Catalan Nationalism - The Origins of Catalan National Identity

The Origins of Catalan National Identity

During the first centuries of the Reconquista, the Franks drove the Muslims south of the Pyrenees. To prevent future incursions, Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne created the Marca Hispanica in 790 CE, which consisted of a series of petty kingdoms serving as buffer states between the Frankish kingdom and Al-Andalus.

Between 878 and 988 CE, the area became a hotbed of Frankish-Muslim conflict. However, as the Frankish monarchy and the Caliphate of Córdoba weakened during the 11th century, the resulting impasse allowed for a process of consolidation throughout the region's many earldoms, resulting in their combination into the County of Barcelona, which became the embryo of today's Catalonia. By 1070, Ramon Berenguer I, Count of Barcelona, had subordinated other Catalan Counts and intransigent nobles as vassals. His action brought peace to a turbulent feudal system and sowed the seeds of Catalan identity.

According to several scholars, the term "Catalan" and "Catalonia" emerged near the end of the 11th century and appeared in the Usatges of 1150. Two factors fostered this identity: stable institutions and cultural prosperity. While the temporary lack of foreign invasions contributed to Catalonia's stability, it was not a main cause. Rather, it provided a site for sociopolitical development. For example, after the County of Barcelona merged with the Kingdom of Aragon, to create the Crown of Aragon in 1137 through a dynastic union, the system was designed to mutually check both the king's and nobility's powers, while the small but growing numbers of free citizens and bourgeoisie would tactically take sides with the king in order to diminish typically feudal institutions.

By 1150, the king approved a series of pacts, called the Usatges, which "explicitly acknowledged legal equality between burghers…and nobility" (Woolard 17). In addition, the Catalan-Aragonese gentry established the Corts, a representative body of nobles, bishops, and abbots that counterbalanced the King's authority. By the end of the 13th century, "the monarch needed the consent of the Corts to approve laws or collect revenue" (McRoberts 10). Soon after, the Corts elected a standing body called the Diputació del General or the Generalitat, which included the rising high bourgeoisie. The first Catalan constitutions were promulgated by the Corts of Barcelona in 1283, following the Roman tradition of the Codex.

In the 13th century, King James I of Aragon conquered Valencia and the Balearic Islands. Subsequent conquests expanded into the Mediterranean, reaching Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, Naples and Greece, so by 1350 the Crown of Aragon "presided over the one of the most extensive and powerful mercantile empires of the Mediterranean during this period" (Woolard 16). Catalonia's economic success formed a powerful merchant class, which wielded the Corts as its political weapon. It also produced a smaller middle class, or menestralia, that was "composed of artisans, shopkeepers and workshop owners" (McRoberts 11).

Over the 13th and 14th centuries, these merchants accrued so much wealth and political sway that placed a significant check on the Aragonese crown. By the 15th century the Aragonese monarch "was not considered legitimate until he had sworn to respect the basic law of the land in the presence of the Corts" (Balcells 9). This balance of power is a classic example of pactisme, or contractualism, which seems to be a defining feature of the Catalan political culture.

Along with political and economic success, Catalan culture flourished in the 13th and 14th centuries. During this period, the Catalan vernacular gradually replaced Latin as the language of culture and government. Scholars rewrote everything from ancient Visigothic law to religious sermons in Catalan (Woolard 14). Wealthy citizens bolstered Catalan's literary appeal through poetry contests and history pageants dubbed the Jocs Florals, or "Floral Games." As the kingdom expanded southeast into Valencia and the Mediterranean, Catalan followed.

The medieval heyday of Catalan culture would not last, however. After a bout of famine and plague hit Catalonia in the mid-14th century, the population dropped from 500,000 to 200,000 (McRoberts 13). This exacerbated feudal tensions, sparking serf revolts in rural areas and political impasses in Barcelona. Financial issues and the burden of multiple dependencies abroad further strained the region.

In 1410, the king died without leaving an heir to the throne. Finding no legitimate alternative, leaders of the realms composing the Crown of Aragon agreed by means of the Compromise of Caspe that the vacant throne should go to the Castilian Ferdinand I, as he was among the nearest relatives of the recently extinguished House of Barcelona through a maternal line. The new dynasty began to assert the authority of the Crown, leading to a perception among the nobility that their traditional privileges associated with their position in society were at risk. From 1458 to 1479, civil wars between King John II and local chieftains engulfed Catalonia.

During the conflict, John II, in the face of French aggression in the Pyrenees "had his heir Ferdinand married to Isabella I of Castile, the heiress to the Castilian throne, in a bid to find outside allies" (Balcells 11). Their dynastic union, which came to be known as the Catholic Monarchs, marked the de facto unification of the Kingdom of Spain. At that point, however, de jure both the Castile and the Crown of Aragon remained distinct territories, each keeping its own traditional institutions, parliaments and laws. This was a common practice at this time in Western Europe as the concept of sovereignty lay in the monarch.

With the dawn of the Age of Discovery, led by the Portuguese, the importance of the Aragonese possessions in the Mediterranean became drastically reduced and, along the rise of barbary pirates predating commerce in the Mediterranean, the theater of European power shifted from the Mediterranean basin to the Atlantic Ocean. These political and economic restrictions impacted all segments of society. Also, because of the locally bred social conflicts, Catalonia squandered in one century most of what it had gained in political rights between 1070 and 1410.

Nevertheless, early political, economic and cultural advances gave Catalonia "a mode of organization and an awareness of its own identity which might in some ways be described as national, though the idea of popular or national sovereignty did not yet exist" (Balcells 9). Other scholars like Kenneth McRoberts and Katheryn Woolard hold similar views. Both support Pierre Vilar, who contends that in 13th and 14th centuries "the Catalan principality was perhaps the European country to which it would be the least inexact or risky to use such seemingly anachronistic terms as political and economic imperialism or ‘nation-state’" (McRoberts 13). In other words, an array of political and cultural forces laid the foundations of Catalan "national" identity.

Llobera agrees with this opinion, saying, "By the mid-thirteenth century, the first solid manifestations of national consciousness can be observed." Indeed, 13th and 14th century Catalonia did exhibit features of a nation-state. The role of Catalan Counts, the Corts, Mediterranean rule and economic prosperity support this thesis. But as Vilar points out, these analogies are only true if we acknowledge that a 14th century nation-state is anachronistic. In other words, those living in Catalonia before latter day nationalism possessed something like a collective identity on which this was to be based, but this does not automatically equate to the modern concept of nation, neither in Catalonia nor elsewhere in similar circumstances during the Middle Age.

The Corts and the rest of the autochthonous legal and political organization was finally terminated in 1716, as a result of the War of the Spanish Succession. The local population mostly took sides and provided troops and resources for Archduke Charles, the pretender, who was arguably to maintain the legal status quo. His utter defeat meant the legal and political termination of the autonomous parliaments in the Crown of Aragon, as the Nueva Planta decrees were passed and King Philip V of Spain of the new House of Bourbon sealed the transformation of Spain from a de facto unified realm into a de jure centralized state.