Maulets (history)

The Maulets (Valencian pronunciation: [mawˈlets]) was a partisan group of Valencian supporters of Archduke Charles, who claimed the Spanish throne as Charles III during the War of the Spanish Succession. They were antagonists to the Botiflers camp, the supporters of competing claimant and eventual winner of the war, Philip, Duke of Anjou (Philip V).

Maulets is also the name of present-day Catalan independentist youth political organization.

As a compensation for having lost the Moor workforce which was expelled from Spain in 1492, the King gave the nobility all the right on the lands that these people had farmed before leaving. This allowed them to impose on the newly arrived Christian population taxes and partitions of lands which in some counties became a very high expense for the peasants. Probably, the hunger for land amongst those poor families led them to accept the conditions, and during 50 years there were no known protests.

Towards the end of the 17th century, a part of these new peasant population profited from the prosperity arising from cultivating and exporting mainly wine and its derivatives, brandy and prunes, and in lesser extent, silk. Then, they started to question the high payments asked by the nobility, which considerably reduced their profits, and tried by all means, from legal suits to armed revolt, to end this system. But the judiciary path, being fully under the control of the Nobles, proved useless; and the armed revolt, called nowadays Segona Germania (Second Brotherhood), was crushed by the Vice-Chancellor and armies of the Nobles in the year 1693, at the "battle" of Setla de Nunyes.

The peasants in this Segona Germania revolt claimed more or less the same as the Maulets would a few years later. They refused the right of the Lords on the former Moorish lands, and called on the Medieval rights given by James I of Aragon during the conquest of the Kingdom, to denounce an alleged lack of legality of the exploitation by the lords, “who treated them like Moors”, given the case that the Laws of the Kingdom banned these kind of taxes and tributes to the Christians. The Nobles, alleged that the King Philip III, expelling the Moriscos, had given them those lands in property, on which they then had every right to regulate.

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