History of Catalonia

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For other perspectives on the history of Catalonia, see History of Spain, History of France, Crown of Aragon, and Principality of Catalonia.

The territory that now constitutes the autonomous community of Catalonia in Spain was first settled during the Middle Palaeolithic. Like the rest of the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula, it was colonized by Ancient Greeks and Carthaginians and participated in the pre-Roman Iberian culture.

As with the rest of Hispania, the area that is now Catalonia was part of the Roman Empire, it then came under Visigothic rule after collapse of the western part of the empire. In 718, the area was occupied by the Moors and became a part of Muslim ruled al-Andalus. The Frankish Empire conquered the area from the Muslims, beginning with the conquest of Roussillon in 760 and ending with the conquest of Barcelona in 801, as part of the creation of a larger buffer zone of Christian counties known as the Marca Hispanica.

In time, the counties of the region gave up their allegiance to the rulers of the Franks and their successors and became attached, as a self-governing principality under the Count of Barcelona, to the Crown of Aragon. Catalonia became the main base for the Crown of Aragon's naval power and expansionism, that spread into Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and later into Sardinia, Sicily, Naples and, briefly, Athens. An identifiably Catalan culture developed in the later Middle Ages under the hegemony of the counts of Barcelona.

The marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile in 1469 laid the foundations for a unified Crown of Spain. In 1492, the Emirate of Granada, the last political entity of al-Andalus in the peninsula, was conquered and the Spanish discovery and conquest of the Americas began. Political power began to shift away from the Crown of Aragon towards Castile.

For a considerable time, Catalonia retained its own laws as a principality of the Crown of Aragon but this came to an end when the new Bourbon dynasty secured the throne of Spain in the War of Spanish Succession and made the former Crown of Aragon territories into provinces of the Crown of Castile following the war. During the war, Catalonia had supported the claim of a member of the Austrian branch of the Habsburg dynasty (after breaking an oath of loyalty to the French Bourbon prince Philip of Anjou (Philip V of Spain) from 1702). Following the surrender of Catalan troops on September 11, 1714, Philip V's enacted the Nueva Planta decrees banning all the main traditional Catalan political institutions and rights and merged its administration into that of the Crown of Castile as a province. However, the Bourbon monarchy allowed for Catalonia's civil law code to be maintained. With the exception of the loyal Basque Country, the new Bourbon king, Philip V of Spain, abolished the ancient privileges of all of Spain's medieval kingdoms, including the Crown of Aragon and with it, those of the Principality of Catalonia. Following the model of France, he imposed a unifying legislation and administration across Spain, as well as introducing the French Sallic Law and founding Spain's own Royal Academy in 1714. This led to the eclipse of Catalan as a language of government and literature. Economically, Catalonia experienced commercial growth in the late 18th century when the Bourbons ended Castile's trade monopoly with Spain's American colonies. The Napoleonic occupation and war in Spain in the early 19th century began a period of political and economic turmoil. In the latter half of the 19th century, Catalonia became a center of industrialization.

In the first third of the 20th century, Catalonia several times enjoyed and lost varying degrees of autonomy like other parts of Spain until the Second Spanish Republic confirmed the autonomies of Spain's traditional autonomous regions, including the autonomy of Catalonia and the official use of its language. Like Madrid, the Basque country and much of Spain, Catalonia fought hard to defend the Second Spanish Republic in the devastating civil war of 1936–1939. With the defeat of the Spanish republic by the right wing forces of Francisco Franco, the autonomies were cancelled and regional languages like Catalan were made illegal. A great effort was made by Franco's regime to crush all regional cultures, languages and identities within Spain but without success. The Catalan language, like other regional languages, continued to be used in private.

In the years after the civil war life was difficult. With Spain devastated and cut off from international trade by boycotts, Catalonia, as a commercial and industrial center, suffered severely. The economic recovery was very slow and it was not until the mid-1950s that the economy reached the prewar levels of 1936. In 1959–1974 Spain experienced the second fastest economic expansion in the world in what became known as the Spanish Miracle and Catalonia prospered greatly from the expansion as Spain's most important industrial and tourist zone. In 1975 Franco died, bringing to an end his dictatorial regime, and in 1978 Catalonia voted overwhelmingly for the new democratic Spanish constitution that recognised Catalonia's autonomy and language.

