Principality of Catalonia
gigatos | March 26, 2022
Summary
The counties that eventually formed the Principality of Catalonia were gradually united under the rule of the Counts of Barcelona. In 1137 the Counts of Barcelona and the Kingdom of Aragon were united under a common dynasty, thus forming what modern historians call the Crown of Aragon. Despite this, Aragon and Catalonia maintained their own political structure and legal traditions, developing separate political communities over the following centuries. Under Alfonso II the Celestial (ruled 1164-1196) Catalonia was first designated as a legal unit. However, the term Principality of Catalonia was not legally used until the fourteenth century, when it began to refer to the territories ruled by the Catalan Cortes.
The institutional system of the Principality changed over the centuries. Political bodies (such as the Cortes, the Generalitat or the Council of the Hundred) were formed and legislation (constitutions derived from the Custom of Barcelona) was elaborated, which limited royal power and consolidated the political model of pactism. Catalonia contributed to the development of the Crown”s trade and troops, and especially its navy. Catalan flourished and spread through the incorporation of new territories into the Crown, such as Valencia, the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, Sicily, Naples and Athens, which formed the Thalassocracy in the Mediterranean. The crisis of the fourteenth century, the end of the reign of the House of Barcelona (1410) and the civil war (1462-1472) reduced the importance of the principality to the Crown and its role in international affairs.
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Origins
Like many other lands on the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula, Catalonia was colonized by the ancient Greeks who chose to settle in Rosas. Both Greeks and Carthaginians interacted with the main Iberian population. After the defeat of Carthage, Catalonia, along with the rest of Spain, became part of the Roman Empire. Tarracon became one of the main Roman forts on the Iberian Peninsula and the capital of the province of Tarracon Spain.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire near the end of the 5th century, the Visigoths came to power, the Moorish Al-Andalus subjugated the territory in the early 8th century, after conquering the kingdom of the Visigoths in 711-718. After the defeat of the troops of Emir Abdur-Rahman al-Ghafiki at the Battle of Poitiers, the Franks gradually took control of the former Visigoth territories north of the Pyrenees, previously captured or allied with the Muslims, in that part of Catalonia that is now part of France. In 795 Charlemagne created what came to be known as the Spanish Brand, a buffer zone behind the region of Septimania, composed of separate self-governing minor kingdoms, which served as a defensive border between the Umayyads of Al-Andalus and the Frankish kingdom.
In 987 Count Borrell II refused to recognize the Frankish King Hugo Capet and his new dynasty, and thus effectively removed Barcelona from Frankish rule. During the ninth and tenth centuries, the Catalan counties became dominated by the alueurs (cat. aloers), peasants with small family holdings – allodes, who were not bound by formal vassal dependence, did not incur any duties and were engaged in consumptive farming. At the beginning of the eleventh century Catalan counties underwent a process of feudalization – under the pressure of the lords, the formerly independent peasants entered into vassal ties. The middle of the century is characterized by fierce social enmity. The lords used violence against the peasants, taking advantage of new military tactics and recruiting well-armed mounted mercenary soldiers. By the end of the century most of the Aluer were converted to vassals. During the regency of Hermesinda of Carcassonne, the decay of central authority became evident. In response to feudal violence, the Catholic Church created sagreres, zones within a radius of 30 paces around churches where violence was forbidden under pain of excommunication, and founded the Peace and Reconciliation movements of God. The Council of Toulouse in Roussillon in 1027, where the Truce of God was first proclaimed, was presided over by Abbot Oliba.
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The dynastic union
In 1137 Ramón Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona, married Petronila of Aragon, thus creating a dynastic union between the Count of Barcelona with its subordinate territories and the Kingdom of Aragon. This union later formed the basis of the Crown of Aragon. During the reign of Ramón Berenguer IV, Lleida and Tortosa were also conquered.
The Battle of Mure (12 September 1213) and the unexpected defeat of King Pedro II and his vassals and allies, the Counts of Toulouse, Commenge and Foix, led to the fading of the strong human, cultural and economic ties that existed between the territories of Catalonia and Languedoc.
In 1258 the Treaty of Corbeil was concluded. Jaime I of Aragon, a descendant of Sunifred and Bello, and thus heir to the House of Barcelona, ceded his family rights and possessions in the Languedoc and recognized Louis IX, King of France of the Capetings, as heir to the Carolingian dynasty. In return, the King of France formally renounced his nominal suzerainty over the Catalan counties. The de facto independent Catalan counties were also recognized as such de jure, but the agreement meant that the separation of the peoples of Catalonia and Languedoc was irreversible.
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At the same time, the Principality of Catalonia developed a complex institutional and political system based on the notion of an agreement between the estates of the state and the king. Laws (called constitutions) required the approval of the Cortes Generales of Catalonia, one of the first parliamentary bodies in Europe, which forbade the royal power to create legislation unilaterally (starting from 1283). The first Catalan constitutions were adopted by the Catalan Cortes in Barcelona in 1283. The last constitutions were promulgated by the cortes in 1705-1706, under the presidency of the disputed King Charles III. The collections of constitutions and other rights of Catalonia followed the tradition of the Roman codes. These constitutions formed an elaborate body of rights for all inhabitants of the principality and limited the power of kings.
