From the Origins of Catalonia to the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Catalonia is located at the north-eastern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, between the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean, and the Ebro basin. It covers an area slightly larger than Belgium and has 6 million inhabitants, more, for instance, than Denmark. Catalonia has a language of its own, which produced a literature from the thirteenth century onwards and fulfils all the requirements of a present-day culture. Since 1979 Catalonia has enjoyed political autonomy, exercising powers which, though far inferior to those of the member states of a federal republic such as Germany or the United States, constitute a recognition of its collective personality and are slowing down the effects of centuries of oppression of the identity of the Catalan people by the Spanish state.