Catalonia Calling

This is not a proper blog post but more a request for HELP and CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM.

I've been working on the cover for the Catalonia Is Not Spain book over the weekend and here's the result. The picture is La Diada by Joan Abelló and the Abelló Museum in Mollet del Vallès have kindly given me permission to use the painting that the great Catalan artist produced after the Catalan National Day in 1977, the first after the death of Franco.

One of the big difficulties is getting the blurb text right. Here it is :-

"How much does the world know about Catalonia and its role as a great medieval empire and one of  Europe's first nation-states?

In Catalonia Is Not Spain: A Historical Perspective, author Simon Harris takes the reader through 1,000 years of Catalan history focusing on the Principality's often difficult relationship with Castile-dominated Spain.

Assimilation attempts by the Catholic Kings and Habsburgs, the siege of Barcelona and annexation by the Bourbons and 300 years of absolutist monarchs and repressive dictatorships have brought Catalonia and Spain to where they are today.

This insightful and balanced history gives an insider's background to the current political situation and explains why Catalans believe that Catalonia is not Spain".

I appreciate that many of you won't agree with the content and if that's the case please refrain from commenting. A blurb has a very limited amount of space and you have to get key information across in a limited number of words.

The text inside, although from a Catalan point of view, is actually much more balanced and in the preface I make the point that Catalonia Is Spain and that the phrase Catalonia Is Not Spain is used on signs and placards as part of the independence campaign.

The title, cover and blurb are designed to provoke the reader, create interest and encourage them to buy the book.

I'd be grateful if you could answer the following questions

1. Can the text be improved in any way?

2. Would this cover encourage you to buy the book? Why/why not?

Any other constructive criticism would be much appreciated.

If the answer the Question 2 is YES, you've still get time until October 13th to help me reach the crowdfund target, I have created to publish the book.

Click on the image below, make a pledge and not only will you receive an early copy but also your name will appear in the credits.

This is obviously not a serious political or historical point but during the War of the Spanish Succession and particularly during the Siege of Barcelona in 1714, the Catalan troops dressed in blue and claret (blaugrana)

Whereas Felipe V's Bourbonic Castilian troops dressed in white

Some things never change!

PLEASE CONTRIBUTE TO THE CROWDFUND FOR THE BOOK!!!

The origins of Christopher Columbus are shrouded in mystery and show characteristics of a political cover-up. What seems extremely clear is that the idea of a humble Genoese wool weaver's son gaining favour with kings and leading an expensive expedition to discover the New World is highly implausible.

Was he Catalan? I am strongly inclined to think so but, although I present all the pro-Catalan arguments here, I have to admit that as far as international historians are concerned the jury is out. However, what might appear to be a slight tangent in the book's argument is worth recounting because it is a clear example of history being rewritten to favour the Castilian oligarchy.

The first time it occurred to me that Christopher Columbus might be Catalan was over 20 years ago whilst reading Robert Hughes' account of the building of the Columbus Monument at the bottom of La Rambla in his immense 'Barcelona', written just prior to the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games.

"The presence of Columbus - Colom, to give him his Catalan name - requires some explanation today, but in 1882, the year Rius i Taulet commissioned the monument, it was self-evident. Columbus did have connections with Barcelona: he recuperated from his first voyage there and was received by Ferdinand and Isabella, who bestowed on him the plangent title of Almirante del Mar Oceano - Admiral of the Ocean Sea ... Late-nineteenth-century Catalans were convinced, as an article of patriotic faith, that Columbus was Catalan himself. (He was in fact Genoese.) Not only that: he was the Catalan who discovered the New World from whose subsequent plunder by Castile all future Catalans, at least until the time of the indianos, were excluded. It has never been lost on Barcelona that Columbus ... is pointing out to sea with his back towards Castile. Because of the inconvenient configuration of the coast, he is pointing in the general direction of Libya, not America, but the sea is Catalan. In order to reinforce Columbus's incipient catalanisme, the designer ... covered the plinth with ... figures symbolizing the role played by other Catalans in the discovery of America - the Blanes family, for instance, or the priest Bernat de Bol, who went on the Discoverer's second voyage and became the first apostolic vicar of the West Indies."

At the time I paid little attention apart from adding the fact that the Columbus statue was pointing out to Libya to my growing list of Barcelona trivia.

After Dinner Talk

Then a couple of years ago, a friend who had just come back from a holiday in the Caribbean came round for lunch and over coffee started talking about her visit to the British-controlled island of Montserrat. "That was when I realised Columbus had to be Catalan," she exclaimed. "After all, why would a Genoese sailor in the employment of the Crown of Castile call one of his discoveries after a religious mountain in the centre of Catalonia?"

