Josep M. Salrach: "In 714, the spark was produced that made Barcelona the capital"

BarcelonaJosep Maria Salrach (Barcelona, ​​​​1945) is one of the great medievalists of Catalonia and Europe. Failing health, he has made an effort to speak to the ARA in this interview. Emeritus professor at the UPF, we review with him his career and his vision of Catalonia around the year 1000, at the time of the formation of the nation.

Until last year I was still teaching... from the hospital!

— When I retired from UPF, I accepted the idea of telling a history of Catalonia from antiquity in the 21st century for members of the College of Graduates. This forced me to read and delve into other periods beyond the medieval period. Since I was making encyclopedias, this has always worked well for me. And yes, I was able to give some lessons from the Hospital de Sant Pau through the screen.

Now, despite his delicate health, he continues to write. He is finishing the 'Catalonia Carolingia'.

— I would like to finish it, but I won't be able to. Ramon d'Abadal started it in 1920. The work has been passed down from one generation to the next: a century to publish all the Catalan documents prior to the year 1000. Catalonia has many, and more will appear, especially in the archives of notarial protocols. Notaries often have to copy earlier documents. The work, of great value, totals between 6,000 and 7,000 documents. Gaspar Feliu and I are the directors of the last volumes, which include the introductory volume that Abadal never completed.

There they are establishing the meaning and importance of the work.

— Yes, it is where we reconstruct the history of Catalonia from this period.

What is the reason for this abundance of Catalan documents?

— This is an exceptional case in Europe. Perhaps we could find a similar case in some region of Italy. The surprising thing is that these are not political documents, but documents from everyday life. Especially regarding property rights: civil law. This shows that there really was a practice of law.

Is it due to the Roman influence passed on by the Visigoths?

— There is no doubt that it comes from the Romans, from the Late Empire. The Visigoths come from the north of the Pyrenees, from their kingdom of Aquitaine, where Roman and Visigothic law coexisted. This coexistence is transferred to the peninsula. Therefore, here there is an incomplete knowledge, perhaps precarious, but a knowledge of Roman law. From the Code of Theodosis.

Josep Pla was proud to preserve family documents from the 14th century. This is quite common, isn't it?

— Yes. There are even some exceptional families who have preserved documents from the year 1000. What does this mean? That people were absolutely convinced that the document reflected a reality, certainly more real than the writing itself. When Al-Mansur attacked Barcelona at the end of the 10th century, the people of the surrounding area closed themselves off from the city and took the documents with them. If you lost your property because someone had invaded it, one day you could go to the judge with the deed and, if the judge said it was authentic, you could get it back. The documents were wills, deeds of sale, donations, mortgage loans, agrarian contracts, some inventories...

Where does your passion for documents and history come from? Do you have family documents?

— No, no. But in my family there was a passion for preserving everything, for collecting. There was great veneration for my grandfather's brother, the sculptor Frederic Marès. I was a country boy who worked as a peasant helping his uncles in the fields, in Llinars del Vallès. I also helped his father, who had a small bleach factory. His father was an invalid. But as I was doing well in my studies, my great-uncle Marès, the sculptor, helped me to do my baccalaureate in Barcelona. I combined this with working at a correspondence school called CEAC. And I did evening classes at the Institut Maragall. Then my great-uncle put me in the Escolapios de Sant Antoni and I did the sixth grade and the first grade at the Milà i Fontanals, then one of the best institutes in Barcelona. And then I went to the university residence run by Fèlix Martí, an extraordinary person in thought, training, and spirituality.

Did you study with the sculptor Marès?

— Yes, he paid for everything: my studies, my residency, my tuition, everything. He never told me, but I was supposed to work for him at the museum. When I finished my degree, the City Council called me to join the museum. But I had started working in the publishing world, which was so extraordinary in the 1960s. The teachers selected the students to work with them at the publishing houses. Some made the Enciclopèdia Catalana, others at Planeta, and we made Salvat Universal. I stayed at Salvat perhaps too many years. I ended up as director. That's where I learned Catalan.

When did you go to France?

— In the 80s, when I was older, but it was a bit of a spin-off from the publishing world. Salvat asked me to direct a universal history in installments that would run to 10 volumes. I looked for coordinators from all over the world, especially French ones. And through them I went to Paris for a year to study at the Sorbonne, and for another year to teach at Paris VII.

Who do you consider your teachers?

