Hi ha pocs casos de trobadors que eren dones trobairitz , sempre de la noblesa. En el segon, les raons per les quals havia escrit determinat poema. Quant a les vides n'hi ha de tot tipus: De vegades un joglar podia convertir-se en trobador i cantar ell mateix les seves composicions o donar-les a un altre joglar.
De la mateixa manera, un trobador podia esdevenir joglar. Balada faz ab coindet son b d'amor m'estera ben e gent A qu'a ma bela don a randon, b quar ai estat tan lonjament. Emparentada amb els nostres goigs. La dansa que teniu com a mostra s'aparta una mica d'aquest esquema. Aquest sol ser el motiu principal.
Partiment o joc partit. Arnaut Daniel fou el gran mestre d'aquest estil. Per suposat, hem de tenir en compte que alguns -molts? Nonetheless, it has also had to accept that much of the art from this period has been seriously compromised by the destruction wrought by the Eclesiastical Confiscations of the 19th century and the Civil War of the 20th century.
If we are indeed able to perceive them in this way it is thanks to the effort and critical responses contained in the studies, research, teaching and informative actions coming from the field of art history in the past few decades, and thanks to the job of cataloguing, conserving and restoring our cultural heritage that the Catalan and French public administrations have been performing around the land, particularly at the restoration and conservation centres in Valldoreix and Perpignan.
Thanks to all the aforementioned stakeholders, we are now becoming aware of what the period produced and what remains of it. The activity centres have been identified, we are aware of the most active authors and, among them, we are capable of distinguishing the more common from the more skilled, creative and daring. We are now poised to reflect on the uses and functions of the images, and the main subjects and thematic trends have been identified.
First came the series of late 18th-century academic objections against the overload, excess, bells and whistles and popular superstitious religiosity that was expressed through the figurative arts during the Baroque period. Few authors or cultural moments in time depart from the majority trend towards disdain. Martinell i Brunet had completed his studies on Baroque sculpture and architecture in Catalonia before the Civil War broke out, but the publication of the three must-read volumes of his Arquitectura i escultura barroques a Catalunya had to wait until , when, fatally, the majority of sculptural works analysed had been reduced to piles of ashes.
However, the Civil War got in the way. Despite the weighty efforts of the Noucentistes, after the image of emptiness in the churches in Catalonia — such as the basilica of Santa Maria del Mar in Barcelona, which prior to July was bedecked with altarpieces from the 17th and 18th centuries, including the formidable main altarpiece — added a harsh new misunderstanding to the long list of anti-Baroque grievances: Fortunately, the evidence of heritage provided by the churches in the regions of Roussillon, the Vallespir, the Conflent and the French Cerdagne, along with the deepening of their rich documentary memory, have made a decisive contribution to exorcising many of these assumptions and to revealing their vacuity.
These regions continued to be the professional workplace of Catalan artists during the 17th and much of the 18th centuries despite the political transformations that culminated in the Treaty of the Pyrenees and the granting of the Catalan lands lying north of the Pyrenees to the Kingdom of France.
Hundreds of pieces of documentary evidence, hundreds of photographs taken before the destruction wrought in that fateful July of and hundreds of pieces preserved and exhibited in museums and churches serve as overwhelming evidence. Listening to and disseminating this evidence has become the first step towards rehabilitating the memory of the art from the Modern Age. On the other hand, this contributes to bolstering other assessments that I consider quite objective, such as the fact that during the 17th and 18th centuries the country invested major resources into an artistic output that was moderately ambitious and fairly uniformly distributed around the entire land, and that the art objects crafted during the centuries of the Renaissance and the Baroque were predominantly found in religious spaces, where there was a profusion of large-scale, monumental altarpieces.
Before this destruction, therefore, no one would have questioned the importance of art from the Modern Age in the configuration of our cultural heritage, unless the position was blurred by prejudices. By showing the specific nature of what succumbed to destruction, these photographs verify a territory both north and south of the Pyrenees that was actively involved in a vivid artistic endeavour characterised by the capacity to maintain a sustained promotion of altarpieces in varied formats, along with paintings, imagery, religious silverwork and also, obviously, the architecture used to build parish.
This vitality would span the three centuries of the Modern Age 16th to 18th , despite the inevitable moments of stagnation or slackening caused by the frequent episodes of war in the Catalan Revolt and the War of the Spanish Succession, the demographic crises caused by plagues and the severe shortages during years of poor harvests.
And it was common to find churchwardenships and brotherhoods and we will soon examine how these institutions were among the most active clientele in the country replacing the altarpieces dating from the Middle Ages for 16th century pieces and then, decades later, renewing some of these with even more monumental structures crafted in the Baroque style in the late 17th or midth century, two particularly exciting moments in the demand for art in Catalonia.
