The constitutional crisis coincided with an economic and social one. In Barcelona, Catalonia’s largest and richest city, rising tensions produced two factions which competed for control of the city’s administration: the conservative biga, supporting ‘pactism’ and opposed to any form of royal centralisation of power, and representing the interests of the urban oligarchy (the ciutadans honrats), the traditional source of power in Barcelona; and the busca, composed of merchants, professionals and artisans (mercaders, artistes and menestrals) who demanded protectionist policies to counter the economic crisis, along with a devaluation of the silver croat and reform of the council of one hundred, the influential body which governed Barcelona independently of the royal authority.
In the Catalonian countryside, far more sensitive than that of Aragon to the possibilities of achieving a general rise in living standards through the development of an economy based on maritime trade, the serfs (a quarter of the population) were becoming disillusioned by a legal system which allowed feudal lords to impose heavy burdens on them under what the country’s constitution called the jus maletractandi. These agricultural vassals (named remences after the term redemtione, redimentia, meaning the price they had to pay to secure their freedom from the soil) won the support of Alfonso who recognised their claims and set up a number of public tribunals to settle the innumerable differences that arose between them and their masters.
On the death of Alfonso in 1458, all these tensions came to a head. A large anti-monarchist group opposed to his successor, Joan II, was formed by those, including the nobility, the clergy and the upper middle classes, whose interests were under threat. Joan had been the executor of his brother’s absolutist policies which he planned to continue. This meant that he did not intend to recognise as heir to the throne, or name as his lieutenant, Carlos of Viana, his son by his first marriage to Blanche of Navarre, as he had polarised dangerous opposition to the king wherever he went, from Navarre to Sicily and Naples. Joan underestimated Carlos’s popularity in Catalonia and made a false move when he had him arrested on 2 December 1460. This led to a revolt which set off a decade of civil war. The Catalan corts and the biga aligned themselves with the prince. The assembly was called upon to judge the king who was alleged to have violated the laws of the land, and a new constitutional body, the consell representant le principat de Cathalunya, was set up which proclaimed Carlos heir to the principality. At this point King Joan decided to give in, freed his son and, on 21 June 1461, sealed the Agreement of Vilafranca.
Rather than being the conclusive triumph of ‘pactism’ over royal authoritarianism, this agreement reflected a radical alteration in the basic concept of ‘pactism’. Under its terms, every political demand made by the Catalan oligarchy since the time of Pere IV (d. 1387) was met: an independent government for Catalonia under the king’s eldest son who became his lieutenant for life; the separation and independence of the legal system from the executive; total control over the crown’s civil servants; and the banning of the king from entry into the lands of the principality without the express permission of all the constitutional bodies. This was revolution by the privileged classes who were aspiring to full realisation of that vision of ‘pactism’ which they had only glimpsed, years before, at Caspe.
On the sudden death of Carlos, however (September 1461), Joan II persuaded the generalitat to bestow the lieutenancy on Ferdinand, his son by his second wife, Juana Enriquez. There was, however, the possibility that the army of the generalitat would march on Gerona where the queen and her son were living, and seek not only to repress a rising of the remences but also to kidnap the royal personages. Joan, therefore, decided to seek military aid from Louis XI, king of France, who in return demanded 200,000 ducats, linked to the income of Roussillon and Cerdagne on the Pyrenean border. When the payment was not made, the two provinces passed into French hands. Juana Enriquez and her son were freed by the French, but when the king of Aragon led his troops into Catalonia, violating the Agreement of Vilafranca, the generalitat declared him a public enemy, in effect deposing him by declaring the throne of Catalonia vacant. They then offered the crown of Catalonia, but not that of Aragon, to Enrique IV, king of Castile. Intense diplomatic negotiations, begun to avert the danger of escalating the conflict, were to culminate in the Treaty of Bayonne (August 1463). Called in to judge the Catalan question, Louis XI persuaded Enrique IV to abandon the rebels and, instead, put forward Castile’s ally, Pedro, constable of Portugal, as candidate for the throne. Pedro quickly won the support of the rebels, who played up his connection with the count of Urgel, his uncle and one of the claimants at Caspe. The Portuguese candidature was also the result of international political intrigue and the convergence of Castilian and Portuguese interests in the Mediterranean which, hitherto, had fallen within the Catalan sphere of influence. In his war against the constable of Portugal, Joan II was able to rely on the support of the other states of the crown of Aragon: Aragon, Valencia, Majorca and Sicily, which had been prudently sitting on the fence since the beginning of the conflict. On the constable’s death in June 1466, the war took a sudden and unexpected twist when the extremist wing of the rebels took the politically and economically radical decision to elect Rene of Anjou, lord of Provence and Lorraine, to the throne, giving a sudden boost to France’s Mediterranean aspirations. From Joan II’s point of view, the war became one aimed increasingly at liberating Catalonia from French occupation, and in this sense may only be said to have ended with the Treaty of Barcelona (1493), through which Ferdinand ‘the Catholic’ managed to extract the two provinces from the French king, Charles VIII, in exchange for a free hand in Italy. However, the civil war had in effect ended in 1472 with Joan II’s entry into Barcelona, while the capitulation at Pedralbes in October closed this painful episode with a general act of clemency to the defeated rebels, the king swearing once more to uphold all the Catalan constitutions with the exception of the Agreement of Vilafranca.