Barcelona Read Free

Saló de Cent inside the Ajuntament
    The Saló de Cent housed the governing body of the city of Barcelona, which had developed out of an order by that great city-shaping king of the thirteenth century, Jaume I, who created a committee of twenty high-ranking citizens, known as peers or probi homines (in Catalan, prohoms) who would advise on city management. The group had among other abilities the power to convene general meetings of citizens, an important step on the much disputed road toward democracy as we understand it now. By 1274 a system emerged from this that, in essence, would govern Barcelona until it was erased by the Bourbons in Madrid in the early eighteenth century. A committee of seven people, made up of five consellers, the mayor, and the chief magistrate, picked a council of about a hundred representative citizens. They were drawn from all walks of life, cobblers and bakers as well as bankers and the upper mercantile orders. Although there were more of the latter, the vote of a tailor or a cooper had more or less the same weight as that of an international textile trader on the Consell de Cent. To some Catalans this seemed highly inconsistent: One might as well, complained a fifteenth-century political scribe named Jaume Safont, put cabrós (a ferociously insulting term, meaning literally “he-goats”) on the committee as men of “vile condition.” To a modern eye, of course, such a policy was the seedling of an egalitarian democracy, long before so radical an idea was launched in any other European state. The Consell de Cent was by a long way the oldest proto-democratic body in Europe. It enshrined the principle that, in a good and well-shaped society, things should happen by contract based on mutual regard rather than by divine right. The most famous political dictum of early Catalunya was uttered there—the unique oath of allegiance sworn by Catalans and Aragonese to the Spanish monarch in Madrid. “We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws—but if not, not.”
    This seemed then, and still does, a perfectly fair and admirable template for marriage as well. It would be an honor to be married in a room associated with such ideals, particularly since neither of us was a practicing Christian (one lapsed Catholic, one lapsed Episcopalian, one an atheist, the other an agnostic, both fond of ceremony but both churchgoers mainly for the sake of the architecture). Even today, when one thinks of monarchy as a decorative and essentially harmless fossil, those words from the Consell de Cent have the sharp and thrilling ring of political truth: They evoke a people who have no doubt about themselves and their identity as a people.
    And what is more, a people who are not necessarily big respecters of other peoples’ personages. Catalans had a traditional knack for putting kingship in perspective. On the facade of the Ajuntament there is a statue of a fifteenth-century merchant named Joan Fiveller. His effigy was put there in the 1850s instead of a figure of Hercules, as an emblem of civic strength. Why? Because at one point in his service as conseller to the city, the Castilian king of Catalunya and Aragon came on a state visit to Barcelona, with his retinue, which was of course large. And Fiveller endeared himself to the Catalans by insisting that the king and his traveling court should pay taxes on the baccala, the salt cod, they consumed. In doing so, he became an uncanonized patron saint of a tendency in Catalan political life which no authority has ever been able to extinguish—a sort of collectivist populism which expresses itself in citizens’ associations and strikes. This demand was entirely a symbolic gesture—it’s unlikely that the royal retinue could have been so big that its consumption of tax-free salt cod would have put very much of