It is clear that to reveal the underpinnings of that artistic vitality, unsuspected until quite recently, we must not only evoke the surrounding economic surge but also allude to at least one determining factor, and one that is logical bearing in mind that the mainstream of artistic commissions bore some relationship with the production of altarpieces and religious art, namely the impact of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
There were changes linked to rituals, which were increasingly rich in externalising expressions of faith, along with others driven by reaffirmed confidence in the traditional Catholic doctrine on the persuasive and catechistic power of images. Many others stemmed from the advent of new subjects an expanded parade of saints with emblematic new additions along with a renewed stress on old subjects in representations with the emphasis on casting certain individuals, ideas or moments in a sublime light, such as the Virgin Mary, the sacrament of the Eucharist and the Passion of Christ, just to cite a few ex-.
This in no way downplays the consequences of the institutional revival on the healthy market in orders for religious art, specifically in relation to the improved finances of the churchwardenships and brotherhoods, or on the impetus for the faithful to join the parish churches, since the Church, through Episcopal supervision of the everyday activity of the rectors, preaching, catechism and masses and other celebrations, had managed to internalise in the congregation the conviction that caring for and ornamenting the holy places was a powerful way of expressing faith and a highly effective act of piety.
For this reason, it makes sense that the altarpiece would become the genre par excellence on the Catalan art scene in the Modern Age. Hundreds of them were built, adapted to the apses of churches and the backs of chapels, and many of them were quite monumental and extraordinarily costly for the meagre finances of the corporations that commissioned them. In fact, it often took more than one decade to pay them off, and they required varied and ingenious financial engineering as we would call it today. The majority came from collective orders from local councils, churchwarden offices and brotherhoods.
However, individually-promoted initiatives were also noteworthy: During the 17th century, the traditional parade of saints expanded with the inclusion of newly-canonised members, including Theresa of Jesus, Francis Xavier, Ignatius, Raymond Nonnatus, etc. There are many examples of this private form of commission, but in this short article I will have to be highly restrictive in the repertoire of those I mention, as I can only refer to the ones promoted in the late 17th and first third of the 18th centuries by the numerous canons at the.
The monarchy should be regarded as unimportant as no Catalan artist was called upon to praise the glories of absolutism, even though a painter with Catalan roots, Hyacinthe Rigaud , a descendant of the Perpignan-born masters Jacint and Honorat Rigau, who, however, was French for all historical and artistic purposes, would end up becoming the champion of the most emblematic absolutism, that of the Sun King, Louis XIV.
However, their involvement was occasional and very limited from the vantage point of their number and the amount of money invested. It is true that we could learn more from this entire noble world, which was so important in other territories, if, to refer to a highly evocative example as it is full of allusions to the arrival of imported works , the art collections from monasteries like Santa Maria de Montserrat, whose church was burned down during the Peninsular War, had been preserved. Indeed if we survey the list of donations noted down in the monograph by Francesc X.
The crown is the work of silversmith Josep Ros. The spectacular nature of the project which. The majority and most skilled of our figurative artists created stories from Catholic doctrine using characters and scenes from the hagiography, the gospels and other Biblical texts. They always drew from interpretations that matched the orthodoxy and guidelines of Catholic catechism as preached from thrones and altars, explained by rectors and assimilated by the people.
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In this sense, it was an iconographically canonical art bereft of alternative discourses or transgression. The parade of saints, the life and theological importance of the Virgin Mary, the life and meaning of Christ and trust in the beneficent power of his Passion, faith in the Eucharist, fear of Purgatory and condemnation to hell were the ideas conveyed the most frequently, combined with allusions to morals, reminders of the pillars of Christian doctrine, primarily the evangelists and the Fathers of the Church, and illustrious genealogies of the religious orders.
However, it is clear that the memory of the enormous importance that altarpieces and narrative religious painting had in characterising the artistic output and defining the visual culture should not make us lose sight of the fact that other genres and typologies were also in considerable demand and that they also enriched the cultural heritage with precious works. For example, still within the universe of individual or collective devotion, we should weigh the power of sacred gold art, as splendid as it is little-known today because, with a few notable exceptions, despite the admiration we feel for some of its more brilliant episodes, it is largely terra incognita from the standpoint of research a fact that determines the knowledge that the educated public may have of it.
The languages of art during the Baroque period A late Renaissance in the 17th century During much of the 17th century, the appearance that the fine arts conferred on the range of stories, personages and symbols that they were called upon to represent did not differ from what had been displayed in the waning decades of the 16th century.
It was a particular version of the well-consolidated formulas of international late Mannerism, the latest guise of the Renaissance languages which, stripped of radical experimentation and paganising sensuality, of the hermeticism and narrative complication of. Therefore, it makes little sense to think of the 17th century as a Baroque century in art, when it only began to become so in the latter years and in a rather peculiar way, as we shall see below.
