Language and History

The origins of Catalan literature, like those of any other, depend very largely on the interplay of language and history. Of the Romance languages, Catalan is one of those, like Provençal and Portuguese, which have remained closest to their Latin roots. As might be expected from its geographical distribution, it forms a bridge language between the Ibero-Romance and Gallo-Romance groups, sharing in both, but never completely absorbed by either. Two facts stand out from pre-Roman times: the existence of an ethnic division, running south-south-east from the central Pyrenees, which affected the later dialect division between eastern and western Catalan; and, conversely, an early ethnic and cultural link between north-east Catalonia and the South of France which remained unbroken until the middle of the thirteenth century. Thus, when the Catalan language began to take on a separate identity in the course of the eleventh century, the old Roman division of Septimania, with its centre at Béziers, was still united with the Tarraconensis, the north-east province of Spain, while ecclesiastically the whole area was controlled by the Archbishop of Narbonne. From a linguistic point of view, this meant that Catalan, which might have become another language of the Ibero-Romance group, was pulled in the direction of Gallo-Romance at the most crucial period in its formation.

The political origins of Catalonia add another dimension. A little before AD 800, less than a century after the Moorish invasion, the country was conquered by the Franks and divided into counties; later, in 864, these were regrouped to form the Marca Hispanica , conceived as a Carolingian buffer-state between France and Moorish-occupied Spain. By 900, the Frankish influence was beginning to weaken, and a strong Catalan dynasty had established itself in the north-east of the Peninsula, with its focus in Barcelona. The effect of the Frankish connection, however, continued to make itself felt in other ways: as a result, Catalonia and the South of France developed a more comprehensive feudal system than the rest of Spain, and the links between the newly founded monasteries on either side of the Pyrenees helped to establish Ripoll, the traditional mausoleum of the counts of Barcelona, as an international centre of learning in the eleventh century.