CATALOGNA

CATALONIA. – Historic Spanish region, corresponding to the present-day provinces of Lérida, Tarragona, Gerona and Barcelona, lying between the Mediterranean, the Pyrenees and the lower Ebro valley.

I. Geography

The territory (32,197 sq. km.) alternates zones of very different aspect, which form smaller regional units (valleys on the Pyrenean side, concas and plains of the foothill sector, camps and coasts of the littoral, etc.) and often preserve historical names (Pallars, Cerdaña, Ampurdan, Vallés, Panadés, Priorato, Noguera, Segarra), as well as forms of economy and culture that are quite distinct. In general Catalonia has a Mediterranean character, with winters much milder and summers less extreme than those of the nearby meseta, and rainfall sufficient for agriculture.

Covering barely one sixteenth of Spanish territory, Catalonia, with its 2,900,000 inhabitants, contains more than one tenth of the state’s population. The density index (92 per sq. km.) is among the highest in Spain; yet while it reaches an absolute maximum in the province of Barcelona (551 inhabitants per sq. km.), it falls to only 25 per sq. km. in that of Lérida (which is inland and mountainous). The originality of the Catalan region is largely attributable to the character of its population, distinct from its Castilian neighbours not only in ethnic type and dialect (akin to Provençal) but also—having long attained the status of a true national language—in temperament, more energetic and more inclined to action. Practically the whole population is Catholic.

Catalan economy features flourishing agriculture (wine, oil, fruit and above all citrus fruits) and a thriving livestock industry (especially horses), already enabling active exports; but its typical trait, within the national economy of which it forms part, is the development of industry, among which textiles (notably cotton), chemicals and engineering predominate.

The larger urban centres are mostly of modern origin and concentrated near the coast: Hospitalet (60,000 inhabitants), Badalona (54,000), Sabadell (52,000), Tarrasa (45,000), in the vicinity of Barcelona, while the old historic cities have remained almost stationary (Lérida with 41,464 inhabitants, Tarragona with 35,648, Gerona with 29,632). Above all stands Barcelona, an industrial metropolis

Industrial and commercial, its population (1,081,175 inhabitants in 1947) is roughly equal to that of Madrid.

Giuseppe Caraci

II. History

Catalonia, whose name is first encountered only in the 12th century, comprises the territory of the Carolingian Hispanic March as it had been during the 9th–10th centuries; from that period it became the principality of Catalonia. The origin of this name is debated; the most plausible hypotheses are that it derives either from the word “castle” or from “land of the Goths,” the latter being more probable. When, at the beginning of the 9th century, the territory was freed from Muslim domination, Barcelona became the seat of a county and gradually succeeded in uniting around itself the other counties into which the Hispanic March had been divided, so that the counties of Girona, Vic, and Barcelona formed a compact nucleus that became the basis of Catalonia’s unity.

Through his role in the Reconquest, Wilfred the Hairy is regarded as the first Count of Barcelona. After important successes, Barcelona fell once more under Muslim rule until Count Borrell II reconquered it, after which the March was able to begin a cultural revival and to bring Western Europe into contact with a new current of civilization. Indeed, Gerbert, later Pope Sylvester II, brought from the Spanish March to France and Italy what he had learned there. This cultural current actually derived from the fusion of Visigothic culture with the Muslim culture that had matured in the monastic school of Santa Maria de Ripoll, reaching its peak under Abbot Oliba in the 11th century. From this century onward, the tendency toward union with the other counties became constant and, in the following century, led to union with Aragon through the marriage of Raymond Berengar IV, the last Count of Barcelona, to Petronilla of Aragon, daughter of King Ramiro and heir to the throne. From this point onward, their descendants were called Kings of Aragon and Counts of Barcelona, though the title “King of Catalonia” was never used.

Despite its union with Aragon and even after forming, following the reconquest of the Kingdom of Valencia, one of the three states of the Crown of Aragon, Catalonia retained its distinctive character, contributing, in collaboration with the Aragonese, to the Mediterranean empire that later passed to Spain. It was also Catalonia that, in the 15th century, welcomed and assimilated the great literary and philosophical movement of Humanism and the Renaissance. When, in the same century, the Crown of Aragon united with that of Castile through the marriage of King Ferdinand to Queen Isabella, when America was discovered, and when the Turks began to dominate the Mediterranean, Catalonia found itself marginalized and distant from the political center of the peninsula, which had shifted to Castile, and from the commercial activity concentrated in the Atlantic.