Prehistory in Catalonia[edit]

Urnfield Culture in northeast Iberia, Late Bronze Age, c. 1300 BCE




The rise of Iberian culture[edit]

Ethnology of Iberia before the Roman conquest, c. 220 BCE



Roman times[edit]

Roman conquest and the provinces of Roman Hispania



From late antiquity to feudalism[edit]

Visigothic and Muslim rule[edit]


In the 5th century, as part of the invasion of the Roman Empire by Germanic tribes, the Visigoths led by Athaulf, installed themselves in Tarraconensis (410) and when in 475 the Visigothic king Euric formed the kingdom of Tolosa (modern Toulouse), he incorporated the territory equivalent to present-day Catalonia. Later, the Visigothic kingdom lost most of its territory north of the Pyrenees and shifted its capital to Toledo. The Visigothic Kingdom of Hispania lasted until the beginning of the 8th century. In 718, the Muslim conquest of Spain reached the northeastern part of the peninsula, where there were few significant battles, the most notable being at Tarragona. In 719, the last unconquered territory of the Visigothic kingdom of Hispania, Septimania, surrendered without battle to the Muslims.

Carolingian conquest[edit]

By the second half of the ninth century, three political subdivisions (marches) existed in the eastern Pyrenees: Toulouse (green), Gothia (blue), and Hispania (pink).

After repelling Muslim incursions as far north as Tours in 732, the expanding Frankish Empire set about creating a buffer zone of Christian counties in the south that became known at the Marca Hispanica or the Spanish March. The first county to be conquered from the Moors lied in the former area of Septimania that became Roussillon (with Vallespir), following the conquest of Narbonne (759). In 785 the county of Girona (with Besalú) on the south side of the Pyrenees was taken. Ribagorza and Pallars were linked to Toulouse and were added to this county around 790. Urgell and Cerdanya were added in 798. The first records of the county of Empúries (with Perelada) are from 812 but the county was probably under Frankish control before 800. After a series of struggles, Charlemagne's son Louis took Barcelona from the Moorish emir in 801 and set up the County of Barcelona.

The counts of the Marca Hispanica had small outlying territories, each ruled by a lesser miles with armed retainers, who owed allegiance through the Count to the Emperor, or to his Carolingian and Ottonian successors.

At the end of the 9th century, the Carolingian monarch Charles the Bald designated Wilfred the Hairy — a noble descendant of a family from Conflent and son of the earlier Count of Barcelona Sunifred I — as Count of Cerdanya and Urgell (870); after Charles's death (877), Wilfred became the Count of Barcelona and Girona (878) as well, which brought together the greater part of what was later to become the Catalan territory, and although on his death the counties were divided again among his sons, except for one brief period Barcelona, Girona, and Ausona continued to be unified under one count.

The rise and fall of the aloers[edit]

During the 10th century the Catalan counts became increasingly independent of the Carolingian rulers. Fealty broke down entirely when the count Borrell II made official in 987 when he failed to swear fealty to Hugh Capet, the first Capetian monarch of the emerging French kingdom. In those years, the population of the Catalan counties began to increase for the first time since the Muslim invasion. During the 9th and 10th centuries, the Catalan counties increasingly became a society of aloers, peasant proprietors of small, family-based farms, who lived by subsistence agriculture and owed no formal feudal allegiance.


This coincided with a weakening of the power of the counts and the division of the Spanish Marches into more numerous counties, which gradually became a feudal state based on complex fealties and dependencies. From the time of the triumph of Ramon Berenguer I over the other Catalan counts, the counts of Barcelona stood firmly as the link in a web of fealty between the Catalan counts and the Crown.

First references to the name Catalonia[edit]

The term "Catalonia" is first documented in an early 12th-century Latin chronicle called the Liber maiolichinus, where Ramon Berenguer III, Count of Barcelona is referred to as catalanicus heros, rector catalanicus, and dux catalanensis.

Some of the manuscripts that remain today suggest that Catalunya (Latin Gathia Launia) derives from the name Gothia (or Gauthia), "Land of the Goths", since the origins of the Catalan counts, lords and people were found in the ancient March of Gothia, known as Gothia, whence Gothland > Gothlandia > Gothalania > Catalonia theoretically derived.[2][3] During the Middle Ages, Byzantine chroniclers claimed that Catalania derives from the local medley of Goths with Alans, initially constituting a Goth-Alania.[4]

Besides, the names Catalonie or Cathalania (Catalonia) and catalanenses (Catalans) are easily found referring to a geographical area and its inhabitants related to the people of the Languedoc.

