The first known human settlements in what is now Catalonia were at the beginning of the Middle Palaeolithic. The oldest known trace of human occupation is a mandible found in Banyoles, described by some sources as pre-

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The rise of the Iberian culture
An iron using culture first appeared in eastern Iberia in the 8th century BC. By the 5th century BC, the Iron Age Iberian civilizationhad become consolidated on the eastern side of the Iberian Peninsula. What is now the Catalan

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Visigothic and Muslim rule
In the 5th century, as part of the invasion of the Roman Empire by Germanic tribes, the Visigoths led by Athaulf, installed themselves in the Tarraconensis (Ebro basin, 410) and when in 475 the Visigothic king Euricformed

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Crown of Aragon union with Crown of Castile
Ferdinand's 1469 marriage to Isabella I of Castile brought about a dynastic unionof the Crown of Aragon with

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Dynastic union with Aragon
Until the middle of the 12th century, the successive counts of Barcelona tried to expand their domain in multiple directions. Ramon Berenguer IIIincorporated

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Napoleonic Wars
In 1808, during the Napoleonic Wars, Catalonia was occupied by the troops of General Guillaume Philibert Duhesme. The official Spanish army had

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Franco's dictatorship
As in the rest of Spain, the Franco era (1939–1975) in Catalonia saw the annulment of democratic

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