A million people thronged the streets of Barcelona on 11 September 2012, clamouring for liberty. This had been their special day long before 9/11. Like Gallipoli, it commemorates a defeat: the rout of the Catalans and their Austrian Hapsburg allies by the Bourbon monarch Philip V of Spain on 11 September 1714 in the closing stages of the War of the Spanish Succession. How could something that occurred three centuries ago get Barcelonans so worked up? It all goes back to the foundation of modern Spain through the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469. Forging a nation-state in an age of non-stop warfare proved a brutal business.
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