Catalonia, Aragon and Castile[edit]

The Crown of Aragon (15th century).
Areas of catalan language.
Miniature (15th century) of the Catalan Court
Europe in 1470

Union with Aragon[edit]

Until the middle of the 12th century, the successive counts of Barcelona tried to expand their domain in multiple directions. Ramon Berenguer III incorporated the county of Besalú, part of the county of Empúries, all of the county of Cerdanya, and also the county of Provence through his marriage to Douce of Provence. The Catalan church, for its part, became independent of the bishopric of Narbonne by restoring the archiepiscopal see of Tarragona (1118).

In 1137 the Crown of Aragon was created by the marriage of Queen Petronilla of Aragon and Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona. Ramon Berenguer IV used the title "comes Barchinonensis" (count of the Barcelonans) as his primary title and "princeps Aragonensis" (prince of the Aragonians) as his second title, beside his wife who retained her title of Regina ("queen"). Their son and heir, Alfonso II of Aragon consolidated the dynastic union as Rex Aragonum, Comes Barchinone et Marchio Provincie ("king of Aragon, count of Barcelona, and marquis of Provence").[5] Catalonia and Aragon retained their distinct traditional rights, and Catalonia its own personality with one of the first parliaments in Europe, the Catalan Corts.



Catalonia became the base for the Aragonese Crown's sea power, which came to dominate a maritime empire that extended across the western Mediterranean after the conquest of Valencia, the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and the accession in Sicily of the kings of Aragon. This period saw a large increase of maritime trade in Catalan ports, particularly of the Aragonese Crown's leading city, Barcelona.

At the end of the 12th century, a series of pacts between the crowns of Aragon and Castile delimited the zones that the two would each attempt to conquer from Muslim-ruled kingdoms, (the "Reconquista"); to the east, in 1213, the defeat and death of Peter II of Aragon ("Peter the Catholic") in the Battle of Muret put an end to the project of consolidating the Aragonese influence and power over Provence. His successor James I of Aragon did not fully consolidate his power until 1227; once he consolidated his inherited realm, he began a series of new conquests. Over the course of the next quarter-century he conquered Majorca and Valencia.

The latter became a new state, the third kingdom associated with the Crown of Aragon, with its own court and a new fuero (code of laws): the Furs de Valencia. In contrast, the Majorcan territory together with that of the counts of Cerdanya, Vallespir, Capcir and Roussillon and the city of Montpellier were left as a kingdom for his son James II of Majorca as the Kingdom of Majorca. This division began a period of struggle that ended with the annexation of that kingdom by the Crown of Aragon in 1344 by Peter IV "the Ceremonious".


The second quarter of the 14th century saw crucial changes for Catalonia, marked by a succession of natural catastrophes, demographic crises, stagnation and decline in the Catalan economy, and the rise of social tensions. The reign of Peter the Ceremonious was a time of war: the annexation of Majorca, the quelling of a rebellion in Sardinia, a rebellion by Aragonese unionists (that was, a faction who wished to extinguish local Catalan privileges in favor of a more centralized kingdom of Aragon), and an Aragonese-Castilian war. These wars created a delicate financial situation, in a framework of demographic and economic crisis, to which was added a generation later a crisis of succession generated by the death in 1410 of Martin I without a descendant or a named successor. A two-year interregnum progressively evolved in favor of a candidate from the Castilian Trastámara dynasty, Ferdinand of Antequera, who after the Compromise of Caspe (1412), was named Ferdinand I of Aragon.


Crown of Aragon union with Crown of Castile[edit]

Ferdinand's 1469 marriage to Isabella I of Castile brought about a dynastic union of the Crown of Aragon with Castile. After the 1512 invasion of the Kingdom of Navarre, in 1516 the monarchies were formally united into a single Kingdom of Spain ("Kingdom of the Spains", as it was known). Each former kingdom conserved its political institutions and maintained its own courts, laws, public administration, and separate coinage of money.

