Frailes y campesinos en la guerra de separación de Cataluña (1640- 1660)

Abstract

This paper discusses the participation of the clergy in the Catalan war of secession in the mid-seventeenth century; in particular, the many anonymous clerics who openly involved in the conflict. To do so we have com-piled a set of cases drawn from sources of different nature: contemporary pamphlets and treatises, documents of certain religious orders, and prosecutions against some preachers. The argument presented here is that such participation not only was much more important than has been assumed so far, but had to do, in turn, with the providential and some apocalyptic bias that the contest took from the start. The subsequent collusion between friars and peasants has often explained by sociological similarities between them. However, this paper stresses the role of the clergy to make sense in the events.