Since then, links have been conjectured with languages of the Caucasus, Africa, Siberia, and Japan. One nineteenth-century researcher concluded that Basques were a Celtic tribe, another that they were Etruscans. And inevitably it has been discovered that the Basques, like so many other peoples, were actually the lost thirteenth tribe of Israel. Just as inescapably, others have concluded that the Basques are, in reality, the survivors of Atlantis.
A case for the Basques really being Jews was carefully made by a French clergyman, the abbot J. Espagnolle, in a 1900 book titled L ‘Origine des Basques (The Origin of the Basques). For this theory to work, the reader first had to realize that the people of ancient Sparta were Jewish. To support this claim, Espagnolle quotes a historian of ancient Greece who wrote, “Love of money is a Spartan characteristic.” If this was not proof enough, he also argues that Sparta, like Judea, had a lack of artisans. The wearing of hats and respect for elders were among further evidence offered. From there, it was simply a matter of asserting, as ancient Greek historians had, he said, that the Spartans colonized northern Spain. And of course these Spartan colonists who later became Basques were Jewish.
With issues of nationhood at stake, such seemingly desperate hypotheses may not be devoid of political motives. “Indigenous” is a powerful notion to both the French and Spanish states. Both define their history as the struggle of their people, the rightful indigenous occupants, to defend their land against the Moors, invaders from another place, of another race, and of another religion. In Europe, this heroic struggle has long been an essential underpinning of both nationalism and racism. The idea that Basques were in their European mountains, speaking their own indigenous European language, long before the French and the Spanish, is disturbing to French and Spanish nationalists. Unless the Basques can be shown to be from somewhere else, the Spanish and French are transformed into the Moorish role—outside invaders imposing an alien culture. From the sixteenth century on, historians receiving government salaries in Madrid wrote histories that deliberately minimized the possibility of indigenous Basques.
But the Basques like the idea, which most evidence supports, that they are the original Europeans, predating all others. If true, it must have been an isolating experience, belonging to this ancient people whose culture had little in common with any of its neighbors. It was written over and over in the records of those who observed the Basques that they spoke a strange language that kept them apart from others. But it is also what kept them together as a people, uniting them to withstand Europe’s great invasions.
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2: The Basque Problem
There lived many brave men before Agamemnon, but all are overwhelmed in unending night, unmourned and unknown, because they lack a poet to give them immortality.
—Horace, ODES, 23 B.C.
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WHEN BASQUES FIRST began appearing on the stage of recorded history, even before there was a name for them, they were observed acting like Basques, playing out the same roles that they have been playing ever since: defending their land and culture, making complex choices about the degree of independence that was needed to preserve their way of life, while looking to the rest of the world for commercial opportunities to ensure their prosperity.
Long before the Romans gave the Basques a name, a great many people attempted to invade the mountains of what is now Basqueland, and they all met with fierce resistance. The invaders were Indo-Europeans intending to move into the Iberian peninsula. It seems to have been acceptable to the indigenous people that these invaders pass through on their path to the conquest of Iberia. But if they tried to settle in these northern mountains, they would encounter a ferocious enemy.
The rulers of Carthage, a Phoenician colony built on a choice harbor in present-day Tunisia, seem to have been the first to learn how to befriend these people. Carthage began about 800 B.C. as a port city. As its commercial power expanded in the Mediterranean, this city-state with elected leaders and only a small population increasingly relied on mercenaries to defend its interests. By the third century B.C., the Carthaginians had made their way up Iberia to Basque country, but they did not try to settle, colonize, or subjugate the inhabitants. Instead, they paid them.
