The kingdom of Valencia had, for some time, an own political life, marked by an official birth in 1238, when Jaume I snatch it away from the Moors, and an official death in 1714, when another less benevolent conqueror, Philippe V, abolished its autonomy. These five hundred years of independence have left Valencian people with a divided personality. Are they a nation, as their political past could suggest, a part of a big Catalonia, as their language and culture would imply, or just an extension of Castile, since their economy has been always linked to it? The País Valencià was an autonomous territory, like Catalonia, and was subjected to the same pressures during the 1620s and the 1630s. If the economic decline of the empire was the main issue everywhere, it seems that the País Valencià should have inclined towards Catalonia’s way. Because no other region of Spain had a worse index of demographic collapse nor had been beaten so seriously by the deportation of the Moorish. All this has driven the author to an analysis of the social and political structure of the kingdom. Was the economy so weak after the deportation as some historians have assumed? These are some of the topics that run parallel throughout a work that it is now republished and that it has become a classic of the Valencian historiography.