One main reason why Barcelona seemed hard to penetrate—apart from the unfamiliarity of its language, Catalan—was that it had decayed so badly since the loss of the civil war. Spain’s dictator, Franco, hated the place and wanted revenge on it for opposing him. He had been in the saddle so long that most Catalans did not remember a world without him. After him, Spain had to be reinvented, a daunting if exhilarating prospect. The father of one of my best friends there had put away, years before, a magnum of fine champagne (Krug, I think). When Franco died he was going to open it, but not before. Franco’s death was heralded by a fusillade of popping corks all over Barcelona, but not my friend’s; it had been sitting in the fridge so long that it had gone flat. So, in a sense, had the city itself. Barcelona grisa, gray Barcelona, was how people referred to it, looking back on the years of Franco and his much despised Falangist mayor, Josep Maria de Porcioles i Colomer, who ran the most intellectually inert and historically oblivious city government of the twentieth century. Barcelona had turned into a sort of sleeping princess, neglected, and ignored. It was one enormous ashtray, covered in a mantle of grime and grit. The buildings that should have made it famous were suffocating and in decay. Even its great Christian monuments, like the Cathedral, had repulsive administrative-modern office blocks jammed next to them, an ugly modernism that signified contempt and seemed to mock the ostentatious piety of Franco’s regime. Things were done to the nineteenth-century architectural masterpieces of Barcelona—Gaudí’s Casa Milà, Domènech i Montaner’s Casa Lle, Morera and his Palau de la Música Catalana—that would never have been allowed to happen to buildings from the medieval era, because although the earlier ones were rightly seen as historically precious, the later ones were wrongly thought of as old-fashioned or grotesque. (It should, in fairness, be added that Franco’s appalling or merely sluggish and greedy lieutenants were not shy about applying the wrecker’s ball to medieval buildings, secular ones, in other Spanish cities.)
And, of course, it wasn’t only the Falangists who thought art nouveau was disposable rubbish. Here is George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia, on Gaudí’s Sagrada Família: “one of the most hideous buildings in the world … I think the anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance.” At least he gave the old man a mention, as did Evelyn Waugh, who for some inscrutable reason decided that another Gaudí building, the Casa Batlló on Passeig de Gràcia, was the Turkish Consulate. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner didn’t even include Gaudí in his canonical Pioneers of Modern Design.
The Barcelona we value so much today had been punitively raped and degraded by business, by the unsupervised and opportunistic greed of developers, who set to work on its fabric not like artists or surgeons, but like amnesiac butchers who were also good family men. Was this the result of deliberately planned policy? The answer has to be No, but. No, but decay is a most powerful force, and amnesia too. No, but it’s hard not to see in Barcelona’s deterioration during the Porcioles years (1957-1973) the unfolding of a vengeful desire for entropy. Barcelona had resisted the caudillo. Bad idea. There would be money for cement works outside the city, because the businessmen who owned them were Franco supporters. But there was not going to be money to restore the great symbolic works of Catalanist architecture, like the Palau de la Música Catalana, because these, like the best of the city’s culture, were opposed to the very spirit of Madrid centralism, of rule from outside Barcelona itself.
