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The Maulets () 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. ==Historical context== 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. After their military defeat, the peasants unrest loomed. New clashes were ready to start in 1700 when Charles II of Spain died with no sons or clear heir, setting the conditions for the War of the Spanish Succession. When Philip V of Spain took possession of the Kingdom of Valencia (one of the component kingdoms of the larger Spanish Kingdom) as a Felip IV of Valencia, there were already many supporters of the archduke Charles of Austria in this territory, as well as in the Principality of Catalonia and Majorca. Their reasons were various, ranging from loyalty to the dynasty of the House of Austria, hate towards the French by a part of the merchants and the industrials, and distrust for the suspected centralist attitude of Philip V of Spain, as seen by the Bourbon rule in France. Merchants and exporters of wine, brandy, silk, and other farming products, which was politically and economically very important, contacted a key person for their cause : General Joan Baptista Basset. General Basset was a Valencian, probably born in Alboraia in an artisan family, who spoke the people’s language and knew very well their claims and needs. He had served during the wars in Italy and Hungary under Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt, a German Noble who had been before Viceroy in Catalonia. The War of the Spanish Succession had a double nature. On the one side, it was a Spanish internal issue, on the other side, it was a major European war for international hegemony. England and the Netherlands (the so-called "Maritime powers", traditional destinations of the Valencian merchants' exports) sided against the Bourbon pretender, Philip V of Spain. As a part of a blockade, Valencian exports to these countries stopped, which meant a total downfall for merchants and the peasants that sold them their Valencian products. The exports to France, a land that produced and exported the same products, did not compensate them in any way for the losses. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Maulets (history)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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