Early Adulthood

As a coastal territory within the Crown of Aragon, Catalonia became the main agent of the Crown’s maritime power, with the port of Barcelona playing a crucial role in the expansion of Aragon’s influence & territories through military conquest & trade into Valencia, Balearic Islands, Sardinia & Sicily. Many of these conquests were made during the long reign of Jaume I, the conqueror (r.1208 – 1276).

Jaume I was not just an extremely effective ruler in foreign affairs. He was equally effective in domestic affairs. He managed to appease the rebellious character of the nobles when at the same time he strengthened the cities’ self-determination by offering them the right to their own governing body.

Barcelona was the first of the kingdom to take up the right given by the reform, creating its local government right after the King’s decree in 1249. The government was made up of a fluctuating number of about 100 people (Consell de Cent) who represented the three distinct estates of the city, the church, the feudal nobility & the people.

Jaume I’s son, Peter III of Aragon (the Great) was the one who defined the extent of the city government’s powers in 1284, after vesting it with a written constitution that clarified its civil, mercantile & procedural rights. Most importantly it offered the city’s councilors a greater authority than the one carried by the Royal delegates in local matters.

It was during Peter III‘s time that the construction of another wall (Pere the Great’s wall) began enclosing the city & its various satellite settlements, from today’s La Rambla to the modern-day Parc de la Ciutadella. In 1298 with Peter III‘s son James II the Just (r.1291 – 1327) on the throne, the founding stone of the new Gothic Cathedral that would be completed more than 150 years later is laid upon the place of the earlier Romanesque church built by the Visigoths in the 6th century.

By the end of the 14th century, the Catalano-Aragonese crown was one of the major powers in Europe with disputes over several territories & conflicts with many of the big players of that time like the Republic of Genoa & the House of Anjou. The territories of the crown extended to the Duchy of Athens (conquered in 1311), and its Catalan galleys and naval consulates reached the whole extent of the Mediterranean coast from East to West, North, and South.

It was at this apex of power that the Kingdom of Aragon was united with the Kingdom of Castile after the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon & Isabella I of Castile in 1469. It thus introduced the concept of one united Christian Spanish Kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula.

In less than 30 years after the unification of the two kingdoms, the joint army of Aragon & Castile conquers the last remaining part of Muslim Al-Andalus  taking the city of Granada in January of 1492. The official inauguration of the word España from ancient Hispania would be used to designate the whole of the two Kingdoms from that point onward.

A few months after the reunification of Spain, on August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus would embark upon his journey that would change the course of history forever. After the discovery of the Americas, he would meet Isabella and Ferdinand in Barcelona to report on his voyage. More than 400 years later a 40-meter-tall column crowned with a 7-meter-tall statue of Columbus would be erected at the end of the famous La Rambla to commemorate the instance.

In 1512 the third Christian Kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula, the Kingdom of Navarre gets annexed by Castile placing the last missing piece in what was rapidly evolving into a very centralized Spanish Kingdom, where the distinct counties, principalities, and local governments would be more & more sidelined by authoritarian royals with hereditary titles.

Although Columbus was received in Barcelona upon his return from the New World, the Catalans were denied the right to trade with the Americas, when at the same time cities like Seville and Madrid became the economic epicenters of a gigantic empire, inflated even more by the marriages of Isabella’s children to the heirs of the Portuguese Crown, and those of the Hapsburg dynasty.