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His festivals were known beyond his own kingdom. So when Juan I of Aragón moved his court to Mallorca, Bellver Castle became the scene of dances, poetry recitals and concerts. It was then that Jaume Lustrach entered the scene. An alchemist hired to make gold and secure financing after all possible loans have been wiped out.

Lustrach's life is a complete mystery before and after his passage through the Island. He arrived in 1395 hired by Juan I, the same year that the king decided to move the court to Majorca to escape the plague that was ravaging the Peninsula. The goal was to get enough gold to become a kind of ATM. He had already exhausted the credits of the Venetian bankers. The monarch imposed a maximum date: the feast of San Miguel, on September 29. But he also gave a space to the Occitan alchemist: a small house at the top of the Torre del Ángel, in La Almudaina. There he lodged with four other assistants and the entourage of guards arranged for his service.

Alchemy fused astrological knowledge, Egyptian concepts and, as the researcher Antonio Contreras explains in Astrology, alchemy and medicine in medieval Mallorca, the philosophical principles of Aristotle. It was believed that there was an association between metals and the stars and planets. Thus, the Moon was silver; the Sun, gold; and Mars, iron.

The aim of the alchemists was to discover the philosopher's stone that would turn lead into gold or silver. A feasible process if, as they argued, all metals were made up of the same basic elements, albeit in different proportions. The key, then, was to recombine them in the proper way.

«Alchemy is a spiritual process where matter is only a representation. The intention was not to do something chemical, but rather it symbolized the purification of the soul ", says the professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the UIB, Ángel Terron.

But the results were not coming and Juan I was beginning to get impatient. The first step was to remove part of the guard that protected the Occitan with the intention of reducing expenses. But in May 1396, the king died in a hunting accident in Catalonia. Without male descendants, the throne went to his brother Martín I.

Lustrach continued working in his workshop until, the logical lack of control of the transition between monarchs, led him to claim several back wages. It was that claim, however, that would make Martín I order an investigation of that character and his particular courtship.

That possibility of obtaining gold with which to sustain his reign led him to maintain the contract with the alchemist. The letters and documents preserved assure that in 1398 he continued working in the Torre del Ángel. But his patience quickly ran out. Especially after reports that everything about Lustrach was hoax. Not only the lack of results in his laboratory, but also his theoretical work.

It was a work on the philosopher's stone, which he had continued in Mallorca at the request of Juan I of Aragon. Volume of which the reports affirmed that it had been "all vanity mixed with great recklessness, that in good reason would be worthy of exemplary punishment". So it was.

The turn of the century marked the end of it. In 1400 the new king wrote to the Procurator of the Kingdom of Mallorca to withdraw his support and to send him, well guarded, to the Veguer prison in Barcelona.

However, Martin I did not have the supporters that the alchemist had in the Court. Among them, his own wife: María de Luna. It was she who interceded for the alchemist until she got him released. The history of Lustrach had been, according to Contreras, the third and last testimony of alchemy in Mallorca. The only thing that remained of his experiments was that study, perhaps incomplete, Work of the Philosophical Pear. [sic] It would take two more centuries for alchemy to leave a mark on the science that would come later. “Talking about chemistry before the 18th century is something risky. It would be born when the alchemists stopped being so spiritual to focus on practice. Paracelsus was already halfway there, ”says Terron. There was already something of that scientific breeding ground in his laboratories.

Alchemy is the discipline sought by the so-called "Philosopher's Stone", an element that allowed matter to be transmuted, the best known example being the transmutation of lead into gold. It must be said that it became closely linked to other disciplines, such as astrology, and even scientific disciplines such as medicine. During the Middle Ages, many doctors had astrological and alchemical knowledge that they used when treating diseases of the human body, and it is at this time, which is when it can be said that alchemy had its peak, many treatises were written on this matter, some of which have come down to us today. Even so, much is unknown about its practice, since both this and its teaching were carried out in a hermetic and clandestine way.

For centuries many have practiced it and even the powerful have funded their research, but without success, unless it is known. Thanks to alchemy, chemistry arose and today alchemy is considered a mere trick or pseudoscience, linked to the occult sciences, although there are still people who, secretly or at least discreetly, continue to study and even practice it.

Mallorca was not alien to these practices, it is said that Ramón Llull, our most international and well-known Blessed, also entered the study of alchemy, even writing a treatise on it, although it seems that said treatise is apocryphal and which was written by one or more people who used the name Ramón Llull to give it more legitimacy. Another story, and this one with a certain historical foundation, tells us about Jaume Lustrach, an alchemist who came to work in Mallorca by royal order.