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| 3. Barcelona and Catalonia |
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| The Spanish Mark had been established as a result of the conquest of Catalonia by Charlemagne (785–811). The county of Barcelona (erected 817) under the Frankish crown became independent, perhaps as early as the 9th century. By the beginning of the 12th century, the counts of Barcelona had large holdings north of the Pyrenees (notably in Provence), to which they added for a brief period Majorca and Iviza (1114–15) and, permanently, Tarragona. | 1 |
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| 1137 |
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| The union of Catalonia and Aragon, begun by Ramón Berenguer IV of Catalonia, was epochal, for it created a powerful state with access to the sea. Catalonian territories included Cerdagne and a large part of Provence, with the later addition of Roussillon (1172), Montpellier (1204, under French suzerainty), Foix, Nîmes, Béziers (1162–96). | 2 |
| Ramón Berenguer IV continued pressure against the Moors: Tortosa fell (1148), and Lerida and Fraga (1149); he encouraged Christian immigration and the establishment of monasteries (e.g., the Cistercian abbey of Poblet, c. 1150). His experts produced the Usages of Barcelona, a legal code that stressed his regalian rights over justice, the peace, and the coinage. | 3 |
| Social change. The period from 1150 to 1213 witnessed considerable agricultural development, population expansion, and the growth of peasant freedom. In towns such as Tarragona, Lerida, and especially Barcelona, entrepreneurs, often funded by Jewish capital and involved in the trade of Moorish slaves, emerged as a class of “proto-patricians,” businesspeople whose local power rested on their wealth. Both commercial and agrarian prosperity depended on the continuation of Muslim industry and technology. The towns gained independence from feudal and ecclesiastical authorities. | 4 |
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