Catalonia is an autonomous community of Spain, designated as a nationality by its Statute of Autonomy. Most of its territory lies on the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula, to the south of the Pyrenees mountain range. Catalonia is administratively divided into four provinces or eight vegueries (regions), which are in turn divided into 42 comarques. The capital and largest city, Barcelona, is the second-most populous municipality in Spain and the fifth-most populous urban area in the European Union.
The recorded history of the lands of what today is known as Catalonia begins with the development of the Iberian peoples while several Greek colonies were established on the coast before the Roman conquest. It was the first area of Hispania conquered by the Romans. It then came under Visigothic rule after the collapse of the western part of the Roman Empire. In 718, the area was occupied by the Umayyad Caliphate and became a part of Muslim ruled al-Andalus. The Frankish Empire conquered northern half of the area from the Muslims, ending with the conquest of Barcelona in 801, as part of the creation of a larger buffer zone of Christian counties against Islamic rule historiographically known as the Marca Hispanica. In the 10th century the County of Barcelona became progressively independent from Frankish rule.
Ferdinand VII was King of Spain during the early 19th century. He reigned briefly in 1808 and then again from 1813 to his death in 1833. Before 1813 he was known as el Deseado, and after, as el ReyFelón.
The Trienio Liberal or Three Liberal Years was a period of three years in the modern history of Spain between 1820 and 1823, when a liberal government ruled Spain after a military uprising in January 1820 by the lieutenant-colonel Rafael de Riego against the absolutist rule of Ferdinand VII.
The Principality of Catalonia was a medieval and early modern state in the northeastern Iberian Peninsula. During most of its history it was in dynastic union with the Kingdom of Aragon, constituting together the Crown of Aragon. Between the 13th and the 18th centuries, it was bordered by the Kingdom of Aragon to the west, the Kingdom of Valencia to the south, the Kingdom of France and the feudal lordship of Andorra to the north and by the Mediterranean Sea to the east. The term Principality of Catalonia was official until the 1830s, when the Spanish government implemented the centralized provincial division, but remained in popular and informal contexts. Today, the term Principat (Principality) is used primarily to refer to the autonomous community of Catalonia in Spain, as distinct from the other Catalan Countries, and usually including the historical region of Roussillon in Southern France.
The Reapers' War, also known as the Catalan Revolt, was a conflict that affected the Principality of Catalonia between the years of 1640 and 1659. It had an enduring effect in the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), which ceded the County of Roussillon and the northern half of the County of Cerdanya to France, splitting these northern Catalan territories off from the Principality of Catalonia and the Crown of Aragon, and thereby receding the borders of Spain to the Pyrenees.
The Catalan constitutions were the laws of the Principality of Catalonia promulgated by the Count of Barcelona and approved by the Catalan Courts. The Corts in Catalan have the same origin as courts in English but instead meaning the legislature. The first constitutions were promulgated by the Corts of 1283. The last ones were promulgated by the Corts of 1705. They had pre-eminence over the other legal rules and could only be revoked by the Catalan Courts themselves. The compilations of the constitutions and other rights of Catalonia followed the Roman tradition of the Codex.
The Catalan Civil War, also called the Catalonian Civil War or the War against John II, was a civil war in the Principality of Catalonia, then part of the Crown of Aragon, between 1462 and 1472. The two factions, the royalists who supported John II of Aragon and the Catalan constitutionalists, disputed the extent of royal rights in Catalonia. The French entered the war at times on the side on John II and at times with the Catalans. The Catalans, who at first rallied around John's son Charles of Viana, set up several pretenders in opposition to John during the course of the conflict. Barcelona remained their stronghold to the end: with its surrender the war came to a close. John, victorious, re-established the status quo ante bellum.
The "Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis" was the popular name for a French army mobilized in 1823 by the Bourbon King of France, Louis XVIII, to help the Spanish Bourbon royalists restore King Ferdinand VII of Spain to the absolute power of which he had been deprived during the Liberal Triennium. Despite the name, the actual number of troops was between 60,000 and 90,000.
The Ominous Decade is a term for the last ten years of the reign of King Ferdinand VII of Spain, dating from the abolition of the Spanish Constitution of 1812, on 1 October 1823, to his death on 29 September 1833.
Jose Maria Torrijos y Uriarte, Count of Torrijos, a title granted posthumously by the Queen Governor, also known as General Torrijos, was a Spanish Liberal soldier. He fought in the Spanish War of Independence and after the restoration of absolutism by Ferdinand VII in 1814 he participated in the pronouncement of John Van Halen of 1817 that sought to restore the Constitution of 1812, for which he spent two years in prison until he was released after the triumph of the Riego uprising in 1820. He returned to fight the French when the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis invaded Spain to restore the absolute power of Ferdinand VII and when those triumphed ending the liberal triennium exiled to England. There he prepared a statement which he himself led, landing on the coast of Málaga from Gibraltar on December 2, 1831, with sixty men accompanying him, but they fell into the trap that had been laid before him by the absolutist authorities and were arrested. Nine days later, on December 11, Torrijos and 48 of his fellow survivors were shot without trial on the beach of San Andres de Málaga, a fact that was immortalized by a sonnet of José de Espronceda entitled To the death of Torrijos and his Companions, Enrique Gil y Carrasco's A la memoria del General Torrijos, and by a well-known 1888 painting by Antonio Gisbert. "The tragic outcome of his life explains what has happened to history, in all fairness, as a great symbol of the struggle against despotism and tyranny, with the traits of epic nobility and serenity typical of the romantic hero, eternalized in the famous painting by Antonio Gisbert." The city of Málaga erected a monument to Torrijos and his companions in the Plaza de la Merced, next to the birthplace of the painter Pablo Picasso. Under the monument to Torrijos in the middle of the square are the tombs of 48 of the 49 men shot; One of them, British, was buried in the English cemetery (Málaga).
