Who ruled Barcelona?

Barcelona occupies a coastal plain on the Mediterranean in north-eastern Spain, hemmed in by the Collserola hills behind and the rivers Llobregat and Besòs on either side. A low hill near the shore made a defensible core, and the sea made it a trading port. Its history has two great themes: its medieval heyday as the capital of a Catalan sea empire, and its long, often violent struggle to keep Catalan self-government within the Spanish state, a struggle that still shapes its politics.

An Iberian people, the Laietani, lived in the area before the Romans, and the name probably comes from an Iberian settlement called Barkeno; the old story that Hamilcar Barca founded it has no support. In the reign of Augustus the Romans founded a small walled colony, Barcino, on the hill of Tàber. It was overshadowed by nearby Tarraco, but its stout walls, rebuilt in the later empire, made it valuable. The Visigothic king Ataulf held court there and was murdered there in 415, and for short periods in the sixth century it served as a Visigothic royal seat.

Arab and Berber forces of the Umayyad Caliphate took the city peacefully in about 717. In 801 Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne, captured it after a long siege, and it became the chief town of a frontier county of the Carolingian Empire. In 985 the Córdoban general al-Mansur sacked Barcelona. No Frankish help came, and in 988 Count Borrell II did not renew his allegiance to the new Capetian king, a step later seen as the start of Catalan independence, though French claims were formally given up only in 1258.

In 1137 Count Ramon Berenguer IV was betrothed to the heiress of Aragon, and their son inherited both realms, forming the Crown of Aragon. Barcelona became its commercial capital. Catalan merchants and fleets took the Crown into the Balearics, Sicily, Sardinia and eventually Naples, the city's maritime customs became a model for Mediterranean sea law, and a new Gothic quarter of churches, shipyards and merchants' halls grew within expanded walls. The Black Death of 1348 began a long decline, worsened by an attack on the Jewish quarter in 1391, banking failures and a civil war from 1462 to 1472. After Ferdinand II of Aragon married Isabella of Castile, the focus of the united monarchy shifted to Castile and the Atlantic.

Catalonia rose against the Spanish crown in the Reapers' War of 1640, and Barcelona surrendered in 1652. In the War of the Spanish Succession the city backed the Habsburg claimant and was taken by Bourbon troops on 11 September 1714 after a long siege. Catalan institutions were abolished, and a fortress, the Ciutadella, was built to watch over the city. That date is now Catalonia's national day.

In the nineteenth century Barcelona became the leading industrial city of Spain, built on cotton textiles. The medieval walls came down in 1854, and Ildefons Cerdà's grid of the Eixample filled the plain, decorated by Gaudí and other modernista architects. Industry also brought class conflict and anarchist movements, culminating in the riots of Tragic Week in 1909. In the Civil War the city was a Republican stronghold and briefly the seat of the government, suffered heavy bombing in 1938, and fell to Francisco Franco in January 1939. Under his rule Catalan language and institutions were suppressed.

After democracy returned Catalonia regained self-government, and the 1992 Olympic Games transformed the waterfront. A disputed independence referendum in 2017 brought a political crisis between the regional and national governments. Barcelona has about 1.7 million people and a metropolitan area of over five million, and is Spain's second city.