MAPPING NETWORKS OF QUEENSHIP AND GOVERNANCE IN LATE MEDIEVAL IBERIA: A SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS OF VIOLANT OF BAR’S POLITICAL CORRESPONDENCE IN 1387

REDES DE REGINALIDAD Y GOBERNANZA EN LA IBERIA BAJOMEDIEVAL: UN ANÁLISIS DE REDES SOCIALES DE LA CORRESPONDENCIA POLÍTICA DE VIOLANTE DE BAR EN 1387

LLEDÓ RUIZ DOMINGO

Universitat Jaume I
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9473-5483

POTESTAS, N.º 28, enero 2026 | pp. 65-92
ISSN: 1888-9867 | e-ISSN 2340-499X | https://doi.org/10.6035/potestas.9324
Recibido: 01/12/2025 Evaluado: 23/12/2025 Aprobado: 12/01/2026

ABSTRACT: This paper examines Queen Violant of Bar’s exercise of relational power in 1387 by analysing her correspondence through Social Network Analysis. Combining close reading with computational modelling, it reconstructs the relational structures that shaped governance within the Crown of Aragon. The article shows how the queen’s letters created bridges between administrative, ecclesiastical, fiscal, and territorial actors, revealing patterns of mediation, negotiation, and political intervention. By interpreting epistolary traces as relational data, the study argues that queenly power operated through dynamic networks rather than static privileges, and demonstrates how digital methods refine medieval political analysis. Key words: Queenship; Social Network Analysis; Epistolary governance; Violant of Bar; Medieval political authority.

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1. INTRODUCTION

Over nearly three decades of scholarship on medieval queenship, the field has moved well beyond questions of whether queens exercised power.[1] The more productive challenge now lies in understanding how authority operated: through which human networks, institutional circuits and territorial configurations queenly action was channelled, negotiated, and made effective.[2] This article approaches that problem by examining Queen Violant of Bar’s correspondence in 1387 through the combined use of close textual analysis and Social Network Analysis (SNA). By focusing on the relational infrastructures within which her political interventions took shape, the study seeks to the concrete webs of interaction that structured governance in a composite medieval monarchy. This study integrates computational methods into the very process of reconstructing and evaluating political practices and not only treating digital visualisations as an auxiliary layer added to traditional interpretation. SNA is used here not to «illustrate» conclusions, but to interrogate the structure of action recorded in Violant’s letters and to illuminate dynamics that are difficult to apprehend through narrative reading alone. By modelling ties, frequencies, clusters, and positions within the relational field of governance, the article transforms dispersed epistolary traces into an analytical map of how authority became legible, negotiated, and enacted in a composite monarchy.

The approach responds to a broader shift, where digital tools enable historians to revisit how evidence is organised and how arguments are constructed. In the case of medieval queenship, the question is not whether a consort possessed «power» in abstract or symbolic terms, but how political action can be recovered from the procedural, administrative, and interpersonal rhythms that structure the documentary record. Violant’s correspondence in 1387 offers an unusually coherent corpus for this purpose. Her letters trace the reconfiguration of the royal administration after the death of Pere the Ceremonious, the integration of Sibil·la de Fortià’s former domains into the queen’s patrimonial sphere, and the Crown’s repositioning within the Western Schism. When treated as relational data, these letters reveal patterns of brokerage, territorial coordination, intercessory work, and administrative insistence that conventional narrative synthesis often obscures.

For these reasons, the article moves between macro and micro-analysis. At the structural level, SNA exposes the distribution of ties across administrative, ecclesiastical, fiscal, and territorial clusters, showing where communicative density accumulated and which actors functioned as intermediaries or bottlenecks within the queen’s sphere of action. At the textual level, close readings of selected letters demonstrate how judicial oversight, fiscal correction, intercession, diplomatic positioning, and political governance were articulated through specific forms of epistolary intervention. The combination of these scales, combining graph structure and textual practice, allows us to reconstruct not only a theoretical model of queenship, but also the operational logic of governance as Violant performed it in the first year of her reign.

By foregrounding the relational architecture of her correspondence, the article argues that queenly authority in 1387 emerges not as a static attribute of office but as the cumulative effect of situated actions, repeated interlocutions, dialogued power, and the management of overlapping jurisdictions. This methodological integration also clarifies how digital tools can strengthen our interpretation: not by replacing contextual reading, but by rendering visible the connective tissue that links individual documents into patterns of political practice. In this sense, Violant’s 1387 network becomes both an object of study and a testing ground for evaluating how computational methods can refine the analysis of medieval political life.

2. SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS: A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL OVERVIEW AND ITS APPLICATION IN MEDIEVAL STUDIES

This article proposes a methodological as well as a conceptual reflection. It takes as its point of departure the question of Queen Violant of Bar’s authority in 1387, and considers how digital tools and SNA may offer alternative ways of approaching female political agency in the late Middle Ages. The increasing dialogue between computational techniques and archival research encourages us to revisit familiar problems such as influence, legitimacy, and the negotiation of power within royal governance. By aligning with the broader «digital turn» in humanities,[3] this contribution explores how thinking through networks can nuance our interpretation frameworks and open new avenues for understanding how authority was exercised, perceived, and sustained.

SNA provides a conceptual language through which patterns of interaction, affiliation, and obligation can be rendered visible. Rather than conceiving medieval actors as discrete, self-contained agents, network approaches emphasise the webs of relations, such as political, institutional, territorial, and domestic, that constituted the fabric of authority.

Network science grew out of the convergence of graph theory, mathematical sociology, and the study of complex systems during the mid-twentieth century. Its intellectual roots reach back to the 1960s, yet it was the rapid growth of computational capacity and the availability of large datasets in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that enabled it to develop into an established field.[4] Initially, network methods were deployed in disciplines such as epidemiology, political science, business analytics, and information theory, where relational structures could be readily modelled and interpreted. Gradually, scholars in the humanities recognised that many of their own problems, such as the organisation of elites, the circulation of texts, the cohesion of religious communities, the spatial articulation of trade, were similarly relational.

Early historical applications of network thinking were fragmented and largely experimental. Forrest R. Pitts’s 1965 study of medieval Moscow, although notable, did not immediately alter methodological practice.[5] A decisive shift occurred with John F. Padgett and Christopher K. Ansell’s seminal 1993 article on the rise of the Medici, which demonstrated the explanatory power of network structures in political transformation.[6] Their work provided a compelling demonstration that relational patterns could illuminate the dynamics of power with a clarity not easily achieved through narrative analysis alone. In the decades that followed, historians increasingly adapted network approaches to their own research questions. Scholars such as Claire Lemercier translated the technical language of SNA into usable methodological frameworks, helping to make network analysis both accessible and intellectually coherent within the discipline.[7] By the 2010s, the field had become sufficiently institutionalised to support dedicated conferences, a specialised publications applying SNA to medieval studies.[8]

This expansion has also revealed ongoing methodological and epistemological challenges. While network visualisation has become widespread, the deeper implications of network thinking, such as its assumptions, its limitations, and its interpretative risks, require sustained reflection. The challenge for historians lies in adopting computational methods uncritically, nor in rejecting them for fear of reductionism, and also in combining quantitative modelling with rigorous archival analysis. SNA is most effective when it sharpens questions, exposes relational patterns otherwise not as identifiable within narrative sources, and provides a transparent basis for interpreting political behaviour.

At its conceptual core, SNA models relationships as networks composed of nodes and edges. Nodes represent individuals, institutions, locations, documents or other units of interest; edges represent the connections between them, whether directed (commands, letters, petitions) or undirected (shared participation, mutual recognition). Edges or nodes may be weighted to reflect frequency, intensity, or significance. Multiple letters exchanged within a short period, repeated appearances in accounts, or enduring fiscal dependencies generate heavier weights and thus encode relational intensity.[9] Nodes can also carry attributes, for example gender, status, territorial origin, institutional affiliation, that shape how networks are interpreted and visualised.

Analytical metrics allow us to move beyond descriptive mapping. Degree centrality captures the number of direct connections a node has, suggesting prominence or accessibility. Betweenness centrality measures the extent to which a node lies on the shortest paths between others, indicating brokerage and influence in the flow of information or authority. Density reveals the degree of cohesion within the network, while clustering identifies subgroups that form coherent communities or administrative spheres. Particularly relevant for queenly studies are ego-networks, which centre the queen and all actors directly connected to her, offering a structural perspective on the reach, intensity, and organisation of her authority.[10]

In medieval political history, SNA enables us to move past impressionistic claims about influence or legitimacy. It allows the relational structures of governance: to be modelled and examined: its clusters of territorial or fiscal administration, its ecclesiastical ties, its household circuits, its regional subgraphs. For an understanding and identifying the form of female authority, SNA offers an especially valuable framework.

