Isabella’s bride price: a Catalan retrospective

The Monastery of Poblet, nestled high in the hills of the province of Tarragona, Catalonia, has played a vital role in the history of the ancient Crown of Aragon. As the Crown’s pantheon, each king was buried high in those hills, ever since its foundation in the marriage of the County of Barcelona and Kingdom of Aragon. However, the long line of successive kings buried there was put to an end by Ferdinand II: He broke the oath promised centuries before to instead be buried with his queen, Isabella, La Católica, in Granada.

Ferdinand was the first king of what Spaniards call the Monarquía Hispánica: a great pan-Atlantic empire and precursor to the modern Spanish state. However, Ferdinand was for the most part secondary to his wife, Isabel, given that she controlled the then far more powerful and populous Crown of Castile. The role of Ferdinand’s homeland, the Crown of Aragon, and its most powerful province, Catalonia, was from then on firmly tied to the whims of the Castilians, under the guise of a common goal.

From here, as history leaves behind the ruins of Poblet, the story divides sharply, as nationalists from opposing camps lay their claims to the borderland between fact and fiction. Was medieval Catalonia subjugated under a united Spanish Crown? Was the colonisation of the New World influenced by domestic conflicts of interest? Or was Barcelona just the spoilt stepchild of an Iberian peninsula that wanted to move beyond?

These are questions that might well have academic answers, but remain problematic in popular discourse. For example, Carles Puidgemont, and all those that follow him, will maintain that Catalonia’s history stretches as far back as an ancient Carolingian kingdom, despite the fact there is no evidence that this entity was the slightest bit independent by modern standards. A more measured view sees Catalonia’s heritage in the County of Barcelona, an independent state that lasted for about 300 years during the Dark Ages, before being falling under the Crown of Aragon. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between these two points. A good place to start would be the Crown of Aragon itself: what was it, who ruled it, and why should it probably have been called the Crown of Catalonia instead?

A tourist in the latter-day Autonomous Community of Aragon would hardly guess it lent its name to one of the greatest maritime powers of the medieval period. The closest the provincial capital, Zaragoza, has to a medieval court is the Aljafería, last occupied by an Aragonese king in 1387. This might be because the Crown of Aragon’s name was largely a coincidence; soon after its establishment, the County of Barcelona’s bloodline came to an end, meaning that of the Kingdom of Aragon was the only one that remained. Therefore, despite Barcelona’s comparative importance, Aragon gave its name to the combined crown. Despite this, the province ceased to be the true seat of power as soon as the Crown was created in 1150: thereafter, most business was done in Barcelona, or the de facto capital, Valencia.

The province of Valencia was an extension of the Aragonese main, created from a claim staked in a war against the Moors. Much like Catalonia, it faced the Mediterranean, but unlike Catalonia, it had no separate history from Aragon; in the 14th century, it was simply a colony, with a far higher Arabic population than the other two provinces. By designating Valencia the capital, the Aragonese royalty could have the benefits of medieval trade without facing up to the moneyed, politically active bourgeois class that had taken root in Barcelona.

However, as Barcelona remained by far the most important trading hub, the designation of Valencia as the capital was heavily criticised by the merchant classes of Barcelona as discrimination against Catalonia within the crown. This was likely true; Catalonia had a reputation for being a mercantile behemoth of great import and even greater ego. The nobles of the Crown were eager to avoid an overt accumulation of power by the merchant classes, and so tried as best they could to divert resources away from Barcelona.

Sadly, Barcelona also lacks any clear indication of its medieval importance, given the severe degree of bombardment the city suffered during the War of The Spanish Succession. Buildings such as the old Generalitat were specifically targeted, to punish the Catalan nationalists that backed the wrong king in the war.

The truth is that Catalonia faced subjugation, not only within the Spanish Crown, but beforehand, where its status forced the nobles – themselves mostly Catalan – to forcibly rein in the jewel of the western Mediterranean, Barcelona. This yoke was loosened later, but only because the inland seas were becoming lesser beasts compared to the great leviathan of the Atlantic. In the New World, the entire Crown of Aragon was secondary. Most evidence points to this being either a conscious choice or a geographical given – rounding the Med to get out into the Atlantic would be a bit daft.

Much like Venice and Genoa, Barcelona became one of the trading cities that saw its fortunes fall as colonialism established trading centres beyond the old nexus of Europe, Africa and Asia; the Mediterranean, while still vital, was no longer the be-all and end-all of trade. This had inevitably impoverished Barcelona since the beginnings of the 16th century, but it certainly had a long way to fall.

The problem was more that Catalonia, and Aragon as a whole, didn’t have much going for it beyond Mediterranean trade. Castile was about four times as populous; before colonialism, it dealt in ranching, grains, and minerals, and in no small quantities. Afterwards, it simply added vast quantities of gold and silver to its arsenal, while Aragon could only count on a fraction of farmland. This total economic disparity, exaggerated by the newfound prominence of port cities like Seville and La Coruna, meant that Aragon, and Catalonia within it, became increasingly secondary in Spanish affairs.

The change in dynamics, along with a slew of other factors, led to the Nueva Planta decrees of 1706, which followed from the end of the war that crippled Barcelona, only to kick a dead horse by turning Spain from a union of two now disparate equals, Aragon and Castile, to a unitary state, the Spain we recognise today.

An inspection of the history of the Crown of Aragon reveals an interesting trend: it was always the junior partner, owing to its far smaller size; however, it was treated with far more respect while it was more economically important. The end of Barcelona’s pre-eminence marked the beginning of Catalonia’s mistreatment under the Spanish Crown. But too many historians make the mistake of starting that story in Barcelona, 1706; it really began hundreds of year earlier - in the crypts of Poblet.