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He built himself a palace in Barcelona, of which nothing remains. He endowed churches there, which have also vanished. If Barcelona is devoid of Carolingian buildings, it is not because the Moors, led by the vizier of Córdoba, briefly retook it in 985, but because of early Catalan “developers” who flattened them during Barcelona’s first building boom in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Early churches in the north, in the towns at the foot of the Pyrenees, which had been established by Wilfred, survived perfectly well and one of them, Santa Maria de Ripoll, is still sometimes called the bressol de Catalunya (cradle of Catalunya) and features a magnificent though timeworn alabaster portal, the finest Romanesque sculptural complex in all of Spain.
    Under the line of count-kings that began with Wilfred the Hairy, the territory of Catalunya expanded steadily. Its crucial political event, which came in the twelfth century, was the marriage of the Catalan count-king Ramón Berenguer IV to Petronella, the queen of neighboring Aragon. This fused Catalunya and Aragon into a large power bloc, formidable enough to keep at bay any incursion from Castile and to fend off the centralist ambitions of the kings in Madrid. Moreover, since their military forces combined, the union of Catalunya and Aragon created a Catalan empire in the Mediterranean. Beginning with Jaume I, who amply deserved his sobriquet El Conqueridor, the Conqueror, the kingdom of Aragon and Catalunya had an empire by the beginning of the fourteenth century.
    The tangible symbol of this was the Llotja, the “lodge”—in effect, the first stock exchange in Europe or anywhere else. The Llotja, in its original Gothic form, was constructed in the fourteenth century, as part of the first of the three largest building booms in Catalan history. The first of these booms, which produced the Llotja and a large amount of the casc antic or medieval city besides, was set going by a singular and obsessive monarch, Pere III, known as El Ceremonios, who ruled Barcelona for much of the fourteenth century.
    The second took place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and it gave us that stupendous and visionary city plan, the first of the grid cities, the ancestor of New York: the Eixample, conceived by Ildefons Cerdà, the New Barcelona that broke out of the constricting muralles and enabled the city to grow beyond its imposed medieval limits.
    And the third building boom was the restoration and refiguring of Barcelona in the years leading up to and then beyond the Olympics of 1992, set in motion by the mayor Pasqual Maragall.
    Catalan building booms tend to have something in common. They defy common sense. This was spectacularly true of what happened under the rule of Peter the Ceremonious. He was a proud man with a quick and dangerous temper. He liked luxury and elaborate protocol and he wanted his city to testify to what he perceived as the glories of his own singular character. He set this ambition forth in a poem, for he was a poet, too—maybe not a great one like Ausiàs March, but not a bad one for a ruler. In its original medieval Catalan it runs:
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    Lo loch me par sia pus degut
noble ciutat, o vila gross’e gran,
o.ls enaemichs valentment garreian
tenent al puny lança e’l brac escut,
o’n esglesia, on devotate sia,
e si u fa’xi, no sera ja repres
per cavallers …
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    Which in modern translation means, more or less:
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    The worthiest of places, so I think
is a noble city, or a great fine town
or to be bravely fighting enemies
with lance in hand, or shield upon one’s arm
or at one’s devotions in a church
and if I do this, then I will not be scorned
by noble knights …
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    He couldn’t have been plainer about this. Cities exist to promote the glory of their inhabitants, their citizens, and, in particular, their rulers. If they don’t or can’t do this, they are not fit to