As the field continues to develop, the most productive uses of SNA will be those that integrate computational modelling and careful archival interpretation. The goal is not to quantify the medieval queenship, but to enrich our understanding of it by uncovering the relational structures that shaped political action. This approach underpins the analysis that follows: a case study of Violant’s 1387 correspondence in which network analysis is used not to supplement interpretation, but to illuminate the architecture of queenly power itself.

3. SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY: PATTERNS OF LEGITIMATION AND POLITICAL ACTION

The application of SNA to the corpus of Queen Violant of Bar’s correspondence from 1387 enables a multi-dimensional reconstruction of her political activity during the first year of her tenure as queen consort of the Crown of Aragon. This study focuses deliberately on a single year—1387—not only because it marked Violant’s formal accession alongside Joan I (r.1387-1396), but also because transitions of reign routinely generate intensified flows of communication, renegotiations of authority, and the reordering of political alliances. The year is particularly suitable for network analysis given the exceptional richness of its documentary record: more than eight hundred letters preserved across distinct chancery registers in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon.[11] This unusually complete series allows us to capture, with considerable granularity, the early architecture of Violant’s authority as it was articulated through writing. By analysing the destinations, functions, and spatial distribution of these letters, it becomes possible to visualise the mechanisms through which she sought to legitimate her position, assert authority, negotiate influence, and reward or discipline those around her. The analysis proceeds along three interrelated axes: the structure of her recipient network, the geographical projection of her correspondence, and the functional roles performed by her communications in acts of rulership, intercession, and patronage.

The first dimension concerns the recipient network, which offers insight into the individuals and offices most frequently addressed by the queen. By mapping all known recipients and analysing degree centrality, we identify those actors who occupied pivotal roles within her correspondence network. Clusters of recipients, whether defined by institutional affiliation, or political function, allow us to detect embedded centres of power and to distinguish between core and peripheral nodes in her relational field. Frequency of contact also provides a measure of strategic importance: repeated correspondence with particular figures may indicate trusted intermediaries, contested relationships, or key zones of negotiation. This approach permits a structural reading of royal favour and influence, grounded in the material trace of communication.

Secondly, we explore the geographical projection of power through a spatial analysis of where the queen wrote from and to whom she addressed her letters. By geolocating the dispatch and reception points of her correspondence, we assess the territorial distribution of her political presence and the extent to which specific regions, such as Catalonia, Valencia, or Aragon, were prioritised. Spatial concentrations may reflect existing political tensions, familial loyalties, recent appointments, or the strategic deployment of royal presence. Crucially, this network is not only physical but symbolic: the circulation of letters constitutes an exercise in authority that transcends geographical distance, reinforcing the queen’s reach through rhetorical and institutional channels. The geo-network model produced using Nodegoat facilitates this mapping, making visible both intensity and directionality of communication across the Crown of Aragon.

The third analytical approach focuses on the functional role of the letters, with particular attention to their use as instruments of intercession, rulership, and promotion. Letters are read not merely as administrative artefacts, but as deliberate interventions in the political and judicial affairs of the realm.

Each of these analytical axes is supported by targeted visualisations developed through digital network analysis tools selected for their compatibility with the relational and spatial methodology adopted in this study. A geo-network map constructed in Nodegoat will visualise the spatial distribution, density, and reach of the queen’s correspondence. Nodegoat was chosen in particular for its capacity to integrate prosopographical data, georeferenced locations, and temporal markers within a single research environment, allowing correspondence networks to be analysed simultaneously as social, spatial, and chronological phenomena.

Complementing this spatial perspective, a force-directed graph generated in Kumu will reveal patterns of clustering among recipients according to topic, institutional affiliation, or political function. Kumu is especially well suited to modelling complex relational datasets and highlighting emergent structures—such as intermediary actors or highly connected nodes—that are not immediately apparent in tabular sources. Finally, a bipartite graph will model intercession dynamics between the queen, the recipient authority, and the final beneficiary, making visible the negotiated and multi-layered nature of political mediation.

Taken together, these tools were selected not for their novelty but for their capacity to render visible different dimensions of queenly power—spatial reach, relational density, and intercessory mediation—thus supporting an interpretation of authority as relational and distributed rather than hierarchical: a system of negotiated ties, strategic interventions, and interdependent actors.