For this reason, things being as they are, when having to present a didactic overview, we have two options. The second option is far bolder: In this case, the story of the events related to Baroque aesthetics would have to wait until the last third of the 17th century. In any event, choosing either option would only be justified if we have first managed to precisely describe both the prevailing expressive formulas and the less prevalent alternatives.
In actuality, contrasting starkly with the fact that the Catalan art market was highly porous to the arrival of foreign masters Castilian, Italian, French, Portuguese during the 16th century and the early decades of the 17th century, there was just a handful of local authors who found the means and motivations to venture beyond the borders of the Principality and spend some years of their career in a major European centre, as Solsona native.
Francesc Ribalta had done at the end of the 16th century, later remaining active in Valencia during the early 17th century. Pasqual spent periods in Seville and Rome, where he seemed to have met Guido Reni and where, to no avail, he put himself forth to participate in painting the Paolina Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore. Thus, creativity understood in its most genuine sense could only spring from intimate commitment to the work itself among the most exacting artists.
Therefore, the sculptors and painters who took inventive impetus in that valuable graphic instrument, the engraving, which was so decisive to the dissemination of artistic culture and iconographies in modern Europe, were in the majority. Painters with sound technical quality and sculptors skilled with the gouge based their works on the engravings of the life of Mary, Christ or the saints, and they strove to transcribe in them, either partly or totally, the compositional suggestions, figures and scenes proposed by some of the great painters, sculptors and draughtsmen on the international scene.
The same held true of the painters: This also holds true of two noteworthy yet anonymous artists: However, above and beyond this standard quality, we can find artisans who often behaved as artists and others who worked as more common craftsmen. Never in the entire Modern Age did our country see. He always, without exception, behaved as an original, exigent sculptor, a master endowed with impeccable technique and an inventive instinct that empowered him to transform the beliefs that he had to draw from into an extraordinarily personal, artistically modern and extremely persuasive figurative world.
On the other hand, we cannot forget that the ultimate effect of the whole relied heavily on the work of the gilders and polychromers, the third trade related to altarpiece-making: They were rendered by combining gilding with gold leaf, painting with brush over gold estofat and numerous artisanal strategies like scraping or stippling the layer of colour superimposed over the gold which clad the reliefs and imagery. The magnificent output of altarpieces from the Baroque period paved the way for the explosion of an impressive tradition in the art of gilding, one full of moments of extraordinary quality rendered by patient polychromers who transformed the work of the image-makers into opulent objects, jewels of wood, a ember of gold.
We should also mention the oeuvre of the great gilders from subsequent periods,. However, shortly before that, Antoni Bordons had rendered the swan song of gilded art in Catalonia on the main altarpiece of the Miracle sanctuary in Riner , adding delightful, ethereal rocaille landscapes to the branching motifs and to the traditional floral garlands. The first fully Baroque signals to appear in Catalan art after were the architectural elements and ornamental techniques of what is called the Solomonic Baroque, which was destined to overtake the structures of altarpieces — still reticular until — within a few years and to enrich their symbolism with specific Eucharistic and triumphal allusions to the triumph of Catholicism as a universal religion through vine leaves, maidens and pelicans nestled in the thick spiral of the shafts.
In these altarpieces, the combination of the ornamental and dramatic values of the aesthetic of the triumphal, selfsatisfied Baroque which was being promoted in the centres of Catholic power, coupled with the effects of the dynamic, inflamed figures that occupied their niches and reliefs, created pieces with a powerful, suggestive impact on the surroundings. After the seventh decade of the 17th century, sculptors such as the ones cited above and their coeval painters began to bring graphic models inspired by the creations of the great 17th century European artists into their repertoires, generally harvested from the world of engraving through widespread engravings made by experts as skilled as Jean Dughet, Cornelis Bloemaert, Robert van Audenaert, Pietro Testa, Teresa del Po, Lucas Vorsterman, Schelte Adams Bolswert and Jean Audran.
Even though we should assume that drawings also played a role in this revamping of the compositional and figurative sources, at this point its role has yet to be clarified. However, what is clear is that since the workshops discovered them so late after the s , when the new Baroque elements did begin to appear in the local repertoires, they brought both the graphic features of their inventors from the classicist and Baroque rhetoric which served the cause of absolutism and Roman Catholicism so well Annibale Carracci,. And what began to appear in painting were the illusionist decorative artifices of vaults and domes envisioned as grandiose and convincing outbreaks of celestial glory viewed sotto in su, colourful and brimming with energy, peopled with saints in a state of weightlessness and a lively throng of angels busy holding the attributes of the surrounding saints or playing musical instruments.
We can find sophisticated and astonishing interpretations of the characteristic Berniniesque Baroque figuration by the great sculptors of the day: These were splendorous decades from the standpoint of creativity: Likewise, elements like the guild system and mindset were gradually coming unravelled, which shook up craftsmanship as the only criteria used to assess the quality of artistic objects.
