1714 and all that

 We are rising and falling and will go up 108m and down 20.  We will see spectacular carving of roadways and olive trees and that will be it.

I don’t know if it is still the case but there is the thing where some English people confuse Britain with England. I suspect it is partly because while everyone else in the Isles were busy discovering Celtic Nationalism the English were being told about the British Empire and that.  Spain, as an idea, has always had that sharper division.  The Kingdom of Aragon had its own Mediterranean Empire and the sense of independence.  It would be useful if we had someone who was much more aware to the similarities and differences between the England-Scotland, Castile-Catalan experiences although I feel the English, away from sport, tend to have a more benign view of the Scots than some Castillians, who both want Catalonia to be ultra-loyal to Spain and disappear completely at the same time.

1714 is a key date in Catalan History. During the War of the Spanish Succession, after the Habsurgs had very nobly undertaken to show everyone else why it wasn;t a good idea to marry your cousin for six generations, Catalonia had sided with Charles VI and lost out when the Bourbon claimant.

The fall of Barcelona on 11th September 1714 ended the Habsburg’s cousin claim to the Spanish Crown. Philip felt that he had been betrayed by the Catalan Courts, as it had initially sworn its loyalty to him when he had presided over it in 1701 - because  might makes right. In retaliation he enacted the Nueva Planta decrees (1707, 1715 and 1716), incorporating the realms of the Crown of Aragon, including the Principality of Catalonia in 1716, as provinces of the Crown of Castile, ending their status as separate states along with their parliaments, institutions and public law  within a French-style centralized and absolutist kingdom of Spain.

And so we push on.