By adopting this multi-scalar analytical approach, the paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how female authority was articulated, mediated, and constrained through written communication. Moreover, it also demonstrates how SNA can make visible the structural and functional dimensions of female political agency.

4. VIOLANT OF BAR: DUCHESS AND QUEEN

Violant of Bar became queen consort of the Crown of Aragon in January 1387, upon the accession of her husband Joan I. Born in 1365, she was the daughter of Robert I, Duke of Bar, and Marie of Valois, a sister of King Charles V of France.[12] This connection placed Violant at the heart of the Valois dynasty, giving her a prominent position within the trans-Pyrenean aristocratic networks.[13] Her marriage to the future Joan I in 1380 had been the result of intense diplomatic negotiations that aimed to strengthen the pro-French orientation of the Aragonese court, even if that was not the desire of King Peter the Ceremonious.[14] At only 15 years old, she travelled from Paris to Barcelona, bringing with her a cultural and political sensibility shaped by the French court, which would have lasting consequences on her style of governance and queenship.

Violant’s early years in Aragon, as Duchess of Girona, were crucial for her political apprenticeship. Already during this period, she built a network of counsellors, servants and clients, some of whom would follow her into the queen’s household after 1387. Her position, however, remained delicate during the last decade of Pere the Ceremonious’ reign (r.1336-1387). The king’s relationship with his fourth wife, Sibil·la de Fortià (r.1377-1387), had created tensions within the royal family,[15] and the household of the Duke and Duchess of Girona had to navigate carefully between loyalty to the sovereign and the defence of their own dynastic future.

The death of King Pere on 5 January 1387 opened new possibilities. As queen consort, Violant quickly moved to assert her position. Her recognition as «la reyna ara regnant»[16] it served to distinguish her from Sibil·la de Fortià, who still retained the title of dowager queen and posed a latent threat to the symbolic and material authority of the new queen.[17] Violant ensured, in coordination with Joan I, the removal of Sibil·la from court and the dissolution of her economic independence. This transition was not only personal but institutional, as it marked a broader reconfiguration of power within the Crown.

In the months that followed, Violant began to shape her own royal household and to secure control over her economic base. The queen’s household was quickly populated with figures loyal to her, many of whom had ties to her household as Duchess of Girona. The new ruling couple also began to act politically and diplomatically. In the context of the Western Schism, Joan I declared the Crown’s support for Clement VII in Avignon, and Violant, as a niece of the King of France, played a visible role in aligning Aragonese diplomacy with French interests.[18] Her actions show a keen awareness of the queenly ideal that prevailed in the Crown of Aragon: a model that demanded not only virtue and decorum, but also the capacity to act as intercessor, mediator and peacemaker within the realms.

This first year of queenship thus set the tone for Violant’s entire tenure. She projected an image of dignity and moderation, while actively consolidating power through networks of matronage and strategic appointments. Her French heritage, far from being an obstacle, became a resource she knew how to deploy in the context of the Aragonese monarchy. Violant’s activity in 1387 was a moment of political redefinition, and she emerged from it as a queen both fully integrated in the institutional framework of the Crown and capable of shaping it to her own interests.

5. MAPPING THE QUEEN’S CORRESPONDENCE: A POLITICAL NETWORK IN THE TERRITORY

The spatial visualisations of Violant’s outgoing correspondence acquire analytical significance once it becomes clear that the queen herself moved very little in 1387, remaining almost exclusively in Barcelona and its immediate environs, with only brief displacements to Vilafranca del Penedès, Molins de Rei, and Montserrat.[19] All other locations represented on the map are therefore not traces of her mobility but the territorial surface onto which her authority was projected. The geography of the letters reveals a system of governance in which royal power is implemented not through itinerancy but through written intervention, articulated from a fixed administrative centre into a spatially dispersed political realm. In this sense, the maps document the operational field of a documentary monarchy, one in which sovereignty is enacted through the circulation of commands, intercessions, and confirmations rather than through the physical presence of the ruler.

Figure 1. Mapping Queen Violant’s Outgoing Correspondance in 1387[20]

Barcelona’s overwhelming dominance reflects its role as the infrastructural core of the queen’s authority. The density of letters issued from this node suggests a model of centralised queenly governance, in which the queen’s position within the administrative circuitry of the Crown, rather than her geographical movement, determined her capacity to influence events throughout the territories. This aligns with the broader late medieval tendency towards bureaucratisation, where the chancery becomes the principal medium for producing binding norms.[21] Violant’s relative immobility is therefore not an index of limited power; rather, it points to a form of rulership premised on the intensification of the written command and on the ability to orchestrate multiple jurisdictions from a stable political centre.

