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Not far from the wetlands of the Aiguamolls de l'Empordà, where water, reeds and migrating birds dominate the landscape, there is a beautiful and small promontory overlooking the Mediterranean.
Today, Sant Martí d'Empúries seems almost impossibly peaceful. A handful of stone houses. A church. Medieval walls. Narrow streets opening towards the sea. Yet this tiny place once stood at the centre of a political world that would contribute to the making of medieval Catalunya.
To understand its importance, however, we must look far beyond the walls that surround it today. Because Sant Martí d'Empúries is not simply a medieval village. It is a place where history never really stopped.
Long before medieval counts ruled from here, Greek sailors had already recognised the strategic importance of this small piece of land. Around the 6th century BC, they established their first settlement on what was then a small island just off the coast. They called the settlement Emporion, a name connected with trade and commerce.
This first Greek settlement became what archaeologists call the Palaia Polis -the Old City. Later, the Greeks expanded onto the mainland, creating the Neapolis, while centuries afterwards the Romans established their own city beside it. In 218 BC, during the Second Punic War, the harbour of Empúries became the gateway through which Roman troops entered the Iberian Peninsula.
Few places in Catalunya illustrate so clearly the successive layers of Mediterranean history. Greek. Roman. Late Roman. Visigothic. Carolingian. Medieval Catalan. And remarkably, while the great Greek and Roman cities gradually disappeared, the old promontory survived.
From the third century onwards, as Roman Emporiae declined, population increasingly concentrated around what is now Sant Martí. During Late Antiquity it remained an important fortified settlement and Empúries became an episcopal see, documented from at least the early sixth century. Archaeological evidence also shows that its harbour continued to connect the settlement with the wider Mediterranean world. The ancient trading post had learned how to survive. And it would survive once again when the political map of Europe changed dramatically after the collapse of the Roman and Visigothic worlds.
To understand medieval Catalunya, we have to forget modern borders for a moment. There was no medieval morning on which somebody suddenly created Catalunya. Its emergence was a long historical process. During the late eighth and early ninth centuries, the Carolingian rulers established and reorganised a series of counties south of the Pyrenees. These territories formed part of the frontier between the Carolingian world to the north and Al-Andalus to the south.
Barcelona, Girona, Osona, Urgell, Cerdanya, Rosselló and Empúries were among the counties that would eventually become fundamental pieces of the political geography of medieval Catalunya. At first, their counts exercised authority within the Carolingian political system. But distance matters. And frontiers create their own realities.
As Carolingian royal authority weakened during the ninth and tenth centuries, the counts became increasingly autonomous. Offices that had once depended upon royal appointment gradually became hereditary, and local dynasties consolidated their control over their territories.
The counties remained connected by alliances, marriages, rivalries, ecclesiastical networks and common political interests. But they were not a single state. This fragmented political landscape is one of the keys to understanding the origins of Catalunya. And Empúries was part of it.
The County of Empúries occupied an important territory in northeastern Catalunya, originally extending along the coast from the Albera range towards the area south of the River Ter. Its geographical position gave it a distinctive character. This was a county of plains and wetlands, rivers and mountains. But above all, it was a county facing the Mediterranean. The sea offered trade and communication. It also brought danger. Piracy and maritime attacks were a constant concern, and the exposed position of Empúries made defence essential. The settlement suffered particularly during the turbulent ninth century, and the comital centre eventually began moving inland.
But Sant Martí remained important. Count Gausbert restored or rebuilt the settlement in the tenth century, around 927. Contemporary evidence presents it not as an insignificant village but as an important fortified centre.
There was a count. There was a court. There were walls. There was a church. And there was a harbour.
An Arabic account describing an expedition against Empúries in 933 even refers to its harbour, shipyards and fortifications -evidence of a maritime activity that was still very much alive. Standing today beside the quiet Mediterranean, it is difficult to imagine that same coastline filled with ships, soldiers, merchants and sailors. But the sea in medieval Empúries was not the edge of the world. It was a road.