One can note the intense desire for liberality in the more demanding artistic milieus. The Coronation of the Virgin c. Regarding the first, a Carthusian painter, the quality and stylistic novelty of his works conserved in Valldemossa monastery, coupled with the aura of his sojourns in Rome, truly exceptional and only comparable to the ones by Valls native Jaume Pons, which added to the.
Altarpiece in the chapel of the Immaculate Conception in the cathedral of Tarragona. Palomino , confer upon him an impressive presence that is also somewhat enigmatic in Catalonia, since none of the works that he rendered, especially in the Escaladei and Montalegre monasteries, has ever been confidently identified.
Mengs, owing to his ability to handle highly varied painting genres and in particular to the originality of the genuine painting discourse he distilled, a cultivated, modern yet balanced language with disaffected, spontaneous notes which shines in the midst of a late Baroque artistic universe dominated by affected rhetoric. These changes are so numerous and important that a historian has the sense of witnessing a change of epoch, a huge evolutionary leap forward in the system of the arts inherited from the 16th and 17th centuries.
To begin with, there was a formidable new development in the world of altarpieces, already visible in the main altarpieces crafted by Pere Costa after This ripe fruit included several examples, such as the decoration of the chapel of Els Colls in Sant. Main altarpiece in the Miracle sanctuary in Riner close-up. The school developed a drawing-based curriculum for painters, sculptors and architects which advocated studying subjects related to knowledge of the models of classical antiquity. This new wealthy, mercurial bourgeoisie spurred commissions that were somewhat unusual for the old art regime, as they were open to a wider variety of subjects sculptures and painting series on mythological or allegorical themes, for example, or depictions of contemporary gallant scenes which stood alongside a language interested in the sources of ancient and modern classicism.
La pintura en Barcelona durante el siglo xviii. Barcelona , 2 vols. This excerpt from the speech was cited and analysed by Joaquim Garriga. Joan Bosch Ballbona ed. Pintura catalana del Barroc. Along similar lines but regarding Roussillon is the important study by Julien Lugand. About the latter, note the reflection by Jaume Barrachina.
Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona , pp. Retables baroques du Roussillon. With regard to painting, for decades we have had to refer back to the pioneer Marcel Durliat. Arts anciens du Roussillon. Crisi institucional i canvi social: Escultura barroca a Catalunya. Universidad de Murcia, Murcia , pp.
For the cathedral of Girona, see Joan Bosch Ballbona. Michel Serre et la peinture baroque en Provence Edicions 62, Barcelona [at press]. Regarding the column of the Immaculate Conception, see Conxita Mollfulleda. Barcelona, , III-Addenda, pp. Pintura catalana del Barroc La Seu de Mallorca. The urn of Saint Ermengol has also inspired research: Pere Pujol i Tubau. A revelatory recent study is the one by Carles Dorico.
Artisti del Cinquecento tra regola e licenza. Einaudi, Turin , especially pp. El arte de la pintura. Publication supervised by Bonaventura Bassegoda. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes , pp. CTHS, Paris , pp. Llums del Barroc, op. El pintor Antoni Viladomat i Manalt Universitat de Girona, Girona , and who has illuminated such spectacular episodes as the ones contained in Francesc Miralpeix. Barcelona Town Hall, Barcelona El pintor Antoni Viladomat Pasqual Pere Moles i Corones. Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona ; Anna Riera.
Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona ; Rosa M. Biographic note The author is an art history reader at the Universitat de Girona and has served as a visiting professor at the Italian universities of Sassari and Cagliari. He studies the art of the 16th and 17th centuries produced in Catalonia, with a stress on the critical study and rediscovery of some of the most important authors in that historical period and on the phenomenon of the reception of international artistic culture in Barcelona.
More specifically, it is concerned with the approximately year period ranging from the midth century to the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in the early 18th century. Catalonia, Spanish monarchy, state, nation, process of political union. In this article, we shall limit ourselves to summarily examining one phase in this long development, namely the period that signalled the transition from an aggregative, institutionally plural monarchy to another territorial form which, in the wake of the Bourbon victory in the War of the Spanish Succession, consolidated a central space — Spain — that was much more unified and characterised by absolutist and centralising forms of government with Castilian roots.
These means were even more varied and nuanced if we bear in mind the evolution in such important social, cultural and identity features as religion, private law and language.
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This theoretical construct, which obviously has a strong political and ideological bias, was first elaborated by the intelligentsia of the Castilian court in the 16th and 17th centuries and more recently upheld by historians with a wide range of ideologies. Indeed, Falangists, monarchists, historians linked to a Marxist or Marxistising history, a good number of Basque and Catalan historians and some Hispanists have also partaken of this interpretation.
The second is the criticism of this model for being a feudal, oligarchic and corrupt system. And finally, this Spanish nationalist historiographic discourse has striven to minimise or conceal the fact that. Many of the premises upon which this Spanish deterministic discourse is based may simply be questioned through a Europe-wide comparative historical exercise.