Avignon and Valencia stand out with particular clarity in the visualization of the correspondence. Their prominence reveals the dual structure of Violant’s political field in 1387: one trans-regional and ecclesiastical, the other territorial and administrative.

Avignon emerges as one of the largest and most frequently addressed nodes, reflecting its unique political significance during the Western Schism.[22] The queen’s repeated communications to the Avignon papacy indicate that her authority operated not only within the territorial framework of the Crown but also within the broader ecclesiastical geography that conditioned the legitimacy of the new monarchs. In network terms, Avignon functions as a supra-territorial hub linked to the queen through high-frequency, high-weight edges, signalling sustained negotiation, intercessory diplomacy, and the management of ecclesiastical alignments following the Crown’s official adherence to Clement VII.[23] These communications reveal a form of queenly brokerage in which Violant mediates between domestic actors and a trans-Pyrenean centre of authority whose decisions directly impacted the political stability of the Crown. Her correspondence with Avignon thus demonstrates the entanglement of territorial and extra-territorial power and illustrates how reginal agency was exercised across multiple scales of the medieval political order.

Valencia, by contrast, represents a zone of intensive territorial governance within the Crown itself. The enlarged Valencian node reflects the high frequency of letters addressed to its governor, municipal authorities, and fiscal officers. This concentration corresponds to the structural pressures facing the kingdom in 1387: fiscal disputes requiring recalibration, judicial conflicts demanding intervention, and municipal tensions intensified by the transition of reign and the integration of Sibil·la de Fortià’s former domains. The queen’s repeated communications reveal Valencia as a space where royal authority required active reinforcement, not because of geographical remoteness but because of the density of competing jurisdictions and the fragility of institutional equilibrium in the wake of succession. In network-theoretical terms, Valencia appears as a high-stress cluster, a subgraph characterised by thick relational edges signalling the iterative interventions necessary to stabilise local governance.

Fig. 2. Main Clusters of Projected Authority by Queen Violant in 1387[24]

The visual prominence of Avignon and Valencia therefore illustrates the two principal axes along which Violant’s power operated: the supra-regional ecclesiastical sphere and the internal territorial field. One reflects her position as a Valois princess situated within the geopolitical dynamics of the Schism; the other reveals her role in the internal reorganisation of the Crown following the end of Pere’s reign. The coexistence of these two poles underscores the multiscalar nature of reginal power: Violant’s authority had to be projected simultaneously outward, toward centres of international legitimacy, and inward, toward the nodes of territorial governance that structured daily political life.

From a network perspective, the maps render visible a queen occupying the central broker position in a composite monarchy characterised by regional differentiation, jurisdictional plurality, and ecclesiastical entanglement. The outward radiating lines from Barcelona represent not simple correspondence flows, but the infrastructural channels through which power was transmitted, connecting the queen to actors who otherwise did not interact directly: local governors, monastic superiors, municipal councils, and the papal curia. Her letters shorten the path lengths between these diverse nodes, thereby reinforcing the connective tissue of the Crown’s political system. Her power is therefore enacted through the maintenance of the communicative infrastructure that binds the political system together.

The significance of this epistolary mode of rulership becomes clearer when contrasted with alternative queenly strategies observable within the Crown of Aragon. Read against the spatial patterns revealed by the correspondence network, this contrast highlights that reginal authority could be stabilised either through communicative reach or through bodily presence. Maria de Luna (r. 1396-1406), confronted with conflicts of political factions, adopted a markedly different approach. Her interventions required physical displacement into contested territories, and contemporary testimony reveals her acute awareness that the travels and arbitrated settlements she secured in person risked unravelling if she departed too soon. The durability of her authority depended in part on the performative force of presence and on the embodied enactment of sovereignty before rival factions whose compliance was uncertain once the queen withdrew .[25]

What the visualisations ultimately demonstrate is that the implementation of royal power in 1387 depended on the epistolary activation of space. Violant’s queenship functioned less through physical displacement than through the sustained deployment of written commands into specific territorial contexts. Avignon and Valencia dominate because they were the sites where legitimacy and governance were most in flux; the queen’s letters represent the instruments through which she intervened to define, correct, and consolidate the political landscape. The maps therefore offer not a record of motion but a diagram of power, a representation of how queenly authority was produced and exercised through the spatial distribution of communication.

