History of Valencia
The history of Valencia, one of the oldest cities in Spain, begins over 2100 years ago with its founding as a Roman colony under the name "Valentia Edetanorum" on the site of a former Iberian town,[1] by the river Turia in the province of Edetania.
Pompey razed Valentia to the ground in 75 BC; it was rebuilt about fifty years later with large infrastructure projects, and by the mid-1st century, was experiencing rapid urban growth with many colonists from Italy.
Conflict between absolutists and liberals continued, and in the period of conservative rule called the Ominous Decade (1823–1833) which followed there was ruthless repression by government forces and the Catholic Inquisition.
City life in Valencia carried on in a revolutionary climate, with frequent clashes between liberals and republicans, and the constant threat of reprisals by the Carlist troops of General Cabrera.
Valentia developed as a typical Roman city from its inception, as it lay in a strategic location near the sea on a river island that would be crossed by the Via Augusta, the imperial road connecting the province to Rome, the capital of the empire.
During Visigothic times Valencia was an episcopal See of the Catholic Church, albeit a suffragan diocese subordinate to the archdiocese of Toledo, comprising the ancient Roman province of Carthaginensis in Hispania.
[17] When Islamic culture settled in, Valencia, then called Balansiyya, prospered from the 10th century, due to a booming trade[18] in paper, silk, leather, ceramics, glass and silver-work.
The Castilian nobleman Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, known as El Cid, who was intent on possessing his own principality on the Mediterranean, entered the province in command of a combined Christian and Moorish army and besieged the city beginning in 1092.
In 1238,[25] King James I of Aragon, with an army composed of Aragonese, Catalans, Navarrese and crusaders from the Order of Calatrava, laid siege to Valencia and on 28 September obtained a surrender.
Local industry, led by textile production, reached a great development, and a financial institution, the Taula de canvi, was created to support municipal banking operations; Valencian bankers lent funds to Queen Isabella I of Castile for Columbus's voyage in 1492.
Some of the most emblematic buildings of the city were built during this period, including the Serranos Towers (1392) and the Torres de Quart (1460), the Llotja (1482), the Micalet and the Chapel of the Kings of the Convent of Sant Doménec or Santo Domingo.
Later, during the so-called Catalan Revolt (1640–1652), Valencia contributed to the cause of Philip IV with militias and money, resulting in a period of further economic hardship exacerbated by the arrival of troops from other parts of Spain.
With the abolition of the charters of Valencia and most of its institutions, and the conformation of the kingdom and its capital to the laws and customs of Castile, top civil officials were no longer elected, but instead were appointed directly from Madrid, the king's court city, the offices often filled by foreign aristocrats.
Valencia had to become accustomed to being an occupied city, living with the presence of troops quartered in the Citadel near the convent of Santo Domingo and in other buildings such as the Lonja, which served as a barracks until 1762.
The 18th century was the age of the Enlightenment in Europe, and its humanistic ideals influenced such men as Gregory Maians and Perez Bayer in Valencia, who maintained correspondence with the leading French and German thinkers of the time.
[37] The mutineers seized the Citadel, a Supreme Junta government took over, and on 26–28 June, Napoleon's Marshal Moncey attacked the city with a column of 9,000 French imperial troops in the First Battle of Valencia.
After the capitulation, the French instituted reforms in Valencia, which became the capital of Spain when the Bonapartist pretender to the throne, José I (Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon's elder brother), moved the Court there in the middle of 1812.
City life in Valencia carried on in a revolutionary climate, with frequent clashes between liberals and republicans, and the constant threat of reprisals by the Carlist troops of General Cabrera.
Services and infrastructure – including municipal water supply, paved roads, and gas distribution – were substantially improved, and a large-scale construction project was initiated at the port.
Gas lighting was introduced in 1840, and soon after a public works project began to pave the streets with cobblestones, a task that took several years because of the lack of council funds.
The public water supply network was completed in 1850, and in 1858 the architects Sebastián Monleón Estellés, Antonino Sancho, and Timoteo Calvo drafted a general expansion project for the city that included demolishing its ancient walls (a second version was printed in 1868).
It did not have the revolutionary fervor of the movement in cities like Alcoy, as it was initiated by the bourgeoisie, but the Madrid government sent General Martinez-Campos to stifle the rebellion by force of arms and subjected Valencia to an intense bombardment.
Despite the Bourbon restoration, the roughly even balance between conservatives and liberals in the government was sustained in Valencia until the granting of universal male suffrage in 1890, after which the Republicans, led by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, gained considerably more of the popular vote.
The best expression of this dynamic was in the regional exhibitions, including that of 1909 held next to the pedestrian avenue L'Albereda (Paseo de la Alameda), which depicted the progress of agriculture and industry.
On 6 November 1936, the city became the capital of Republican Spain under the control of Prime Minister Manuel Azaña; the government moved to the Palau de Benicarló, its ministries occupying various other buildings.
The old river bed was abandoned for years, and successive Francoist mayors proposed making it a motorway, but that option was finally rejected with the advent of democracy and fervent neighbourhood protests.
The economy began to recover in the early 1960s, and the city experienced explosive population growth through immigration spurred by the jobs created with the implementation of major urban projects and infrastructure improvements.
[45][46] In March 2012, the newspaper El Mundo published a story according to which FGV had instructed employees who were to testify at the crash commission investigation, providing a set of possible questions and guidelines to prepare the answers.
[47] In April 2013, the television program Salvados questioned the official version of the incident as there were indications that the Valencian Government had tried to downplay the accident, which coincided with the visit of the pope to Valencia, or even to hide evidence, as the record book of train breakdowns was never found.
[52] On 9 July 2006, the World Day of Families, during Mass at Valencia's Cathedral, Our Lady of the Forsaken Basilica, Pope Benedict XVI used the Santo Caliz, a 1st-century Middle-Eastern artifact that some Catholics believe is the Holy Grail.