This got us thinking and we quickly came up with Antilles, which loosely translates as 'Before Islands', presumably meaning the islands you come to before you reach the mainland. The word for islands in Catalan is illes whereas it is islas in Spanish. Similarly, the country Argentina uses the Catalan word for silver argent rather than the Spanish plata in its name.

These after-dinner reflections were a long way from solid evidence but my curiosity and been pricked and I decided to look into the Columbus story a little more closely.  To my surprise, there was a growing mass of literature on whether Christopher Columbus was Catalan or not.

The Conventional Story

According to legend, Christopher Columbus was born in 1451 in the Italian Republic of Genoa and his Italian name is Cristoforo Colombo while in Spanish he's known as Cristóbal Colón. His father was a humble wool weaver who worked both in Genoa and Savona and who also owned a cheese stand where young Cristoforo worked as a helper.

In 1473, Columbus began his apprenticeship as business agent for the important Centurione, Di Negro and Spinola families of Genoa, and in May 1476  took part in an armed convoy sent by Genoa to carry a valuable cargo to northern Europe. On the trip, he docked in Bristol, England and Galway, Ireland and possibly in Iceland. In the autumn of 1477 Columbus sailed  from Galway to Lisbon, where he met up with his brother Bartolomeo, and the two brothers continued trading for the Centurione family.

Apparently, Columbus was intelligent but self-taught and, as a result of his work with merchants and early sea voyages, he became interested in finding an alternative sea route to the Indies and China. In 1485, Columbus presented plans to João II, King of Portugal proposing that the king equip three sturdy ships and grant him a year to sail out into the Atlantic in search of a western route to the Orient.

Columbus also requested he be made "Great Admiral of the Ocean", appointed governor of any and all lands he discovered, and given one-tenth of all revenue from those lands. The story goes that the king submitted Columbus' proposal to his experts, who rejected it because they believed that Columbus' estimation of a travel distance of 2,400 miles was far too low.

On being rebuffed, Columbus sought an audience from the monarchs Fernando II of Aragon and Isabel I of Castile and on 1 May 1486 he presented his plans to Queen Isabel, who also referred them to a committee. After much consideration, the savants of Spain, like their counterparts in Portugal, replied that Columbus had grossly underestimated the distance to Asia. They pronounced the idea impractical and advised their Majesties to pass on the proposed venture.

However, legend has it that after persistent lobbying at the Spanish court and two years of negotiations, Columbus finally had success and in April 1492 at the Capitulations of Santa Fe, King Fernando and Queen Isabel agreed that if he succeeded he would be given the rank of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and appointed hereditary Viceroy and Governor of all the new lands he could claim for Spain.

Columbus would have the right to nominate three persons, from whom the sovereigns would choose one, for any office in the new lands. He would be entitled to 10% of all the revenues from the new lands in perpetuity. Additionally, he would also have the option of buying one-eighth interest in any commercial venture with the new lands and receive one-eighth of the profits.

I Have My Doubts

This zero to hero story of a poor Genoese wool weavers' son even getting access to, not only one but, two of the most powerful courts in Christendom seems a bit far-fetched to me. Furthermore, not content with having the journey financed and equipped for him, this humble pauper set conditions on the hereditary titles he would receive and how his discoveries would be distributed.

The Columbus of legend had no formal studies yet apparently learnt Latin, Portuguese, and Castilian and there are surviving documents written in all of these but none in Italian or the Genoese dialect. In fact, most of his writings are in Castilian and linguists suggest that they are, in fact, translations from another peninsula language, possibly Catalan or Galician.

For some reason, the story has Columbus born in 1451 but according to his own writings he was already leading maritime expeditions in the 1460s when young Cristoforo Colombo would have only been 15 or 16. Similarly, not only did a commoner get the Catholic kings to finance his expedition and provide him with three ships and crew, most of whom were Spanish not Portuguese or Genoese where he would likely have had more friends, but they also offered him the rank of Admiral and the title of Viceroy and Governor of all the new lands he discovered. Ferdinand and Isabella obviously had a lot of faith in the young Italian's abilities.

Titles such as Viceroy and Governor were only ever given to members of the Castilian or Aragonese nobility, never to foreigners and certainly in Aragon at the time the position of Viceroy, who would rule in the monarch's place, had only ever been given to members of the royal family.

More Research

I knew from the description of the plinth of the Columbus Monument in Barcelona that, in the 1880s, the Mayor and the City Council had believed Christopher Columbus and many of his companions to be Catalan. You only have to scratch the surface to find out how common the theory is. The first important publication on the subject was written in 1927 by the Peruvian historian Luis de Ulloa, who claimed that Christopher Columbus was a Catalan named Joan Colom, who after years of captaining pirate vessels established himself in Portugal and changed his name to Xristoferens Colomo.

