Barcelona (4 page)

No sooner had Roman Barcelona begun to attain a respectable size than the decay and contraction of the Spanish part of the Roman Empire itself began to work against it, pulling it back to inconsequence and provinciality. In a series of maneuvers and takeovers too complicated to recite here, a series of barbarian invasions from Germany came down across the Pyrenees, starting around
A.D.
409: Vandals, Suevians, Alani, and finally a force of (perhaps) 250,000 Visigoths, commanded by their king, Ataulf. The Visigoths have had an unjust press, denounced as destroyers and brutes. But quite a lot had rubbed off on them in the few years since they devastated Greece and sacked Rome. In fact, they had become enthusiastic churchbuilders and in the late sixth century one of their kings, Reccared, imposed Catholicism over Arianism as the official state religion in northern Spain. (So much for a famously silly claim by one American neo-con writer in the 1980s, that the universities and higher institutions of learning in his country were being taken over by “Visigoths in tweed.” If only, one can hear more informed neo-cons groaning.)

Only fragments—and fragments of fragments, at that—survive to mark the Visigoths' Christian presence in Barcelona. The sculptures of evangelists, a lion (Mark), an angel (Matthew), an eagle (John), and the hand of God, which are built into the facade of tiny Sant Pau del Camp, the oldest church in the city, were salvaged and recycled from what was probably a Visigothic chapel on the site. But apart from that, virtually nothing of Visigothic Barcelona remains. What is even more surprising is that no buildings survive that were erected by the great unifier of the Catalan Dark Ages in the middle of the ninth century, and who was mythologized by Catalans for a thousand years after his death as the founder of Catalunya's national independence. This man was known as Guifré el Pelos—Wilfred the Hairy.

Wilfred established his rule of Catalunya by defeating a Frankish overlord, while presiding over the expulsion from Barcelona of the Saracens, who had managed to conquer the city—the next-to-last time any Arabs would get into Barcelona. Despite the nearly intact Roman walls of the little city, the
sarrains—
who had become a big inconvenience to trade, a wasp's nest of Moorish freebooters—were thrown out, or so the story goes, by an alliance between Wilfred the Hairy and Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious, in 801. (Their respective dates, as we have already seen, make this impossible, but never mind. In terms of heraldry, politics, and myth, the idea of Catalan independence begins with him.)

Wilfred the Hairy, having consolidated his hold on northern Catalunya, became an enthusiastic supporter of monasteries and churches, thereby getting the priestly scribes on his side and ensuring himself an excellent press. He endowed almost all the earliest church foundations of Catalunya: Santa Maria de Formiguera (873), Santa Maria de la Grassa (878), Santa Maria de Ripoll(888), and Sant Pere de Ripoll (890) among them. He built himself a palace in Barcelona, of which nothing remains. He endowed churches there, which have also vanished. If Barcelona is devoid of Carolingian buildings, it is not because the Moors, led by the vizier of Córdoba, briefly retook it in 985, but because of early Catalan “developers” who flattened them during Barcelona's first building boom in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Early churches in the north, in the towns at the foot of the Pyrenees, which had been established by Wilfred, survived perfectly well and one of them, Santa Maria de Ripoll, is still sometimes called the
bressol de Catalunya
(cradle of Catalunya) and features a magnificent though timeworn alabaster portal, the finest Romanesque sculptural complex in all of Spain.

Under the line of count-kings that began with Wilfred the Hairy, the territory of Catalunya expanded steadily. Its crucial political event, which came in the twelfth century, was the marriage of the Catalan count-king Ramón Berenguer IV to Petronella, the queen of neighboring Aragon. This fused Catalunya and Aragon into a large power bloc, formidable enough to keep at bay any incursion from Castile and to fend off the centralist ambitions of the kings in Madrid. Moreover, since their military forces combined, the union of Catalunya and Aragon created a Catalan empire in the Mediterranean. Beginning with Jaume I, who amply deserved his sobriquet El Conqueridor, the Conqueror, the kingdom of Aragon and Catalunya had an empire by the beginning of the fourteenth century.

