A New Dynasty

Madrid, 16 January 1716. No siege, no smoke, no soldiers in the street. A king sits down and signs a piece of paper.

Barcelona in 1714, seen from the Bourbon siege lines. The city's walls and skyline rise behind the attackers' trenches. The engraver J. Rigaud published this plate that year to record the assault on the covered way, the outwork beside the ditch whose loss opened the ramparts. The siege it belongs to lasted thirteen months, and much of the defence inside those walls was carried by craft guilds under arms. J. Rigaud (1659-1743) / Wikimedia Commons / CC0

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Contents — 9 sections

OPENING SCENE
A WAR ABOUT SPAIN, FOUGHT INSIDE SPAIN
THIRTEEN MONTHS, AND THE DECREE THAT EXPLAINED ITSELF
THE CENTURY THAT DOES NOT FIT THE STORY
THE STATE DISAPPEARS AND AUTHORITY REASSEMBLES FROM BELOW
THE CONSTITUTION CANCELLED, AND AN EMPIRE LOST
THE MAP REDRAWN, THE CHURCH SOLD, THE CHARTERS TRADED
A REVOLUTION, A REPUBLIC, AND A CONSTITUTION THAT OUTLASTED BOTH
THREE MOVEMENTS, AND A WORD INVENTED FOR THE PAST

OPENING SCENE

Madrid, 16 January 1716. No siege, no smoke, no soldiers in the street. A king sits down and signs a piece of paper.

The paper abolishes a parliament. The Corts of Catalonia had voted taxes and made law for centuries. It will never meet again.

The Generalitat, the standing body that ran Catalonia between sessions, goes with it. So does the Consell de Cent, Barcelona's own city council.

The Council of Castile drafted the text. Philip V signed it. The original sits today in Barcelona, in the archive of the institution it dissolved.

The same king had already done this to Aragón and Valencia in 1707, and to Mallorca two months before. He did not do it to Navarre, or to the three Basque provinces.

Day 2 listed everything the 1469 wedding left standing: separate parliaments, separate laws, separate money, separate taxes. This is the day somebody goes through that list with a pen.

Not all of it, though. What the pen skipped shaped Spain as much as what it struck out.

Today's Core Question: Can a state make itself one country by abolishing the institutions that made it several?

LOCKED AFTER THE PREVIEW

What's in the rest of Day 4

A WAR ABOUT SPAIN, FOUGHT INSIDE SPAIN
THIRTEEN MONTHS, AND THE DECREE THAT EXPLAINED ITSELF
THE CENTURY THAT DOES NOT FIT THE STORY
THE STATE DISAPPEARS AND AUTHORITY REASSEMBLES FROM BELOW
THE CONSTITUTION CANCELLED, AND AN EMPIRE LOST
THE MAP REDRAWN, THE CHURCH SOLD, THE CHARTERS TRADED
A REVOLUTION, A REPUBLIC, AND A CONSTITUTION THAT OUTLASTED BOTH
THREE MOVEMENTS, AND A WORD INVENTED FOR THE PAST

Tomorrow opens with the Disaster. In 1898 Spain loses Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in a single year, and the shock lands on the three movements Day 4 left organised and waiting. Day 5 follows the broken century: a coup, a republic, a civil war and thirty-six years of dictatorship. It asks what happens to a national question when a country stops asking it and starts policing it.

UP NEXT

Back Continue to Day 5

OPENING SCENE

Philip as France sent him off: Hyacinthe Rigaud painted the seventeen-year-old Duke of Anjou in 1700-01, as he left Versailles to take up the Spanish throne, his right hand resting on his new crown. Rigaud dressed him in Spanish black, and laid across it the sky-blue ribbon of the Holy Spirit, the French crown's highest order. The picture never went south with him. It stayed in the French royal collection, and it hangs at Versailles.Hyacinthe Rigaud / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain