By the time Cervantes visited Barcelona in the early seventeenth century and placed words of praise for that “archive of courtesy” in the mouth of Don Quixote, who extolled its citizens for their refined manners, gallantry, and generosity, the city had already long dominated the province of Catalonia and enjoyed an enviable international reputation. The solid hub of regional communication, production, and culture, Barcelona was already known in a homespun phrase as the cap i casal de Catalunya, the head and hearth of Catalonia, or, to use the architecturally dignified metaphor of King Joan I, the caput et columna totius Cataloniae, the capital and pillar of all Catalonia. History has made Barcelona the heart of Catalan identity. By the later Middle Ages its place was already secure. Geographically, the city lay squarely in the middle of the Catalan coast; politically, it served as the seat of the provincial parliament, the Generalitat de Catalunya; culturally, it provided a causeway for Mediterranean and European learning and tastes to enter Iberia. At once confidently international and proudly regional, its prosperous citizens took their place among the leading circles of Catalonian society. Because Barcelona has exercised such a decisive role in the formation of Catalonia, its rise often seems inevitable, a natural expression of regional and cultural self–awareness, an event in need only of description and admiration, not explanation.

If, however, we can manage to close our eyes to the approach of the third millennium and retrace our steps, blindly stumbling backward a thousand years before opening them again, the future preeminence of Barcelona would have been hard to predict.