A Short History of Barcelona: Background information when reading The Angel's Game

A Short History of Barcelona

This article relates to The Angel's Game

Barcelona, Spain's second largest city after Madrid, is the capital of the Autonomous Community of Catalonia in the North East of Spain (map) and a major economic center for finance, business, media, arts and international trade.  Its location on the Mediterranean coast brings it mild, humid winters and warm, dry summers.  With a population of 1.6 million it is the eleventh most populated city in the European Union and the sixth-most populous urban area (after Paris, London, Ruhr Area, Madrid and Milan) with almost 5 million people living in the Barcelona metropolitan area.

Legend has it that the city was founded by either the mythical Hercules, or around 250 BC by the Carthaginian general Barcas (father of Hannibal).  The Romans fortified the town as a military camp in about 15 BC.  As the western Roman Empire collapsed, the Germanic Visigoths grew in strength and, by the fifth century, had conquerored most of Gaul (France) and Iberia (Spain) including Barcelona.  Three centuries later the dominance of the Visigoths had been replaced by the might of the Moors (North African people who were early converts to Islam).  But not for long - in 801, Louis, son of Emperor Charlamagne, reconquered the area and it became part of a buffer zone, known as the Spanish Marches (map), which separated the Iberian Peninsula, controlled by the Moors, from the Frankish Kingdom which extended across much of Western Europe (map).

By the middle of the 12th century, the Counts of Barcelona had expanded their territory to include all of Catalonia including the ancient kingdom of Aragon.  The territory known as the Crown of Aragon, with its center in Barcelona, reached its height in the 13th century having conquered Sicily, large chunks of Southern Italy and Athens in Greece.  Barcelona's power declined in the mid 15th century when Isabella of Castille married Ferdinand of Aragon which, after considerable infighting, eventually united the majority of Spain under one monarch.  Their daughter, Catherine of Aragon would later marry into the English House of Tudor (thus validating, in the eyes of European royalty, the rather dubious origins of the Tudor dynasty).  The subsequent annulment of their 24-year marriage by her husband, Henry VIII, led to England breaking away from the Catholic Church and a souring of relations between Spain and England which continued through various wars and a number of centuries.


Books you may know that are set in and around Barcelona

• The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game.
• The Cathedral of the Sea by Idelfonso Falcones, set in 14th century Barcelona at the height of the Inquisition.
• Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell's personal observations of the Spanish Civil War, published in 1938.
• Homage to Barcelona by Colm Tóibín, nonfiction.
   

Interesting Links
BookBrowse member Margaret Ristagno lives in Barcelona, and recently blogged about one of Catalonia's most popular traditions - The Day of the Book:

• A brief history of Catalonia's Day of the Book
• A photo tour of Barcelona on St Jordi's Day/The Day of the Book

Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Angel's Game. It originally ran in July 2009 and has been updated for the May 2010 paperback edition. Go to magazine.

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