Another major case combining commercial expansion and a strong representative tradition was medieval Catalonia.
For some historians, it was second only to England in its constitutional arrangements.[916] The Catalan regime even preceded England’s when it affirmed in 1283 that laws should be issued with the counsel and assent not only of nobles and church leaders but of townsmen as well[917] - in England these points were only officially affirmed in 1311/1322.[918] Catalonia developed a precocious commercial and maritime empire in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries.
It epitomized regional resistance to Bourbon Castile until 1714, when the Crown of Aragon[919] was absorbed by the latter. It has held a prominent place in accounts of early modern revolution, as an example of societal opposition to encroaching absolutism and an outgrowth of strong municipal structures that sustained self-government.[920] [921]Catalonia therefore reflects both the common assumption of representative rule under commercial expansion and the narrative of all-powerful Continental monarchies suppressing local institutions and commercial growth. It thus exemplifies the theories questioned in this book. In fact, however, the Catalan Corts had a prehistory in the medieval period that parallels England’s. The Corts were a body with judicial functions that became the main representative institution. As historical scholarship has shown, Barcelona’s strong municipal phase of the fourteenth century was preceded by a period of strong comital power and land consolidation starting in the 1100s.6 The centralized, unifying powers of the countprince were stronger than in Italy, more similar to Flanders, and weaker than in England. These conditions weakened the regime over time and undercut its capacity to survive into the modern period.
Given its commercial development, Catalonia is a more appropriate unit of comparison in examining the trade thesis than either the Kingdom of Aragon, the poorer, insular, noble-dominated region to its west or the composite Crown of Aragon.[922] Catalonia “was the true centre of the Aragonese Empire.” The Aragonese nobility was more independent than the Catalan one, it had more limited land obligations to the crown, including to serve, was not taxed, did not contribute as much to the Reconquista, and in general resisted the growth of central government.[923] As historians have noted, this makes Aragon closer to Hungary and Poland, examined in Chapter 10, pushing the whole Crown towards the model of an “aristocratic republic,”[924] which, as we shall see, generally proved unable to survive overtime.
The Catalans had a strong countprince in the count of Barcelona;[925] eventually also facing Italian competition, they understood the need for central governance and cooperated more.[926]The first section describes the frequency of the Catalan Corts. The following ones show how the Catalan trajectory reflects the logic suggested in this book: how patterns of land concentration and conditionality help predict institutional outcomes, how judicial concerns were dominant, and how representative activity interacted with fiscal pressures only later. The robust municipal institutions of the mercantile fourteenth century are thus shown to have historical foundations in strong comital power.
8.1