Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

There is a little princess from Castile, and she marries a little prince from Catalonia. She goes to live in Barcelona, and on the second day, a servant talks back to her. The girl asked for a glass of water, or where they kept the chamber pot, something, and the servant told her to go and look for herself. Naturally, the Castilian princess appeals to her husband: The foulmouth must have a flogging. The prince shrugs: “My lady, I am sorry,” he says, “I cannot comply.” She, going wild, inquires why. “Here, unlike in Castile,” says the husband with a heavy heart, “the people are free.”

In the year 1450, more or less, the two kingdoms were joined by a royal intermarriage. Anyone could have seen that, as a marriage, it would end badly, very badly. I compare the union of the two crowns to a marriage that is going badly because the discrepancies that lay in the years to come were very much like those between two individuals who marry wanting different things. The Catalans wanted a union between equals; Castile, as time passed, gradually forgot this founding principle.

All was well in the first couple of centuries because the two kingdoms continued as they always had been, each with its back to the other. Catalonia, governed by the Generalitat (the Catalan government), paying tribute to the common crown more symbolically than anything. Then the Hispanic monarchy, which had been itinerant in the Middle Ages, settled in Madrid. The seat of power shifted to Castile.

According to one of our oldest constitutions, the Catalans were obliged to fight for the king only “in the case of an attack on, and in defense of, Catalonia.” In other words, Madrid was not allowed to recruit cannon fodder for its wars in Flanders, the plains of Patagonia, or any one of the fetid corners of Florida. As for taxation, the amount paid by Catalans had to be approved by its own court. Accustomed as they were to their despotic ways, the monarchs now based in Madrid found it intolerable, scandalous, that the peninsula’s most prosperous area should not give up anything when there was a war on — against half the world.

Ludicrous! The crowns had joined together in the fifteenth century, not the kingdoms; the same king for all, never the same government, and never under the yoke of Castile. That had been the agreement. In Castile, this independence was always seen as a nuisance, and later a betrayal. Remember what I said about a marriage going wrong? One side had forgotten its promises, the other was feeling increasingly stifled.

In the year 1640, the Catalans had had enough, and the entire country rose up in rebellion. Mobs of angry peasants entered Barcelona. The Spanish viceroy was apprehended when he tried to flee. They didn’t treat him well, it’s fair to say. The largest piece left of him would have fit inside a vase.

The uprising of 1640 was followed by a war between Catalonia and Castile, with France caught in the middle. A long, cruel war in which neither party gave any quarter. It concluded with an indeterminate pact that left everything more or less as it had been, Catalonia governing itself according to its own constitutions and liberties, Castile plumbing the depths of decadence.

The ensuing peace was a long intermission, more than anything. Catalonia and Castile exchanged openly hostile glances. Mistrust on the part of Castile had converted into undisguised rancor. Indeed, see what the writer Quevedo had to say on the subject:

Catalonia is the grotesque abortion of politics. Its people are a pox on their kings, and all suffer because of them. A nation arming itself with criminals unworthy of ever being pardoned.

Here he limited himself to expressing a repute we fully justified. Elsewhere, he was more to the point, elucidating the adequate treatment for this treacherous breed:

As long as there remains in Catalonia even the one Catalan, and stones in the field, we shall have an enemy, and we shall have war.

How kind! “Grotesque abortion. . a pox on their kings.” A worthier inquiry surely would have been to ask why no one loved us.

Castile’s high point came with the conquest of the Americas. Thereafter, it fell into a dull and lethargic stupor. An outcome written in its roots. The Castilian character par excellence is the hidalgo , that is, the nobleman, a medieval creation who still lives on. Proud to the point of madness, going out of his way for the sake of honor, capable of fighting to the death over a slight, but incapable of any constructive initiative. That which for him is a heroic gesture, in the eyes of a Catalan is nothing but the most laughably pigheaded error. He can’t see beyond the present moment; like dragonflies, he aspires to brilliance, but his wings flutter erratically, carrying him low and to no place in particular. His hands are good only for bearing arms; otherwise, it would mean getting them dirty. He does not understand, much less tolerate, other ways of life: Industriousness is repellent to him. In order to prosper, that same aloof conception of dignity paradoxically impels him to plunder defenseless continents, or to carry out the miserable role of courtier.

Spanish nobility. . Spanish nobility. . I shit on their nobility! What did we have to do with that scum? Work, to the true Castilian, was dishonorable; for a Catalan, the dishonor was not to work. I can still hear my father, holding out the palms of his big hands for me to see: “Never trust any man with smooth hands.”

Their grubby empire sank into history’s dirtiest, lowest slime. Millions of the natives were enslaved, their backs broken in mines across the Americas, but Castile, apart from cracking the whip, was unable to construct a free, or at least sound, economy. Any initiative it came up with was cut short by a monarchy with shades of the Asiatic — as well as being autocratic, also backward and especially corrupt.

In 1700, finally, after the Loon had died, the magnitude of the disagreement between Catalonia and Castile became evident. For the Catalans, a French king was a political aberration, the end of all their freedoms, of their very essence as a nation. France’s autocratic regime, which would sooner or later come to apply to Spain, would cancel all indigenous powers. When Castile chose Little Philip, there was no way back from the conflict. In reaction, Catalonia opted for Archduke Charles of Austria to sit on the Spanish throne. (Or a maharaja from Kashmir, if he had come and presented his credentials — anything but a French Bourbon.)

That will do. Now you might understand better the situation in the peninsula of that year. For the Catalans, Spain was merely the name for a free confederation of nations; the Castilians, on the other hand, saw in the word “Spain” an imperial extension of Castile. Or, put another way: For the Castilians, Spain was the chicken coop and Castile its rooster; for the Catalans, Spain was a designation merely for the stick used to beat the chickens. Therein lies the tragedy. In fact, when a Catalan and a Castilian used the word “Spain,” they were referring to two opposed ideas — which is what leads to such confusion for the foreigner. See what I am driving at? In reality, there is no such thing; Spain is not so much a place as a failure to meet.

But before I finish, allow me to say just a few words about my nation, Catalonia. Because in the picture painted so far, I might seem to be a Vaubanian enamored of just one side of the Pyrenees, and that simply isn’t the case.

Even as a child, I realized what a piece of flotsam Catalonia was, floating along on the currents of history when, by rights, it should have sunk hundreds of years before. The problem was that no one wanted to notice its congenital weakness and, even less, try to remedy it. When our concelleres , the Catalan government ministers, held a parade, it was pitiful. A group of silly-looking rag dolls who thought themselves very important — for they never had to doff hats to the king — and their garments and caps were made of red velvet. To the people, they were the “Red Pelts.” We were too enamored of the pantomime.