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On the one hand, the experience of Castile (the heart of the empire) differed from that of the rest. '4 Instead of dismissing Spain's decline as either the inevitable result of some deeply rooted flaw in the Spanish character, the consequence of the personal shortcomings of its rulers, or the inexorable outcome of 'strategic overstretch', Elliott viewed it as a process that might have been reversed with the right combination of economic, political and social reforms. Instead of irreversible decline, then, the key questions became how could the great empire best be managed and how could its power and reputation best be maintained.

5 The tension between centre and periphery, the nature of patriotism and community, the costs of empire, the need to conserve - and to justify - the assets conferred on Castile by providence: these form the interlocking themes of John Elliott's work on Spain and its world during the early modern period, and they have been taken up in this collection of essays by his students and disciples. Each derives, in some way, from an idea or assertion in Elliott's work, and each has benefited from his perceptions and path-breaking research.

But he was not the only Catalan to keep a diary or to write an autobiography: almost eighty 'first-person documents' from Catalonia have so far been discovered for the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Indeed, the relatively democratic regime of the principality encouraged citizen participation in government, so that autobiographical writing became a public as well as a private act, an expression of citizenship itself. The anti-castilianism expressed in Pujades' diary therefore offers an interesting insight into the views of the centre held on the periphery, and a way of understanding the cultural forces that frustrated Olivares' attempts to erode the barriers that existed between the states of the peninsula.