Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (41 page)

The early years of Ferdinand and Isabella’s joint reign were marked by the last Iberian crusade against the Emirate of Granada, and by the expedition of Christopher Columbus ‘to the Indies’. Both were completed in 1492–3.
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Yet there was no move towards closer union. Indeed, the Castilians jealously guarded their monopoly on contacts with the Americas. The most important development in the kingdom-county was the establishment of a Council of Aragon to co-ordinate the affairs of the Aragonese ‘empire’.
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The Crowns of Aragon and Castile were kept strictly apart. (One may compare Aragon’s position to that of Scotland after the union of the Crowns with England in 1603; the monarch had left for greater things, but the ‘auld kingdom’ remained intact.)

Ferdinand, as king of Aragon, was also responsible for launching Aragonese historiography. The
Crónica de Aragón
(1499) of Gualberto Fabricio de  Vagad was commissioned by him;
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Lucio Marineo Sículo’s
De Aragoniae Regibus et eorum rebus gestis libri V
(1509) provided a multi-volume tour of Aragon’s past, real and imaginary, from the legendary eighth-century monarchs of Sobrarbe to the death of Alfonso V in 1458.

From 1494, Ferdinand was hard pressed to defend his dynasty. Carefully laid plans were going awry. Three of the royal couple’s five children, including the crown prince, predeceased their mother. So, too, did their eldest grandson and heir. The fourth child, Juana la Loca, was mentally disturbed; and the fifth, Catalina, headed to disaster in England as ‘Catharine of Aragon’. An ingenious solution was found by recognizing Juana’s Habsburg husband, Philip the Fair of Burgundy, as heir apparent to the Castilian throne. But in September 1506 he died as well. In an ironical twist of fate, a few months before Isabella’s death in November 1504, she and Ferdinand had been chosen to be joint emperors of the (defunct) Byzantine Empire.

Yet the worst anxieties were misplaced. The torrent of premature deaths did not carry off everyone. Despite Juana’s mental illness, two of her sons, grandsons of
Los Reyes Católicos
, Carlos/Charles and Fernando/Ferdinand, grew to manhood. Both faced dazzling futures at the head of the Habsburg world. On the death of Philip the Fair, Habsburg Burgundy had passed to Carlos/Charles, his eldest son, who in 1516 also succeeded his grandfather in Castile and Aragon. Three years later he was elected Holy Roman Emperor as Charles V and became known to history as the ‘emperor of the World’.
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Some people find the intricacies of dynastic politics tedious. To the medieval mind, they held prime importance. All the key decisions of Charles V’s reign were underlain by the sheer unwieldiness of his inheritance. The first, in 1521, was to appoint his brother Ferdinand as acting emperor in Vienna; the second, in 1555, was to divide the Habsburg lands permanently and to limit the rule of his son Philip to the Spanish territories. But possession of large parts of the Americas gave the Castilian element greater weight in the conglomerate than all the other lands put together. In 1516, when welcoming their presumptive co-king, the
Cortes
of Castile made sure that Aragon was formally excluded from the Americas. This selfish disposition was never rescinded.

In succession to Charles V, who abdicated in 1556, four kings from the House of Habsburg mounted the throne:

Felipe II (Philip II), the Prudent (1556–98)

Felipe III (Philip III), the Pious (1598–1621)

Felipe IV (Philip IV), the Great (1621–65)

Carlos II (Charles II), the Bewitched (1665–1700)

Aragon made trouble for all of them. Philip II was the first in history to use the title of ‘king of Spain’.
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Old divisions persisted. Castile and Aragon were still in personal but not constitutional union when their king was elected Holy Roman Emperor. Yet the election did not make them a dependency of the Empire: they remained, like Hungary, in the category of the emperor’s non-imperial territories.

After 1555, however, Aragon’s predicament changed once again. Indeed, as the Kingdom of Spain took flight, many historians talk as if Aragon’s story had finished. Such was not the case. The kingdom-county lived on: it kept its separate laws and institutions, its languages and traditions, and its cultural and commercial connections with its former ‘empire’. And it repeatedly rebelled against Castilian presumptions.