Since the return of democracy in 1975, there have been other studies including a comparison of the Coats of Arms of the noble Barcelona family of Colom i Bertran and the official Coat of Arms of Christopher Columbus and both were found to include stripes, a rampant lion and a globe with a cross on top but the dove present on the Colom i Bertran Coat of Arms was missing the Columbus crest.

Coincidentally, the word dove is translated as colom in Catalan and according to testimonies in the court cases that the Columbus family brought against the Spanish monarchs for breaking their word on the hereditary titles promised at the Capitulations of Santa Fe, was initially present on the Columbus Coat of Arms. However, it was removed by Castilian censors in later versions presumably because it would have given away Columbus' true identity.

In 1976, another study showed that the four Colom Bertran brothers, Guillem, Francesc, Joan and Lluís, were clearly contemporaries of the Admiral. However, it wasn't until 1999 that the researchers from the Institut Nova Història led by Jordi Bilbeny began to pull the various threads together into a coherent whole. What follows is a much simplified version of the conclusions but gives a reasonably clear idea of their claims.

Joan Colom i Bertran

According to Bilbeny and his team, Christopher Columbus' real name was Joan Colom i Bertran from a Barcelona family of high-ranking religious or military men, navigators, cosmographers or merchants with access to the Court. His brothers, Francesc and Lluís were President of the Generalitat and a sea-captain respectively so the family had important political connections and maritime experience. Joan Colom had more brothers and sisters including Jaume, Guillem, Elionor, Isabel and Beatriu. All these names also appear in the official Christopher Columbus' family tree in their castilianised versions. Furthermore, Joan Colom had a son called Jaume whilst Columbus' son was called Diego, which is the medieval translation of Jaume in Castilian.

Joan Colom was born in 1424 and married twice. His first wife was Margarida d'Alós, with whom he had three sons, and his second Felipa de Coimbra, who was daughter of Pere of Portugal and of Elisabet of Urgell, which made her granddaughter of Jaume of Urgell, the failed Catalan pretender to the Aragonese throne.

Joan Colom had been a military leader on the side of the Generalitat in the Catalan Civil War against Fernando the Catholic's father Juan the Faithless during which time the Catalans had made Pere of Portugal their king. Following the defeat, Joan escaped and led pirate attacks off the coast of Catalonia on military and merchant targets before ending up in the service of Louis XI of France for whom he led expeditions into the Arctic. It seems very likely the Joan Colom would have visited North America so he knew of the existence of another continent across the Atalantic and reasoned that the rich pickings would be further south. This was why he could be so confident in his demands to the Portuguese and Spanish monarchs.

In the 1480s, Joan Colom wound up at the Potuguese court where he fell in love with Felipa, the sister of his deceased former ally, Pere of Portugal. They had a son called Ferran, who as great-grandson of Jaume of Urgell would have definitely had a claim to the throne of Aragon. Incidentally, Ferran is translated as Fernando or Hernando in Castilian and sure enough, the official Christopher Columbus had a son called Hernando.

For patriotic reasons, Joan Colom wanted to lead his expedition to the New World from Catalonia and, taking advantage of the amnesty for participants in the Civil War, installed himself in the port of Pals on the coast of Northern Catalonia. Negotiations began mainly with Fernando of Aragon in order to guarantee the benefits and hereditary titles, which would allow Colom to establish what would effectively be a new royal family in the New World. In return, Bilbeny suggests, Colom would have renounced his son Ferran's claims to the throne of the Crown of Aragon.

In August 1492, the expedition set sail from the Catalan port of Pals. The Spanish version claims Columbus embarked from Palos de la Frontera in Andalusia but recent studies show that as today, its port, which is set on a river estuary, was certainly not big enough to moor three large ocean-going ships. Furthermore, many of Columbus' companions are documented as living in the Empordà region of Catalonia and of being known to the Colom i Bertran family. The best example is the famous Yañes Pinzón brothers who in Catalan were Anes Pinçon.

In early engravings, most of the flags the ships carry bear stripes just like the Catalan senyera whilst the Castilian flag showing the picture of a castle is suspiciously absent. The flags cannot be Spanish flags because the red stripes on the gold background of the rojigualda wasn't invented until 1785. Incidentally, when you stop and think about it, the Spanish flag looks much more like the Catalan senyera than it does the Castilian flag. Perhaps the design was chosen to protect Castilian territorial claims to the Americas.

Censorship

There is so much evidence that Columbus and Colom were the same person and the reasons why the story was changed are pretty obvious. Colom's descendants were of royal descent and as soon as the Catholic Kings realised how much power they had given away at the Capitulations of Santa Fe and the size and wealth of the new territory, they knew they had made a mistake.

Fernando, in particular, was autocratic enough to have introduced the Inquisition so they would have had few qualms about breaking their deal with some rebellious Catalan nobles. Furthermore, the printing press was just beginning to come to centre stage and someone as capable as Fernando would have realised the power of propaganda. Unfortunately, the censors left traces of the cover-up and eagle-eyed researchers can still find them to this day.