The Royal Barcelona Trading Company to the Indies also known as the Barcelona Company was a trading company in the 18th century chartered by the Spanish crown, operating from 1755 to 1785, and which had a monopoly on trade to the Caribbean islands of Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo and Margarita. The company provided a legal framework and a focus for capital which enabled Catalan merchants to break free from the restrictions of the Cadiz monopoly on trade with the Indies, provided skills and contacts that enabled the development of free trade between Catalonia and the Americas to flourish after the company's demise, and contributed to the development of the textile industry which later became the basis of industrialisation in Catalonia. The integration of Catalonia'a economy in international trade is the root of the exceptional experience of Catalan industrialisation and the development of an increasingly capitalist economy.
This is a timeline of Catalan history, comprising important legal and territorial changes and political events in Catalonia and its predecessor states and polities. To read about the background to these events, see History of Catalonia.
The Catalan State was a short-lived state proclaimed during the events of 6 October 1934 by Lluís Companys as the "Catalan State within the Spanish Federal Republic".
Queen Isabella II of Spain was barely three years of age when her father, King Ferdinand VII, died on 29 September 1833. The years of her minority were marked first by the regency of her mother, Maria Christina of the Two Sicilies, and then under General Baldomero Espartero, covering almost the first ten years of her reign, until 23 July 1843, when Isabella was declared to be of age.
Francisco Copons y Navia, 1st Count of Tarifa was a Spanish soldier, active during the War of the Pyrenees and the Peninsular War. He was appointed captain general of Catalonia in 1812 and promoted to lieutenant general in 1814.
The anti-clerical riots of 1835 were revolts against the religious orders in Spain, fundamentally for their support of the Carlists in the civil war that began after the death of King Ferdinand VII at the end of 1833, and which took place during the summer of 1835 in Aragon and, above all, in Catalonia, within the context of the uprisings of the Spanish Liberal Revolution that sought to put an end to the regime of the Royal Statute, implemented in 1834 by the regent María Cristina de Borbón-Dos Sicilias, and to give way to a constitutional monarchy with the reestablishment of the Constitution of 1812.
The massacre of friars in Madrid in 1834 was an anti-clerical riot that took place on July 17, 1834, in the capital of Spain during the regency of Maria Cristina and the first Carlist war (1833-1840) in which several convents in the center of Madrid were assaulted and 73 friars were killed and 11 were wounded, because of the rumor that spread through the city that the cholera epidemic that had been ravaging the city since the end of June and that had worsened on July 15 had occurred because "the water in the public fountains had been poisoned by the friars". "The result of little more than twelve hours of violence" was a "party of blood and vengeance". "It was the first time that the Church had been subjected to the uncontrolled actions of its own believers. As contemporaries observed, these events demonstrated, above all, the loss of prestige of the religious in Catholic Spain, as was happening in other countries".
The Spanish coup d'état of July 1822, also known as the coup d'état of July 7, was a failed coup d'état that took place in Spain during the Liberal Triennium. It was intended to put an end by force to the constitutional regime, reestablished after the triumph of the Revolution of 1820, and to restore the absolute monarchy. As Juan Francisco Fuentes has pointed out, "it was the most serious attempt of absolutist coup d'état, which not in vain had its epicenter in the Royal Palace of Madrid", although it had numerous ramifications outside the capital, which demonstrates "the existence of a relatively broad and mature plan". "It marked a turning point in the course of the Triennium", stressed Ángel Bahamonde and Jesús Antonio Martínez. The same thesis is held by Pedro Rújula and Manuel Chust: "The July crisis marked in a traumatic way the evolution of the constitutional regime".
The Royalist War was a armed conflict that took place in Spain during the last year and a half of the Liberal Triennium. It began in the spring of 1822—there is no agreement among historians about the exact moment of its beginning—with the extension of the actions and the number of royalist parties that had already been acting since the spring of 1821 with the purpose to reestablish the absolute power of king Ferdinand VII. They were confronted by the constitutional armies that defended the liberal regime established after the triumph of the Revolution of 1820. Its fundamental setting was Catalonia, Navarra and Basque Country and in the first phase the royalist forces were defeated and were forced to take refuge in France. The war took a definitive turn in favor of the royalists when on April 7, 1823, the invasion of the French army of the Cien Mil Hijos de San Luis began, which had the support of reorganized Spanish royalist troops. in France and of the royalist parties that had managed to survive the constitutionalist offensive. On September 30, 1823, King Ferdinand VII was "liberated" from his "captivity" and the next day he abolished the Constitution of 1812 and restored absolutism.
