Carolingian Catalonia

A pedestrian strolling along Carrer Trafalgar, window shopping in Barcelona's Barri Gotic, may, if alert, catch a glimpse of a street sign indicating the Carrer Lluis el Piados - Louis the Pious Street. The street sign informs the reader that Louis was king of Aquitaine and conqueror of Barcelona in 804 (the date is now known to be 801). His street is very short, only a couple of blocks, in a city where more important avenues recall Catalonia's heroes of the high and late Middle Ages, when Catalonia wasthe centre of the Crown of Aragon's wealth and power in the western Mediterranean, or revolutionaries of the nineteenth century--