The only remaining question is why did a Barcelona noble called Joan change his name to Christopher or Cristòfor in Catalan. The answer is simple. These were religious times and the current pope was the Valencian Alexander VI of the Borja family, who as a Catalan speaker would have known Joan Colom. The reason for the expedition wasn't only commercial but was to take Christianity across the water just as Saint Christopher had carried Jesus across the river in the Bible tale.

An interesting footnote to Catalan Columbus mystery came in 2011 when Spanish researchers collected the DNA of the families of the various claimants and the plan was to make a comparison with the DNA of Hernando Colón whose body lies in Seville Cathedral. As the research was drawing to a close, lead investigator Dr José Antonio Lorente was interviewed on Catalan TV and said that the Catalan hypothesis looked the most likely. Mysteriously, the research was never heard of again and the results still haven't been published.

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An edited version of this article is included in my book Catalonia Is Not Spain: A Historical Perspective.

It is available on Amazon as you will see by clicking on the following links.

Catalonia Is Not Spain: A Historical Perspective on Amazon.co.uk

Catalonia Is Not Spain: A Historical Perspective on Amazon.es

Catalonia Is Not Spain: A Historical Perspective on Amazon.com

You can also find out More on My Blog

As far as the official history of Spain is concerned, the reign of Felipe II was, if anything, even more important than that of his father Carlos V, who by a slow process of piecemeal abdication from 1550 onwards left his son as king of Castile, Aragon and the Italian possession of Naples and Sicily as well as the Netherlands and newly conquered American and African territories. Felipe II became King of Portugal in 1581 and during his reign the Spanish began the exploitation of colonies as far afield as the Philippines, which were named after him. The expression "The empire on which the sun never sets" was coined during reign of Felipe II and reflects the extent and power of the Spanish empire at the time.

On the military front, the reign began well with victories against the French at Saint Quentin and Gravelines in 1557 and 1558 and a little later the major victory against the Turks at Lepanto in 1571. However, Felipe is best remembered for losing a large part of Spain's Dutch possessions, which declared independence from Spain in 1581, and the crushing defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English and the intemperate weather conditions in 1588. Although historians attribute these victories and defeats to Spain, they were in fact Atlantic campaigns serving Castilian foreign policy and Mediterranean Catalonia had no inclination to get involved.

Phillip's main contribution to the Siglo de Oro was the building of the great monastery-palace of El Escorial and his decision in 1561 to turn the nearby small town of Madrid into the capital of the Spanish Empire, beginning a building programme that would be continued by his successors. From a Catalan point of view, the decision to concentrate administration and decision-making in a town chosen mainly for its central location changed the course of history.

Stuck in the middle of Castile's vast central meseta, Madrid is the highest capital of any major European country. Unlike most other cities, it is not set on the coast or a navigable river and, although located in the centre of the Iberian peninsula, in the 16th century this made it impossible to get to. This meant a series of radial caminos reals or royal roads had to be built in order to connect the capital with the provinces and there is no other country to which the term centralism can be more aptly applied.

All public investment since the time of Felipe II has been based political rather than economic considerations and roads, railway lines and even flight routes fan out from Madrid deliberately marginalising the towns on the periphery. Prioritising the capital has meant that private investors have had to pay for transport infrastructure with the resulting need for profit, hence the high cost of toll motorways in Catalonia.

Airports in Spain are controlled by a national board AENA, which prioritises international flights to Madrid making it difficult for international businessmen to get directly to Barcelona or Bilbao. Similarly, the Mediterranean corridor, the freight railway linking Barcelona, Valencia, Cartagena, Malaga and Algeciras with Europe has been repeatedly blocked by central government in favour of a Central corridor connecting Madrid with Europe by blasting a tunnel through the Pyrenees at a much higher cost. Modern national transport policy is a direct consequence of Felipe II's decision to make the small town of Madrid the capital of his empire in 1561.

Another consequence of the decision was that unlike other provincial capitals located on rivers or the coast, Madrid had no history of commerce and so had no merchant bourgeoisie or skilled tradesmen. It was initially a city populated by courtiers and government officials and its business life was dependent on its role as a centre of government. This favoured the aversion of the Castilian nobility to work and money-making mentioned in an earlier chapter. To this day, Madrid businesses depend as much on government contracts as they do on competing for international markets giving them an unfair advantage over provincial capitals such as Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao or Seville.

Another cause for Catalan concern was the consolidation of the Spanish Inquisition and Felipe's general religious intolerance against not only Jews and Muslims but also Protestants. This not only had a detrimental effect on Catalan trade but also is a cornerstone of the Black Legend. For Northern European historians, it was the violence with which the military campaign was conducted against Dutch Protestants that sealed the Spanish reputation for cruelty. To this day, Spain's military commander in the Dutch campaign, the Duke of Alba, is the bogeyman that haunts children's nightmares in Holland.

