Roman rule
For the next invasion of the region, however, there is much written evidence. The Romans entered the Iberian peninsula after their defeat of Carthage in the Punic wars. Roman rule quickly spread from the Carthaginian settlements along the Mediterranean coast through the rest of the peninsula. The northwest, including the Basque regions, were conquered by Pompey, after whom the large Basqueland city of Pamplona is named, in the first century BC.
The looseness of the Roman federation well suited the Basques, who retained their traditional laws and leadership within the Roman Empire. The poor region was little developed by the Romans and there is not much evidence of Romanization; this certainly contributed to the survival of the separate Basque language.
The lack of a large Roman presence was encouraged by the passivity of the Basques. Roman military records show that there was never a need to fight insurrections in the Basque country. Basqueland never needed Roman garrisons to control the populace, unlike the surrounding Celtic areas.
On the contrary, Basques were used by the Romans to guard their empire. There is a great deal of evidence for a Vasconne cohort. This cohort spent many years guarding Hadrian's Wall in the north of Britain. Also at some time in its history it earned the title fida or faithful for some now forgotten service to the emperor.
There is some evidence for other Basque units serving in the empire as well. Even today, nationalist Basques look back on the Roman Empire as an ideal time, claiming that even though there was no Basque independence, the Basques still had almost total internal control. As well as their lack of exposure to Roman garrisons, the Basque survival was also aided by the fact that Basqueland was a poor region. It had no unused cropland that could be used to settle Roman colonists and it had few commodities that would interest the Romans. Only a small number of Roman traders would have come to Basqueland. This isolation is what allowed the Basque language to survive and not be overwhelmed by Latin as occurred in so many other regions of the Empire.
If the Roman Empire had continued, however, there is a good chance the Basque language would have vanished. During the Roman period the territory where Basque was spoken slowly shrank and, by the end of the period, it seems Basque had become limited to rural regions, while the major cities such as Pamplona were Romanized.
Middle Ages
The history of Basqueland darkens, however, with the arrival of the Germanic peoples and the collapse of the Roman Empire. Rather than being an isolated area in the centre of a large empire, the Basques were placed at the border between the warring Visigothic and Frankish kingdoms. Basqueland became a very strategically important piece of territory desired by both sides.
At the same time, the Basques lost their lifestyle, which was dependent on trade with the Roman Empire. These two changes transformed the Basques from being one of the most docile people in Europe into a group of dedicated warriors bent on survival. There are scattered reports from this period of presumed Basque brigands (in Latin, bagaudae) in Aquitaine and Spain stealing those things which they used to be able to trade for.
Most of the confrontations with the Basques were, however, instigated by the outsiders. Both the Franks and Visigoths sent armies through Basqueland repeatedly during their long-running war. While there are few records, armies of the day rarely treated the inhabitants of the lands they were passing through well. The Basqueland was probably repeatedly plundered for foodstuffs and fodder to maintain the armies.
The rugged Basque territory is ideal for banditry and it is not surprising that despite the oppresion by their neighbhours the Basques could still survive. Just as in every time of persecution in their history the Basques simply moved to the hills and held out there for many years.
The Basques also proved during this period that, despite the lack of central authority, they could protect their homeland when the need arose. After Charlemagne's Franks invaded northern Spain, they returned home and en route pillaged the Basqueland, stripping it of any wealth they could find. The Basques, however, intercepted the Frankish army while it made its way through a mountain pass. Despite poor weaponry and fewer fighters the Basques destroyed much of the Frankish force. The Battle of the Roncesvalles Pass was the only major defeat Charlemagne suffered in his long career. These events were immortalized in the French-language Chanson de Roland, an important piece of medieval verse.
The Basques did not similarly mobilise against the Islamic invaders who, just a few years earlier, had seized most of the Iberian peninsula. Although Christians, Basques did not resist the Muslim advance; it was stopped only by Frankish troops in Poitiers. Later, the Christian kingdom of Pamplona (later the Kingdom of Navarre) and the short-lived Muslim kingdom of the Banu-Qasi, with capital in Tudela, had a typical feudal alliance with cross marriages.
Although there was a Kingdom of Navarre, the bigger part of the current territories of the Basque country (Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya and Álava) were never part of it. Instead, they were independent feudal territories whose assemblies chose to be united with the kingdom of Castile, so long as the king pledged allegiance to their local laws or fueros.
From the Renaissance Era to the Nineteenth Century
As the Middle Ages came to an end, the Basque lands came to be divided between France and Spain. Most of the Basque population ended up in Spain, a situation which persists to this day. The Navarrese and the Basques from Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya and Álava were able to keep a large degree of self-government of their provinces in Spain and France, functioning practically as separate nation-states: the fueros gave each Basque province separate local laws, taxes and law courts. The Basques, serving under the Spanish flag, were renowned mariners. Spanish ships with many Basque sailors were some of the first Europeans to reach North America, and many early European settlers in Canada and the United States were of Basque origin.
The self-government of the northern Basque provinces came to an end with the French Revolution, which centralized government and abolished all of the various local privileges granted by the ancien régime. The Basques were pushed to counter-revolutionary positions. Later on, when the Napoleonic Army invaded Spain, it had almost no trouble in keeping the southern Basque provinces loyal to the occupier, and the southern Basque Country was the last part of Spain kept by the French because of this lack of resistance.