6. ANALYSING A QUEEN’S NETWORK: VIOLANT OF BAR IN 1387

The interpretive force of Queen Violant of Bar’s correspondence in 1387 emerges most clearly when the analysis moves from the structure of her recipient network to the thematic distribution of her letters. This ordering emphasises that epistolary authority depends on communicative content and on institutional routing: who is addressed, how frequently, and with what implications for implementation. Seen through this lens, the outgoing letters provide evidence for the relational infrastructure that enabled a consort to function as an administrative and political actor within a composite monarchy characterised not only by jurisdictional plurality and territorially segmented governance, but also by a distributed model of dynastic rule in which authority was exercised by the king, the queen, and other members of the royal family.[26] The concentration of repeated ties and the persistence of targeted communication suggest that Violant’s power in 1387 can be understood as sustained relational labour directed toward offices capable of translating reginal intervention into governmental outcomes.

Fig. 3. Ego-network of Queen Violant’s outgoing letters in 1387[27]

The ego-network of outgoing correspondence indicates that Violant occupies a structurally central position linking multiple institutional clusters that do not naturally cohere without sustained connective work. Governors, municipal councils, fiscal officers, ecclesiastical authorities, household agents, and territorial administrators of the queen’s own lordship are integrated into a single relational field organised around her node. The repeated edges connecting the queen to high-frequency recipients suggest that epistolary governance in 1387 operated through iterative administrative action: letters were used not only to communicate decisions already settled elsewhere, but also to produce compliance, refine procedural outcomes, and stabilise fragile configurations of jurisdiction in the first year of Joan I’s reign. In network terms, relational intensity becomes a proxy for political workload. What appears as density in the graph translates into elements where authority required continual reinforcement in order to be socially and institutionally effective.

As can be seen, the relational intensity is unevenly distributed, with a restricted set of recipients emerging as persistently central nodes in the queen’s outgoing communication. This pattern is analytically significant because «centrality» is the trace of institutional necessity. Pope Clement, the governor of the Kingdom of Valencia, fiscal officers, high-ranking ecclesiastics, and key household figures appear as indispensable conduits for the implementation of queenly initiative in a year characterised by administrative and political recalibration. The graph therefore helps distinguish between nominal authority and operational authority. It shows the queen engaging repeatedly with those actors who could translate her will into enforceable outcomes across territories and jurisdictions. The effect is to shift our interpretive frame away from a model of queenship understood primarily as symbolic partnership and toward one in which co-rulership is recoverable through routine institutional contact and the sustained management of administrative networks.[28]

Fig. 4. Recipients of Violant of Bar’s Outgoing Correspondence in 1387[29]

Fig. 5. Main recipients of Queen Violant’s outgoing letters in 1387

Person | Outgoing letters
Pope Clement VII | 93
Treasurer | 37
Duke of Montblanc | 23
Governor of Valencia | 23
Batlle of Cubelles | 21
Batlle aljama of Valencia | 18
Cardinal of Viviers | 14
Bishop of Saragossa | 11
King’s Ambassadors in Avignon | 11
King Joan of Aragon | 10

The prominence of Pope Clement at the top of the recipient hierarchy, alongside a treasurer, the queen’s brother-in-law, and the governor of Valencia, signals the multiscale architecture of the queen’s interlocutory field. This distribution suggests that Violant’s correspondence was oriented simultaneously toward an internal axis of political, fiscal-jurisdictional implementation and an external or supra-territorial axis of ecclesiastical legitimacy. Such a configuration is particularly revealing in 1387, when the reorientation of the Crown in the context of the Western Schism and the political reordering after Pere the Ceremonious required constant communicative maintenance. The queen emerges, structurally, as an integrative node whose letters shortened the path lengths between local administrative actors and the wider centres of authority that shaped loyalty, obedience, and legitimacy. In this sense, the network implies a form of queenly brokerage: the queen’s authority is enacted through her ability to connect institutional spheres that might otherwise remain weakly linked or jurisdictionally fragmented.