Felipe II is famously quoted as saying "Before suffering the slightest damage to religion in the service of God, I would lose all of my estates and a hundred lives, if I had them, because I do not wish nor do I desire to be the ruler of heretics," and the violence with which the Spanish conquistadors evangelised, but also raped and tortured, the indigenous population of the Americas adds further fuel to the Black Legend.

As he strived to enforce Catholic orthodoxy through an intensification of the Inquisition, students were barred from studying elsewhere and books printed by Spaniards outside the kingdom were banned. This brought an early introduction of censorship and propaganda, which I hinted at in the Columbus chapter but was used for many other purposes.

Admittedly, the School of Salamanca flourished but none of this benefitted Catalonia, in general. or Barcelona, in particular, which being a sea port has long been an entry point for new and unconventional ideas to the peninsula. The city's prosperity has always been based on the fact that it's a difficult to control melting pot, which contrasts sharply with the closed mentality of land-locked Central Spain.

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This excerpt is taken from the Chapter 12 of my forthcoming book 'Catalonia Is Not Spain: A Historical Perspective'

You can find out more on My Blog

Or help me get the book published by contributing to my Crowdfunding Project on Verkami

At the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Catalans actually pledged allegiance to the Bourbon pretender Philip of Anjou, future Felipe V.

They changed sides and began to support the Austrian Archduke Charles after the Pact of Genoa of 1705, which was signed with the English, who promised them military support and to guarantee the Catalan laws and constitutions.

Archduke Charles became Holy Roman Emperor and the English were not so keen on supporting him and also there was a change of government from Whigs to Tories. England pulled out of the war in 1713 after signing the Treaty of Utrecht, from which they got Gibraltar and Menorca.

The Catalans continued fighting but the attrocities committed by the Franco-Castilian troops of Felipe V against the Catalans during the Siege of Barcelona in 1714 preyed on the minds of many liberal Whigs. The case was brought up in Parliament and a number of books were published.

I particularly like the subtitle of 'The Case of the Catalans Consider'd' - 'You gain your Ends and Damn them when you're done'.

That's exactly what the English did to the Catalans!

There's been a lot of talk about how the result of the Scottish referendum might affect the Catalan independence movement but to be perfectly honest I always thought it was irrelevant.

Perhaps a YES would have created a precedent and opened up the way for recognition of Catalonia and acceptance by the EU but equally it might have increased fear that more nation-states would break apart and so countries like France, Italy and Begium would have been even keener to block a Catalan referendum.

What is very clear is that the right-wing Spanish nationalist press in Madrid will have field day claiming that this is the end of independence movements for the forseeable future. This is also completely false. There is a strong grassroots movement here, the majority of political parties are in favour of a referendum and a date's been set. Even if Catalans don't manage to vote on November 9th, the Catalan people's desire to control their own future won't go away.

No, I'm disappointed because I really believe that the age of big unresponsive and aggressive nation states is over. The EU is an opportunity for greater regionalisation, call it autonomy, call it devolution, call it independence, call it what you will.

I'm sad for the people of Scotland because they have less chance of creating a nuclear-free, more socially just and economically viable Scotland on their own terms according to their own Scottish priorities.

Bad luck, folks! Keep trying! .... What was it that Robert the Bruce said?

Una abraçada from Catalonia and I hope you'll be with us and standing alongside us in our own struggle for greater independence and justice.

It is not surprising that many Spaniards consider the reign of the Catholic Kings as the beginning of modern Spain, and commentators of the time were aware of the historic importance of the union. When Fernando the Catholic inherited the Crown of Aragon in 1479, some members of the Royal Council even suggested that Fernando and Isabel adopted the title of Kings of Spain. They refused because both were concerned with consolidating their own power base and were jealous of external interference, even from a spouse.

Castilian writer Diego de Valera is quoted as addressing Fernando and Isabella with these words. "You have the monarchy of all the Spains and you reform the imperial throne with the blood of the Goths from which you descend and which for so long has been spilled and spread." Catalan humanists such as Cardinal of Girona, Joan Margarit i Pau, said "Hispaniam restaurate et recuperate" and in the dedication of his Paraliponenom Hispaniae wrote, "In coming to the throne of your fathers and progenitors you have returned with your matrimonial bond to the Hispanias Citerior and Ulterior the unity which since the time of the Romans and the Visigoths had been lost".

However, all contemporary commentators refer to the plural Spains, embodied in the Roman concept of separate provinces of Hispania, rather than a singular Spain of the modern state we know today. As J.H.Elliot states in his excellent Imperial Spain "The union itself was purely dynastic: a union not of two peoples but of two royal houses. Other than the fact that henceforth Castile and Aragon would share the same monarch, there would, in theory, be no change either in their status or in the form of government. It was true that, in the person of Fernando, their foreign policies were likely to be fused, but in other respects they would continue to lead the lives they had led before the Union."

