In two and a half centuries, the Visigoths mounted twenty campaigns against the Basques. The Basques won battles and they lost battles, but for the 200,000 Visigoth soldiers attempting to hold all of Iberia, the Basques were always an insurmountable problem.
In hindsight, the Visigoths were one of many misfortunes of history that helped preserve the Basques. The constant warfare united a people who had previously remained separate mountain tribes. The Romans had written of the Caristos, Vardulos, and Autrigones—distinct tribes of Vascones who may have been Alavans, Guipúzcoans, and Vizcayans. The Visigoths found no such people, only a single group of ferocious enemies throughout Vasconia—the Vascones whom they could not control.
The Basques always resisted not only militarily but culturally. They kept their language and religion. Only after the fall of the Visigoths did Christianity slowly penetrate Basque culture, and even then, Basque religious beliefs coexisted with Christianity for centuries. Some still survive.
FOR SEVERAL CENTURIES, while everyone around them spoke Latin languages, the Basques spoke Euskera. While neighboring cultures followed the male line, the female line of Basques inherited property and titles because women did the farm work, while men went off to war. While everyone else was Christian, the Basques worshiped the sun and moon and a pantheon of nature spirits. Surrounded by the cult of Jesus Christ and the apostles, they had Baxajaun, the hairy lord of the forest, and Mari, who dwelled in caves and assumed many forms. And while all the people around them had learned from the Romans to live by a legal code, Basque law was still based on unwritten custom.
The Basques simply wanted to be left alone, but suddenly, with civil war destroying Visigoth rule, a new and even more aggressive non-Christian group arrived. Muslims from North Africa landed in Spain in 711, invited to cross over from Morocco by a Visigoth ruler to help defeat his Visigoth rival. Once landed in Iberia, the 800-year struggle to expel the Muslims would leave a permanent imprint on Christianity and European culture.
In three years, they penetrated almost the entire peninsula, and by 714, Musa, leader of a North African Islamic alliance, was at the edge of Basqueland. Like other conquerors, he was not impressed by what he found there. An Arab history written six centuries later recalled, “Pamplona is in the middle of high mountains and deep valleys; little favored by nature.” Of the people it says, “They mostly speak Basque which makes them incomprehensible.”
The Muslims decided they would take the area anyway and use it as a base from which to move into the lands of the Franks north of the Pyrenees. But Musa, after so many successes on his way through Iberia, could not conquer Vasconia. Four years later, in 718, a second army took Pamplona. For centuries thereafter, the Basques and the Muslims lived side by side in a complicated relationship. The Muslims repeatedly took Pamplona but couldn’t hold it. They could hold the southern flatlands by the Ebro, but when they ventured north into the mountains, the Basques would storm out of forests and down slopes and drive away the intruders.
In 732, the Muslim ruler of Spain, Abd-al-Rahman, led a force out of Pamplona northeast into the mountains of Navarra, climbing up into the narrow rocky pass above Roncesvalles, up the valley of the Nive, which meets the Adour at Bayonne, across the Adour to the swamps of Aquitaine and up the center of France to Poitiers, less than 200 miles from Paris, where he was finally stopped and turned back by the king of the Franks, Charles Martel. Poitiers was the farthest north the Muslims ever reached.
The legend of Charles Martel and the battle of Poitiers has grown. Every French schoolchild knows of it. Extreme rightwing racist groups still invoke the name of Charles Martel when speaking of purging Europe of non-Europeans.
It was during this long period of fighting with the Muslims that the Basques became Christians, part of the Christian struggle to drive out the infidel, what is called in Spain the Reconquista. The earliest estimates place the Christianization of the Basques in the seventh century, but some historians believe that the Basques were not a Christian people until the tenth or eleventh century. In any case, the Basques were not dependable Christians. They did not fight for Christianity; they fought for Basqueland, which the Franks threatened at least as much as the Muslims. Basques let Abd-al-Rahman pass through their mountains because he was on his way to fight the Franks. Some Basques even fought against Charles Martel in France a few years after Poitiers. But in Iberia they fought against the Muslim takeover.
And so this small people fought both Christians and Muslims and managed to survive and keep their lands.