By this time the Basques were the veterans of centuries of war and were valued as mercenaries throughout the Mediterranean. They had fought in Greece in the fourth century B.C. In 240 B.C., a conflict first over Sicily and then over Iberia led to a series of bitter wars between Carthage and Rome. Basque mercenaries fought for Carthage, the losing side, and are thought to have been part of Hannibal’s legendary invasion of Italy in 216 B.C. The Basques knew Carthage when it was the greatest commercial center in the world, a city of imposing wooden houses on a hillside facing a prosperous harbor. And they saw Carthage after Rome destroyed it in 146 B.C., when the city was nothing but the blackened stone foundations of burned buildings, the once green hillside sowed with salt to kill agriculture. This taught the Basques to underestimate neither the power nor the ruthlessness of Rome.
ACCORDING TO POPULAR MYTH, their rugged, mountainous terrain made the Basques unconquerable, but it is also possible that few coveted this land. Many passed through, disproving the assumption that their mountains were impenetrable. They are small, but their steepness, the jagged protrusion of rocks above the rich green velvet beauty of sloped pastures, gives them false importance, making them appear far higher than the mere foothills of the Pyrenees and minor ranges of the Cantabrian Sierra that they are. In a harsh winter the peaks are powdered with snow, giving them the illusion of alpine scale. But most of the passes, which appear at regular intervals throughout the Basque Pyrenees, are usable year round. In French, the passes of the region are called ports, meaning “safe harbors” or possibly even “gateways.” The Basse Navarre village of St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, on the Nive River, is surrounded by imposing peaks. Its name comes from being the rest-and-supply stop before the pass, what seems a thrilling climb up to the clouds. Yet the altitude of the peaks is not quite 5,000 feet, not as high as the tallest of New York’s Adirondacks, and the highest point in the pass below is a mere 3,500 feet at the heights of Ibañeta, before dropping down to Roncesvalles in Spanish Navarra. The other high pass, the Port de Larrau between Soule and Navarra, climbs through rocky peaks so bald it seems to be above the timberline. But it is only 5,200 feet high, and the Port de Lizarrieta, near the Nivelle Valley, has an altitude of less than 1,700 feet, an easy crossing for Celts, Romans, or World War II underground refugees. The central Pyrenees, to the east of Basqueland, have peaks twice the altitude of the highest Basque mountains.
It was not the foothills of the Pyrenees with their brilliant green, steeply inclined pastures, or the cloud-capped rocky outcroppings of Guipúzcoa, nor the majestic columns of gray rock towering above the Vizcayan countryside near Durango, nor the Cantabrian Sierra with its thrilling views of the wide Ebro Valley below, that conquerors coveted. Instead, invaders wanted the great valley of the Ebro where now lie the vegetable gardens of Logroño and the vineyards of Rioja, or the rich lands beyond in Spain, or they wanted the plains of France north of the Adour.
It is uncertain how large an area belonged to the pre-Roman Basques. The fact that their currently known borders are edged by lands considered more valuable suggests that the Basques were pressed into this smaller, less desirable mountainous region, that they live in what was left for them.
The perennial issue of Basque history—who is or is not a Basque—obscures the boundaries of pre-Roman Basqueland. The Romans referred to a people whom they called Vascones, from which comes the Spanish word Vascos and the French word Basques. The earliest surviving account of these Vascones is from the Greek historian Strabo, who lived from 64 B.C. to A.D. 24, which was after the Roman conquest of Iberia. But the Latin word Vascones is also the origin of Gascognes, the French word for the Basques’ neighbors in the French southwest. It is not always clear when Roman accounts are referring to Basques and when they are referrin
g to other people in the region. Or were Gascognes originally Basques who became Romanized?
A forceful Roman presence first appeared on the Iberian peninsula in 218 B.C., during the wars against Carthage. In the rest of Iberia, the local population was first crushed, then Romanized, but Basqueland was more difficult to conquer. Rebellions continually broke out in Vasconia, not only by Vascones, but also by the previous invader, the Celts. The Romans sent in additional legions, and in 194 B.C. the Celts, who had never been able to conquer the Basques, were decisively defeated by the Romans. Soon after, the Romans defeated the Basques as well.