MacIlwain,5 evolved from forms based on shared sovereignty towards republican models or models of parliamentary monarchy, and finally to liberal democratic regimes through longer or shorter transitional periods. Thus, numerous studies have revealed the evolutionary capacity of the institutions in the Catalan pactist system in both theory and political practice. All of these processes had gotten underway before the arrival of the Bourbons. Two divergent models of state: Western political thinking in the early Modern Age. However, we should bear in mind that these concepts are neologisms coined in the 18th century and that they are far from being — in both theory and in the practice of government — contrasting or incompatible systems, as it might seem from the subsequent simplification and use of them.
Specifically, with regard to Spanish political thinking during the reign of the Hapsburgs, the classic dichotomy between Catalan-Aragonese constitutionalism and Castilian absolutism has been further nuanced and enriched. Since the s, a series of historians has noted the existence of a constitutionalist current linked to changes in the tax system which were introduced in the Crown of Castile late in the reign of Philip II; this Castilian constitutionalist thinking emerged among the urban oligarchies and connected with the spirit of reform and regeneration in a society and economy that had fallen into a grave crisis.
After all, despite the existence of political and legal thinking that was critical — or relatively critical — of the idea that the monarch was above positive law and that he could therefore legislate and grant privileges at will, the comunis opinio of the doctrine of Castilian policy in the late Modern Age was that the sovereign was only limited by divine law, natural law and the law of nations.
This would also have repercussions on the monarchy as a whole, given that if institutional diversity is viewed as a source of weakness, respect for the forms of government local to each kingdom or province would be questioned16 and attempts would be made to introduce the political underpinnings of Castilian law there. Compilation of the legislation agreed to by the Courts of Catalonia until the laws enacted in Thus, the political and ideological principles of CatalanAragonese pactism evolved in a direction completely different to the theorisations of the Castilian court.
In Aragon and Catalonia, especially after the late decades of the 16th century, the legalist formulations of the legal consultants found new elements in the historic discourse to invigorate contractualist approaches. Specifically, the myth of the furs codes of law of Sobrarb and a new story on the Carolingian origins of Catalonia enabled them to build ideological and juridical elaborations that would provide arguments and political fuel to the movements of and According to this theorisation, the king was encompassed by a body from which he could not be distinguished and in which his power was subsumed.
This formula, which in turn allowed for a variety of interpretations more or less restrictive with regard to royal power , can be noted in Catalonia in the works of Antoni Oliba, Andreu Bosc and especially Joan Pere Fontanella. They envisioned the state as a natural community that emerged from the social impetus of a collective that transferred power in order to fulfil its needs for defence and protection, while reserving freedom and sovereignty for itself. On the eve of , the representative and parliamentary political principles as well as the concept of popular sovereignty, the idea of an elective monarchy and the right of resistance were rather deeply rooted in the Catalan body politic, and latent within them was the option of a parliamentary monarchy or even a fully republican option.
Generally speaking, the constitutionalist avenue of thought advocated a territorial model of state that recognised the institutional diversity of the historical formations that comprised it, while in the majority of cases the. The case of the Spanish monarchy, which joined the Crowns of Aragon and Castile, the Portuguese empire and other territories, may be paradigmatic of this issue. Monument to the jurist and politician Joan-Pere Fontanella Olot, - Perpignan, in Olot, the city of his birth.
It is the work of sculptor Miquel Blai. It should be noted that there is no dearth of exceptions to this rule. Thus, a supporter of placing limits on monarchic power, Juan de Mariana, who even advocated tyrannicide, was, in contrast, a supporter of Spanish institutional unity. There were essentially two problems: Yet nor should we forget the dynamic, not static, nature of the dialectic between the centre of the Spanish monarchy, the Castilian Court, and Catalonia, since this relationship went through a wide variety of circumstances in terms of the evolution in the human and material forces, the ideological elaborations, the social balances and imbalances and the international political contexts.
Finally, we should also note that the political dialectic of the kingdoms and provinces on the periphery arose not only with the central government of the monarchy; rather especially in border provinces like Catalonia, there were also interrelations between them and neighbouring powers, France in this case. However, these considerations do not belie the idea that there was almost permanent constitutional tension between centre and periphery given that their divergent conceptualisations on the model of state, as outlined above, would clash in political practice both when establishing the scope and limits of the jurisdiction of monarchic power and when defining and carrying out directives aimed at constructing a territorial state capable of being consolidated and conserved through the agitated, divided Europe of the early centuries of modernity.
The latest studies on the 16th century in Catalonia are making it increasingly clear that the political-constitutional edifice built since the late 15th-century reign of Ferdinand the Catholic soon revealed itself to be too fragile and precarious to ensure a correspondence or collaboration between the Catalans and the Crown. Back in the reign of Charles I and in the early years of Phillip II, the constitutional tensions blossomed in a variety of spheres. Likewise, since the s, imperial policy in the Mediterranean had been seriously thwarting Catalan mercantile interests. These clashes culminated in May , when the viceroyal guard tried to capture the military i.
