Word: catalunya
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...begin with, an important town; the Roman capital of what is now Catalunya was farther south, at Tarragona. But Barcelona began to gain significance after the Roman Empire collapsed and the invading Visigoths took over, and it became a capital in the 9th century A.D., when Charlemagne's heirs conquered the city port, threw out the Arabs who had taken charge of it as the northern extension of the Arab conquest of Spain, and then in effect turned it over to a Catalan strongman, Wilfred the Hairy, the semilegendary founder of the Catalan state...
From then on, Catalans ran Catalunya, and Barcelona, for themselves. They were jealous of their independence and determined to sustain their own laws ; and language. From the 13th century through the 15th, their outward thrust created a Mediterranean trading empire that stretched from the coast of North Africa to the gates of Byzantium. With the money this brought home, a city grew: the greatest Spanish city of the Middle Ages. Even today the Barri Gotic, or Old City, of Barcelona, facing the port, contains in its winding alleys more functioning Gothic structures than any other such enclave in Europe...
...century poet Joaquim Rubio i Ors put it -- spoken by about 6 million people today and matrix of an important national literature that goes back to the days of the troubadours. (Catalan and Provencal were sister languages, and poets writing in both moved among the courts of France and Catalunya...
...various times since the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, Castile has tried to take Catalunya over and suppress its speech. Francisco Franco banned all publishing and teaching in Catalan, hoping to prevent his subjects from thinking separatist thoughts. But obdurately, Catalan survives, and now that separatist dreams have faded -- Jordi Pujol, the president of the autonomous region of Catalunya, dropped the separatist plank from his party's platform last October -- it is the language that remains the focus of Catalunya's enthusiasm for cultural distinction...
...important English example is a perfect copy of Caxton's "Royal Book", dated about 1487. Noteworthy among the Spanish collectors items is the "Usatges do Barcelona e Constituciones do Catalunya", printed at Bareelona about 1495. Among the Portuguese incunabula is a Hebrew Bible, dated in Lisbon...