Nueva Planta decrees
The Nueva Planta decrees were a number of decrees signed between 1707 and 1716 by Philip V—the first Bourbon king of Spain—during and shortly after the end of the War of the Spanish Succession by the Treaty of Utrecht.
Angered by what he saw as sedition by the Aragonese, who had supported the claim of Charles of Austria to the Spanish thrones during the war, and taking his native France as a model of a centralised state, Philip V suppressed the institutions, privileges, and the ancient charters of almost all the areas that were formerly part of the Crown of Aragon. The decrees ruled that all the territories in the Crown of Aragon except the Aran Valley were to be ruled by the laws of Castile, embedding these regions in a new, and nearly uniformly administered, centralised Spain.
The other historic territories—Navarre and the other Basque territories—supported Philip V initially, whom they saw as belonging to the lineage of Henry III of Navarre, but after Philip V's military campaign to crush the Basque uprising, he backed down on his intent to suppress home rule.
The acts abolishing the charters were promulgated in 1707 in Valencia and Aragon, in 1715 in Majorca and the other Balearic Islands, and finally in Catalonia on 16 January 1716.
The decrees effectively created a Spanish citizenship or nationality, that judicially did not distinguish between Castilian and Aragonese anymore, both with respect to rights and law. They abolished internal borders and customs except for the Basque territory, giving grant to all Spaniards to trade with American colonies. Henceforth, top civil servants were appointed directly from Madrid, the King's court city, and most institutions in these territories were abolished. Court cases could only be presented and argued in Castilian, which became the sole language of government, displacing Latin, Catalan and other Spanish languages.
