Catalonia

CATALONIA. - A historical Spanish region, corresponding to the present-day provinces of Lérida, Tarragona, Gerona and Barcelona, bounded by the Mediterranean, the Pyrenees and the lower Ebro valley.

I. GEOGRAPHY

The territory (32,197 sq. km.) alternates zones of a very different appearance, which constitute minor regional units (valleys of the Pyrenean reverse slope, concas and planas of the piedmont sector, camps and costas of the coast, etc.) and often preserve historical names (Pallars, Cerdaña, Ampurdan, Vallés, Panadés, Priorato, Noguera, Segarra), as well as fairly well differentiated forms of economy and culture. On the whole Catalonia has a Mediterranean character, with winters far milder and summers less extreme than in the neighboring meseta, and with rainfall sufficient for the needs of agriculture.

On barely 1/16 of Spanish territory, Catalonia gathers, with its 2,900,000 inhabitants, more than 1/10 of the State's population. The density index (92 per sq. km.) is, among Spaniards, one of the highest; but, while it reaches its absolute maximum in the province of Barcelona (251 inhabitants per sq. km.), it falls to barely 25 inhabitants per sq. km. in that of Lérida (inland and mountainous). The originality of the Catalan region must be attributed in large part to the character of its population, distinct from the neighboring Castilians, even more than by ethnic type and dialect (akin to Provençal), long since raised to the dignity of a true national language, by a more energetic temperament and one more inclined to action. It is almost entirely Catholic.

The Catalan economy presents a flourishing agriculture (wine, oil, fruit and above all citrus fruits) and a flourishing livestock raising (especially horses) which already allow an active export trade; but its typical trait, within the national whole of which it is a part, is the development of industries, among which textiles predominate (above all cotton spinning), along with chemicals and mechanical industries.

The major urban centers are mostly of modern origin and concentrated near the coast: Hospitalet (60 thousand inhabitants), Badalona (54), Sabadell (52), Tarrasa (45), in the surroundings of Barcelona, while the old historical cities have remained practically stationary (Lérida with 41,464 inhabitants, Tarragona with 35,648, Gerona with 29,632). Above all of them stands out Barcelona, an industrial metropolis and commercial center whose population (1,081,175 inhabitants in 1947) roughly equals that of Madrid.

Giuseppe Caraci

II. HISTORY

Catalonia, whose name is encountered only in the 12th century, comprises the territory of the Carolingian Spanish March as it had been during the 9th-10th centuries; from that age it became the principality of Catalonia. The origin of this name is debated; the most plausible hypotheses are that it derives from the word castle or from land of the Goths; and the latter would be more probable. When at the beginning of the 9th century the territory was withdrawn from the Muslim yoke, Barcelona became the seat of a county, and gradually succeeded in gathering around itself the other counties among which the Spanish March had been divided, and thus it was that the counties of Gerona, Vich and Barcelona formed a compact nucleus that was the basis of the unity of Catalonia.

Because of the impulse given to the reconquest, Wilfred was regarded as the first count of Barcelona. After important successes Barcelona fell back into the power of the Muslims, until Count Borrell II reconquered it, and from then on the March was able to begin a cultural revival and to put the European West in touch with a new current of civilization. Indeed Gerbert, later Pope Sylvester II, brought from the Spanish March to France and to Italy what he had learned there. This cultural current in reality derived from the fusion of Visigothic culture with Muslim culture, matured in the monastic school of St. Mary of Ripoll, when it reached its apex under Abbot Oliva in the 11th century. From this century the tendency toward union with the other counties is already constant and leads in the following century to the union with Aragon thanks to the marriage of Raymond Berengar IV, last count of Barcelona, with Petronilla of Aragon, daughter of King Ramiro and heir to the throne. From this moment their descendants called themselves kings of Aragon and counts of Barcelona, but the designation king of Catalonia was not used.

Despite the union with Aragon and although, after the reconquest of the kingdom of Valencia, it formed one of the three states of the crown of Aragon, Catalonia preserved its particular personality, as the artificer, in collaboration with the Aragonese, of the Mediterranean empire that later passed to Spain; it was also Catalonia that welcomed and assimilated in the 15th century the great literary and philosophical movement of Humanism and the Renaissance. When in this same century the crown of Aragon united with that of Castile thanks to the marriage of King Ferdinand with Queen Isabella, when America was discovered and the Turks began to dominate in the Mediterranean, Catalonia found itself displaced and far from the political center of the peninsula, transferred to Castile, and from the commercial movement concentrated in the Atlantic.

In the modern age Catalonia has shown itself to be one of the Spanish regions that has most distinguished itself in the field of industry and culture: indeed great industrial nuclei flourish in it, and it has achieved a dense cultural formation that has expressed itself through the ages in the Catalan language (one of the three Romance languages of the peninsula) or in the Castilian (Spanish) language v. BARCELONA and the other dioceses of Catalonia.

