Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

When his turn came, Ferrer stood up and said: “I have a question: Is Catalonia any different now from what she used to be? Do our laws and privileges not give us the ability to oppose the Castilians who want unjustly to oppress us? What reason does the Bourbon have for oppressing us so severely, wanting to make our open and free people into a nation that is subjugated and enslaved? So who could possibly agree to Castilian vanity and violence being enthroned over the Catalans, that we should serve in the same ignominy they force upon the Indians?”

“You’re all crazy, irresponsible!” replied those on the side of the Red Pelts. “You’re going to bring our whole nation to ruin!”

I should like to be impartial. I would never say that the noblemen who voted to submit were all corrupt. By no means. There were more than reasonable justifications for not offering resistance. We had been abandoned; we were being attacked by the entire might of the Two Crowns, the French and Spanish empires combined. Voting for a negotiated solution, however little we might expect from such a thing at this point, did not necessarily imply serving Little Philip.

Ferrer invoked the name of the king of Portugal, a kingdom that was fearful of following the Catalans down the same route and who surely would help us; if we resisted, Emperor Charles wouldn’t be able to wash his hands of us without his international prestige being tarnished. England had signed a long-standing agreement; the Catalan ambassadors were traveling around all the courts of Europe arguing the case for a people who wanted nothing more than that most basic of rights: survival.

He was interrupted several times. Ferrer remained deaf to the voices of friends and enemies alike. He went over Catalonia’s history, of the pernicious dynastic alliance with Castile, and continued: “For all these reasons, let us at once take up arms and raise our flags, let us enlist soldiers without a moment’s delay. May the Fidelísimos Brazos Generales, our three honorable branches, use all the authority that God has placed in their hands; may they immediately draw up manifests to make our justice and our proceeding absolutely clear to all of Europe, and let our enemies discover to their cost that the spirit and honor of the Catalan nation has not declined a jot.”

Deep down, though, not even Ferrer was very hopeful. It was such a desperate play that it could almost have been mistaken for a noble suicide.

“May our nation meet her end with glory,” he went on, “for a glorious end is worth more than accepting demands and violence the likes of which even the Moors were never guilty of.”

My dear vile Waltraud interrupts me here, raising her great head like a cow who can’t find her pasture and asking, again and again, what my own opinions were at that time. They were not of the least significance, but very well, I shall summarize them.

My point of view sought to be as dispassionate as possible, and this was it: Both sides were right. To submit would mean losing the liberties that had ruled us for a thousand years, being transformed into one more province of Castile and its empire, sharing its people’s yoke, suffering merciless repression. Resisting, as the Red Pelts kept proclaiming, meant ruin and massacre. We were faced with a choice between two options, each as bad as the other.

There was a vote. Submission won. By a sizable majority. Ferrer gave a leap, went over to the secretary with the small bell, and insisted that his name be noted, that there be a specific record of his vote against. It was like signing his own death warrant. When the Bourbons arrived, that would be evidence enough to hang him. And yet other nobles got to their feet and went to follow Ferrer’s example!

I was amazed. Why would people do such a thing?

We ought to examine the other side of the coin, too. Just as admirable or even more so, strange though it may seem. Because there were noblemen like Francesc Alemany, Baldiri Batlle, Lluís Roger, or Antoni València, whose consciences led them to vote for submission, and so they did. Later, things would take a turn. And they fought. They followed the will of the majority, setting aside their personal opinions in favor of the general good. Waltraud asks me why I have tears in my eyes. I can tell you: because these men, who never chose resistance, fought unfaltering for a long year of siege. They acted in support of other people’s ideas, even those people who were opposed to them. And at dawn on September 11, 1714, they sacrificed their lives. All of them. I can see València now, attacking a wall of bayonets, saber in hand, swallowed up by a sea of white uniforms.

To give you some idea of the significance of the resolution, I’d say that the noblemen’s branch of the parliament was similar to that of the English lords. More important than the number of votes, it had an intangible moral weight, and it was very common that the people’s branch simply ratified their decisions.

“It serves you right that your side lost,” I said to Peret as we headed home. “Aren’t you ashamed of having sold your opinion?”

“No, lad, not at all,” he replied. “The Red Pelts paid me to join the claque in favor of submission, but they were foolish enough to pay up in advance.”

“In any case, they’re currently at two — zero,” I snorted as we made our way across a packed Plaza de Sant Jaume. “Priest and nobility, in favor of submitting. Tomorrow the people’s branch will follow the ruling from the nobles. It’s over.”

I have never been so wrong. We were still in the square when a spokesman came out onto the balcony and did indeed inform the crowd that the noble branch had voted for submission. It was as though a frozen downpour had fallen. No one objected. Of those thousand throats, not one rose up in an angry shout. But instead of going home, they continued to camp out where they were, there in the Plaza Sant Jaume!

In my opinion, that was the real turning point. Not an act of rebellion but a deaf noncompliance. The people down there were so disconcerted by what they had heard, just as the nobles up on the balcony were disconcerted by that mass stillness and silence. What could they do? They couldn’t expel all those people. Nobody would dare, nor did they have enough troops to try. Besides, an act of violence like that could lead to just the kinds of disturbance that the Red Pelts were trying so hard to avoid.

That whole night nobody moved from the packed square. The following day, the people’s branch of the parliament assembled. The atmosphere out on the street, and Ferrer’s speech, had so fired them up that their vote went in favor of resistance, and by an overwhelming majority. This time the Plaza Sant Jaume did react, with an explosion of joy: “Publish the Crida ! Publish it!”

There was so much shouting, and it was so passionate, that they were no longer merely expressing a desire. It was a threat and an order; fail to comply and anything could happen. And more of the noblemen changed their votes! But it didn’t end there. The most intransigent of the Red Pelts placed a thousand legal obstacles in the way. They alleged that the branch of aristocrats had expressed the change in their intentions out in the corridor, not in a session that had been convened legally, and as such, it was not a binding decision. Their strategy, as it’s not hard to deduce, consisted in drawing out proceedings for so long that the people outside grew tired and went home. They did not succeed. Two days and nights had gone by and the Plaza de Sant Jaume was as full as ever, or fuller. Generosity always has this bitter side to it; those most willing to give everything are those with the least to gain by a victory and the most to lose from a defeat. Over the course of those two days, the debates ran aground.