I started to read a book called  ”La Catedral Del Mar” by Ildefonso Falcones.

And in that context, I came across this wonderful critiques of the book written by Lou Velazquez’s on Goodreads.

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“Students of the history of European political and economic systems might find the description of how Catalan nationhood evolved from feudal to syndicated mercantilism; free men might escape an existence as a vassal under an exploitative feudal lord by fleeing to a free city, like Barcelona, and joining a guild as an apprentice to become a potter, carpenter, or a stevedore. The king of Catalonia negotiates his checks and balances: the needs of his nobles, so that they don’t seek the protection of another king (as occurred in Mallorca and Montpelier; the Church and its hungry coffers; the Inquisition (a church within the church)with even hungrier coffers; the Jewish bankers and traders who are regarded as the king’s property and kept in a locked ghetto for their own protection due to church fomented anti-semitism; the cofradias (which we would see as labor union meets Knights of Columbus); and “la host”. La Host is a function of the masses (sometimes, angry mobs)sanctioned by the king; the king knows enough not to interfere too much with the will of the people. In fact, the king might play off any of these power centers against each other: brilliant. When the people/cofradias declare a “Via Fora”, the citizenry takes up arms for the common good of the city and social order. In Barcelona of the 14th century there existed an industrial revolution with banking which had a symbiotic relationship with government. We might say that this governmental arrangement was an early experiment in proto-democracy where any man might work hard, learn a trade and rise withing his peer group. The nobles of this era hated this powerful new merchant class, but it is precisely this mechanism which made Catalonia the economic powerhouse of Spain since its inception with the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabel. I would love to see this book made into a well done epic movie.

La Catedral del Mar kept me riveted. I read it in Spanish and finished it in one week. I’d read Falcones’ La Mano de Fatima first, though he wrote La Catedral del Mar first. Though I loved both books, Falcones’ volumes of research necessary to write both books probably found some economy in that he uses similar literary devices and story lines in both books. It’s like listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and then listening to some of his other compositions; you can definitely hear some repetition: an orphan son who rises from adverse humble origins, a tortured single parent, noble parental surrogates, loves lost and then found. These observations are not meant as damning praise as I was never bored or lost in unnecessary byzantine twists. None-the-less, both are master works for a man who has only recently acknowledged his literary muse. These books are scholarly texts which can teach the human facts and contexts of two very important eras in Iberian history. I would put his work in the same standing as Ken Follett.”

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