Of Aragon’s Italian possessions only Sardinia and Sicily stayed under direct Aragonese control. Malta and Gozo were donated to the Knights of St John in 1530.
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Sardinia, ‘the pearl of the Tyrrhenian Sea’, escaped Spain’s close attention except as a naval base from which the Iberian wool trade could be protected. Sicily stayed cut off from the rest of Italy. Indeed, for a long time to come, Sicilians probably had more in common with Catalans and Aragonese than with Piedmontese, Lombardi or Tuscans.
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Malta, too, despite the severance of its direct link, continued to exhibit strong Aragonese influences. From start to finish, Aragon made a prominent contribution to the Hospitallers, whose religious ethos, seafaring prowess and crusading traditions struck a common chord. The Aragonese formed one of the eight
langues
or ‘nations’ into which the knights were organized; the Auberge d’Aragon stands to this day as one of the grand edifices of Valletta; and eight out of twenty-eight Grand Masters of the Order in the Maltese period came from Aragon; the escutcheon of Juan de Homedes (r. 1536–53) is carved into the keystone arch of the city gate of Mdina. Most curiously, the centrepiece hanging above the altar in the chapel of the Langue d’Aragon in Valetta, a painting by Mattia Preti, shows a mounted St George slaying the Devil on the background of a medieval battle. The picture was long assumed to portray a battle-scene from the Holy Land. Recent conservation work, however, has revealed that it portrays the victory of El Puig, inflicted on the Moors in 1234 in the region south of Valencia. In other words, Preti had been commissioned to illustrate an episode in the foundation myth not of the Hospitallers, but of the Crown of Aragon.
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The separate identity of the Crown of Aragon was long preserved within Spain. Despite the dominance of Castile and the stream of centralizing measures flowing from the new capital in Madrid, Aragonese particularism continued to make itself felt right up to the early eighteenth century. Though the
Cortes
could only be convened by the king, the nobles maintained control over the
Diputación
, a representative body for preparing petitions, and the chief legal officer, the justiciar, could not be removed on the king’s order. The
Fueros
, the corpus of Aragon’s traditional laws and customs, was considered sacrosanct, and internal customs posts enforced the protective tariffs of Aragon-Catalonia’s commerce. Under Philip II and his successors, the lands and people of the Crown remained proud and formally distinct until the day of its extinction.

Religion provided a source of regular trouble. The Spanish kings were eager to enforce religious uniformity, and remained dutiful supporters of the Holy Inquisition, which Ferdinand and Isabella had founded. For practical purposes, however, the Inquisition could not enforce its rulings in Aragon. The nobility was temperamentally indisposed to help; and many dissidents and suspects were able to evade investigation. At least one-third of the population of Valencia were
moriscos
, Moorish converts, whose conversion to Catholicism was barely skin-deep. In the eyes of Madrid, where central power now resided, the failure of the Inquisition to make headway against them was proof of Aragon’s unreliability.

