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'
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