Granollacs and the supporters of confronting the abuses of royal jurisdiction. However, ultimately, the fear that the events in Catalonia might end through the same military might that Philip II had wielded in the altercations in Aragon — which led to the execution of the Aragonese justice Juan de Lanuza, among other actions — dissolved the resistance from the Catalan institutions. This laws issued by the king and the branches was unilaterally suspended via a Royal Pragmatic. The rapprochement of the Courts of , in which the flood of noble appointments by the king was answered by the granting of a donation of 1,, pounds, was a fleeting mirage.
These constitutions were questioned by the Generalitat and the military branch, which unleashed yet another bitter institutional and legal dispute that led to the imprisonment of the military deputy and auditor. In the early decades of the 17th century, the clearest expression of this contradiction was the issue of the repression of banditry. However, I believe it would be risky to attribute all the political and social upheaval — in which certain bandit lords were unquestionably involved — to a specific social class, and even more erroneous to relate it to the system of laws and constitutions of the country, which, lest we forget it, included a much broader swath of society than just the noble class.
This is because, though it is true that the constitutions of Catalonia may have been an instrument to safeguard certain private or estate interests, it is equally true that they upheld many general and community interests which were often trampled upon by the same royal officials who were fighting the bandit lords. The failure of the Courts of led two ideas on the political dynamic of the Principality to take root among the government circles of the monarchy.
The second was that the political mechanisms were already incapable of correcting or reconducting this situation, and that therefore to avoid greater evils, the combined use of force and politics must be imposed. The strategy of calling the Courts accompanied by the presence of an army had been broadly debated in the boards and councils of the monarchy since However, a detailed examination of these deliberations reveals that there was widespread consensus among the Court ministers on the need for the combined use of force and politics to modify the constitutional balance inherited from the dynastic union of the Catholic Kings.
The discrepancies only lay in whether or not to do it at a time when this internal constitutional problem might be mixed with the overarching conflict over European hegemony that the Spanish and French powers were facing. And as is known, this was the strategy ultimately chosen by the ministry of Count-Duke Olivares to put an end to what was considered a rebellion by the Catalans in the summer of In short, the political theorisations with unitarist and absolutist tendencies that dominated at the heart of the Castilian court were accompanied by initiatives in the realm of political practice which advocated a combined use of force and politics.
This, in our opinion, radically questions the line of interpretation which has recently upheld the existence of a Spanish imperial ideology, sup-. It should be noted that the most recent historiography on the formation of the modern state has stressed not only that was it difficult to govern against the provincial ruling classes but that it was also difficult to govern without their support.
The urbanised petty nobility, honorary citizens, merchants and canons of Barcelona, as well as some rising liberal professionals, especially doctors and judges, made up a highly cohesive ruling class which at that time dominated both institutions and steered the fates of Barcelona and Catalonia as a whole. Its fundamental core was the urban patricians, the so-called honorary citizens, that is, citizens who were distinguished by their political and economic status, whose rank equalled that of the nobility through a privilege issued by Ferdinand II in However, this Barcelonabased ruling class was bolstered by the addition of members from both the upper and lower echelons of the body politic.
First, it included members of the traditional Catalan nobility — nobles and knights — who had been involved in an intense process of urbanisation since the late 15th century. The status of honorary citizen could be acquired either through the system of cooptation, which expanded the rolls of honorary citizens through assemblies held by the patricians every year, or. In short, unlike other European urban oligarchies, the Barcelona elite was open, or at least relatively open. The inclusion of numerous family lineages of jurists, as well as the promotion of legal studies among the ranks of the nobility, contributed to strengthening and disseminating among these elites the values of the pactist political model which had secular roots in the production of Catalan law.
Elliott noted the extraordinary precariousness of the posts that the viceroyal administration made available to a ruling class which was comprised of around people in around According to this English historian: However, these figures were insufficient since the Crown had to supply 19, more pounds from the outside in order to meet the salaries of the viceroys around 6, pounds and to balance the budget.
Neither a military career nor a post in the civil administration of the central government of the monarchy was an easy, generous means of ascent for this Catalan ruling class. Nor were the encomiendas of the major military orders, which were theoretically open to all subjects of the King of Spain, a means of integration and compensation for the members of the Catalan ruling class. The case of the France of Richelieu, Mazzarino and Colbert has been held up as an example of the efficacy of royal patronage — centralised, in this case — which succeeded in the objectives of achieving control over the provinces of.
The attempts to build these ties via members of the Court like Pere de Franquesa and Salvador Fontanet never managed to achieve either solidity or continuity. However, the attempts to articulate a pro-royal nucleus based on family clans located in the Principality, such as the Marimons, never managed to take hold either, nor did enlisting the services of the upper aristocracy, the Duke of Cardona, to attain the interests and designs of the Crown.
