Oath of Fealty of the Aragonese Lords to their Monarch

We, who are as good as you,
swear to you, who are no better than us,
to accept you as our king and sovereign,
provided you observe all our liberties and laws,
but if not, no.

The Catalans' sense of otherness — the separation, cultural and institutional, from the rest of Spain — comes through loud and clear in the oath of allegiance their leaders swore to the Aragonese kings in the 15th century... . Catalans have always waxed lyrical over their medieval defiance of kingship and railed against 'centralism' — rule by Madrid. Their political history is one long rebuke to the dominant ideology of Europe: that of the nation-state that subsumes and represses cultural differences within it.

Barcelona, by Robert Hughes