Their defeat by the Romans marks the beginning of the first known instance of Basques tolerating occupation without armed resistance. But the reason appears to be that the Romans, intent on more fertile parts of Iberia, learned to coexist with the Basques, and the Basques came to learn that Roman occupation did not threaten their language, culture, or legal traditions. The Romans came to understand that the Basques could be pacified by special conditions of autonomy. The Basques paid no tribute and had no military occupation. Most important of all, they were not ruled directly by a Roman code of law but were allowed to govern themselves under their own tradition-based system of law. The Romans asked little more from Basques than free passage between southern Gaul and the lands beyond the Ebro.
The Basques were left to their beloved sense of themselves, surrounded by an empire to which they didn’t belong, speaking a language that none of their neighbors understood.
Crowded into steep, narrow valleys, their society was organized around control of the limited workable land. The needs of this cramped agricultural existence made Basque social structures different from those of societies that lived in ample expanses. The bottomland by the river was usually owned communally. Rights to grazing on the good slopes were administered by local Basque rule.
Leaving the Basques content in their mountains, the Romans conquered the Ebro and fought with each other over it. In 82 B.C., two Roman factions began a ten-year war for control of the Ebro. Sertorius, a battle-scarred warrior, proud of having lost one eye in combat, seized the valley with some local support. In a previous campaign against the Celts, Sertorius had learned enough Celtic to pass himself off in the enemy camp, and he boasted of his ability to penetrate local cultures. But in 75 B.C., the handsome and elegant Pompey, a favorite of Rome and commander of the forces loyal to the emperor, retook the Ebro and founded a town on a tributary, the River Arga. It was to be a strategic fortress, controlling both the plains south to the Ebro and important passes to the north through the Pyrenees. The town, which Pompey, with unflinching immodesty, named Pompaelo, also was intended to be a great outpost of Roman civilization. Later it became known in Spanish as Pamplona.
The few surviving fragments of Pompaelo do not suggest great Roman architecture, but even if it was only a provincial town of the empire, marble-pillared villas, temples, and baths built by the Romans must have been dazzling to the wild mountain Vascones.
At the time of Christ, Strabo wrote of three cities: Pamplona; Calahorra, which Pompey captured from the Celts the year he founded Pamplona; and Oiasona, of unknown origin and today called Oiartzun, a town located between San Sebastián and the French border. To the north, a military base called Lapurdum, thought to have been at the present-day site of Bayonne, began to grow into an urban center.
Roman cities became important to the Basques because the Romans also built an excellent road system connecting all of Vasconia, so that farmers and shepherds could bring their goods to the Roman-built cities to be sold. The Vascones learned to grow Roman crops such as grapes and olives for the Roman market. Rural Basque communities started decorating their villages with Roman mosaics and Roman-style monuments.
Basque mercenaries defended the far borders of the Roman Empire. Basques who fought well for the empire were offered Roman citizenship, a rare distinction until Caracalla, Roman emperor in 211, granted it to all the Empire. A Basque unit served in England, based in present-day Northumberland, and Basques helped defend Hadrian’s Wall, which stretched across northern England to keep the Picts and other Celts out. Plutarch wrote that Gaius Marius, the antipatrician commander in whose name the one-eyed Sertorius had taken the Ebro, freed enslaved prisoners of war and made them his personal, fiercely loyal bodyguard. This force was composed of several thousand liberated Varduli, a Basque tribe from Guipúzcoa, whom he took with him when he was exiled to Africa. When he was able to return to Rome, he brought them to frighten his patrician Roman adversaries. The Varduli ran wild in the imperial city and, in fact, frightened almost everyone in Rome. They attacked patricians and raped their wives. Finally, Marius’s ally Sertorius ordered his troops to their camp, where he had the Varduli Basques killed with javelins.
A tour of duty in the empire was twenty-five years, and so Basques saw the empire and its inventions. They were at peace with Rome. There is no record of a conflict between Basques and Romans from 20 B.C. for the next four centuries until the fall of Rome. This may have been the longest period of peace in Basque history.
As they learned of new ideas, they expressed them in Euskera with Latin words. Olive is oliba; statue is estatu, which also means “state”; statesman is estatari.
