The convenientia played a central role in the organization of Catalan society from the beginning of the eleventh century to the end of the twelfth, but its origins are to be found earlier and farther afield, in early medieval notarial traditions. The near total absence of documents from the Visigothic kingdom, however, precludes a demonstration of the direct influence of earlier traditions, whether indigenous or external, on the eleventh-century Catalan scribes who first composed convenientiae. The documentary context in which this form first appeared was particularly rich and, by the 1020s, increasingly fluid. Toward the end of the tenth century, the strict adherence of scribes to formulae, such as those found in the highly influential formulary of Santa Maria de Ripoll, began to break down. This development was perhaps connected to the disruption caused by the sack of Barcelona in 985, but whatever the precise reason for the change, scribes began to use new terms in standard types of documents and to create entirely new documentary types. Formally, the convenientia evolved from documents concerning conditional grants, the settlement of disputes, oaths of fidelity, and castle-holding agreements.

This understanding of the development of the convenientia, rather than simply the observation of its appearance, allows for a more sophisticated model of the connections between words written on parchment and the institutions that inspired those words.

Making agreements is one thing; keeping them is another. We are much less well informed about this second aspect of the process. Individual cases did end up in courts or other dispute-settlement fora that have left records, and here we can see an enforcement mechanism at work. Such cases are, however, few and far between, and furthermore only show that certain agreements failed. What about those agreements that worked, or at least did not break down to the point where they generated a record of a dispute? How were agreements kept? The agreements themselves give indications. Some convenientiae contain simple penalty clauses, though others address the issue of guarantees at great length, as was the case in the convenientia between Berenguer Ramon I and Ermengol II of c. 1021. Parties proposed various types of real and personal sureties, and they detailed procedures to be followed in case of violations. The threat of these sanctions certainly played a role in encouraging adherence to agreements, but sanctions are, like dispute-settlement procedures, negative factors, potential consequences of a change in the status of the agreement. Other factors contributed to the maintenance of agreements in a less mechanical fashion. The oath is one such element; we must revisit its relationship to the convenientia in order to understand more fully the nature of agreements. The written word is another, for the very inscription of the convenientia on parchment was a part of the process of making sure that it would be kept.

Close to 1,000 of the written agreements that Catalan scribes identified as convenientiae have survived in various forms down to the present day. The earliest such document, as seen in the previous chapter, is a highly complex treaty between two counts, involving issues of castle tenure, inheritance, alliance, commendation, and security. These themes continued to predominate in convenientiae. But many written agreements dealt not with the fate of entire counties, but with the disposition of a single castle, or even a tiny plot of land. Solidi were numbered not in the hundreds, but in single digits. The actors were not counts, but simple monks, or reasonably well-off peasants. In the minds of scribes, the agreement between Berenguer Ramon I and Ermengol II was of the same species as the following document of 1076:

Why did they draw the connection? What was an agreement in eleventh and twelfth-century Catalonia?

In attempting to address such questions, we must confront an unwieldy mass of evidence.

Ramon Berenguer I's organization of a network of castle tenure and military service around convenientiae spread widely throughout Catalonia. Lower levels of the lay aristocracy mimicked the count's actions and his words; similarly, the regime spread – in varying degrees – to neighboring counties, and to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, both secular and monastic. The system of convenientiae was not, however, simply a phenomenon of the second half of the eleventh century, for the agreements outlasted the original participants. Their descendants, whether biological or institutional, renewed the arrangements repeatedly, maintaining these structures of power and lordship into the twelfth century. An original exemplar of a convenientia that Dalmau Bernat de Peratallada entered into in 1062 for the castle of Begur stands as a symbol of this phenomenon: in 1114 Dalmau's son, also named Dalmau, subscribed a brief codicil to the text of the first convenientia, promising to keep the same agreement with Ramon Berenguer III. Not all renewals, of course, were on precisely the same terms. The content of these agreements evolved slowly, in response to economic and political developments. As the twelfth century progressed, there were more and more disputes over agreements, and the convenientia lost the near monopoly it had enjoyed in the eleventh century as the written manifestation of structures of power. But overall, the coherence of the structures established in the eleventh century persists deep into the twelfth.