The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [14]
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