In Spain, with some irony, through the various civil wars of the 19th century the fueros were upheld by the traditionalist and nominally absolutist Carlists and opposed by the victorious constitutional forces.
The southern Basque provinces and Navarre made up the backbone of the (Carlist) upheavals, which sought to give the crown of Spain to the male heir Carlos (and, later, to the heirs of his line).
Very much christianized at that time, and fearing that, under modern liberal uniformizing constitutions they would lose their self-government, Spanish Basques massively joined the traditionalist army, which was mostly paid by the provincial governments of the Basque provinces. During the First Carlist War, as the differences between the Apostholic (official) and the Navarrean (Basque basis) parties inside the Carlist rebel band grew, the latter signed an armistice which included the promise by the Spaniards of keeping Basque self-government. As this promise was not accomplished fully, there was a further upheaval (the Second Carlist War, which ended in a similar way. Ultimately, the Basque provinces and Navarre lost most of their autonomous power, but retained control over fiscal laws and collections with Ley Paccionada, a power they still retain in modern day Spain in the form of fiscal conciertos with the national government in Madrid.
Thus the same wars that brought relative liberty to most of Spain abolished most (but not all) of the traditional liberties of the Basques. However, the Spanish Basque provinces retained the widest autonomy in peninsular Spain, but far less than they had previously expeienced.
Modern history
The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the appearance of the new Basque nationalism which came with the foundation of the Basque Nationalist Party (EAJ-PNV), in which Christian-Democratic ideas were mixed with racism against Spanish immigrant workers who were seen as perverting the purity of the mythical Basque race. The party asked for independence or at least autonomy.
In 1931 Spain became a Republic and soon Catalonia (the next most ethnically distinct region inside Spain, also with a strong independence movement) was given self-government. However, the Basques had to wait until the Spanish Civil War was already under way to be granted the same rights.
Basques fought on both sides in the Spanish Civil War, with Basque nationalists and leftists from Biscay and Guipúzcoa siding with the Second Spanish Republic, and the Navarrese Carlists siding with General Francisco Franco's insurgent forces (who were known in the rest of Spain as "Nacionales" or "Nationalists", a very misleading phrase in Basque terms). Today, some Basque nationalists claim that the Spanish Civil War was a war of Spain against the Basques, despite there having been Basques on both sides. There is no question, though, that one of the greatest atrocities of this war was the bombing of Guernica, the traditional Biscayne capital, by German planes. Much of the city was destroyed and a great deal of Basque history was erased.
In 1937 the troops of the Autonomous Basque Government surrendered in Santoña to the Italian allies of General Franco, beginning one of the hardest periods of Basque history in Spain. After the war, Franco began a dedicated effort to turn Spain into a uniform nation state. Considering Biscay and Guipúzcoa as "traitor provinces", he abolished the remains of their autonomy, but Navarre and Alava maintained small local police forces and some tax self-government.
Franco's regime introduced severe laws against all Spanish minorities, not least the Basques, in an effort to suppress their cultures and languages.
The backlash to these actions created a violent Basque separatist movement that as of 2000 has resulted in the deaths of about 800 people over the past 30 years. The terrorist group responsible for most of the violence is known as Euskadi Ta Askatasuna or ETA. The end of the Franco regime saw an end to the suppression and a creation of an autonomous Basque region in Spain. ETA continues its actions, however, fighting for full independence and socialism.
Geography
The current autonomous Basque area of Spain, known as "Euskadi" in Euskara, "País Vasco" in Spanish and the "Basque Country" in English, is composed of three provinces or territories: Araba/Álava;, Bizkaia/Vizcaya and Gipuzkoa/Guipúzcoa (in each case, this is the Euskara name followed by the Spanish name). There are 2,123,000 people living in the Basque Country: Araba, 279,000; Bizkaia, 1,160,000; and Gipuzkoa, 684,000. The most important cities are: Bilbo/Bilbao (in Bizkaia), Donostia/San Sebastián; (in Gipuzkoa) and Gasteiz/Vitoria (in Araba). Both Euskara and Spanish are official languages. Knowledge of Spanish is virtually universal; 27 per cent of the people speak the Basque language, but this number is increasing for the first time in many centuries.
There is also a substantial Basque population in the adjacent Spanish autonomous community and province of Navarre, and in nearby parts of France — see Basque Country for more information. There is at least some ethnic Basque presence in many countries of the Americas, including a community in Idaho and eastern Nevada who first came over to herd sheep.
Issues of Persecution
Both Spain and France have, at times, tried to suppress Basque linguistic and cultural identity. France, the epitome of the nation state, has a long history of attempting the complete cultural absorption of ethnic minority groups. Spain has, at most points in its history, granted some degree of linguistic, cultural, and even political autonomy to its Basques, but under the regime of Francisco Franco, Spain actively attempted to suppress nearly all signs of nationality or ethnicity, going so far as to ban public use of Euskara.
Today, the Basque Country within Spain has a great deal of cultural autonomy, and even a significant amount of political autonomy. Many schools in the region use Euskara as the primary language of education.
Culture
There are interesting social differences between the Basques and their neighbours. The Basque people have an unusually close attachm
Source | Copyright
Related categories
