More than any other part of Spain, Catalonia had suffered from the war with England and the Continental System. The closure of its ports had told cruelly upon its merchants and manufacturers, who were fully aware that their sufferings were the logical consequence of the French alliance. They had, moreover, a historic grudge against France: after encouraging them to revolt in the seventeenth century, the Bourbons had then abandoned them to the mercies of the King of the Castilians. In the great war of the Spanish Succession, Catalonia had taken sides against France and Don Philip, and had proclaimed Charles of Austria its king--not because it loved him, but because it hated the French claimant. Even after the Peace of Utrecht the Catalans had refused to lay down their arms, and had made a last desperate struggle for provincial independence. It was in these wars that their _miqueletes_[296] had first made their name famous by their stubborn fighting. These bands were a levy _en masse_ of the population of military age, armed and paid by their parishes, not by the central government, which could be called out whenever the principality was threatened with invasion. From their liability to turn out whenever the alarm-bell (_somaten_) was rung, they were also known as _somatenes_. The system of the _Quinta_ and the militia ballot, which prevailed in the provinces under the crown of Castile, had never been applied to the Catalans, who gloried in the survival of their ancient military customs. The _somatenes_ had been called out in the French war of 1793-5, and had done good service in it, distinguishing themselves far more than the troops of the line which fought on the frontier of the Eastern Pyrenees. The memories of that struggle were still fresh among them, and many of the leaders who had won a name in it were still fit for service. In Catalonia then, more than in any other corner of Spain, there were all the materials at hand for a vigorous popular insurrection, even though the body of regular troops in the principality was insignificant. The Catalans rose to defend their provincial independence, and to recover their capital, which had been seized so shamelessly by the trickery of Duhesme. They did not concern themselves much with what was going on in Aragon and Valencia, or even in Madrid. Their fight with the invader forms an episode complete in itself, a sort of underplot in the great drama of the Peninsular War, which only touches the main struggle at infrequent intervals. It was not affected by the campaigns of Castile, still less had it any noticeable influence on them. It would be equally possible to write the history of the war in Catalonia as a separate treatise, or to compile a general history of the war in which Catalonia was barely mentioned. [296] So called from Miquelot de Prats, the Catalan _condottiere_ who served under Caesar Borgia. From him the light infantry, once called _almogavares_, got the name of _miqueletes_.