there had been social barriers to marriage across strata among the Montpellier elite. In a text of 1113, the local lord (dominus) Guilhem V renewed the prohibition of intermarriage and business transactions between milites and burgenses of the town.18 This prohibition would cease to apply in the thirteenth century. The milites were urban knights in Montpellier, a form of local nobility, to be distinguished from the domini of the countryside.19 Domicellus was another term used to designate the urban and rural nobility of Mediterranean France, enjoying currency in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Generally, the twelfth-century milites were followers of the Guilhem lords, holding urban or suburban land as a means of support; their vocation was primarily military.20
In the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a fusion occurred between the milites and the townspeople in Montpellier, a common evolution among Mediterranean urban nobility. As early as 1113, the daughter of the burgensis, Faiditus, married a nobleman, Guillelmus Aimoni, the son of Bernardus Guillelmi, vicarius (viguier) of Montpellier.21 She received an oven in inheritance from her father Faiditus, who was a landholder in the parish of Saint-Denis, the episcopal quarter of Montpellier. It may have been this marriage that provoked Guilhem Vâs reiteration of the prohibition of marriage, noted above.22 If marriage was possible between the powerful Aimoni family and a burgensis family in the early twelfth century, such an occurrence was probably not infrequent. By the second half of the twelfth century, the milites had lost much of their raison dâĂȘtre, and their fusion with the mercantile elite was well underway.
In Montpellier, there was continued evolution in urban social categories in the course of the thirteenth century, due to economic expansion, the regime change from the Guilhem seigneurial family to the Aragonese royal family in 1202â1204, and to crises such as the Albigensian crusade, though the crusade affected the town less than other parts of Langu...