Originating in the 11th century, the Cortes General de Catalunya was one of the first parliaments in continental Europe. The cortes consisted of representatives of the three estates, and their president was the king. The modern parliament of Catalonia is considered a symbolic and historical successor of the former cortes.
In order to collect general taxes, the Cortes of 1359 established a permanent representation of deputies called the Diputació del General, later known as the Generalitat, which gained important political influence in the following centuries.
The thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth century were a period of prosperity for the principality. The population increased and the Catalan language and culture expanded to the islands of the Western Mediterranean. In the reign of Pedro III the Great Sicily was conquered and the invasion of the French Crusaders repulsed. His son and heir Alfonso III conquered Menorca, and Pedro”s second son Jaime II conquered Sardinia. Catalonia was the center of the empire. The Catalan company under Roger de Flor, composed of experienced mercenary almogavars, veterans of the War of Sicily Vespers, was hired by the Byzantine Empire to fight the Turks and defeated them in several battles. After the assassination of Roger de Flore by order of the emperor”s son Michael Palaeologus (1305), the company retaliated by plundering Byzantine territory and on behalf of the king of Aragon occupied the duchies of Athens and Neopatria. Catalan rule in Greek lands lasted until 1390.
Territorial expansion was accompanied by a great increase in Catalan trade, the center of which was Barcelona. The developed trade network that stretched across the Mediterranean could rival that of the maritime republics of Genoa and Venice. In the spirit of this development, institutions such as the Maritime Consulate, one of the first collections of maritime law, were created for the legal protection of merchants.
The second quarter of the fourteenth century witnessed critical changes in Catalonia, marked by a succession of natural disasters, demographic crises, stagnation and decline of the Catalan economy, and rising social tensions. The possessions of the Crown of Aragon were greatly affected by the Black Death and later outbreaks of the plague. Between 1347 and 1497 Catalonia lost 37 percent of its population.
In 1410, leaving no surviving heirs, Martin I died. By a compromise in Caspe, Ferdinand of the Castilian house of Trastamar received the crown of Aragon as Ferdinand I of Aragon. During the reign of Juan II, social and political contradictions caused a civil war in Catalonia (1462-1472). In 1493 France formally annexed the counties of Roussillon and Cerdanya, which it had occupied during the conflict. Under Juan”s son, Ferdinand II, the northern Catalan counties were returned without war, and a constitution of observance (cat. Constitució de l”Observança) (1481) was adopted, establishing the subordination of royal authority to laws approved by the Catalan cortes. After decades of opposition, the Arbitration of Guadalupe (1486) freed serfs from most feudal abuses in exchange for a ransom.
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The marriage of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1469 united two of the three main Christian kingdoms on the Iberian peninsula, and after Ferdinand II”s invasion of Navarre in 1512 the kingdom of Navarre was also annexed.
This caused a strengthening of the conception of Spain already existing in the minds of these kings, consisting of the former Crown of Aragon, Castile, and Navarra, annexed by Castile in 1515. In 1492 the last remaining part of Al-Andalus around Granada was conquered and the Spanish conquest of the Americas began. Political influence began to shift from Aragon toward Castile and, later, from Castile to the Spanish Empire, which was engaged in frequent wars in Europe in the struggle for world domination. In 1516 Charles I became the first king to rule over the crowns of Castile and Aragon simultaneously as his own dominions. After the death of his grandfather Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, he was elected Holy Roman Emperor under the name Charles V in 1519. Charles V”s reign was a relatively harmonious period, and Catalonia generally accepted the new arrangement of Spain, despite the decline of its own importance.
For a long time Catalonia, as part of the former Crown of Aragon, continued to maintain its own laws and constitutions, but their importance gradually waned in the transition from a treaty-ruled territory to a centralized model, and as a result of the kings” desire to extract as many resources as possible from the territories. In the end, the special Catalan rights were destroyed by the defeat of the War of the Spanish Succession.
In the two centuries that followed, Catalonia usually found itself on the losing side in a series of wars that steadily led to an increasing centralization of power in Spain. Despite this, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries the role of the political community in local affairs and the general government of the country was increased, while royal power remained relatively limited, especially after the last two Cortes (1701-1702 and 1705-1706). The contradictions between the constitutional Catalan institutions and the increasingly centralized monarchy, together with other factors such as the economic crisis, the presence of soldiers and peasant revolts caused various conflicts such as the Catalan Rebellion, also known as the War of the Reapers (1640-1652), in the context of the Franco-Spanish War of 1635-1659. During this war Catalonia, led by the president of the Generalitat Pau Claris, declared itself an independent republic under French protectorate in 1641 and then a principality within the French monarchy, but the Catalans were defeated and reincorporated into Spain in 1652.
