Barcelona

That fortune began to turn with the famine of 1333. The Black Death reached the city in 1348 and kept coming back for the next century and a half, emptying streets that its trade had filled. Fear of the plague found a scapegoat in 1391, when a mob stormed the Call on the false charge of spreading it and killed much of the Jewish community.

The merchants answered hard times with institutions. In 1401 the city founded the Taula de Canvi, often called the oldest public bank in Europe, and its council, the Consell de Cent, defended the city's rights against the crown. But Barcelona was split between an oligarchy of nobles and clergy and the merchants and artisans who wanted a share of power. The merchants took the city government in 1453 and lost it again seven years later, and in 1462 the quarrel widened into a war between the Generalitat, the standing body of the Catalan parliament, and King John II. Barcelona held out to the end, and only after a long siege did it surrender to the king in October 1472.