The tangible symbol of this was the Llotja, the “lodge”—in effect, the first stock exchange in Europe or anywhere else. The Llotja, in its original Gothic form, was constructed in the fourteenth century, as part of the first of the three largest building booms in Catalan history. The first of these booms, which produced the Llotja and a large amount of the
casc antic
or medieval city besides, was set going by a singular and obsessive monarch, Pere III, known as El Ceremonios, who ruled Barcelona for much of the fourteenth century.

The second took place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and it gave us that stupendous and visionary city plan, the first of the grid cities, the ancestor of New York: the Eixample, conceived by Ildefons Cerdà, the New Barcelona that broke out of the constricting
muralles
and enabled the city to grow beyond its imposed medieval limits.

And the third building boom was the restoration and refiguring of Barcelona in the years leading up to and then beyond the Olympics of 1992, set in motion by the mayor Pasqual Maragall.

Catalan building booms tend to have something in common. They defy common sense. This was spectacularly true of what happened under the rule of Peter the Ceremonious. He was a proud man with a quick and dangerous temper. He liked luxury and elaborate protocol and he wanted his city to testify to what he perceived as the glories of his own singular character. He set this ambition forth in a poem, for he was a poet, too—maybe not a great one like Ausiàs March, but not a bad one for a ruler. In its original medieval Catalan it runs:

 

Lo loch me par sia pus degut
noble ciutat, o vila gross'e gran,
o.ls enaemichs valentment garreian
tenent al puny lança e'l brac escut,
o'n esglesia, on devotate sia,
e si u fa'xi, no sera ja repres
per cavallers …

 

Which in modern translation means, more or less:

 

The worthiest of places, so I think
is a noble city, or a great fine town
or to be bravely fighting enemies
with lance in hand, or shield upon one's arm
or at one's devotions in a church
and if I do this, then I will not be scorned
by noble knights …

 

He couldn't have been plainer about this. Cities exist to promote the glory of their inhabitants, their citizens, and, in particular, their rulers. If they don't or can't do this, they are not fit to be called cities; they are merely villages, large or small. The status of a city can be gauged from the glory of its institutions. Some of these are religious, of course, but others are civil. And since there was no city in the Mediterranean world more religiously devoted to money than Barcelona, Catalan commerce had to have its own cathedral. Clearly, what Peter the Ceremonious and his Catalan contemporaries wanted was to build, on the edge of the sea which was the source of their wealth, a kind of medieval World Trade Center—though one which could not be destroyed by the Arabs, who were still in command of most of Spain south of the Ebro.

They wanted to build much more, and they did. To make sure the
moros
would not get in, they remade the city walls. They built a huge wall that started on the sea, just south of the Drassanes, the earlier medieval shipyards, and enclosed the whole area that now lies between the Ramblas and the Paral-lel. It enclosed the
horts i vinyets,
the market gardens on which Barcelona's emergency food supply depended. It was a giant garden fence. That was a strategic necessity. But what was not so plausible were the efforts and money they expended on a whole range of buildings we now see as the essence of medieval Barcelona. The Casa de la Ciutat; the Saló del Tinell with its stupendous arches—those semicircular rainbows of stone; Santa Maria del Mar; much of the Cathedral; and, of course, the Llotja. Were these and other masterpieces of the Barri Gòtic (Old City) raised in a time of peace and prosperity? Absolutely not. In 1333 the Catalan wheat crop failed and about ten thousand people, a quarter of the city's population, starved to death. Barcelona was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. That was what gave the background to this great building its bizarre and manic quality. Think about New York for a moment. The greatest city in the world was traumatized almost to the point of paralysis by a terrorist attack which killed fewer than three thousand people, out of a population of eight million. Less than 0.1 percent. But here was a fourteenth-century city which in one year lost about 25 percent of its population, and still built continuously, with an unquenchable belief in the future—even though it was at the same time being attacked by other assorted acts of God as well.