In the modern age, Catalonia has distinguished itself as one of the Spanish regions most prominent in industry and culture: large industrial centers flourish there, and it has achieved a dense cultural formation expressed over time in the Catalan language (one of the three neo-Latin languages of the peninsula) or in the Castilian (Spanish) language. V. barcellona and the other dioceses of Catalonia.

Federico Udina

III. Literature

This comprises the body of works in Catalan, a language that modern philology clearly distinguishes from Provençal, Spanish, and Galician-Portuguese. Formed in the eastern Pyrenees during the Reconquest of the Hispanic March, Catalan had an area of diffusion limited to the west by the counties of Pallars and Ribagorça, to the south by the course of the Segura, and to the east by the Balearic Islands. Aragonese expansion into Italy introduced the language into the political spheres of Sicily (late 13th century) and Naples (15th century), where it prevailed in writing in Sardinia from the mid-14th to the early 16th centuries. After the annexation of the states of the Crown of Aragon (Catalan counties, Kingdom of Aragon, Muslim kingdoms of Majorca and Valencia subdued by James I) to the Kingdom of Castile under the Catholic Monarchs, Catalan continued to be used officially in the Principality of Catalonia and in the kingdoms of Majorca and Valencia until Philip V of Bourbon (1714), but it became increasingly rare as a literary language, reducing to a spoken tongue.

Words in the Catalan vernacular already appear in Latin documents of the 9th century and texts of some length in the 11th; but around the year 1200 dates the first literary monument, the Homilies d’Organyà, with almost all the characteristics of the new linguistic organism.

Territorial contiguity and political relations with southern France, and above all linguistic similarity, led Catalan poets to prefer the refined Provençal, initiating, in the second half of the 11th century, that Occitano-Catalan dualism that would last until the mid-15th century. In Provençal, Ot de Montcada (1050–1100), Berenguer de Palou (1150–85), Alfonso I of Barcelona (II of Aragon, 1152–96), Guillem de Cabestany (1160–1220), Guillem de Berguedà, and

Vidal de Besalú (1160?–1210?), whose *Razós de trobar* are already a code of poetic decadence. In them the religious theme is absent; only the *Doctrinal* of Ramon de Castelbrou (1220–70?) and the *Proverbis rimate* of Guillem de Cervera (1165–1245) offer some moralizing interest. Cerveri de Girona (1250?–80?) treats, for the first time, religious (the *Canyó de Madona Santa Maria*, *Lo vers de Dio*) and moral subjects (*Lo plant de rey En Jaume*, *Lo plant d’En Ramon de Cardona*). Toward the close of the 13th century, in the reign of the troubadour kings Peter II of Catalonia (III of Aragon) and Frederick III of Sicily, Jufre de Foixà, a Franciscan and later a Benedictine, worked in the *Regles de trobar*, an epigone of Vidal de Besalú, cultivating amorous, gourmand, and at times Marian poetry, as in *Corai e volumat*.

From the end of the 12th century, alongside the predominantly secular poetry in Provençal, religious poetry in pure Catalan or permeated with Provençalisms developed. It is distinguished by Marian poems, especially the *Virolai* to the Madonna of Montserrat: *a Rosa plasent, soleyl de resplandor*.

The creators of Catalan prose were Llull, de Vilanova, Muntaner. Numerous literary monuments in prose already appear in the 13th century: lively, like the *Libre dels feyts del regne* of James I, attributed to him though certainly anonymous; or sober, like the *Chronica* of Bernat Desclot, historiographer of Peter II; genealogical, like the *Lo libre de saviessa*, likewise assigned to the conquering king, and the *Dits de savis e de philosophs* of the Jew Fafuda Bonsenyor. Only in the last decades of the 13th century and the early 14th do writers worthy of the name of classics appear. The first arise in Majorca (Llull) and in Valencia (Arnau), while in the principality of Catalonia history and law were cultivated in preference: one need only think of the *Usatges* initiated by Count Raymond Berengar I, the *Libre de Consolat de Mar*, the juridical work of St. Raymond of Peñafort, and the Catalan jurists of the 14th and 15th centuries, who generally wrote in Latin.