When Christopher Columbus made his discovery in The Americas during a Spanish-sponsored expedition, and began to shift Europe's trade and economic centre of gravity (and the focus of Spain's ambitions) from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean, undermining Catalonia's economic and political importance. Aragonese and Catalan power in the Mediterranean would continue, but efforts to achieve further Spanish conquests in Europe itself largely stopped and the maritime expansion into the Atlantic and the conquest of territories in the Americas was not a Catalan enterprise. Castile and Aragon were separate states until 1716 in spite of a shared crown and the newly established colonies in the Americas and Pacific were Castilian, administered as appendages of Castile, until in 1778 Seville was the only port authorized to trade in America, and until the dynastic union Catalans, as subjects of the Crown of Aragon, had no right to trade directly with the Castilian-ruled Americas.


The Reapers' War[edit]

The Reapers' War "Corpus of Blood" by Antoni Estruch i Bros (1907).
Partition of Catalonia (1659).



The president of the Generalitat, Pau Claris, declared a Catalan Republic under the protection of Louis XIII of France. This allowed the French army to cross the Pyrenees into the Iberian peninsula during the long Franco-Spanish War. After major setbacks, Spanish forces had driven out the French and crushed the rebellion by 1652 and most of Catalonia was once again part of Spain but Catalonia gained recognition of its rights from the Spanish Habsburg monarchy. When the war between Spain and France ended in 1659, the peace treaty ceded the Catalan-speaking territories north of the Pyrenees, Roussillon, Conflent, Vallespir, Capcir, and the northern half of Cerdanya, to France.

War of the Spanish Succession[edit]

In the last decades of the 17th century during the reign of Spain's last Habsburg king, Charles II, despite intermittent conflict between Spain and France, the Catalan economy recovered, not only in Barcelona, but also along the Catalan coast and even in some inland areas. However, at the end of the century, after the death of the childless Charles II (1700), the Crown of Spain went to his chosen successor, Philip V of the House of Bourbon. The Grand Alliance of Austria, England and the United Provinces gave military support to a Habsburg claimant of the crown, Archduke Charles. Catalonia initially accepted Philip V following prolonged negotiations between Philip V and the Catalan Cortes between 12.10.1701 and 14.1.1702, which resulted in an agreement where Catalonia retained all its previous privileges and gained a the status of free port (Puerto Franco) for Barcelona as well as the right to commerce with America, but this did not last. In 1705 the Archduke entered Barcelona, which recognized him as King in 1706; thus breaking an oath of loyalty to the Bourbon claiment, which had negative repercussions for Catalonia when Philip V eventually won the war.

The resulting Spanish War of Succession (1705–14) may have benefitted Charles's foreign allies but was a disaster for the Catalans, Valencians and Aragonese. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713–14) ended the possibility of Barcelona's resistance to Bourbon rule. The Bourbon king, determined to punish what he saw as sedition from Catalonia and Valencia established the Nueva Planta decree (1716), abolishing the Catalan constitutions and with it the Catalan and Valencian parliaments and rights and established a new territorial structure. He suppressed the Catalan universities (Barcelona University moved to Cervera) and abolished the administrative use of the Catalan language; half a century later, the Catalan language would also be banned from primary and secondary schools.

Economic recovery[edit]


The Napoleonic Wars[edit]

In the 1790s, new conflicts arose on the French border, due to the French Revolution and the French Revolutionary Wars. In 1808, during the Napoleonic Wars, Catalonia was occupied by the troops of General Guillaume Philibert Duhesme. The official Spanish army had evaporated, but popular resistance against the French occupation occurred in Catalonia as in other parts of Spain, and eventually developed into the Peninsular War. Girona was besieged by the French and defended by its inhabitants under the direction of general and military governor Mariano Álvarez de Castro. The French finally took the city December 10, 1809, after many deaths on both sides from hunger, epidemics, and cold; Álvarez de Castro died in prison one month later.



The Carlist wars[edit]

The reign of Ferdinand VII (reigned 1808–33) saw several Catalan uprisings and after his death the conflict over the succession between the absolutist "Carlist" partisans of Infante Carlos and the liberal partisans of Isabella II led to the First Carlist War, which lasted until 1840 and was especially virulent in the Catalan territory. As with the Basques, many of the Catalans fought on the Carlist side, not because they supported absolute monarchy, but because they hoped that restoration of the Old Regime would mean restoration of their fueros and recovery of regional autonomy.




