History of Catalonia - The Reapers' War

The Reapers' War

The Reapers' War (Catalan: Guerra dels Segadors, 1640–52) started as an uprising of peasants in Barcelona. Conflicts had already arisen between Catalonia and the monarchy in the time of Philip II. Having exhausted the economic resources of Castile, Philip wished to avail himself of those of Catalonia; the Catalan governmental institutions and privileges were well protected by the terms of union of the kingdoms, and were jealously guarded by the Catalan oligarchy. After Philip IV acceded to the throne in 1621, the Count-Duke of Olivares attempted to sustain an ambitious foreign policy by taxing the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, which meant laying aside the until-then-prevailing principles of confederation, in favor of centralism (often referred to in a Spanish context as unitarism). Resistance in Catalonia was especially strong, given the lack of any significant apparent regional return for the sacrifices.

When Spanish tercios (military corps) concentrated in Roussillon at the end of the 1630s, because of the Thirty Years' War with France, the local peasants were required to lodge and provision the troops. On June 7, 1640, an uprising known as the Corpus de Sang took the lives of various royal functionaries, not all of them Castilian. Mutinies continued; the Generalitat of Catalonia succeeded in channeling the revolt against the policies of the Count-Duke, transforming a social revolt into a political war against Castilian domination, a war for Catalan independence.

The president of the Generalitat, Pau Claris, declared a Catalan Republic under the protection of Louis XIII of France. This allowed French troops to draw that much closer to the heartland of Spain. By 1652, Catalonia was again occupied by Spanish troops; and when the war between Spain and France ended in 1659, the peace treaty ceded the Catalan-speaking territories north of the Pyrenees, Roussillon, Conflent, Vallespir, Capcir, and the northern half of Cerdanya, to France.