Yet this same period also witnessed a strengthening of the local institutions, which were primarily controlled by the ruling class. This contrasts with the volatile or spasmodic nature of their ties with the Crown. Instead of getting the Catalans to adhere to the imperial designs of Olivares and Philip IV, as many ministers at court wished, this only sparked new constitutional tensions that derived from the irregular billeting of the troops, the illegal mobilisations of the local people and the tax burdens imposed beyond the constitutional limits.
This convergence, which was highly visible after January-February , would not be undone during that three-year period and would culminate with the revolutionary process of , an institutional agreement through which Pau Claris would become the political leader of the Catalan ruling class. The rupture of The military factor ultimately provided the fuse and spark that led the longstanding institutional and jurisdictional tensions to explode.
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After , the French-Spanish. During the ensuing months, it pressured the peasants and lower class to billet the troops, which was not only exceedingly unconstitutional but was also harrowing for villages which had already suffered greatly. The first reaction to this strategy was vehement social outcry. It was initially anti-military and anti-tax, but it soon took on the guise of a class conflict,58 and the religious tone that the protest soon adopted led it to gain momentum in society.
This episode was a milestone in the process of rupture between the Madrid government and the Catalan ruling class, a process that would ultimately prove to be irreversible. Likewise, and this demonstrates that both sides were aware of the political significance of the episode, Pau Claris and Olivares immediately embarked upon separate secret negotiations with France, Catalonia with the goal of exploring the possibility of securing French military aid should a bloody battle with the Court of Madrid ensue, and Spain, which contacted Richelieu, despite the war, to neutralise this potential scenario.
With the aim of gaining time to prepare military intervention measures against Catalonia, the Court of Madrid implemented a policy of concealing its repressive intentions, although the Catalan leaders were not hoodwinked. Thereafter, while Madrid viewed military control of the province as a neces-. The best option in the minds of the Catalan leaders was to remain the vassals of the Catholic King while saving the land from the hordes of soldiers and ensuring its political system of freedoms and constitutions.
From to The Catalan constitutional controversy in the game of European international politics. Cover of one of the propaganda books on the Catalan uprising written by Friar Gaspar Sala. To the leaders who had been at the helm of the revolutionary movement, this was both a means of portraying political strength to the Court of Madrid and a way of legitimising and binding most of the villages to the resistance against the royal armies. Setting up administrative, military and financial structures strong enough to sustain a large-scale war required time, not to mention levels of experience and accumulations of capital that were unavailable at that time.
Kafka a la platja
The perceptions of the causes and development of the process of rupture were different, yet they all led to a feeling of distance and mistrust. In Castile, and especially in the Castilian court, the Catalan and Portuguese rebellion rendered it impossible to establish that compact, well-built, cohesive state designed and run by Castile. In Catalonia, the Spanish unifying project dreamt up by the intelligentsia at court and tested by Olivares had revealed itself to be aggressive and unilateral, as it attacked the Catalan political and national identity.
Although it permeated the political and intellectual debate at the time, the identity factor with the interplay of Catalonia-Castile-Spain as the fundamental referents was not what triggered the Revolt of Catalonia of The political conceptualisation of Spain and the absolutist tendencies of the central government nurtured unifying policies that came upon vigorous resistance in the Catalan political community, which had.
This was enshrined by the Treaty of the Pyrenees in , which also signalled the partition of Catalonia. Even though the Court of Madrid considered more stringent repressive options, the continued threat from France meant that the central governing bodies of the monarchy chose to try to control the political life of the Principality by the royal reserve of the vote in the Generalitat and the Consell de Cent, an institutional measure which was combined with a greater Spanish military presence on Catalan soil.
And, in fact, the royal reserve on the vote became a bone of contention which instead of getting the Catalan ruling class to adhere to the political will of the Court of Madrid aroused a spiral of unsatisfied claims and institutional clashes. Cent at its core. Likewise, as this ruling class was relatively socially open and had the ability to integrate the most dynamic sectors from Catalan society, the claims for selfgovernance attained widespread support and were not foreign to the groups who spearheaded the economic transformations in the Principality in the second half of the 17th century.
The Onze de Setembre 11th of September defeat would lead to the establishment of an absolutist political model in Catalonia, which contrasted with the pactist nature of its own historical tradition. This model reflected the political hallmark of the Bourbon dynasty, but it was also the outcome of ideals that sought to politically and. However, even after the repression of the War of the Spanish Succession and the constant military subjugation of the land, one could still detect unequivocal signs of a persistent Catalan national identity throughout the 18th and early 19th century.
All of these factors together consolidated the shaping of a national identity in some of these communities, such as Catalonia, which would last even after they were dispossessed by the force of their institutional and legislative structures with mediaeval origins. For the notion of composite monarchy, see: Past and Present, no. Editorial Complutense, Madrid For the notion of segmented state, see Charles Tilly. Las revoluciones europeas Political Thought and the British Union of Cambridge University Press, Cambridge , pp.