The second third of the 19th century saw a Catalan cultural renaissance, a cultural movement to recover Catalan language and culture after a long period of decay. This became politically important to Spain as a whole, because in the latter half of the 19th century, Catalonia became a centre of Spain's industrialization and Catalonia became the largest textile producer in the Mediterranean. Catalonia had to contend with a grave shortage of energy resources and the weakness of the domestic Spanish market. Catalan industry was helped by protectionist policies which reduced competition from foreign products within Spain. As in much of Europe, the popular classes were molded into an industrial proletariat, living and working in inhuman conditions.

Catalan nationalism and the workers movement[edit]

Main article: Catalan nationalism




Republic and civil war[edit]

Proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic on 14 April 1931 in Barcelona.




Bank note from the Generalitat de Catalunya, 1936.



Franco's dictatorship[edit]

As in the rest of Spain, the Franco era (1939–1975) in Catalonia saw the annulment of democratic liberties, the prohibition and persecution of parties, the rise of thoroughgoing censorship, and the banning of all leftist institutions. In Catalonia it also meant, yet again, the repression of Catalan culture, the annulment of the statute of autonomy, the banning of many specifically Catalan institutions, and the complete suppression of the Catalan-language press, although the publication of Catalan books was allowed from 1941. During the first years, all resistance was energetically suppressed, the prisons filled up with political prisoners, and thousands of Catalans went into exile. In addition, 4000 Catalans were executed between 1938 and 1953, among them the former president of the Generalitat Lluís Companys i Jover.

After an initial period in which Spain tried to build an autarky, Franco's regime changed its economic policies and in the 1960s and early 1970s the economy entered a period of rapid economic expansion that became known as the Spanish Miracle. The period was marked by agricultural modernization, a massive expansion of industry and the start of mass tourism. As industry in Catalonia expanded, workers migrated from rural areas across Spain to work in Barcelona and its surrounding area, turning it into one of Europe's largest industrial metropolitan areas. Working-class opposition to Franco began to appear, usually clandestinely, and most notably in the form of the Comisiones Obreras ("Workers Commissions"), a return of trade union organizing, and the revival of the PSUC. In the 1970s democratic forces united under the banner of the Assemblea de Catalunya ("Catalan Assembly").

Democracy restored[edit]

Emblem of the Government of Catalonia.
Jordi Pujol i Soley, president of the Government of Catalonia (1980–2003).


Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the institutions of Catalan autonomy continued to develop, among them an autonomous police force, the creation of the comarcal administrations (roughly equivalent to United States "counties" or United Kingdom "shires" or "counties", but distinct from the historical Catalan counties) and a supreme court in the form of the Tribunal Superior de Justícia de Catalunya.


In 1992 Barcelona hosted the Summer Olympics, which brought international attention to Catalonia. During the 1990s, the absence of absolute majorities in the Spanish parliament made governments reliant on support from the various nationalist parties (Catalan, Basque, Canary Islands, etc.) which was leveraged by CiU, to gain broaden the scope of Catalan autonomy during the last government of Felipe González (1993–1996) and the first of José María Aznar (1996–2000).

In November 2003, elections to the Generalitat gave the plurality, but not the majority of seats to CiU. Three other parties (Socialists' Party of CataloniaSpanish Socialist Workers' Party, PSC-PSOE, Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and Initiative for Catalonia Greens (ICV)) united to take the government, making Pasqual Maragall, (PSC-PSOE) the new president.


On 16 September 2005, the ICANN officially approved the domain.cat, the first domain for a language community.

Declaration of Sovereignty[edit]

On 23 January 2013, parliament approved a declaration asserting that Catalonia is a sovereign entity. This should bring on a referendum for independence from Spain.[6]


  1. ^ Grun, R; et al. (2005), "ESR and U-series analyses of enamel and dentine fragments of the Banyoles mandible", Journal of Human Evolution, retrieved 31 October 2006 .
  5. ^ E. Bagué, J. Cabestany & P. Schramm, Els Primers Comtes-Reis, Vicens-Vives, 3rd. Edition, Barcelona, 1985, pp. 15–77.
  6. ^ "CATALONIA DECLARES ITSELF A SOVEREIGN ENTITY". AP. Retrieved 23 January 2013. 


  • Mentiras Historicas comunmente creidas by Jose Luis Vila-San-Juan Ed Planeta pp 215–230 1996 ISBN 84-08-01795-0
  • This article draws on material in the corresponding article in the Spanish-language Wikipedia.

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