III. LITERATURE

It comprises the whole body of works in Catalan, a language that modern philology clearly distinguishes from Provençal, from Spanish and from Galician-Portuguese, and which, having taken shape in the eastern Pyrenees during the reconquest of the Hispanic March, had an area of diffusion bounded to the west by the counties of Pallars and Ribagorça, to the south by the course of the Segura, to the east by the Balearic Islands. Aragonese expansion into Italy introduced this idiom into the political spheres of Sicily (end of the 13th century) and of Naples (15th century); in Sardinia it prevailed in writing from the mid-14th century to the early 16th century. After the annexation of the states of the Aragonese crown (Catalan counties, kingdom of Aragon, Muslim kingdoms of Majorca and Valencia subdued by James I) to the realm 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 an increasingly rare instrument of literary expression, until it was reduced to an almost exclusively spoken language.

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

Reasons of territorial contiguity and of political relations with southern France and, above all, of linguistic similarity led the poets of Catalonia to prefer refined Provençal, initiating, in the second half of the 11th century, that Occitan-Catalan dualism which would last until the mid-15th century. In Provençal sang 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 Ramon 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 Castellnou (1220-70?) and the Proverbis rimats of Guillem de Cervera (1165-1245) offer some moralizing interest. Cerveri de Girona (1250?-80?) treats, for the first time, religious subjects (the Canzó de Madona Santa Maria, Lo vers de Din) and moral ones (Lo plant de rey En Jaume and Lo plant d'En Ramon de Cardona). Toward the end of the 13th century, in the time of the troubadour kings Peter II of Catalonia (III of Aragon) and Frederick III of Sicily, Jofre de Foixà worked, a Franciscan and then a Benedictine, an epigone, in the Regles de trobar, of Vidal de Besalú and a cultivator of love poetry, gourmande and sometimes also Marian, as in Coral e voluntat.

From the end of the 12th century, alongside the predominantly worldly poetry in Provençal, religious poetry developed in pure Catalan or Catalan permeated with Provençalisms. Marian poems stand out there, especially the Virolai to the Madonna of Montserrat « Rosa plasent, soleyl de resplandor ».

The creators of Catalan prose were Llull, de Vilanova, Muntaner. Numerous literary monuments in prose are already offered by the 13th century: lively ones, such as the Libre dels feyts of the reign of James I, to which it is attributed, although it is certainly by an anonymous author; or sober ones, such as the Chronica of Bernat Desclot, historiographer of Peter II; paremiac ones, such as Lo libre de saviessa, also assigned to the conquering king, and the Dits de savis e de philosophes of the Jew Fafuda Bonsengor. Only in the last decades of the 13th century and the first of the 14th are writers worthy of the name of classics encountered. The first arise in Majorca (Llull) and in Valencia (Arnau), while in the principality of Catalonia history and law will preferably be cultivated: one thinks of the Usatges begun by Count R. Berenguer I, of the Libre de Consolat de Mar, of the juridical work of St. Ramon de Penyafort, of the Catalan jurists of the 14th and 15th centuries, who generally make use of Latin.

Ramon Llull (v. LULLO) raises Catalan to a perfect instrument of philosophical-theological speculation and of mystical experience, with his more than two hundred writings, securing for the literature of Catalonia a considerable place in medieval Europe. Arnau de Vilanova (b. around 1240; v. ARNALDO da VILANOVA) worthily stands beside him; in his treatises in Catalan (Confessió de Barcelona, Lió de Narbona, Rahonament d'Avinyó and a pamphlet addressed to King Frederick III), the logical structure is enlivened by impetus and by a humorous sense in the picturesque. Ramón Muntaner (d. 1336) narrated in his Chronica, as an eyewitness, the Catalan expedition to the East, with nationalistic exaggeration and in a language by then definitively molded.

In the 14th century versifying in Provençal continues, varied by copious Catalanisms. To be remembered: the aforementioned Muntaner in his Sermó per lo passatge de Sardenya; James II, whose Dansa on the sad state of the Church was commented on by Arnau; two followers of the school of Toulouse created in 1324; Llorenç Mallol, singer of the Cross, and Joan Blanch, author of Marian poems.

King Peter III (IV of Aragon) was a poet; to him are owed, in prose, the Ordinacions of his court, which earned him the appellation of the Ceremonious. Created in 1395 by John I, the Jochs florals of Barcelona; the Barcelona school handed down until the mid-15th century the Toulousan conventionalism with Arnau March, Lluís de Vilarrasa, the Masdovelles, etc.