Mitificadores del pasado, falsarios de la Historia. Constitucionalismo antiguo y moderno. Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, Madrid In this book, which contains six lectures delivered at Cornell University during academic year , Charles H. The Swedish Riksdag in an International Perspective. Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, Stockholm , pp. The Fountain of Privilege. University of California Press, Berkeley A Shared European Heritage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge , 2 vols. Eumo, Vic , especially pp. IEC, Barcelona , pp. Journal of Early Modern History, no. Les Corts generals de Pau Claris.
Ministry of Public Administrations, Madrid , pp. Also in the Courts of , the Royal Branch asked for greater representation in the courts the number of cities and villages with the right to attend , a request that was put into place in the courts of , when the Royal Branch also called for the individual vote to replace the unitary vote of each branch, just as the representatives of the third estate would in the French General Estates 80 years later, in Los mecanismos del poder. Los ayuntamientos catalanes durante el siglo xviii.
Alianza, Madrid ; Albert Garcia Espuche. Barcelona entre dues guerres. Economia i vida quotidiana Ciutats, viles i pobles a la xarxa urbana de la Catalunya Moderna. Rafael Dalmau, Barcelona Regarding the integration of Catalan commerce into the world circuits, see: Eumo, Vic ; Josep M. For the transformations of the agrarian and manufacturing sectors: El Camp de Tarragona i el Priorat durant els segles xviii i xix.
Pagesos, mariners i comerciants a la Catalunya litoral. Felipe V y el triunfo del absolutismo. Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona , pp. Del patriotisme al catalanisme. Eumo, Vic , pp. The American Historical Review, no. Parliaments, Estates and Representation, no. Revista de las Cortes Generales, no. This was categorically proven in Salustiano de Dios. The quotation is from page This legislative tradition was what would fruitlessly start the assault on the pactist and federal constitution, inherent to a limited monarchy, of the territories in the Crown of Aragon in the 16th and 17th century.
In short, the goal was to impose in them an absolutist, standard system that would unify all the peninsular lands under the imprint of the law of Castile. Kagan and Geoffrey Parker. Homenaje a John H. For the Catalan historical-mythical positions: Anuario de Estudios Medievales, no. The Parliament of England Weston and Janelle R. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge The Historical Journal, no. Constitutionalism and Statecraft during the Golden Age of Spain: Revista de Occidente, no. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid , pp.
The Logic of Personal Knowledge. Essays Presented to Michael Polanyi. Routledge, London , pp. On the use and dissemination of this concept applied to Spain in the studies of John H. See, too, Jon Arrieta. A useful bibliographic survey of this topic can be found in Xavier Gil Pujol. Granollers, Granollers ; Jordi Buyreu.
Institucions i conflictes a la Catalunya Moderna. Entre el rei i la terra. Afers, Catarroja i Barcelona, ; Oriol Junqueras. UAB, Barcelona , 2 vols. Entre el rei i la terra See, too, Ernest Belenguer. Also, the attention given this topic in Jon Arrieta.
Les Corts de Catalunya. Elliott, La revolta catalana Vicens Vives, Barcelona , p. Elliott, La revolta catalana Regarding the sessions of XXI , pp. On this ruling class of Barcelona in the early Modern Age, see basically: Homenaje a Jaume Vicens Vives. Ariel, Barcelona ; James S. See, too, the information on certain families available in the following works: Curial, Barcelona ; Pere Molas Ribalta.
Regarding the privilege of the 31st of August , see Jaume Vicens Vives. Ferran II i la ciutat de Barcelona. Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona , p. Els juristes i la defensa de les constitucions. Joan Pere Fontanella Eumo, Vic ; James S. El jurista Fontanella i les seves cartes. Clarendon Press, Oxford ; Robert R. Anatomy of a Power Elite: Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century.
¿De qué escriben los jóvenes?
State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc. Quaderns de la Selva, no. Regarding the Marimons, see: La Generalitat de Catalunya Base, Barcelona , pp. UAB, Barcelona , pp. The graphs and maps in this article were published in Pedralbes, no. Universitat de Lleida, Lleida , pp. La Guerra dels Segadors. Milenio, Lleida , pp. Ohio State University History, Base, Barcelona , facsimile edition. Likewise, on the informative and propagandist meaning of the work, see Karsten. Guerres, identitats i contraidentitats. Afers, Catarroja i Barcelona, On the new political-constitutional context which arose in Catalonia after , see primarily: Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona , pp.
Del al Del Tractat dels Pi-. Regarding the ensuing period: Del Tractat dels Pirineus Catalunya durante el reinado de Carlos II. On the plans for military domination based on the construction of a citadel in the city of Barcelona: La ciutadella de Barcelona Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Cuenca , pp.