Just like the Reconquista mentioned in an earlier chapter, the idea of a united Spain under the Catholic Kings is a much later, probably 19th century concept, when the nation-states and national consciousness was developing in most modern European countries. I return to the analogy with the union of England and Scotland. When James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, the two countries remained separate under a single monarch until the Act of Union in 1707. Fernando and Isabel were husband and wife but ruled their respective realms separately.

Furthermore, the citizens of the two kingdoms had sense that they were part of a unified whole, either politically or culturally. The Crowns of Aragon and Castile had different laws, tax systems, political institutions, coinages, cultural traditions and languages.

It is difficult to appreciate from a modern perspective but for a Catalan, Castile was as much if not more a foreign country than much of what is now Italy. Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and Naples had been part of the Crown of Aragon for centuries. For a Castilian, Catalonia was at least as foreign as Portugal. In the time of horse travel, Portugal was much more accessible from Castile and there were no natural borders such as the mighty Pyrenees to divide the two territories.

The reasons why Castile began to attain ascendancy were two-fold. The political model that Castile had developed was much more favourable to autocratic rule than that developed by the constituent parts of the Crown of Aragon. In Castile, the monarch had much more legislative and fiscal power than the kings of Aragon, who had to make pacts with the various parliamentary bodies before taking any decision.

Furthermore, the dynastic union of the Crown of Aragon and the Crown of Castile wasn't a union of equals. The Catholic Kings made Castile into the political pivot of the new monarchy because it was bigger, more centrally positioned in the peninsula, had a much larger population and was also going through an economic boom. The Crown of Aragon, in general, and Catalonia, in particular, had fallen on hard times due to war, plague and failed harvests. In fact, by the late 15th century Valencia was a more prosperous Mediterranean port than Barcelona.

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This excerpt is taken from the Chapter 8 of my forthcoming book 'Catalonia Is Not Spain: A Historical Perspective'

You can find out more on My Blog

Or help me get the book published by contributing to my Crowdfunding Project on Verkami

A short walk round Barcelona's Ciutat Vella, literally Old City, makes it obvious that the city was once the capital of a great empire. Today, in fact, Barcelona is probably the most important city in Europe that is not the capital of a state. In many respects this is a problem for landlocked and less obviously attractive Madrid, which although a wonderful city, doesn't have quite the same charms as Barcelona, the Gran Encisera or Great Enchantress.

Founded as a Roman castrum or military encampment in around 14 BC on the site of an Iberian settlement, Barcino was one of the many natural ports along the stretch of coast between Emporion, where the Roman originally landed, and Tarraco or Tarragona, which they made their capital. It was set on a small hill, Mons Taber, a short way back from the sea and had two main streets Decamanus Maximus and Cardus Maximus, which still run through the Gothic Quarter as Carrer del Bisbe and Carrer de la Llibreteria respectively.

By the second century AD, Barcino was a fortified oppidum with a population of around 5,000. Long sections of the original Roman walls can still be seen today and three surviving column of the Temple of Augustus stand at the peak of Mont Taber on Carrer Paradis just behind the Cathedral. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, the Palau de la Generalitat stands roughly on the site of the Roman forum so government has been exercised from the same location in Barcelona for more than 2,000 years.

Recent excavations suggest that, particularly throughout the later stages of the Roman Empire, Barcino was significantly more important than originally thought. When Roman control began to weaken in the early 5th century and Hispania was invaded by Germanic tribes, it is not surprising then that the Visigoths made Barchinona one of their important centres.

Ataülf established his court in Barchinona before being murdered by his troops there in 415 AD and his successor, Wallia, moved the capital of the Visigoth empire of Aquitania and Gallia Narbonensis to Toulouse leaving Barchinona as an important military post because of its fortified walls and trading port. From about 500 AD onward, Barchinona alternated as capital of the Visigoth empire with Toulouse until Toledo was made capital of Visigoth Hispania under Leovigildus in 573 AD.

It seems clear that, although part of Spain now, Barcelona's historical position has always been as part of a territory straddling modern Spain and France that looks out towards the Mediterranean. This is the territory where Catalonia exercises its cultural and linguistic influence and even today she is capital of a European Union megaregion, which stretches along the Mediterranean coast from Marseille to Valencia. Catalonia is not Spain because it is much more than that.

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This excerpt is taken from the Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book 'Catalonia Is Not Spain: A Historical Perspective'

You can find out more on My Blog

Or help me get the book published by contributing to my Crowdfunding Project on Verkami

Catalonia's location as a terra de pas or passageway between the Iberian peninsula and the rest of Europe has definitely marked its history as has its position on the Mediterranean. A natural meeting point for different cultures, the territories that Catalonia came to occupy were also of strategic importance to invaders who came from both north and south and also from the sea.