— Undoubtedly, Ferran Soldevila. His biographies of James I and Peter the Great, his edition of the Chronicles... He is a great, great historian. I did not know him, but I did know Ramon d'Abadal: I was greatly influenced by reading his summaries of the Carolingian era and his book The first Catalan counts. And without a doubt Jaume Vicens Vives.

He has also read a lot of modern and contemporary history.

— Yes, Josep Fontana, for example. All his great volumes. And of course Pierre Vilar, who directed the History of Catalonia 62, in which I wrote a volume. I was able to establish a personal relationship during my stay in Paris. Among the French, Guy Bois, a communist militant and historian, or Michel Vovelle, a leader in the history of mentalities, and also a Marxist. Or Pierre Bonassie, a Marxist humanist, whose influence led me to write the history of world hunger.

What relationship has it had with historiographical Marxism?

— Marxism is one of the two influences I am told about. The other is the important religious formation that I have never completely abandoned. I am a believer. These are the two fundamental humanisms that explain Europe: Christian democracy and socialism. Today we are moving away from these bases and roots.

Catalonia was a nation before it became a state, and it has remained a nation after losing its statehood. Where does this strength come from? What are its pillars? Fontana speaks more of law – of laws – than of language.

— There are many things that influence it. The progressive awareness of realising that they are talking about the same thing, political life and also internal trade, which surely exerts more influence than one thinks: that everyone ends up having a market within a day's walk. This arises spontaneously and the lords help, of course: the bigger the market, the more income you can obtain.

Let's go back. When the Roman Empire fell, how were society, power and the market reconfigured? There are five centuries of evolution.

— People stop belonging to a large political structure, the Roman Empire, and become dependent on a smaller political structure, an impoverished copy of the previous one, the Germanic kingdoms, which are actually a mixture. Here, in addition, the Muslim invasion takes place. It is a period that is difficult for us to imagine, we do not know what we would like to know. It is possibly when Catalonia opens up to the world, as Abadal says, and becomes aware of itself. When Enric de Pisa writes his poem about the illustrious Pisans who come to conquer Mallorca, in 1112, he tells an anecdote, perhaps invented but funny: the Pisans come with ships to attack Mallorca and due to a storm they miss their course and end up in Blanes. On the beach there are some people who are not tourists, of course, and who say to them: "Hey, we are Catalan Christians." Christians, okay, but where does this come from that they describe themselves as Catalans?

Something has clicked.

— A world of relationships between powerful people has developed, what we call feudal institutions, by virtue of which loyalty is sworn, services are provided, alliances are formed, and war is waged. All of this works on a very important legal heritage.

The continuity of Roman law.

— One of the miracles is that the notion of public good was never lost. Despite the savagery, the violence, etc., there were always people who had the idea of public good in mind. Whether it was fulfilled or not is another matter, but the notion was there. And it constitutes the future, very future, basis of the State.

The barbarians of the north were not so...

— They had also lived within the Eastern Roman Empire.

We are precisely now in a moment of very strong crisis of the idea of public good.

— We have struggled for centuries to improve. In the 12th century there was a first renaissance, a reaction against the more savage aspect of the feudal world. In the feudal era, pacts were loved almost more than law, negotiation more than justice.

What is pactism and what does it mean in Catalan institutional political culture?

— It is very important. A research group of six people has spent the last twelve years gathering Catalan documentation on justice and conflict resolution in Catalonia between the 9th and 12th centuries. In the 9th and 10th centuries, large and small problems were resolved through justice in accordance with a Roman-Visigothic legal code and professionals who applied it. This happened in the Carolingian era. It has been said that afterwards it collapsed and a time of anarchy came. But now we know that not everything collapsed. The notion of the public good did not disappear. The notion of how justice was administered did not either. More pacts were made, both noble and private. Political pacts were born here, in the 11th and 12th centuries. Large problems were resolved either by war or by negotiation. Arbitrators were chosen to act as mediators and there were arbitration rulings. And in our case, with a weak monarchy and a lot of power in the estates, pacts were crucial. The monarchy is weak because it spends more than it should due to its ambitious political initiatives of peninsular and Mediterranean expansion.

There was neither the demographic nor the economic capacity to maintain them.

— And the point is that this weakness results in a constitutional monarchy even if it doesn't want to. In that sense, we are an advanced country.

This is what Pau Casals said in 1971 to the UN that Catalonia had its first Parliament long before England (in 1283 with Pere el Gran) and that in the 11th century it had the embryo of the United Nations with the Peace and Truce.

