The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [13]
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.
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