If a new idea offered commercial opportunities, the Basques embraced it—a characteristic that would remain with them throughout history. Through their mountain passes, they traded the olive oil they had learned about from the Romans, just as they did the wheat and iron they had learned of from the Celts. The iron and wheat trades continued long after the Celts had left, and the trade in Roman products long survived that empire as well.
But though Basques learned from both the Celts and the Romans, they did not assimilate with either one. All of Iberia except Vasconia was speaking a Latin language, living under Roman legal institutions, and practicing the Roman religion, which by the fourth century was Christianity. South of the Ebro in present-day Castile, north of the Adour in present-day Aquitaine, and to the east in present-day Aragón, all areas the Romans preferred to Basqueland, the people were assimilated. They spoke a Latin dialect and acquired the Christian religion.
But only a few Basque areas left any records of Christianity during Roman rule. By modern times these same places had completely lost their Basque identity. Calahorra, the Roman city on the Ebro, where stories of early Basque Christian martyrs have been preserved, today is no longer Basque. Today, the closer in Basqueland one is to the Ebro, the more Roman influence can be felt. The part of Basqueland with the fewest Euskera speakers is southern Navarra and Alava, the part the Romans wanted. The olive groves and vineyards that the Romans introduced in these areas flourish. Pre-Roman Basques probably cooked with animal fats and drank fermented apple cider, but modern Basques cook almost exclusively with olive oil and reserve the butter that they produce in their northern mountain pastures only for baking. And they are wine drinkers. Only occasionally do they consume cider made, during the winter, from the apples that prosper in Guipúzcoa.
But in the mountains on both sides of the Pyrenees, the Basque language and culture have remained strong. The borders of cultural zones remain much the way the Romans left them 1,600 years ago. The Romans were clearly the most effective assimilators the Basques ever encountered. Given enough time, they might have swallowed up the remaining Basques as they did most of the cultures in the empire. But before that could happen, the Roman Empire fell.
IN THE LONG Basque memory, the Roman Empire is considered a good period. In the context of Basque history a good period was one with a reasonable invader, an intruder with whom you could do business. Today, Basques still refer to this time as an example of how they would like to peacefully coexist with larger powers.
In the unstable atmosphere of power vacuums left by the decline of Rome, several groups moved into Iberia. These so-called barbarians—Vandals, Suevi, and Alans—easily passed the Basque ports of the Pyrenees, overran Pamplona, took the Ebro, and passed on to contro
l most of the peninsula without ever bothering with most of Vasconia.
By the year 400, the disintegrating Roman Empire turned to the Visigoths, who had helped the Romans control Gaul, to do the same in Iberia. From that moment on, chronicles of the life of Visigoth monarchs end with two words: Domuit Vascones. All the rulers of the peninsula to follow down to the present-day Spanish government have had the same thought: “We must control the Basques.”
The Visigoths were romanized central Europeans who had moved west from the Danube Valley. Like most of the peoples in the area at the time, they professed a self-styled variation of Christianity. Establishing a capital in what is now the southern French city of Toulouse, these one-time allies of Rome became competitors. In A.D. 410 they overran Rome itself.
In 415, they entered Iberia, not from Vasconia but from Catalonia on the other end of the Pyrenees. From there they moved up the Ebro, from its mouth at the Mediterranean near the Catalonia-Valencia border. Eventually they gained control of all of Iberia and held on to it for 250 years. Until 507 they ruled from Toulouse, and then, after they lost southern France to the Franks, Toledo became their capital.
During the century of Toulouse-based rule, Basqueland was the crossroads of Europe. Again, as long as populations, merchants, soldiers were just passing through on their way to Iberia, the Basques accepted them. But Visigoth rule was not to be like Roman rule. The Visigoths wanted to conquer and control the Basque mountains. And so the Basques fought them in campaign after campaign, swooping down from their mountains to attack the new rulers on the plains.
Basque History of the World Page 3