‘Catalunya i Carlemany’: the genesis of a difference

The visitor to present-day Catalonia cannot go far before encountering the Catalan flag. As well as flying from poles, its red and yellow stripes start out at the observer from where they have been painted on walls, on roadside rocks, on empty hoardings and, in one impressive example that I saw in 2007, sixty feet high up the cliffside beneath a viaduct on the road between Hostalric and Arbúcies. It usually occurs with a strident legend, which visitors will see again and again: ‘Catalunya no es Espanya!’

The official suppression of the Catalan language under Franco means that this slogan evokes bitter memories for those who remember that government. Even among the younger population chauvinism against the people and their language is much resented, and political parties campaign, not on whether, but on how quickly and how far Catalonia should move for independence. The difference between Catalonia and its Castilian-speaking neighbours is much older than these episodes, however. Furthermore, especially in towns like Girona or Besalú where high medieval city centres grudgingly accommodate cars over their cobbles and the vibrant modernism of Barcelona has a weaker hold, there is little doubt to whom this difference can be attributed. If visitors be in Girona, they may stay at the Hotel Carlemany, and everywhere cafés, shops and street names also bear this name from the past: Carlemany, or as he is better known in English, Charlemagne.

Outside Catalonia, Charlemagne’s ill-fated venture into Spain in 778 is best known for giving rise to the Chanson de Roland. In the area that would become Catalonia, however, it marked out a particular frontier status, between Christianity and Islam, between the future Spain and France, and between the Carolingian empire, of which it indubitably formed part, and the Umayyad emirate of Córdoba. The 778 campaign opened an interest in the area on the part of the Carolingians that was to last for two centuries.

It also began a process of secession in the lands of the old Visigothic province of Tarragona. Secession was nothing new there: as the Muslim armies of Tarīq ibn Ziyād arrived in Spain in 711 the Tarraconensis was in revolt and King Roderic’s eventual defeat by the Muslims was due not least to the long march down from the north with an exhausted and disenchanted army to meet a new foe.