IN 1837, a forgotten manuscript from late-eleventh-century Normandy was published at Oxford. After centuries of obscurity, this epic poem titled La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland), became a classic of French literature. Revered for the extraordinary beauty of its Old French verse, it tells of Charlemagne’s great victories in Iberia against the Muslims and how he had now decided to return to France. He marched his army through the Roncesvalles pass. Just as the last of his men were climbing out of the pine forest to the narrow rocky port, leaving Charlemagne’s nephew, Roland, to hold the pass, the Muslims attacked. Roland fought valiantly with his great sword, but the Franks had been betrayed to the Muslims by Ganelon, a traitor from their own ranks, and faced with the overwhelming numbers of two huge Moorish armies, Roland died in the pass, saving Europe from that fate-worse-than-death, the Muslims.
The manuscript was written at the time of the First Crusade, when anti-Islamic bigotry had been elevated to the status of a religious belief and was being feverishly embraced. The poem has made the battle of Roncesvalles more famous than that of Poitiers. Even before the poem was rediscovered, the legend of Roland had the same stature in France as El Cid in Spain, an icon of national identity. In the sixteenth-century classic Don Quixote, Cervantes wrote of Roland and “that traitor, Ganelon.”
But the truth is very different. The real battle had taken place three centuries earlier, in 778. From the opening lines—”King Charles, the Great, our Emperor, has stayed in Spain for seven years”—the poem is historically wrong.
Charlemagne had only spent a few months in Spain, and the ones betrayed were not the French but the Muslims. There was no Ganelon, but there was a Suleiman, a Muslim who was feuding with the emir in Cordoba over control of the Ebro Valley. In 777, Suleiman, wishing to take the Ebro away from the emir’s control, had crossed the Pyrenees to offer Charlemagne a list of cities above the great river that he had arranged to have fall to the Franks without a fight. Seeing an opportunity, Charlemagne crossed into Spain in spring 778 from the Mediterranean side, the old Visigoth path of conquest. He was able to take Girona, Barcelona, and Huesca with almost no resistance. But in Zaragoza on the Ebro, the Muslim commander did not follow the plan, instead defending the city. Faced with a real fight for the first time in this expedition, Charlemagne decided to forgo Zaragoza and return to France. It was now August, and he had been in Spain only about four months. On his way back he chose to attack Pamplona, destroy its walls, and loot the town. In so doing he enraged not the Muslims but the Basques.
To return to France, Charlemagne chose the same pass as had Abd-al-Rahman in his ill-fated 732 conquest of Europe. Throughout history this was the pass chosen for conquest. Though narrow and rugged, it is wide enough for an army. It is easier to cross than the neighboring Ispegui pass, which leads up to sheer gray rock and narrow waterfalls, by means of a narrow ledge of a road along the mountainside. Smugglers used the cloud-covered crests of the Ispegui pass, preferring its inaccessibility. But armies always chose Roncesvalles.
Early twentieth-century smuggler apprehended by the Spanish at the Ispegui Pass.
The Basques, being greatly outnumbered, waited in the pine woods in a place known in Basque as Orreaga, literally, the place where the pine trees grow, which has been translated into Spanish as Roncesvalles, valley of the pines, and into French as Roncevaux. The Basques allowed the huge Frankish army to pass, climbing up to the windswept heights today known as Ibañeta.
From there, the Pyrenees can be seen all the way across to the rugged mountains of Basse Navarre. But after Ibañeta the army had to thin out to single file to drop down along a mountain trail to the rocky valley of waterfalls that parts the Pyrenees. Charlemagne made it through and up to the steep mountainside village of Valcarlos, where wild apples still grow in the steep woods. While waiting in Valcarlos, the rear guard, commanded by his nephew Roland according to the poem (though some records write of an official named Hruodlandus), was attacked.
The Basques ran out of the forest with rocks and spears, attacking the Franks, who were sluggish with their heavy arms. There, on the bald heights of Ibañeta where wild purple crocus push through the grass, according to one account written only about fifty years later, the Basques killed every trapped Frank. Possibly some escaped, but it is certain that they killed Roland or Hruodlandus, two others close to Charlemagne, and a significant part of the force. Then the Basque forces simply dispersed, going home to their mountain villages, so that there was no Basque army for Charlemagne to pursue in vengeance. Pamplona was left to revert to Muslim rule.
