CATALONIA

CATALONIA. Catalonia is a land of mountains and seashores in the northeastern corner of Spain. The northern Pyrenees and the western Sierra de Cadi create the mountainous profile visible from the eastern stretch of the Mediterranean coast. The foothills of these mountains extend throughout the region, flattening only at the coastline. Rivers cut through the valleys, making their way to the Mediterranean and connecting the mercantile and industrial cities of the coast with the agricultural interior. To the south, only the flat, marshy delta of the Ebro River resists the Sierran uplift.

A province of approximately 300,000 people by the end of the fifteenth century, Catalonia was the political and economic force of the Crown of Aragón, wielding this power through its capital city, Barcelona. Catalonia was governed by the Corts, the parliament representing the province in dealings with the king, and by the Diputació del General, the treasury and tax-collecting agency of the Corts. The union of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragón in 1469 brought the two crowns under one monarchy. Despite this union, Catalonia continued to govern itself, reflecting Ferdinand's vision of a united Spain ruling over coexisting autonomous regions.

Catalonia did not share in Castile's "Golden Age" in the sixteenth century, which was fueled in large part by exploitation of Castile's American territories. Although Ferdinand repeatedly affirmed the Crown of Aragón's right to participate in transatlantic trade, several factors inhibited this. Seville was the official port for Spain's American empire and the most convenient port for the trade, which disadvantaged Mediterranean merchants. Moreover, Catalonia suffered from a lack of capital following a civil war (1462–1472) in addition to a contraction in population caused by repeated waves of plague from the fourteenth century onward. The population of mid-sixteenth century Catalonia (331,000) never reached one-twentieth that of Castile (6,300,000).

During the reign of Philip IV, as Spain faced economic depression and extraordinary expenses in the Thirty Years' War, the crown looked to Catalonia and other parts of its monarchy for increased tax revenues. The Catalans feared the loss of their traditional liberties and resisted the efforts of Philip IV's chief minister, the count-duke of Olivares, to raise their contributions to the Habsburgs' war efforts. Intransigence on both sides led to the Catalan rebellion of 1640–1652, which ended with a royal victory and a wise decision by the crown not to punish the rebels too harshly. Catalonia remained loyal to the Habsburgs when a Bourbon prince inherited the throne of Spain. When the Bourbons retained the throne after the hard-fought War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), they determined to bring Catalonia under closer central control. Nonetheless, Bourbon economic policies channeled resources into Catalan industry and commerce in the eighteenth century. Thanks to a boom in industries such as cotton manufacturing, and the opening of the American trade to all Spanish ports after 1765, Catalonia was arguably the most dynamic part of Spain at the end of the eighteenth century, with a population approaching one million. Efforts of French revolutionaries to incite another revolt in Catalonia against the Bourbon monarchy were not effective, and Catalonia shared the fate of the rest of Spain during the Napoleonic invasion and the subsequent war of independence against the French.

CATALONIA

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