BARCELONA WAS SHAPED, AND ITS DESTINY DETERMINED, by the fact that it began as a port and has been one ever since. Exactly when this birth occurred cannot now be fixed. At one point, there was a thin speckle of Bronze Age settlement by the sea there, extending up the seaward flank of what is now Montjuïc, the mountain which rears up to your right as you look out to sea from the waterfront. The people who inhabited it were known as the Laietani; they were, as far as anyone knows, indigenous; they were one of the various branches the Celtic tribesmen who, in prehistoric times, had come down across the Pyrenees to the coastal plains of what is now Catalunya and interbred with the resident Iberians, themselves the product and residue of earlier invasions from North Africa. Practically nothing is known about the Laietani. They did not have a written language (again, as far as anyone knows), which suggests that they did not trade except among themselves. One of the principal streets of modern Barcelona is known as the Via Laietana, and was so christened when an urban renewal scheme demanded a straight cut from hillside to waterfront; but there isn’t a smidgen of evidence that its track, when pushed through in 1908, had anything to do with the elusive Laietani, and little trace of them—no artifacts, let alone buildings—was found in the excavations. A small fossil of their presence may have been (not certainly, only possibly) the name Barcino, which supposedly meant “welcoming port.” Current fashions in history tend to favor the underdog, but even allowing for that the Laietani would seem to have achieved little, made less, and vanished almost without a trace under the heel of the Romans, who colonized this part of the Spanish coast as a base from which to run their war against the Carthaginians in 210 B.C. Even so, the future Barcelona did not become a significant colony—or not right away. That honor belonged to Tarraco (the future Tarragona), conquered in 210 B.C. by the ferocious young general Scipio Africanus Major, who marched south the next year and utterly destroyed the Punic base of Carthago Nova. Tarraco was rich. So was Carthago Nova, whose silver mines alone brought in twenty-five thousand drachmas a day. These were colonial possessions worth having. Not so the future Barcelona, which produced little but fish, and a once much esteemed breed of local oyster—long since, alas, rendered extinct by the industrial pollution of the harbor water.
But when the Romans conquered a place, they took it over completely and re-formed it in their image. So it was with the little settlement that straggled up the slope of Montjuïc—a name, incidentally, that may (but again, not certainly) derive from Mons Iovis, the “hill of Jupiter.” The problem with Montjuïc was its lack of water. But two streams ran down from the plain to the beach, and it made sense to relocate the town (if it were to grow) between them, on a small, and today barely perceptible, eminence named Mont Taber. These framed the new city, which was hardly more than a village. It covered about thirty acres and was shaped liked a fat boot heel. Roughly at its center was the forum, which lies beneath what is still the administrative core of Barcelona—the Plaça Sant Jaume, between the Ajuntament, the seat of city government, and the Palau de la Generalitat, which houses the state government of Catalunya. In essence it was a Roman military camp, but one defined and outlined by thick masonry brick and cement walls. But small and rather ad hoc though Barcino (as it was named) might be, it still signified Rome, the greatest power on Earth, and consequently the cult of the Roman emperor and the Roman gods. Hence its temple dedicated to the Emperor Augustus, of which a few remains survive in the form of three Corinthian columns in the basement of a house at No. 10, Carrer del Paradis, just off Plaça Sant Jaume. They don’t look like much. But on the other hand, none of the Roman relics of Barcelona do, except perhaps for a few parts of the old city wall, massive and obdurate and much built into by later construction. The lower levels of Barcelona are not a Pompeii. If you expected the interest of this ancient city to reside in its most ancient parts, you would be sorely disappointed.
No sooner had Roman Barcelona begun to attain a respectable size than the decay and contraction of the Spanish part of the Roman Empire itself began to work against it, pulling it back to inconsequence and provinciality. In a series of maneuvers and takeovers too complicated to recite here, a series of barbarian invasions from Germany came down across the Pyrenees, starting around A.D. 409: Vandals, Suevians, Alani, and finally a force of (perhaps) 250,000 Visigoths, commanded by their king, Ataulf. The Visigoths have had an unjust press, denounced as destroyers and brutes. But quite a lot had rubbed off on them in the few years since they devastated Greece and sacked Rome. In fact, they had become enthusiastic churchbuilders and in the late si
xth century one of their kings, Reccared, imposed Catholicism over Arianism as the official state religion in northern Spain. (So much for a famously silly claim by one American neo-con writer in the 1980s, that the universities and higher institutions of learning in his country were being taken over by “Visigoths in tweed.” If only, one can hear more informed neo-cons groaning.)
Only fragments—and fragments of fragments, at that—survive to mark the Visigoths’ Christian presence in Barcelona. The sculptures of evangelists, a lion (Mark), an angel (Matthew), an eagle (John), and the hand of God, which are built into the facade of tiny Sant Pau del Camp, the oldest church in the city, were salvaged and recycled from what was probably a Visigothic chapel on the site. But apart from that, virtually nothing of Visigothic Barcelona remains. What is even more surprising is that no buildings survive that were erected by the great unifier of the Catalan Dark Ages in the middle of the ninth century, and who was mythologized by Catalans for a thousand years after his death as the founder of Catalunya’s national independence. This man was known as Guifré el Pelos—Wilfred the Hairy.