Ramon Llull (see LULLUS) raised Catalan to a perfect instrument for philosophical-theological speculation and mystical experience, with his more than two hundred writings, securing for Catalan literature a notable place in medieval Europe. He is worthily accompanied by Arnau de Vilanova (b. c. 1240; see ARNALDO DA VILLANOVA), whose treatises in Catalan (*Confessió de Barcelona*, *Liçó de Narbona*, *Rahonament d’Avinyó*, and a pamphlet addressed to King Frederick III) display logical structure enlivened by vehemence and humorous sense in picturesque style. Ramón Muntaner (d. 1336) narrated in his *Chronica*, as an eyewitness, the Catalan expedition to the East, with nationalist exaggeration and in a language now definitively formed.

In the 14th century verse continued to be written in Provençal, varied by copious Catalanisms. Notable are the aforementioned Muntaner in his *Sermó per lo passatge de Sardenya*; James II, whose *Dansa sol triate* on the state of the Church was commented on by Arnau; two followers of the Toulouse school founded in 1324: Llorenç Mallol, singer of the Cross, and Joan Blanch, author of Marian poems.

A notable figure was King Peter III (IV of Aragon), to whom are owed, in prose, the *Ordinacions* of his court, which earned him the epithet “the Ceremonious.” Founded in 1395 by John I, the *Jocs florals* of Barcelona perpetuated until the mid-15th century the conventionalism of Toulouse with Arnau March, Lluís de Vilarrasa, the Masdovelles, and others.

In a language freer of Provençalisms, popular religious narrative poetry flourished: *Biblia rimada* of Seville; *De la vinguda de l’Anticrist*; *Epistola*, sent from heaven; *Questió entre l’ànima e’l cors*; *Cant de la Sibilla*; *Passio*; poems on Sts. Nicholas, George, Margaret, Catherine; *Lausors de la Divinitat* of Aymon de Cescars; *Libre del romiatge del venturós pelegri* to Purgatory; *Cobles de la mort*.

Northern French idiomatic infiltrations prevail instead in secular narrative poetry by Joan Basset, Pere March, Francesc Ferrer, Pere and Guillem Torroella, Bernat de So (*Visió en somni*), and the anonymous authors of *Frare de Joy* and *Sor de Plaser* and the *Storia del amat Frondino e de Brisana*.

Among narrative poems of religious interest are the anonymous *Dispensació de la senyora de Moxent* (Gregory XI in 1371 permitted the marriage of two cousins); a diabolical *Jubliou* of ecclesiastical subject; the social and religious satires *Planys del cavaller En Materó* (anonymous); the *Libre de fra Bernat* of Francesc de la Via; the *Testament d’En Bernat Serradell* of Vic and the *Sermó del biebetó*; the moralizing poems *Libre dels set savis de Roma* (anonymous) and the *Debat entre Honor e Delir* of Jaume March.

The most important historical work of 14th-century Catalonia is the *Crònica* of Peter III by Bernat Descoll (d. 1391). Almost all artistic prose (such as the novellas *La filla del rey d’Hongria*, *la comtessa fidel*, etc.) and religious prose (translations of the *Legenda aurea* and that of the Grail, *Viatge al purgatori* of Ramon Perellós, *Libre de Gamaliel*, *Mistòria de Llàtzer*, *Destrucció de Jerusalem*) reduce to French adaptations, with the exception of the writings of Francesc Eiximenis and St. Vincent Ferrer.

The former, born at Gerona c. 1340, a Franciscan and later bishop of Elna and patriarch of Jerusalem, composed the vast encyclopedia *Lo crestià* (1381–86), of which Books I, II, III, and XII remain, the latter a true political treatise (*Regiment de princeps e de comunitats*), which, together with the *Regiment de la cosa pública*, reflects the Catalan democratic ideal. As a religious writer he produced a *Vida de Teschucrixt*, the *Doctrina compendiosa*, and the *Libre dels àngels*.

A less prolific but spiritually more elevated writer was Vincent Ferrer, a Dominican of Valencia.

(1350-1419), of whom there remain in the vernacular the *Contemplació molt devota* and two series of *Sermons*. His brother Bonifacio, a Carthusian, translated the Bible admirably.