Another significative way to interpret the recipient structure of Violant’s correspondence in 1387 is to treat its density as evidence of activated authority in a year of heightened political opportunity. The concentration of repeated ties is consistent with a queen who possessed the institutional capacity to intervene and who chose to mobilise it decisively in the first year of the new reign. In this context, the Western Schism offered a particularly effective field for reginal action. The Crown’s alignment with Avignon created an expanded space for the redistribution of ecclesiastical favour, the recompense of loyal supporters, and the orchestration of new or renewed circuits of fidelity across the realms. Violant’s sustained correspondence with papal and high clerical interlocutors can thus be read as a deliberate investment in legitimating strategies that linked dynastic transition to the construction of dependable political alliances. The same logic of reinforcement operates within the patrimonial sphere. The expansion of the queen’s Cambra following the dismantling of Sibil·la de Fortià’s former position did not simply increase Violant’s economic capacities;[30] it enlarged the territorial reach of her jurisdiction and strengthened her role as head of the administrative entity of the queen’s lands. The volume and persistence of letters addressed to officials and local agents of her lordship indicate that this patrimonial growth translated into concrete governmental practice, embedding reginal authority through routine oversight and iterative enforcement. Read against the conjuncture of 1387, the network’s density therefore expresses an intentional programme of consolidation in which ecclesiastical realignment and the reconfiguration of the queen’s lands became complementary instruments for the extension of queenly power.

Fig. 6. Categorisation of Queen Violant’s outgoing correspondence in 1387

Once this architecture of recipients is established, the thematic distribution of the letters can be interpreted with greater conceptual precision. The graphs indicate that co-rulership constitutes the dominant field of correspondence, which aligns closely with the network’s concentration around high-level offices of implementation. Alongside co-rulership, the administration of the queen’s lands and a cluster of political matters reveal two additional arenas of sustained action that complicate any reductive understanding of the queen as either merely intercessory or merely collaborative. The combined evidence therefore supports a composite model in which co-rulership forms the most visible thematic axis, while the Cambra supplies the patrimonial and jurisdictional infrastructure that anchored Violant’s operational autonomy, and the political category captures her engagement in territorial stabilisation and ecclesiastical-diplomatic negotiation.

Fig. 7. Categorisation of co-rulership correspondence in 1387

The Lands-related correspondence is particularly decisive for reframing how power is conceptualised in this year. Its volume suggests that the queen’s lordship was not a secondary or a residue of queenship but an administrative sphere that generated a substantial workload of governance on daily basis. Letters directed to local officials and territorial agents demonstrate that reginal lordship was enacted through procedural insistence, fiscal oversight, and the routine reaffirmation of jurisdiction. In this light, the Queen’s Lands emerges as a space of autonomous reginal rule operating within, but not reducible to, the wider monarchical system. The importance of this axis also helps explain the queen’s broader capacity for political intervention. By sustaining a dense network of officers whose loyalty and function were tied directly to her lands, the queen consolidated a material foundation that strengthened her legitimacy and enhanced her negotiating position within the wider structures of co-governance. The thematic graph thus allows us to interpret the Queen’s Lands simultaneously as a space of direct rule and as an enabling infrastructure for the queen’s role in the administrative and political life of the Crown.

At the territorial level, the concentration of correspondence linked to Valencia suggests a high-pressure zone of governance in which the queen’s authority was repeatedly mobilised to stabilise administrative hierarchies and to embed recognition of new queenly rights after the dismantling of Sibil·la de Fortià’s former sphere of influence. The repetition of letters in this cluster implies a logic of iterative correction: political problems were not resolved through a single directive but required sustained written intervention that reinforced the authority of the new regime at a local level. This pattern also reframes the meaning of the co-rulership category itself. It suggests that co-governance becomes most visible where institutional equilibrium is fragile, and where the relational workload required to restore stability is correspondingly intensified.

At the supraterritorial level, the prominence of Avignon and senior ecclesiastical recipients reveals that the queen’s political activity in 1387 operated within a broader geography of legitimacy conditioned by the Western Schism. The density of correspondence with papal and high clerical actors suggests that Violant functioned as a key mediator in consolidating the Crown’s alignment and managing the institutional consequences of obedience. This is where the queen’s dynastic identity acquires analytical significance. Her position as a Valois princess offered a relational resource that could be mobilised within ecclesiastical diplomacy, enabling her to serve as an intermediary between a domestic field of governance and a transregional centre of authority. The letters thus reveal a form of power that is simultaneously institutional and relational: authority is enacted not merely through command but through the capacity to sustain legitimacy across multiple scales of the political order.