Wilfred established his rule of Catalunya by defeating a Frankish overlord, while presiding over the expulsion from Barcelona of the Saracens, who had managed to conquer the city—the next-to-last time any Arabs would get into Barcelona. Despite the nearly intact Roman walls of the little city, the sarrains—who had become a big inconvenience to trade, a wasp’s nest of Moorish freebooters—were thrown out, or so the story goes, by an alliance between Wilfred the Hairy and Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, in 801. (Their respective dates, as we have already seen, make this impossible, but never mind. In terms of heraldry, politics, and myth, the idea of Catalan independence begins with him.)
Wilfred the Hairy, having consolidated his hold on northern Catalunya, became an enthusiastic supporter of monasteries and churches, thereby getting the priestly scribes on his side and ensuring himself an excellent press. He endowed almost all the earliest church foundations of Catalunya: Santa Maria de Formiguera (873), Santa Maria de la Grassa (878), Santa Maria de Ripoll(888), and Sant Pere de Ripoll (890) among them. He built himself a palace in Barcelona, of which nothing remains. He endowed churches there, which have also vanished. If Barcelona is devoid of Carolingian buildings, it is not because the Moors, led by the vizier of Córdoba, briefly retook it in 985, but because of early Catalan “developers” who flattened them during Barcelona’s first building boom in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Early churches in the north, in the towns at the foot of the Pyrenees, which had been established by Wilfred, survived perfectly well and one of them, Santa Maria de Ripoll, is still sometimes called the bressol de Catalunya (cradle of Catalunya) and features a magnificent though timeworn alabaster portal, the finest Romanesque sculptural complex in all of Spain.
Under the line of count-kings that began with Wilfred the Hairy, the territory of Catalunya expanded steadily. Its crucial political event, which came in the twelfth century, was the marriage of the Catalan count-king Ramón Berenguer IV to Petronella, the queen of neighboring Aragon. This fused Catalunya and Aragon into a large power bloc, formidable enough to keep at bay any incursion from Castile and to fend off the centralist ambitions of the kings in Madrid. Moreover, since their military forces combined, the union of Catalunya and Aragon created a Catalan empire in the Mediterranean. Beginning with Jaume I, who amply deserved his sobriquet El Conqueridor, the Conqueror, the kingdom of Aragon and Catalunya had an empire by the beginning of the fourteenth century.
The tangible symbol of this was the Llotja, the “lodge”—in effect, the first stock exchange in Europe or anywhere else. The Llotja, in its original Gothic form, was constructed in the fourteenth century, as part of the first of the three largest building booms in Catalan history. The first of these booms, which produced the Llotja and a large amount of the casc antic or medieval city besides, was set going by a singular and obsessive monarch, Pere III, known as El Ceremonios, who ruled Barcelona for much of the fourteenth century.
The second took place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and it gave us that stupendous and visionary city plan, the first of the grid cities, the ancestor of New York: the Eixample, conceived by Ildefons Cerdà, the New Barcelona that broke out of the constricting muralles and enabled the city to grow beyond its imposed medieval limits.
And the third building boom was the restoration and refiguring of Barcelona in the years leading up to and then beyond the Olympics of 1992, set in motion by the mayor Pasqual Maragall.
