Banditry in Early Modern Catalonia: Origins, Historiography, and the Mediterranean Context

ABSTRACT Banditry has traditionally been one of the clearest expressions of social and political unrest in early modern Mediterranean Europe. In the Principality of Catalonia, the phenomenon reached a particularly intense level during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although extensively studied in recent decades, the complexity of this phenomenon continues to invite new interpretative approaches. Institutional records, when read at face value, offer a skewed and limited perspective, filtered through the lens of the very powers tasked with suppressing it. Such sources often conflated all actions outside the law, blurring the line between political outlaws and common criminals. Recent historiography has helped to dismantle this conflation and to move beyond what Eva Serra called “the generic criminalization found in the paperwork of the viceroyal institutions” (2003: 35). Building on these insights, this article proposes a working definition of banditry, outlines its historiographical evolution, and examines the specific characteristics of Catalan banditry and its impact on the Principality within a wider Mediterranean framework.