Furthermore, as the land is poor in natural resources, such as precious metals or wheat, the inhabitants had no choice but to go abroad and trade if only in order to survive. Due to Catalonia's reliance on foreign trade, a merchant class developed very early on to rival the oligarchy of the nobles.

Similarly, early trade guilds were set up to regulate local commerce and administer taxes. Consequently, a prosperous and powerful middle class grew up and towns tended to be governed by committees including representatives of the nobility, the church and the merchants and guilds.

As I have already mentioned, the Catalan counties remained vassals of the Franks for longer than other territories in the north of the Iberian peninsula. The House of Barcelona gradually grew to dominate the Marca Hispanica until the title of Count of Barcelona became hereditary under Guifré el Pilós in 897 and declared independence from the Franks under Borrell II in 988. However, the Count of Barcelona was still primus inter pares, first amongst equals, and could only maintain ascendancy over the other counts by consensus.

This contrasts sharply with the political development of landlocked Castile, which was centred on military conquest from and defence against the Moors for more than 250 longer than the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon. The conquest of Valencia was completed by Jaume I in 1238 whilst the Catholic Kings didn't complete the conquest of Granada until 1492.

Inevitably, a military society would develop along different lines to a society based on trade and commerce. The nobility were military commanders normally subject to direct orders from the king and when a territory was conquered its government was ceded to the noble who conquered it. The land-owning nobles owed allegiance to the king and this relationship favoured absolute monarchy.

As territory was acquired quickly by military means, it was allotted as rewards to nobility, mercenaries and military to exploit in large estates known as latifundia. The gifts finished the traditional small private ownership of land, eliminating a social class that had also been typical of the Al-Andalus period. This didn't happen in Catalonia where peasants were smallholders jealous of their land rights and strongly motivated to get the best out of their plot.

The nobles of Southern Castile and Andalusia were often absentee landowners more interested in the life and intrigues in the royal court than making their large estates more efficient. The population in Southern Spain were not smallholders but an underclass of jornaleros, landless peasants who were hired by the latifundists as day workers for specific seasonal campaigns. The Castilian peasant class lived for the most part in abject poverty and the absence of a dominant class of merchants and tradesmen meant that early democratic structures did not develop in the same way as they did in Catalonia.

A corollary of this was that the Castilian nobility tended to have a distaste for work and commerce considering it below them. A Castilian noble became wealthy as a result of land acquisition not work. The long-term effect of this was a mistrust of Jews, which resulted in their expulsion from Spain in 1492, and the consequent economic and financial problems of the 16th century. Symptomatic of this is the belief that Catalans are mean and avaricious simply because the region remains the industrial and commercial powerhouse of Spain.

These cultural, economic and territorial differences between Castile and a Crown of Aragon have led to two political visions for Spain. Unfortunately, a centralised government ruled by an absolute monarch or for large periods of the 20th century, a dictator, with heavy influence of both the military and the church has generally held sway.

Catalans are very proud of their democratic traditions and their defence has been a major motivation throughout their history. In fact, La Diada, the Catalan National Day celebrated every year on September 11th commemorates the abolition of the Catalan political institutions and charters in 1714 and serves as a reminder that Catalonia wants its traditional democratic rights returned.

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This excerpt is taken from the Chapter 6 of my forthcoming book 'Catalonia Is Not Spain: A Historical Perspective'

You can find out more on My Blog

Or help me get the book published by contributing to my Crowdfunding Project on Verkami

There is a common confusion that revolves around the difference between the Kingdom of Aragon and the Crown of Aragon, which initially also included Catalonia and came to include the Kingdoms of Valencia, Mallorca, Sardinia, Sicily and Naples as well as parts of Greece.

As all these constituent parts were separate sovereign states, the Crown of Aragon is often refer to by the convenient term the Catalan-Aragonese Confederation. This is because the two founder states, the Kingdom of Aragon and the Principality of Catalonia always retained their sovereignty. However, the similarity between the names of the Kingdom and the Crown of Aragon is often used as an excuse to say that Catalonia was always part of Aragon and has never existed in its own right.

Although nearly 30 years in Barcelona has given me a very Catalan my view on things, I have also had the good fortune to explore the rest of Spain in-depth. A couple of years ago, one of our closest friends invited us to spend a week at her home in Palencia in Northern Castile, and with typical Castilian generosity took us on a fascinating historical, cultural and gastronomic tours of the region.

Very interested to hear my impressions, our friend was delighted to see that I was blown away by everything I saw but slightly annoyed that my experiences only served to confirm my sense of the difference between Castile and Catalonia. There are no Visigoth churches comparable with San Juan de Baños in Catalonia, for example, and the plateresque period so important in Castilian religious ornamentation finds virtually no representation in Catalan church design. Similarly, I quickly became aware of the importance of the Kings of Navarre on the region during the Christian conquest and found myself reading up on a whole set of names with whom I was previously unacquainted. Furthermore, you try getting decent lechazo here in Barcelona.