A strange figure of an Averroist sceptic was the Franciscan Majorcan Anselm Turmeda (b. 1352), who in 1387 became a Muslim and died in Tunis after 1423. Nevertheless, his *Libre de bons amonestaments*, in rhymed proverbs, constituted the moral code of the Catalan people until the 18th century. More lively are the *Cobles de la divisió del regne de Mallorques*; but his masterpiece, lost in the Catalan version, is the *Disputa de l'ase*, inspired by Arabic tales and varied with sensual and uninhibited narratives.

Catalonia, for geographical, political and commercial reasons, was the first Hispanic region to be reached by the influences of Italian Humanism, which penetrated there in the time of John I and Martin I and became established, among other things, through the coexistence of Catalans and Italians in Naples during the reign of Alfonso the Magnanimous. Translations of Cicero, Sallust, Livy, Ovid, Quintus Curtius, Seneca and Boethius multiplied. Wide diffusion was also enjoyed by the *Històries Troyanes*, translated by Jaume Conesa between 1367 and '74.

Chronologically the first great Humanist of Catalonia was Bernat Metge (1350-1413?), secretary to John I, but imprisoned by Martin I, where he wrote *Lo somni* (1398), the first Humanist work in Catalan. In it the author converses with the spirit of King John on the schism of the Church and the spirituality of the soul, and with Tiresias on the good and bad qualities of women. He reveals familiarity with the Latin classics, with Petrarch and with Boccaccio (whose tale of Griselda he translated) and a streak of scepticism and sensuality, evident also in his *Sermó poètic*, a humorous garland of bad thoughts and advice. In his *Libre de Fortuna e Prudencia* Italian currents intersect with French national ones.

The Dominican of Valencia Antoni Canals (d. 1419) oscillates between the medieval spirit of his doctrinal works—*Exposicions devotes*, *Recull d'eximpiis*, *Tractat de confessió*, a version of an apocryphal *Letter of St Bernard to St Germanus*—and the Humanism of his translations from Valerius Maximus and Seneca (*De providentia*) and the poem *Scipió e Annibal*, a reworking of Petrarch’s *De Africa*.

The Barcelona school of poetry was soon surpassed by the Italian one, which took its inspiration from Dante and especially from Petrarch, and sought an ever more severe language free from exoticisms. Andreu Febrer translated the *Divine Comedy*; Lleonard de Lloselles moralized in verse; Joan Fogassot essayed religious and political subjects; Jordi de Sant Jordi, one of the last to write in Provençal, transcended the medievalism of his *Ennuigs* in the *complanta* *Desert d'amichs, de béns e de senyor*, a document of profound humanity written in prison after the defeat in Sardinia (1423) in the time of the Magnanimous. Worthy of mention are also Huch Bernat de Rocaberti, Antoni Vallmanya, Romeu Llull; but above all stands the Valencian Ausias March (q.v.), the greatest writer of Catalonia after Llull and the most illustrious follower of the new school. His *Cant espiritual* marks one of the highest peaks of Catalan religious literature.

In the second half of the century the literary primacy passed to Valencia, where the poetic school alternated satirical subjects, often of uninhibited obscenity, with religious themes, equally felt and lived. Among them may be recalled: Bernat de Fenollar, Jaume Gacull, Narcís de Vinyoles, Joan Escrivà (a poet also in Castilian, author of the famous *letrilla* “Ven muerte tan escondida...”), Joan Roig de Corella (*Lahors de la Vierge Marie*), Jayme Roig (*Spill o Libre de les dones*).

The Humanist trend is evident also in prose, above all in universal histories, such as the *Compendí historial* of Antoni Genebreda (d. 1395), bishop of Athens, and of G. Jaume Domènech, and in national chronicles by Gabriel Turell, Pere Tomich and the anonymous author of *Le fidel compte d’Urgell*. A modern vision, however, informs the *Chroniques d’Espanya* of Pere Miquel Carbonell, from the time of the Catholic Monarchs. Narrative boasts, alongside translations from the Italian, two notable chivalric romances: the *Cirial e Guelfa*, a fine amplification from the *Novellino*, and the *Tirant lo Blanch* of the Valencians Joanot Martorell and Martí Joan de Galba, grafting a Breton subject onto the Catalan literary tradition. Religious prose moves from the *Memorial del pecador remut*, a transitional work by Felip de Malla (d. 1431), to the baroque grandiosity of the Valencians Roig de Corella and Miquel Pereç. Spontaneous, instead, is the *Vita Christi* of Sor Isabel de Villena (d. 1490), a masterpiece of Catalan prose.

