When the Part Forana said 'enough'

PalmThey were fed up with injustice. They bore the brunt of taxes, suffered minimal representation in institutions relative to their numbers, and these institutions were in the hands of privileged minorities, who acted according to their own interests, when they didn't directly plunder the public coffers. In July 1450—575 years ago—the Part Forana of Mallorca simply said "enough" and laid siege to Ciutat. A revolt began that would last for two years.

The causes were the usual ones, not only in Mallorca, but in Europe at the time. It's no surprise that this was a period of peasant revolts everywhere. As Maria Barceló lists, the triggers were "the poor governance of the oligarchy, the squandering of public funds, the unequal distribution of taxes" and "the arbitrary acts committed by the city authorities", with "frequent complaints about embezzlement of public funds (...) and tax fraud by those who should have paid". Years earlier (1425) embezzlement by public administrators equivalent to 3.8 billion euros in today's money had been discovered: since the Mallorcan institutions had to admit that they could not meet the payment of their debts, a new tax was established on a basic necessity, salt, which particularly harmed the Part For.

What could outsiders do in this situation? Not much, because they had no role in the island's government. The University of the City and the Kingdom—now the Palma City Council and the Consell de Mallorca simultaneously—primarily looked after the interests of the capital. The veguer de fuera, the theoretical delegate for outside affairs, was appointed by the City. Outsiders represented the majority of the population, but were only entitled to a third of the seats in the Grand and General Council.

The final straw was King Alfonso the Magnanimous's decision to demand the land titles. The king wasn't even in his territories; he had settled in his new possession: the Kingdom of Naples, and he was constantly in need of money, whether for his wars or the exercise of patronage. He had left the government of memory.

Those who were supposed to collect the money didn't have it easy. In Manacor and Petra, they were greeted with stones. Then, some 5,000 or 6,000 foreigners gathered in Inca on July 26, 1450, to immediately lay siege to the city. Their cry of revolt could not have been clearer: "Let the traitors die," that is, those public administrators whom they blamed—and rightly so—as the cause of all their ills.

The one who intervened to calm the rebels was the Bishop of Urgell and Co-Prince of Andorra, Arnau Roger de Pallars, who was passing through Mallorca. He was from an aristocratic family—common among high-ranking ecclesiastical officials—and chancellor of Magnánimo himself. It should be added that the latter's tax-collecting zeal was also directed toward the Church, which at that time held large estates. This fostered a certain amount of support for the rebels among the clergy.

The governor of Mallorca at the time was Berenguer de Olms. According to Guillem Morro, it was suspicious that he had been suspended from office for 21 months—during which, of course, he religiously collected his salary without having to work. Olms agreed to receive a foreign delegation, which presented him with a lengthy list of grievances: better distribution of burdens, repayment of money improperly spent, review of accounts, administrative separation from the City, a moratorium on debt payments, etc. To all of this, the governor replied that he would study it—what is usually said when trying to get out of a difficult situation.

The greatest fear of the governor and the king himself was that the City's artisans might join the foreigners, which seemed quite feasible throughout the revolt. They were the two groups most affected by the skyrocketing public debt and the oligarchy's tricks. The monarch opted for the old tactic of divide and conquer: he treated the artisans of Palma with the magnanimity to which the nickname owed, while behaving harshly toward foreigners.

From that moment on, and practically throughout the entire duration of the crisis, embassies to Barcelona and Naples—from both foreigners and citizens—saw a succession of attempts to gain the favor of King Alfonso, Queen Maria, or both. The Catalan Cortes and the Barcelona councilors also took part in this conflict. The foreigners opted for a rather clever strategy: they organized a kind of penitent procession and submitted to public humiliation to obtain a royal pardon.

This led the governor to mistakenly believe that he had won. And he was so foolish as to impose a perpetual fine of two thousand pounds—a significant sum—that the Part Forana would have to pay every year until the end of time, instead of applying some measure of clemency. He also ordered two rebels to be tortured and executed. Furthermore—this is a lesson politicians never seem to learn—what the repression did was radicalize the revolt. By April 1451, Palma was once again besieged, and the foreigners cut off the city's water supply.

The Governor's Failure

From the very beginning, the peasant from Manacor Simó Crooked Ballester stood out as the main leader of the Forana Revolt. There's no evidence that he had any physical defects, and Tort must have been one of the many family nicknames. A price was placed on his leader: the one who was captured would receive a substantial cash reward, a house in the city, and lifetime exemption from paying taxes. But, like a kind of Robin Hood, not only did no one turn him in, but "his name became ever more prominent," comments Jordi Maíz.

The authority of the Church—in this case, the prior of the Carthusian monastery of Valldemossa—once again succeeded in getting the foreigners to lift the second siege. The useless governor believed this truce was the right time to regain the initiative. So he sent his lieutenant, Jaume Cadell, at the head of a thousand supposedly loyal foreigners to confront the rebels. The less-than-glorious result was that his men defected en masse to the enemy side.

That victory spurred the foreigners, who for the third time stood before the walls of Ciutat. It was the longest siege—a month—and this time the actions of two Catalan ambassadors—sent by Maria de Castella—managed to halt the hostilities. The following August, the queen announced the immediate dismissal of Berenguer de Olms.

There were also dissidents among the rebels. According to Morro, there was a "more ideological" faction, led by Ballester, and another "aggressive and bellicose" faction, more radical. Fires were set on farms owned by members of the city oligarchy.

Would a peaceful solution be possible? No matter how many times the peasants swore and perjured their perpetual loyalty to the king and queen, the truth is that they had called into question the very political structure of the kingdom. There was no other solution than the repression and punishment of the rebels. An army led by a new governor, Francisco de Erill, landed in Mallorca in July 1452. Erill immediately made it clear that he was not joking: he demanded that the foreigners hand over any weapons they had in their possession and forbade them from meeting with each other.

This time there were no intermediaries or pacts that would help. Erill commanded an army of Italian mercenaries -sacomaní– who on August 31 ruthlessly crushed the foreigners at the Battle of Rafal Garcés, near Inca. More than half a century later (1523), a second battle would take place on that exact same spot, this one against the 'brothers', which would represent the beginning of the end of the next revolt.

Alfonso the Magnanimous proved not to be as magnanimous as had been assumed. Public roads in Mallorca were macabrely marked with hanging rebels, and—most interestingly from the monarch's point of view—a fine of 150,000 pounds was imposed on the foreigners, an astronomical amount for the time. Paying this financial penalty impoverished the foreigners even further, if possible. They had made a desperate gamble. And they had lost it.u

Information prepared from the studies of Guillem Morro, Ricard Urgell, María Barceló, Miguel Ángel Casasnovas, Jordi Maíz and Gabriel Fuster.