Cathedral of the Sea

At daybreak every morning, when he got up to start a hard day’s grind, he would stare out their bedroom window. He had always done this with his father, even in his last illness, the two of them leaning on the thick stone windowsill and peering up at the heavens to see what the day held in store. They would look out over their lands, which were clearly defined by the different crop growing in each field and extended right across the huge valley beyond the farmhouse. They watched the flight of the birds and listened closely to the noises the animals were making in their pens. These were moments of communion between father and son, and between the two of them and their land: the only occasions when Bernat’s father appeared to recover his sanity. Bernat had dreamed of being able to share similar moments with his wife, to be able to tell her all he had heard from his father, and his father from his own father, and so on back through the generations.

He had dreamed of being able to explain that these fertile lands had in the distant past been free of rent or service, and belonged entirely to the Estanyol family, who had worked there with great care and love. The fruits of their labors were entirely theirs, without their having to pay tithes or taxes or to give homage to any arrogant, unjust lord. He had dreamed of being able to share with her, his wife and the mother of the future inheritors of those lands, the same sadness his father had shared with him when he told the story of how it was that, three hundred years later, the sons she would give birth to would become serfs bound to someone else. Just as his father had told him, he would have liked to have been able to tell her proudly how three hundred years earlier, the Estanyol family, along with many others in the region, had won the right to keep their own weapons as freemen, and how they had used those weapons when they had responded to the call from Count Ramon Borrell and his brother Ermengol d’Urgell and had gone to fight the marauding Saracens. How he would have loved to tell her how, under the command of Count Ramon, several Estanyols had been part of the victorious army that had crushed the Saracens of the Córdoban caliphate at the battle of Albesa, beyond Balaguer, on the plains of Urgel. Whenever he had time to do so, his father would recount to him that story, tears of pride in his eyes; tears that turned to ones of sadness when he spoke of the death of Ramon Borrell in the year 1017. This was when, he said, the peasant farmers had become serfs again. The count’s fifteen-year-old son had succeeded him, and his mother, Ermessenda de Carcassonne, became regent. Now that their external frontiers were secure, the barons of Catalonia—the ones who had fought side by side with the farmers—used the power vacuum to exact fresh demands from the peasants. They killed those who resisted, and took back ownership of the lands, forcing their former owners to farm them as serfs who paid a part of their produce to the local lord. As others had done, the Estanyol family bowed to the pressure; but many families had been savagely put to death for resisting.

“As freemen,” his father would tell Bernat, “we fought alongside the knights against the Moors. But we could not fight the knights themselves, and when the counts of Barcelona tried to wrest back control of the principality of Catalonia, they found themselves facing a rich and powerful aristocracy. They were forced to bargain—always at our expense. First it was our lands, those of old Catalonia. Then it was our freedom, our very lives ... our honor. It was your grandfather’s generation,” Bernat’s father would tell him, his voice quavering as he looked out over the fields, “who lost their freedom. They were forbidden to leave their land. They were made into serfs, people bound to their properties, as were their children, like me, and their grandchildren, like you. Our life ... your life, is in the hands of the lord of the castle. He is the one who imparts justice and has the right to abuse us and offend our honor. We are not even able to defend ourselves! If anybody harms you, you have to go to your lord so that he can seek redress; if he is successful, he keeps half of the sum paid you.”