Basque History of the World (4 page)

A brief attempt to tie the Basques to the Picts, ancient occupants of Britain who spoke a language thought to be pre-Indo-European, fell apart when it was discovered the Picts weren’t non-Indo-European at all, but were Celtic.

If, as appears to be the case, the Basque language predates the Indo-European invasion, if it is an early or even pre-Bronze Age tongue, it is very likely the oldest living European language.

If Euskera is the oldest living European language, are Basques the oldest European culture? For centuries that question has driven both Basques and non-Basques on the quest to find the Basque origin. Miguel de Unamuno, one of the best-known Basque writers, devoted his earliest work, written in 1884 when he was still a student, to the question. “I am Basque,” he began, “and so I arrive with suspicion and caution at this little and poorly garnered subject.”

As Unamuno pointed out, and this is still true today, many researchers have not hesitated to employ a liberal dose of imagination. One theory not only has Adam and Eve speaking Euskera but has the language predating their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The name Eve, according to this theory, comes from
ezbai
, “no-yes” in Euskera. The walls of Jericho crumbled, it was also discovered, when trumpets blasted a Basque hymn.

The vagaries of fact and fiction were encouraged by the fact that the Basques were so late to document their language. The first book entirely in Euskera was not published until 1545. No Basques had attempted to study their own history or origins until the sixteenth-century Guipúzcoan Esteban de Garibay. Spanish historians of the time had already claimed that Iberia was populated by descendants of Tubal, Noah’s grandson, who went to Iberia thirty-five years after the Flood subsided. Garibay observed that Basque place-names bore a resemblance to those in Armenia where the ark landed, and therefore it was specifically the Basques who descended from Tubal. Was not Mount Gorbeya in southern Vizcaya named after Mount Gordeya in Armenia? Garibay traced Euskera to the Tower of Babel.

In 1729, when Manuel de Larramendi wrote the first book of Basque grammar ever published, he asserted that Euskera was one of seventy-five languages to have developed out of the confusion at the Tower of Babel. According to Juan Bautista de Erro, whose
The Primitive World or a Philosophical Examination of Antiquity and Culture of the Basque Nation
was published in Madrid in 1815, Euskera is the world’s oldest language, having been devised by God as the language of Adam’s Paradise, preserved in the Tower of Babel, surviving the Flood because Noah spoke the language, and brought to present-day Basque country by Tubal.

In one popular legend, the first Basque was Aïtor, one of a few remarkable men who survived the Flood without Noah’s ark, by leaping from stone to stone. However, Aïtor, still recognized by some as the father of all Basques, was invented in 1848 by the French Basque writer Augustin Chaho. After Chaho’s article on Aïtor was translated into Spanish in 1878, the legend grew and became a mainstay of Basque culture. Some who said Aïtor was mere fiction went on to hypothesize that the real father of all Basques was Tubal.

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.

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.

W
HEN
B
ASQUES 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.

A
CCORDING 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 referring 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.