In a language purer of Provençalisms is expressed the popular narrative poetry of a religious character: 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; Lansors de la Divinitat of Aimó de Cescars; Libre del romiatge del venturós pelegrí, on Purgatory; Cobles de la mort.

Idiomatic infiltrations from northern France prevail, on the other hand, in the secular narrative poetry of Joan Basset, Pere March, Francesco Ferrer, Pere and Guillem Torroella, Bernat de So (Visió en somni) and of the anonymous authors of Frare de Joy and Sor de Plaser and of the Storia del amat Frondino e de Brianna.

Religious interest is presented, among the narrative poems, by the anonymous Dispensació de la senyora de Moxent (Gregory XI, in 1371, permits the marriage of two cousins); a diabolical fabliau on an ecclesiastical subject; the social and religious satires Planys del cavaller En Materó (anonymous); the Libre de fra Bernat of Francesco de la Via; the Testament d'En Bernat Serradell de Vich and the Sermó del bisbetó; the moralizing poems Libre dels set savis de Roma (anonymous) and the Debat entre Honor e Delit of Jaume March.

The most important historical work of the Catalan 14th century is the Crònica de Pere III of Bernat Descoll (d. 1391). Almost all artistic prose is reduced to reworkings from French (such as the tales La filla del rey d'Hongrie, la contessa fidei, etc.) and religious prose (versions of the Legenda aurea and of that of the Grail, Viatge al purgatori of Ramon Perellós, Libre de Gamaliel, Història de Llàtzer, Destrucció de Jerusalem), with the exception of the writings of Francesc Eximenis and of St. Vincent Ferrer.

The first, b. at Girona around 1340, a Franciscan, then bishop of Elna and patriarch of Jerusalem, composed the vast encyclopedia Lo crestià (1381-86), of which books II, I, II, III and XII remain, the last a true political treatise (Regiment de princeps e de comunitats), which, with the Regiment de la cosa pública, reflects the Catalan democratic ideal. As a religious author he wrote a Vida de Jesuchrist, the Doctrina compendiosa, the Libre dels àngels. A less prolific writer, but of a loftier spiritual physiognomy, was Vicenç Ferrer, a Dominican of Valencia

(1350-1419), of whom there survive in the vernacular the Contemplació molt devota and two series of Sermons. His brother Boniface, a Carthusian, translated the Bible excellently.

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

Catalonia, for geographic, political and commercial reasons, was the first Hispanic region reached by the influences of Italian Humanism, which penetrated there in the times of John I and Martin I and established itself, among other things, through the coexistence of Catalans and Italians in Naples during the reign of Alfonso the Magnanimous. The translations of Cicero, Sallust, Livy, Ovid, Quintus Curtius, Seneca, Boethius multiplied. The Històries Troyanes translated by Jaume Conesa between 1367 and '74 likewise enjoyed wide diffusion.

Chronologically the first great humanist of Catalonia was Bernat Metge (1350-1413?), secretary of John I, but cast into prison by Martin I, where he wrote Lo somni (1398), the first humanistic work in Catalan. In it the author converses with the spirit of King John about the schism of the Church and the spirituality of the soul, and with the heretic about the good and bad qualities of women. It reveals familiarity with the Latin classics, with Petrarch and with Boccaccio (whose tale of Griselda he translated) and a substratum of skepticism and sensuality, detectable also in his poetic Sermó, a humorous string of bad thoughts and counsels. In his Libre de Fortuna e Prudència Italian currents intersect with native French ones.

The Dominican of Valencia Antoni Canals (d. 1419) oscillates between the medieval spirit of his doctrinal works – Expositions devotes, Recull d'eximplis, Tractat de confessió, a version of an apocryphal Carta de s. Bernat a s. Germana – and the humanism of his translations from Valerius Maximus and Seneca (De providentia) and of the poem Scipió e Annibal, a reworking of Petrarch's De Africa.

The Barcelona poetic school was soon overtaken by the Italian one, which drew inspiration from Dante and especially from Petrarch, and sought a language ever more free of exoticisms. Andreu Febrer translated the Divine Comedy; Leonard de Los moralized in verse; Joan Fogassat essayed religious and political subjects; Jordi de Sant Jordi, one of the last to versify in Provençal, surpassed the medievalism of his Ennuigs in the "lament" Desert d'amichs, de béns e de senyor, a document of profound humanity written in captivity after the disaster of Sardinia (1423) in the times of the Magnanimous. Also worthy of mention are Huch Bernat de Rocaberti, Antoni Vallimanya, Romeu Llull; but above them all rises the Valencian Ausias March (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 was assumed by Valencia, in whose poetic school satirical subjects, often of uninhibited obscenity, alternate with religious themes, equally felt and lived. Let us recall: Bernat de Fenollar, Jaume Gaçull, Narcís de Vinyoles, Joan Escrivà (a poet also in Castilian, author of the celebrated "letrilla" Ven muerte tan escondida...), Joan Roig de Corella (Lahors de la Vierge Marie), Jayme Roig (Spill o Libre de les dones).