Taken together, the recipient architecture and the thematic distribution of the letters suggest that Violant’s authority in 1387 cannot be captured by a single explanatory register. The network demonstrates where power was routed and where administrative pressure accumulated; the topic graphs clarify how that pressure translated into concrete modes of action. Read in combination, they reveal a queen whose political agency was articulated through an interdependent triad of practices: the everyday task of co-governance, the direct administration of her Cambra as a jurisdictional and fiscal engine of queenly autonomy, and a multiscalar political engagement that connected territorial stabilisation with the management of ecclesiastical legitimacy in the context of the Western Schism. This integrated configuration invites a reconsideration of the analytical boundaries often imposed on queenly action. Rather than treating co-rulership, lordship, and political mediation as discrete compartments, the evidence indicates that they functioned as mutually reinforcing dimensions of a single operational system of queenship.

7. CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, Social Network Analysis has been used to reconstruct the relational architecture of Queen Violant of Bar’s outgoing correspondence in 1387, treating epistolary traces as structured evidence for the operational logic of reginal authority. The exceptional density of the surviving corpus for a single year allows a fine-grained analysis of how authority was enacted during a moment of dynastic transition, administrative reordering, and ecclesiastical realignment. By converting letters into relational data, the study specifies the institutional channels, territorial nodes, and procedural rhythms through which Violant’s action became politically effective within the Crown of Aragon.

The recipient structure of the network is decisive for defining this model of authority. Violant’s correspondence displays a selective pattern of high-frequency interlocutors whose offices controlled the implementation of governance across fiscal, territorial, and ecclesiastical domains. The concentration of communication addressed to the pope, the treasurer, the governor of Valencia, and other key agents indicates that Violant’s action in 1387 was channelled through identifiable administrative bottlenecks. This distribution should be read as a measure of institutional workload and of the points where political stress demanded repeated queenly intervention, rather than as a simple reflection of rank.

Even if the analysis is grounded primarily in outgoing letters, the pattern of sustained, high-frequency ties suggests a further political implication. Queen Violant appears to have positioned her office as a necessary point of articulation within the machinery of government. In practical terms, her correspondence normalised the queen as a regular route through which problems of compliance, fiscal correction, jurisdictional adjustment, and ecclesiastical negotiation were expected to be addressed. This implies a form of power that is best captured as institutional necessity: the capacity to make queenly intervention structurally difficult to bypass in moments when administrative and legitimating decisions required coordination.

The thematic distribution of the letters reinforces this structural reading and clarifies the internal composition of Violant’s authority. Co-rulership constitutes the dominant field of action, consistent with her sustained engagement with offices responsible for justice, finance, and territorial administration. The prominence of correspondence tied to the queen’s lands shows that patrimonial lordship functioned as a major sphere of governance with its own fiscal and jurisdictional burdens. The political category reveals a multiscalar projection of authority: intensive intervention in Valencia during local and institutional recalibration, alongside sustained engagement with Avignon that reflects the queen’s role in managing legitimacy in the context of the Western Schism. In combination, these patterns support a composite model of queenship in which administrative co-governance, patrimonial rule, and political mediation form an interdependent operational system rather than separate analytical compartments.

Beyond its empirical findings, this article advances a methodological intervention within queenship studies by demonstrating how digital network visualisation can be used not merely as an illustrative device but as an analytical instrument for interpreting reginal power. By treating epistolary evidence as relational data, Social Network Analysis makes visible forms of authority that are difficult to capture through narrative or institutional analysis alone: brokerage positions, administrative bottlenecks, and the spatial projection of command without physical mobility. The combined use of geo-network mapping and relational graphs enables the articulation of queenship as a multiscalar and infrastructural practice, structured simultaneously by territory, office, and communicative frequency. In this sense, the methodology employed here contributes to ongoing debates on medieval queenship by shifting the analytical focus from exceptional acts or formal prerogatives to the everyday mechanisms through which queenly authority was operationalised, normalised, and made politically effective within complex systems of governance.

The evidence analysed here remains circumscribed by the nature of the corpus. A single-year, outgoing dataset necessarily privileges the queen’s side of the communicative field and the survival logic of the chancery record. Extending the model to adjacent years would allow testing whether the configuration observed in 1387 reflects an intensification specific to accession or a more durable structure of Violant’s queenship. Comparative work with other corpora from the Crown of Aragon would further clarify the balance between individual political style and institutional expectation. Within these limits, the 1387 correspondence offers a strong empirical basis for arguing that queenship in this context operated as a practical, institutionalised modality of governance whose mechanisms can be recovered with particular clarity when epistolary evidence is analysed as a relational system.

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