In 1582 royal troops were sent to Valencia without local agreement, and in 1589 the same thing happened in Ribagorça. But Philip II’s displeasure with the Crown of Aragon came to a head through the obstinacy of a royal secretary of Catalan origin called Antonio Perez. Perez, facing a dubious charge of murder, fled prison in Madrid and on reaching Aragonese territory promptly appealed to the protection of the
Fueros
. In particular, he claimed the right of a legal procedure, the
firma de manifestación.
The justiciar, Juan de Luna, ruled that Perez could not be extradited to Madrid. The viceroy was killed during violent demonstrations in Barcelona, and the king’s patience snapped. An army of 12,000 men marched into Aragon. Perez was smuggled across the frontier into Béarn. The justiciar and twenty-one other officials were executed. The king then hypocritically reconfirmed the
Fueros
, and a sullen Aragon returned to the
status quo ante
.
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The subsequent experience of the Crown lands within the Spanish state was characterized by a long, uneasy truce punctuated by three more violent episodes. The first insurrection, known to Castilians as the ‘Catalan Revolt’ (1640–52) and to the Catalans either as the
Corpus de Sang
(because it broke out on the day of Corpus Christi) or as
La Guerra dels Segadors
, the ‘War of the Reapers’ (because the first person killed by the soldiery was an innocent reaper), was provoked by a prolonged period of oppressive taxation and by the forcible billeting of troops in the countryside. Local disturbances drew in a French army, which occupied northern Catalonia for years, and the resultant conflict cost Spain an enormous haemorrhage of blood and treasure over two decades. It was terminated by the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), when Rosselló and east Cerdanya were ceded to France as the price of peace.
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The second insurrection, between 1687 and 1697, was named the ‘Revolt of the
Barretinas
’ after the high-crowned berets worn by Catalan peasants. The complaints were much as before, but this time did not involve the towns and cities. Tensions rose after a peasant mob demolished the small port of Mataro, and three members of the
Diputación
were arrested in Barcelona for daring to lodge a protest against official reactions. French agents toured the villages, a rural militia was raised, military support arrived from Roussillon, and in the culminating phase Barcelona was ineffectively surrounded. Years of local raids and vicious reprisals preceded an inconclusive stalemate.
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The third insurrection, between 1700 and 1713, erupted in the context of the Franco-Spanish War over the Spanish Succession. Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia all declared in favour of the Austrian contender, ‘Don Carlos’ von Habsburg, and organized a self-governing federation. In their own eyes, they had taken to arms in defence of their ancient liberties. In the eyes of Madrid and of Versailles, they had mounted an intolerable defiance of monarchical rule. French and Spanish armies combined to reduce the rebels to obedience. Valencia was reconquered in 1707, and Aragon in 1708. Barcelona held out through two terrible sieges until September 1714.
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By then, further resistance was pointless, and compromise was impossible. The Treaty of Utrecht signalling the general European peace had already been signed. ‘Don Carlos’ had left for Vienna. The French candidate, Philippe de Bourbon, was already installed in Madrid as King Felipe V, and his officials were busy preparing the
Nueva Planta
or ‘New Order’, whereby uniform Castilian laws and practices would be introduced throughout Spain.
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The Catalan separatists were totally isolated and capitulation was unavoidable. The French marshal-duke of Berwick marched in to install a military government. The pillars of the Crown’s autonomy, the
Diputación
and the
Generalitat
of Catalonia, together with the mint and the university, were closed down; the system of provincial tariffs was abolished. Leaders of the ‘rebellion’ were executed or exiled, and a Spanish captain-general took command. The Catalan language was banned. Henceforth Castilian customs, Castilian speech and Castilian rule were to enjoy a monopoly. The name of Aragon remained as a little more than a Spanish administrative unit. The dying embers of the Crown of Aragon were extinguished for ever.

III

The ‘Crown of Aragon’ has not fared well on the fields of remembrance. Ultimately a loser in the competition with Castile, and a mere ghost in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when most foundational historical works were compiled, it is a frequent absentee in the resultant narratives. It tends to be presented as ‘a historical region of Spain’, not, like its sometime counterpart, Portugal, as a sovereign state. As often as not, its legacy is treated with indifference, if not with hostility, and it is left as a codicil to the main Castilian story. Most Spaniards today have lost all sense of the Crown of Aragon’s separate and extraordinary past.

The attitudes of those who might seemingly have the strongest interest in the subject give the greatest cause for reflection. For today’s Aragonese and Catalans do not share a common outlook; the historic marriage of their two countries has dissolved into mental divorce. The Aragonese – inhabitants of the ‘Autonomous Spanish Community’ of Aragon – do not dance the
Joca Aragonese
in order to stress the historic link with Catalonia: quite the opposite. And for many Catalans, the very name of Aragon sticks in the throat. In place of the ‘kingdom-county’, monuments and textbooks in Catalonia refer to the ‘medieval Catalan state’, or to the ‘Catalan Empire’ or sometimes to some unidentified ‘kingdom’. The concept of a multinational ‘Crown of Aragon’ is distinctly out of fashion. In academic circles, it is often replaced by the dubious neologism of the ‘Catalan-Aragonese Federation’. Modern politics, in fact, plagues almost all attempts to recall the Crown of Aragon with accuracy and affection. The dual kingdom-county, with its long chain of dependencies, lived and died long before the age of modern nationalism; and its ethos was ill matched to modern enthusiasms. Its memory has not been espoused by Spanish nationalism, by Catalan nationalism, nor even by provincial Aragonese particularism.