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Decline (17th century)
In 1593, the king unilaterally suspended an important part of the agreements made by the 1585 Cort, and from that moment on, a period of conflicts began, that were intermittent but increasingly serious, between the Catalan institutions holding to the agreed regime, and an internationally established monarchy with an imperial outlook, which not only nursed a tendency towards the exercise of absolute power and the equalising of the regimes of the different States of the Crown, but also continual and very serious military commitments on various fronts. As a consequence, the monarchs of the first half of the 17th century put intense pressure on the Generalitat, in a context of social crisis that would continue to deepen.The conflict escalated dramatically in 1640 and led to a new civil war which echoed that of the 15th century: the separation of Catalonia with regard to the Spanish Monarchy, the alliance and then direct linking with France, exhausting of the experience and return to the sovereignty of the King of Spain, and as a final balance, the strengthening of royal power in Catalonia from 1652 onwards and definitive cession of the county of Rosselló and part of Cerdanya to France in 1659.
The Generalitat’s irreversible subordination to the power of the monarchy was in part compensated by the organisation of the Conference of the Three Commons – the Generalitat itself, the Barcelone Council of One Hundred and the military Braç – which worked to defend the interests of the Principality during the latter part of the 17th century, and which, following the succession of Charles II in 1700, would lead the Principality from the initial acceptance of Phillip V of Bourbon until the change of sides under the protection of the pact of Genoa in 1705. The unfolding of the War of Succession, with the siege of Barcelona and its surrender on September 11th 1714, led to the abolition of the Generalitat and the two other institutions making up the Conference of the Three Commons.