The humanistic tendency is evident also in prose, above all in the universal histories, such as the Compendi historial of Antoni Genebreda (d. 1395), bishop of Athens, and of G. Jaume Domènech, and in the national chronicles of Gabriel Turell, Pere Tomich and the anonymous author of

Le fidel compte d'Urgell. Modernity of vision, on the other hand, informs the Chròniques d'Espanya of Pere Miquel Carbonell, from the time of the Catholic Monarchs. Narrative prose boasts, alongside versions from the Italian, two notable chivalric romances: the Curial e Guelfa, a fine amplification from the Novellino, and the Tirant lo Blanch of the Valencians Joanot Martorell and Martí Joan de Gualba, a grafting of a Breton subject onto the literary tradition of Catalonia. Religious prose passes from the Memorial del pecador remut, a transitional work by Felip de Malla (d. 1431), to the baroque turgidities of the Valencians Roig de Corella and Miquel Pérec. Spontaneous, by contrast, is the Vita Christi of Sister Isabel de Villena (d. 1490), a masterpiece of Catalan prose.

The sixteenth 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 developing, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a dramatic and novella-writing school in Spanish: it is the age of Guillem de Castro, of Timoneda, of the Notturni. Catalonia and Majorca, on the other hand, either limit themselves to cultivating, for practical purposes, religious literature – manuals of piety, goigs, popular dramas modeled on the medieval mysteries with some Renaissance framing – or shut themselves up in nostalgia for the past: such is the meaning of the historical works of Cristòfor Despuig, Pere Gil, Jeroni Pujades, Andreu Bosch and of the two great forgeries of the seventeenth century: the Feysts d'armes de Catalunya by the minim Joan Gaspar Roig i Jalpi attributed to Bernat Bodes, and the heraldic Trobes by a Valencian nobleman circulated under the name of the supposed fifteenth-century versifier Jaume Febrer. A poet of vigorous religious inspiration, despite the corrupt language and the 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 Ausias March-inspired lyric cultivated in Barcelona in the preceding century (e.g., Pere Serafí, 1565).

Two facts prepared the rebirth of Catalan literature: the formation, in the eighteenth century, of centers of humanistic and high culture through the work of Josep Finestres, the Marquis of Llió and Antoni de Capmany in Catalonia, of Gregori Mayans and Francesc Pérez Bayer in Valencia, of Bonaventura Serra in Majorca; and the traditional and historical tendency assumed in Catalonia by Romanticism, chiefly through the influence of Manzoni and Scott.

In 1833 Bonaventura Carles Aribau published the Oda a la Pàtria, which found a ready echo in Catalonia (Joaquim Rubió i Ors), in Valencia (Vicents Bois) and in Majorca (Marian Aguiló). These and Manuel Milà i Fontanals ensured, through their historical researches, the traditional and medievalist sense of the new Catalan culture, which made much use of the popular poetry carefully studied and enhanced.

The conventionalism of the Jochs florals, restored in Barcelona in 1859, was immediately surpassed by Jacinto Verdaguer (1845-1902; v.). The passage, however, from post-Romanticism to modern poetry was due principally to the poets Joan Maragall, a Catalan (1860-1911), singer of the Pyrenean solitudes, Goigs a la Verge de Núria, and of the presence of God in the spirit and in the world, Cant espiritual, and Miquel Costa i Llobera (v.), a Majorcan (1854-1922). Worthy of note, as religious poets, are Joan Alcover (Poemes bíblics), J. M. López-Picó (the Paul Claudel of Spain, as Valbuena has called him), 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 scholarly prose the following stand out: Antoni Rubió i Lluch (1856-1937), who with his studies on Catalan Greece and on medieval culture gave Catalonia directions equal to those that his great friend Menéndez y Pelayo gave to all of Spain; Jordi Rubió i Balaguer, J. Puig i Cadafalch, J. Massó i Torrents, Father Anselm M. Albareda, Manuel de Montoliu, F. Valls i Taberner, F. Soldevila, Joan Estelrich, etc.

In religious doctrinal literature the following are prominent: Josep Torras i Bages, bishop of Vich, the Capuchin Miquel d'Esplugues, the Jesuit Ignasi Casanovas, the canon Carles Cardo.

Now, once the crisis of the decade 1936-45 is over, it is legitimate to hope that Catalan literature will secure the place that, by virtue of its history, is its due within the cultural framework of Spain.

Michele Batllori