At the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, in which the Catalans and their army, together with other parts of the Crown of Aragon, supported the unsuccessful claim of Archduke Charles to the Spanish throne as Charles III, the victorious Bourbon Duke of Anjou, now Philip V, after a long siege, occupied the capital of Catalonia on September 11, 1714, and in 1716 signed the Decrees of Nueva Planta, which abolished the Crown of Aragon and all remaining Catalan institutions and laws (except civil law) and prohibited the administrative use of the Catalan language.
The Franco era ended with the death of Franco in 1975. In Spain”s subsequent transition to democracy, Catalonia regained its cultural and political autonomy. It became one of the autonomous communities of Spain. In comparison, “Northern Catalonia” in France has no autonomy.
The Weger was appointed by the king and was accountable to him. He was the military commander of his vägeria (and thus caretaker of state-owned castles), chief magistrate, and responsible for public finances in the same area. As time went on, the functions of the veger became more and more centered around the judiciary. Under him there were cortes de veguer or cortes de la vegueria with their own seal. The cortes had authority in all matters except those pertaining to the feudal aristocracy. They usually dealt with petitions concerning royal, civil and criminal matters. However, the veger also retained some military functions: he was commander of the militia and governor of the royal castles. His job was to keep law and order and maintain royal peace: in many respects his position was similar to that of sheriff in England.
Some larger vegeries included one or more sub-vegeries (cat. sotsvegueria), which had a considerable degree of autonomy. At the end of the twelfth century there were twelve sotsvegueria in Catalonia. At the end of the reign of Pedro III the Great (1285) there were seventeen, and during the reign of Jaime II the Just there were twenty-one. After the French annexation of Perpignan and Villefranche de Conflan in 1659, Catalonia was divided into 15 végeries, nine sub-regions, and one special district of Val d”Aran. This administrative division was in force until 1716, when it was replaced by the Castilian corrhimientos.
The first mention of Principatus Cathaloniae is found in the convocation of the cortes at Perpignan in 1350, presided over by Pedro IV of Aragon and III of Barcelona. The purpose of this was to indicate that the territory under the laws of these cortes was not a kingdom, but an extended territory under the Count of Barcelona, who was also King of Aragon, as shown in the “Acts of the General Cortes of the Crown of Aragon 1362-1363.” However, an earlier reference, in a more informal context, seems to be present in the chronicles of Ramon Muntaner.
When more counties came under the jurisdiction of the Count of Barcelona and Cortes, such as the Countship of Urgell, the name “Catalonia,” which included several counties under different names, including the Countship of Barcelona, began to be used to refer to the entire subordinate territory as a whole. The terms Catalonia and catalans were commonly used in relation to the territory in northeastern Spain and western Mediterranean France, and their inhabitants, and not just for the county of Barcelona, at least from the beginning of the twelfth century, as can be seen from the earliest written references to these names in Liber maiolichinus (about 1117-1125).
In 1931 the republican movements chose to abandon the term because of its historical association with the monarchy, but it continued to be used by pan-Catalanists to distinguish Catalonia from the other “Catalan lands”. Today it is common to use the term Principality to refer to the territories of the Autonomous Community, and sometimes also includes Andorra, “Northern Catalonia” and the part of Aragon adjacent to Catalonia, although the term is not used in the Statutes of Catalan Autonomy.
Catalan constitutes the original core of the Catalan-speaking territories. Catalan shares common features with the Romance languages of Iberia and the Gallo-Romance languages of southern France. Some linguists consider it an Ibero-Romanic language, while most consider it a Gallo-Romanic language, such as French and Occitan, which diverged from Catalan between the 11th and 14th centuries.
Catalan experienced a golden age in the late Middle Ages, reaching a peak of maturity and cultural completeness, and with the inclusion of new lands in the dominions of the Crown of Aragon it spread territorially. Examples of this are the works of the Mallorcan Raymund Lullius (1232-1315), the Four Great Chronicles (13th-14th centuries), and the Valencian school of poetry, culminating in Ausias Marcus (1397-1459). Catalan became the language of the Kingdom of Mallorca as well as the main language of the Kingdom of Valencia, especially in the coastal regions. It also spread as far as Sardinia and was used as an administrative language in Sicily and Athens. Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, Catalan was present throughout the Mediterranean and was one of the first bases of the lingua franca.
Guided by the notion that political greatness is linked to linguistic consolidation, the Royal Council promoted an extremely standardized language. By the fifteenth century, the city of Valencia had become a center of social and cultural development. The chivalrous novel Tirant White (1490) by Joanot Martourel shows the transition from medieval to Renaissance values, which can also be seen in the works of Bernat Metje and Andreu Febrer. During this period Catalan remains one of the “great languages” of medieval Europe. Catalan was the first book printed in the Iberian Peninsula, produced by means of hand typesetting.
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