I can't remember exactly how the topic came up but one morning over breakfast, we were talking about the origins of the respective regions and our friend came out with the claim that Catalonia had never existed as a separate entity because it was ruled by the Count of Barcelona. Her argument was that being only counts, they had to be vassals of somebody and that somebody had to be the King of Aragon so Catalonia had never existed in its own right.

Later that day we were taken into Valladolid and given an amazing tour of the city by a local historian. Once again, the topic of Catalonia came up and the historian also informed me that Catalonia had never existed other than as part of Aragon. It was at this point, by the way, that I discovered that mentioning the idea of a Catalan-Aragonese Confederation drives proud Castilians absolutely ballistic.

The idea that separate countries can be ruled by the same monarch whilst at the same time retaining their own laws, institutions and identities is very easy to understand. A very clear example would be that of England and Scotland, whose King James VI became James I of England in 1603. The two countries remained completely separate both politically and culturally throughout the 17th century until they were united politically at least by the Act of Union in 1707.

This is much the same as Catalonia and Aragon, which remained united but separate for centuries and who together were able to create an empire including Catalonia, Aragon, Valencia and Balearic Islands as well as large parts of Southern France and later Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, Naples and Milan and even Athens and Neopatria in Greece. I'll be looking at the commercial rather than territorial motivations behind this expansion later on but it is clear that the Crown of Aragon is what for convenience Catalan historians refer to as the Catalano-Aragonese Confederation.

The Crown of Aragon was a composite monarchy, also nowadays referred to as a confederation of individual states or kingdoms. It was ruled by one king as a result of the dynastic union of the Kingdom of Aragon and the County of Barcelona. The component realms of the Crown were not united politically except at the level of the king, who ruled over each autonomous polity according to its own laws, raising funds under each tax structure, dealing separately with each Cortes.

Put in contemporary terms, it has sometimes been considered that the different lands of the Crown of Aragon functioned more as a confederacy of cultures rather than as a single country. In this sense, the larger Crown of Aragon must not be confused with one of its constituent parts, the Kingdom of Aragon, from which it takes its name.

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This excerpt is taken from the Chapter 4 of my forthcoming book 'Catalonia Is Not Spain: A Historical Perspective'

You can find out more on My Blog

Or help me get the book published by contributing to my Crowdfunding Project on Verkami

When I arrived in Barcelona in 1988, I landed in what I thought was Barcelona, Spain. I had no idea that Catalonia had ever been a separate country or had aspirations of separating from Spain again in the future. I immediately fell in love with life in the city of Barcelona and my early trips up the coast and out into the Catalan countryside convinced me that I'd wound up in a pretty cool place.

Catalonia still felt like a region of Spain to me so given the choice of two languages, I opted to learn Spanish rather than Catalan. All the bilingual Catalans spoke Spanish anyway and it would also mean I'd get by on jaunts around the rest of Spain.

The Catalanisation process was a slow one. I suppose it began by choosing to support FC Barcelona rather than Real Madrid and continued as I started to watch more and more television in Catalan. In those days, Spanish television was as dreadful as it is now with game shows, South American soap operas and dumb gossip programmes.

I vividly remember the first time I switched the dial on my cheap portable TV over to Catalan TV3 and was greeted by an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In fact, the 'Space the final frontier..' introduction was the first thing I ever memorised in the Catalan language. What's more, I was probably feeling a bit homesick and lots of British series were shown on TV3. Dubbed versions of sitcoms, such as Fawlty Towers, The Young Ones, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and Yes, Minister, and soaps such as Eastenders, Coronation Street and Neighbours all made me feel much more at home even if it was a little surrealistic watching Michael Crawford say 'Oooh, Betty ...' and then continue in Catalan.

This must have been around 1989 or 1990 and I wasn't yet familiar with some of the differences between Catalan and Spanish culture. To be perfectly honest, it all seemed a foreign jumble to me. I do remember thinking, though, that if these people chose to show British TV series, they probably had more in common with me than the ones that chose to show South American soaps and bullfighting.

Obviously my grasp of the language improved very quickly and I began to notice the positive effect that a few words of Catalan had on people. I was mainly freelance English teaching at the time and every time I went to meet a new client things seemed to go better if I introduced myself in Catalan, apologised for my limitations and then switched to Spanish. So in many respects my first reason for getting to grips with the languages was in order to get better work.

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This excerpt is taken from the first chapter of my forthcoming book 'Catalonia Is Not Spain: A Historical Perspective'

You can find out more on My Blog

Or help me get the book published by contributing to my Crowdfunding Project on Verkami