At the end of the poem, tears are rolling over the white beard of Charlemagne as he says, “Oh God, how hard my life is.” But, in fact, Charlemagne never recorded the encounter. The Basque attack of August 15, 778, was to be the only defeat Charlemagne’s army ever suffered in his long military career.
The first record of the battle was written in 829, after the death of Charlemagne, and states that the French army, although far larger, was defeated by Basques. The Basques built few monuments to their victories. In Pasajes San Juan, the great Guipúzcoan port, along the little street that follows the deep water harbor cutting into the mountains, stands a nearly forgotten stone shrine, built in 1580, that commemorates the Basque victory over Charlemagne.
The lesson of the battle of Roncesvalles should have been: Do not to alienate the Basques. Yet somehow, in the ensuing centuries, Roland became the battle’s hero—in time, even to the Basques. The Basques went on to other battles against Franks and both with and against Muslims, against the Vikings and even the Normans. With their small population, ambush remained a favorite technique. But throughout northern Navarra, folk legends developed that are still heard today of a local character, a giant of Herculean strength named Errolan—Roland. Basque myth had become Christianized.
Constant warfare was changing Basque society. The people moved into fortified towns. A military chain of command gradually evolved in which once separate tribal chieftains became generals, the generals became a ruling class, and, in 818, Iñigo Iñiguez became king and ruled for thirty-three years. The Kingdom of Navarra, the only kingdom in all of Basque history, had begun. It would last until 1512, its dynasties becoming defenders of Christianity, a great regional power of the Middle Ages, and a critical force in the Reconquista. These Basques of Navarra helped create the country that Basques would one day see as their greatest problem—Spain.
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3: The Basque Whale
Many say that the first to take on this harrowing adventure must have been fanatic—eccentrics and dare-devils. It would not have begun, they say, with reasonable Nordics, but only with the Basques, those giddy adventurers.
—Jules Michelet, on whaling, LA MER, 1856
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IN 1969 a cave with drawings of fish dating back to the Paleolithic Age was discovered in Vizcaya. The fish appear to be sea bream. A sea bream drawing was also found in a cave in Guipúzcoa, and drawings of a number of other fish species have been discovered as well. These drawings are remarkable because Paleolithic man, living in natural caves 12,000 years ago, usually chose to depict mammals, such as deer and horses, and not fish. He had not yet gone to sea. But these same caves are also significant because the remains of fish bones and shells reveal an unusual prehistoric diet.
A reverence for sea bream, bixigu, has been conserved through millennia on the coast of Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa. It is a traditional Christmas dish, and in Guipúzcoa, a pastry shaped in the form of a sea bream is served on Christmas Eve. On that night, the people of San Sebastián gather by their perfectly curved, elegantly lamp-lit bay, and climb Mount Igueldo, the steep little mountain at the harbor entrance, carrying a large effigy of a sea bream. This is because the fish is associated with Olentzaro, a pre-Christian evil sort of Santa Claus who slides down chimneys on Christmas Eve to harm people in their sleep. Fireplaces are lit for the holiday to keep him away.
In the early twentieth century, when Basques who had migrated to Madrid formed a gastronomic society, they named it Besuguin-a Lagunak, Friends of the Sea Bream. In San Sebastián such gastronomic societies make a near ritual of fishing sea bream on Saturday nights in January.
The following recipe from the gastronomic society Donosti Gain, which means “in San Sebastián,” was collected by the well-known Guipúzcoan chef José Castillo.
SEA BREAM
(for two)
1 beautiful sea bream
6 tablespoons olive oil
4 tablespoons vinegar
2 slices guindilla pepper (a dried red, slightly hot, local pepper)
4 cloves garlic
Put the sea bream in a casserole.
Roast it well in an oven.
Put the vinegar in a skillet and turn up the heat. When the vinegar is reduced to half, add the juice from the fish that is left in the casserole and let it simmer a little.
In another skillet put the olive oil and the garlic cloves cut in slices. Heat the skillet with the oil and garlic. When the garlic begins to turn golden, add the guindilla and turn off the heat. Add the reduction of vinegar and fish juice.