The County of Empúries appears in the historical record in the early ninth century. Its political history was closely connected at first with neighbouring Rosselló, and different counts governed these territories within the Carolingian sphere.
Over time, however, local dynasties strengthened their position. This process was not unique to Empúries. Across the future Catalan lands, the same transformation was occurring: political power was becoming increasingly rooted in local families and territories.
One revealing figure was Gausfred I, Count of Empúries and Rosselló during much of the tenth century. His reign illustrates the increasing autonomy of the Catalan counts. Sources indicate that he began using the formula by the grace of God and issued coinage without the name of the Frankish king -small gestures perhaps, but politically significant ones.
Power was slowly changing its language. The counts were no longer merely distant representatives of another ruler. They were becoming rulers in their own right. This gradual transformation is essential to understanding the emergence of medieval Catalunya. It was not created by a declaration. It evolved.
Eventually, however, Sant Martí's position became a weakness. Its exposure to maritime attacks and the changing political and economic geography of the county encouraged the counts to move their centre of power inland.
During the tenth and eleventh centuries, Castelló d'Empúries increasingly assumed the role of capital, a transfer that was effectively completed by the time of Count Hug II in the late eleventh century. The move was logical. Castelló offered greater security and stood at the centre of an extensive agricultural territory. But Sant Martí never disappeared. Its walls remained. Its church remained. Its people remained. And perhaps most importantly, its memory remained.
The present Church of Sant Martí is much later than the first medieval church documented here. The current building dates largely from the beginning of the sixteenth century, while parts of the medieval walls and castle belong principally to the thirteenth century. So what we see today is not a perfectly preserved Carolingian capital. History rarely offers us anything so simple. Instead, Sant Martí is a palimpsest. Every generation wrote something upon it without completely erasing what came before.
Perhaps this is where Sant Martí becomes much more than a beautiful medieval village. It helps us understand the peculiar way in which Catalunya was formed.
The medieval Catalan counties were political territories with their own rulers, institutions, aristocratic networks and relationships with monasteries, bishoprics and neighbouring powers. They competed. They negotiated. They married into one another. They fought. And gradually some became more powerful than others.
The County of Barcelona would eventually acquire a dominant position, but that later predominance should not make us forget the importance of counties such as Empúries, Rosselló, Cerdanya, Urgell, Pallars or Besalú.
Medieval Catalunya was not simply Barcelona expanding outwards. Its history was woven from many territories. Empúries was one of those threads. Indeed, the counts of Empúries preserved a remarkable degree of political identity for centuries, sometimes cooperating with and sometimes resisting the increasingly powerful House of Barcelona. The county was finally incorporated into the royal domain at the beginning of the fifteenth century, after a long and complicated history of dynastic changes and conflicts. That longevity matters. Because it reminds us that medieval political geography was far more complex than the borders we see on maps today. A landscape that remembers And then there is the landscape itself. This is perhaps what makes Sant Martí d'Empúries so extraordinary. You can stand on the medieval walls and look towards the same Mediterranean that brought Greek merchants here more than 2,500 years ago. Behind you lies the Empordà plain. Not far away are the wetlands of the Aiguamolls. To the north rises the landscape of Cap de Creus. And beneath your feet are centuries of human occupation.
Few places allow us to move so naturally from the classical Mediterranean into medieval Catalunya.
Emporion became Emporiae. Emporiae became medieval Empúries. The ancient trading settlement became an episcopal centre. The episcopal centre became a comital capital. And the comital capital eventually became the small village we see today. The place changed. The people changed. The languages changed. The religions, rulers and political systems changed. But the promontory remained. Perhaps that is the greatest lesson of Sant Martí d'Empúries. History is rarely a succession of clean beginnings and endings. It is continuity transformed. And here, beside the Mediterranean, the stones of an ancient Greek settlement eventually became part of the landscape from which medieval Catalunya emerged.
More information: Visit l'Escala
va ser el resultat d'un llarg procés,
com una fruita de maduració lenta.
Catalonia was not born on a particular day;
it was the result of a long process,
like a fruit slowly ripening.
Ramon d'Abadal i de Vinyals
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