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.