— These are realities. It is always difficult to determine whether a meeting with a monarch is already a Parliament. There may be room for discussion. But it is indisputable that in the 11th century we are at the origins of pacts and the origins of parliamentary assemblies. And Catalonia is at the forefront of that path.

Hence the resistance to absolutism.

— Especially because the middle classes, and even the working classes, believe that this political system is very advantageous to them: everything can be discussed, everything can be agreed upon. The monarchy cannot be arbitrary: whether it likes it or not, it must respect the law.

Does this path of pact continue to this day?

— If we look closely, politics is a pact. Good politics is dialogue and pact. It is like the trial and error in a transaction between a seller and a buyer: they must end up agreeing on a price. In politics, of course, there are forces of pressure. But there must always be dialogue. This also happened in the Process: it started from a dialogue that turned out to be impossible.

We are left with the Generalitat. Now the idea is for it to collect taxes. It is like returning to the medieval origins of the Generalitat, which was created to collect taxes.

— But the current Generalitat has a capacity for government that the medieval one did not have.

Has the importance of the Muslim world in Catalonia been underestimated?

— Good question. I may have gone too far and said that feudalism destroyed the Muslim heritage in Catalonia. Some Arabists have accepted this, but others have been angry, and they are probably right.

How was Barcelona the capital city forged? How did we get to the Usatges, the Consell de Cent, the Consolat de Mar and the Mesa de Cambio?

— Every fire starts with a spark. The spark occurred in the year 714, when the Muslims who had been occupying the Peninsula entered the part of Tarraconensis that would be the future Catalonia. The only city with enough weight to confront them was Tarragona, the Roman Tarraco. And it was practically the only one they took in the assault. The bishop of the time fled to Italy and the ruling class of the city, if not killed in the resistance, also dispersed. The Muslims continued towards Barcelona, ​​​​which surely did not resist. It surrendered and, therefore, kept its defensive structure intact. The senatorial class of the city that had large properties in the countryside was not forced to flee and surely coexisted with the Muslim garrison.

So the spark is a surrender a thousand years before the surrender of 1714?

— I had not thought of this. The fact is that when, less than a hundred years later, in 801, Guillem de Tolosa and the young Louis the Pious entered Barcelona, ​​the city did resist, making common cause with the Muslims, with whom the relationship was probably not bad: they did not impose too heavy taxes on them. However, there was a bad relationship with the Franks. They resisted for almost a year and, finally, when they made an agreement, they charged them with respect to the laws, etc. Charlemagne's Franks adopted a policy that is not unique to Catalonia: if there was no total resistance, if there was capitulation, a level of authority, of properties, etc. was respected. Soon we will have in Barcelona sometimes French accounts, sometimes Hispano-Gothic ones. Barcelona will be the great capital of the frontier of the empire in the south of the Pyrenees. And in the disputes with his relatives, the count of Barcelona will end up directing the hegemony and constituting a principality. But this type of evolution is common throughout Europe.

This is how pre-states take shape.

— Yes, supra-comtal political structures are emerging everywhere. Either because the Carolingians themselves decide it or because aristocratic families take power. And when maritime and economic expansion begins in the 12th century, Barcelona becomes a cape and a manor. In Barcelona everything is decided: salaries, product prices... The box will be fundamental in collusion with the city government, of course.

And who is your favorite monarch king?

— James I, a boy who was born and lived under the tutelage of the Templars, poor thing. He had to have a very hard education, he lost his father when he was very young, but he was convinced that he had a destiny to fulfill. A mission. He was a somewhat enlightened man. And he turned out well. He created the Països Catalans, but at what price, right? But life is like that. I don't want to justify it. In other aspects he was something to admire.

Since you have chosen Jaume I, in 1250, at the time of the great Mediterranean expansion, how did a peasant live in Catalonia?

— We tend to imagine a very exploited being. And I'm not saying that he wasn't. But he wasn't a slave, by any means. He had recognized rights. The lord couldn't do what he wanted with a peasant. There was no peasant without a lord, he was subject to the lord's dictate and, therefore, we shouldn't be surprised that the peasants revolted. But they revolted precisely because in the peasant class there was a kind of aristocracy: peasants who were rich and powerful enough to be lenders to their lords and to have positions of responsibility at the head of the community. The lords had to watch because the peasants ensured their own. modus vivendi. Between the lord who could immediately go to live in the city and the peasant who paid rents, the one who collected them was another peasant. The rich peasants came to have power. The royal villas were represented in Les Corts and the peasants could be present, something that in moments of maximum tension the nobles could not bear.