The 16th century marks the general decline of Catalan life; only Valencia persists in its cultural traditions, sending Humanists to Paris (Joan Lluís Vives and Pere Joan Perpinyà) and to Barcelona (Pere Joan Nunyes) and, between the 16th and 17th centuries, developing a dramatic and narrative school in Spanish: it is the age of Guillem de Castro, of Timoneda, of the *Nocturnos*. Catalonia and Majorca, instead, limit themselves to cultivating, for practical ends, religious literature—manuals of piety, *goigs*, popular dramas reworked from medieval mysteries with some Renaissance framework—or close themselves in nostalgia for the past: such is the sense of the historical works of Cristòfor Despuig, Pere Gil, Jeroni Pujades, Andreu Bosch and of the two great forgeries of the 17th century: the *Feixos d’armes de Catalunya* by the minor writer Joan Gaspar Roig i Jalpí attributed to Bernat Boades, and the *Trobes araldiques* by a supposed Valencian nobleman circulated under the name of the alleged 15th-century versifier Jaume Febrer. A poet of vigorous religious inspiration, despite the corrupted language and satirical excesses that made him popular, was Vicenç Francesc Garcia, better known as the Rector de Vallfogona (d. 1623), whose *Cant d’agonia* surpasses the lyric of Ausias March imitation cultivated in Barcelona in the previous century (e.g., Pere Serafí, 1565).

Two events prepared the revival of Catalan literature: the formation, in the 18th century, of Humanist centres and of high culture through the efforts of Josep Finestres, the Marquis of Llió and Antoni de Campany in Catalonia, of Gregori Mayans and Francesc Pérez Bayer in Valencia, of Bonaventura Serra in Majorca; and the traditional and historical direction assumed in Catalonia by Romanticism, chiefly under the influence of Manzoni and Scott.

In 1833 Bonaventura Carles Aribau published the *Oda a la Pàtria*, which found ready echo in Catalonia (Joaquim Rubió i Ors), in Valencia (Vicents Boix) and in Majorca (Marian Aguiló). These and Manuel Milà i Fontanals, with their historical researches, ensured the traditional and medievalist sense of the new Catalan culture, which drew much from popular poetry, studiously and valuably collected.

The conventionalism of the *Jocs florals*, restored in Barcelona in 1859, was at once surpassed by Jacint Verdaguer (1845-1902; q.v.). The transition, however, from post-Romanticism to modern poetry was chiefly due to the poets Joan Maragall, a Catalan (1860-1911), singer of Pyrenean solitudes, *Goigs a la Verge de Núria*, and of the presence of God in spirit and world, *Cant espiritual*, and Miquel Costa i Llobera (q.v.), a Majorcan (1854-1922). Worthy of note as religious poets are Joan Alcover (*Poemes bíblics*), J. M. López-Picó (described by Valbuena as the Paul Claudel of Spain), Miquel Ferrà, Josep Carner (*Nabi*, a poem on Jonah) and the priests Llorenç Riber, Antoni Navarro, Bartomeu Guasp, Pere Ribot, Camil Geis, Miquel Melendres.

In learned prose the following stand out: Antoni Rubió i Lluch (1856-1937), who with his studies on Catalan Greece and medieval culture gave Catalonia directions equal to those of his great friend Menéndez y Pelayo for all Spain; Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, J. Puig i Cadafalch, J. Massó i Torrents, Fr Anselm M. Albareda, Manuel de Montoliu, F. Valls i Taberner, F. Soldevila, Joan Estelrich, etc.

In religious doctrinal literature, the following stand out: Josep Torras i Bages, bishop of Vich, the Capuchin Miquel d'Esplugues, the Jesuit Ignasi Casanovas, and the canon Carles Cardó.

Now, having overcome the crisis of the decade 1936–45, it is reasonable to hope that Catalan literature will secure the place in Spain’s cultural landscape that its history entitles it to.