Plague, for instance. Because Barcelona was a great sea-trading city, it was unusually and directly vulnerable to the plague, whose germs,
Yersina pestis,
came in the saliva of lice, which rode on the skin of rats, which crossed the Mediterranean in the holds of ships. The city's economy was just beginning to recover from the catastrophes of the 1330s when plague struck in 1348. Majorca was the first part of Europe to get it, and then Catalunya. Eighty percent of the population of the Balearic Islands died. In Barcelona government was nearly wiped out: Four out of the five consellers died, for instance. The result of the Black Death, here as elsewhere, was social chaos. Those with a millenarian view announced that the Last Judgment and the Final Days were coming. Many blamed it on the Jews, and every Catalan knew someone who knew someone else who had seen Jews throwing corpses in Christian wells. So along with the epidemics and renewed cycles of famine there were lynch mobs and pogroms. If you wanted a textbook example of how medieval states and polities could come apart and collapse, you could not find a better one than Barcelona at the time that the Llotja was being built, under the reign of Peter the Ceremonious. Truly, the living envied the dead, and everyone feared the hand of God was against them. And yet they continued to build, in the face of disasters that none of them understood.

They found refuge and solace in religion, so perhaps it is not a mystery that the calamitous fourteenth century was the great period of Catalan church building. But the Catalans, then as now, took great pride in their mercantile hardheadedness and they had already elevated business to a kind of state religion, which had the advantage of letting bankers and wholesalers in baccala feel like the gods, heroes, and saints they always knew they were. And that was why they built La Llotja del Mar, right at the height of the plague, between 1380 and 1392.

The Llotja

A
llotja
is a business exchange. Most actively trading cities in the old
paisos Catalanes
in southern France and northeastern Spain had such lodges—Perpignan, Aix, Palma, and so on. But the llotjas of Palma and Barcelona were by far the grandest and most permanent of them.

This reflected Barcelona's preeminence as a trading city, at a time when Madrid was hardly more than a cluster of mud huts beside the Manzanares River, and no idea of a Spanish empire run from it had yet been conceived. The count-kings of Catalunya had consulates in no fewer than 126 places across the Mediterranean. Their mercantile empire stretched from Venice to Beirut, from Málaga to Constantinople, from Famagusta to Tripoli, from Montpellier to Cairo. No other country had such a network. They traded everywhere and with everybody. To the Levant they exported woolen cloth and sheepskins, dried fruit, olive oil, and iron. In return they got pepper, incense, cinnamon, and thousands on thousands of slaves. To the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, Naples, and Sicily, which made up the Catalan empire in the fourteenth century, they exported cloth, leather goods, saffron, and arms; they brought back cotton, wheat, baccala, and more slaves. They traded in textiles with Flanders and in everything from dried figs to nuts and miles of cloth with the cities of the Barbary Coast of North Africa. This trade was mainly carried on by Catalan Jews, who would be furiously persecuted by stupid Spanish Christians in the fifteenth century but at the time the Llotja was being built in the fourteenth were not only tolerated but encouraged by the pragmatic Catalans, for the simple reason that a Jew could set up as a trading agent in Muslim cities from which Christians were excluded.

No medieval culture, then, was as forthright in its commitment to the virtues of business as that of fourteenth-century Catalunya. And none would be until the English in the nineteenth century, whose dithyrambs in praise of money and the middle class remind one so strongly of the Catalans. Only one thing was better than a merchant, and that was two merchants. In the 1380s a former Franciscan theologian, Francesc de Eiximenis, published a four-volume work of 2,500 chapters called
Regiment de la Cosa Publica,
in which he argued that the only protection citizens had against warlords and tyrants was a strong, dominant middle class. The bourgeois, full of
seny
(common sense) and public spirit, were virtue itself. They should be a protected species. “Merchants,” Eiximenis declared, “should be favored above all other lay people in the world … they are the life of the people, the treasure of public interest, the food of the poor, the arm of all good commerce.… Without merchants, societies fall apart, princes become tyrants, the young are lost and the poor weep.… Only merchants are big givers and great fathers and brothers of the common good.”