Bring to a boil for 1 minute.
Uncover the sea bream and add the liquid.
This leaves the question: What is meant by a “beautiful sea bream”? The answer was suggested in a 1933 book about fish written by the pseudonymous Ymanol Beleak, a native of Bilbao who lived many years in San Sebastián and whose real name was Manuel Carves-Mons. Beleak, an entrepreneur who, among other projects, manufactured chocolate boxes and created his own label of sparkling wine, wrote, “A sea bream of quality has a small head and thick back. It does not need to be large to be good.”
ORIGINALLY,THE BASQUE idea of the sea, itsaso, was the Bay of Biscay, that part of the Atlantic between France and Spain that on some medieval maps is marked El Mar de los Vascos, the Basque Sea. This, by Atlantic standards, is a relatively unfertile corner of the ocean, because while fish tend to cluster in the relatively shallow water over continental shelves, the Iberian shelf is short, dropping off steeply close to shore.
Detail of a map by Giacomo Cantelli entitled “Vizcaya is divided into four major parts,” from Mercurio Geográfico, Rome, 1696. Note that the gulf is labeled Mare di Basque, the Basque Sea. (Photography archive of the Untzi Museoa-Maritime Museum, San Sebastián)
With flair and imagination, the Basques have created great dishes out of even the least fleshy little creatures of their unfruitful Basque Sea: txangurro, the scrawny spider crab of winter; txitxardin, tiny baby Atlantic eel caught in the rivers, also in winter; antxoa, the spring anchovies; txipiron, small squid caught off the coast in the summer; and sardina, the fat summer sardines that were a specialty of the Bilbao area before the pollution that came with the industrial revolution.
Txipiron
Basque fishermen invented ways of cooking inexpensive local catch. Ttoro is a dish traditionally prepared by Labourdine fishermen based in towns at the mouth of the Nivelle: St.-Jean-de-Luz, Ciboure, and the village at the harbor entrance, Socoa. It is made from locally available fish, and the recipe varies from cook to cook. The following recipe is from Casinto De Gregorio, a Guipúzcoan who established a cozy little restaurant in St.-Jean-de-Luz in the 1920s. The restaurant, Chez Maya, is still in the family, and the cook, his grandson, Freddy, still uses his ttoro recipe.
TTORO
(for six)
6 hake steaks 2 large onions
6 very sm
all monkfish 2 leeks
3 rascasse (a local redfish 1 3/4 pound tomatoes
in the same family as ocean 4 garlic cloves
perch, which is not a 1 pint white wine
substitute) 1 bouquet garni
2 large red gurnard (thyme, bay leaf
(a bony European fish) and parsley)
1 1/3 pound mussels pepper
6 nice-sized langoustines
Clean the fish. Cut the gurnard in slices. Filet the rascasse. Keep the bones.
Sauté the chopped onions, minced leek, and chopped garlic in olive oil for 15 minutes; add the heads and bones of the fish and cook slowly. Add the tomatoes, crushed, the wine, a quart of water, the bouquet garni, and pepper. Cook 90 minutes.
Clean and open the mussels, adding the juice to the pot.
Strain the liquid.
Flour the fish and sauté for 1 minute in olive oil.
Combine everything and cook slowly for 10 minutes.
Serve in soup bowls with garlic croutons.
Despite their inventive cooks, the Basques did not stay in their little sea, content with its little creatures. What first drove them out farther than the known world was the pursuit of a deadly but profitable giant: the Basque whale.
PLINY, THE FIRST-CENTURY Roman naturalist, described whales as creatures that lived off the north coast of Iberia. Until the Basques overhunted them, giant whales, along with porpoises and dolphins, made the Bay of Biscay their winter home.
Several varieties of whale, including the huge sperm whale, could be seen off the rocky coastline. The most valued one has the scientific name Eubalaena glacialis, referring to the fact that it spent its summers amid the icebergs, cruising past pale blue glacier faces off Norway, Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador. When these waters began to freeze for the winter, it would come down to the Bay of Biscay. Some scientists had proposed the Latin name Balaena euskariensis after its popular name, the Euskera or Basque whale.
Basque History of the World Page 4