Catalan building booms tend to have something in common. They defy common sense. This was spectacularly true of what happened under the rule of Peter the Ceremonious. He was a proud man with a quick and dangerous temper. He liked luxury and elaborate protocol and he wanted his city to testify to what he perceived as the glories of his own singular character. He set this ambition forth in a poem, for he was a poet, too—maybe not a great one like Ausiàs March, but not a bad one for a ruler. In its original medieval Catalan it runs:
Lo loch me par sia pus degut
noble ciutat, o vila gross’e gran,
o.ls enaemichs valentment garreian
tenent al puny lança e’l brac escut,
o’n esglesia, on devotate sia,
e si u fa’xi, no sera ja repres
per cavallers …
Which in modern translation means, more or less:
The worthiest of places, so I think
is a noble city, or a great fine town
or to be bravely fighting enemies
with lance in hand, or shield upon one’s arm
or at one’s devotions in a church
and if I do this, then I will not be scorned
by noble knights …
He couldn’t have been plainer about this. Cities exist to promote the glory of their inhabitants, their citizens, and, in particular, their rulers. If they don’t or can’t do this, they are not fit to be called cities; they are merely villages, large or small. The status of a city can be gauged from the glory of its institutions. Some of these are religious, of course, but others are civil. And since there was no city in the Mediterranean world more religiously devoted to money than Barcelona, Catalan commerce had to have its own cathedral. Clearly, what Peter the Ceremonious and his Catalan contemporaries wanted was to build, on the edge of the sea which was the source of their wealth, a kind of medieval World Trade Center—though one which could not be destroyed by the Arabs, who were still in command of most of Spain south of the Ebro.
They wanted to build much more, and they did. To make sure the moros would not get in, they remade the city walls. They built a huge wall that started on the sea, just south of the Drassanes, the earlier medieval shipyards, and enclosed the whole area that now lies between the Ramblas and the Paral-lel. It enclosed the horts i vinyets, the market gardens on which Barcelona’s emergency food supply depended. It was a giant garden fence. That was a strategic necessity. But what was not so plausible were the efforts and money they expended on a whole range of buildings we now see as the essence of medieval Barcelona. The Casa de la Ciutat; the Saló del Tinell with its stupendous arches—those semicircular rainbows of stone; Santa Maria del Mar; much of the Cathedral; and, of course, the Llotja. Were these and other masterpieces of the Barri Gòtic (Old City) raised in a time of peace and prosperity? Absolutely not. In 1333 the Catalan wheat crop failed and about ten thousand people, a quarter of the city’s population, starved to death. Barcelona was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. That was what gave the background to this great building its bizarre and manic quality. Think about New York for a moment. The greatest city in the world was traumatized almost to the point of paralysis by a terrorist attack which killed fewer than three thousand people, out of a population of eight million. Less than 0.1 percent. But here was a fourteenth-century city which in one year lost about 25 percent of its population, and still built continuously, with an unquenchable belief in the future—even though it was at
the same time being attacked by other assorted acts of God as well.
Plague, for instance. Because Barcelona was a great sea-trading city, it was unusually and directly vulnerable to the plague, whose germs, Yersina pestis, came in the saliva of lice, which rode on the skin of rats, which crossed the Mediterranean in the holds of ships. The city’s economy was just beginning to recover from the catastrophes of the 1330s when plague struck in 1348. Majorca was the first part of Europe to get it, and then Catalunya. Eighty percent of the population of the Balearic Islands died. In Barcelona government was nearly wiped out: Four out of the five consellers died, for instance. The result of the Black Death, here as elsewhere, was social chaos. Those with a millenarian view announced that the Last Judgment and the Final Days were coming. Many blamed it on the Jews, and every Catalan knew someone who knew someone else who had seen Jews throwing corpses in Christian wells. So along with the epidemics and renewed cycles of famine there were lynch mobs and pogroms. If you wanted a textbook example of how medieval states and polities could come apart and collapse, you could not find a better one than Barcelona at the time that the Llotja was being built, under the reign of Peter the Ceremonious. Truly, the living envied the dead, and everyone feared the hand of God was against them. And yet they continued to build, in the face of disasters that none of them understood.
They found refuge and solace in religion, so perhaps it is not a mystery that the calamitous fourteenth century was the great period of Catalan church building. But the Catalans, then as now, took great pride in their mercantile hardheadedness and they had already elevated business to a kind of state religion, which had the advantage of letting bankers and wholesalers in baccala feel like the gods, heroes, and saints they always knew they were. And that was why they built La Llotja del Mar, right at the height of the plague, between 1380 and 1392.
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