The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [24]
Elcano was given an annual pension and honored with a coat of arms featuring a globe with the words Primus circumdedisti me, Thou who first circumnavigated me. But many of the surviving eighteen received nothing. One, Juan de Acurio, stated two years later that all he had earned from the voyage was “glory, experience, and a bale of cloves.”
The Victoria went on to the merchant service, making one voyage to the Caribbean and going down with all hands on the second. To the enormous profit of the Basques, this was an age when an unprecedented number of ships were being lost at sea, and the demand for shipbuilding seemed limitless.
Basques returned to the Philippines. Andrés de Urdaneta, became the second man to circumnavigate the globe, completing a nine-year expedition in 1536. Then Miguel Lopez de Legazpi y Gorrocategui, who had gone to Mexico in 1528, where he amassed the fortune every adventurous Spaniard of the day was dreaming of, sailed to the Philippines, took Luzon, and established Manila as the capital of the new colony in 1571. Centuries later, when Spain lost its colonies and conflicting nationalisms divided the Spanish and the Basques, the angry Spanish military would no longer remember that it was the Basques who had secured much of Spain’s global empire in the first place.
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4: The Basque Saint
Those who know the Jesuits know that Basque nationalism is completely Catholic.
—Sabino Arana, EL CORREO VASCO, July 29, 1899
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BASQUES MAY REMEMBER their own role in building the Spanish Empire, but almost no one wants to remember the Basque role in building Spain itself. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the Reconquista had been accomplished. The Moors—and while the victors were at it, the Jews and the Gypsies—had all been driven out of Spain. Los reyes Católicos, the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand of Aragón and Isabella of Castile, had forcibly fused a huge country, taking control of every kingdom and fiefdom on the Iberian peninsula except Portugal and the Basque Kingdom of Navarra.
Basques, in search of wealth and nobility, had fought for los reyes Católicos against other Basques to take Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya, and Alava. In exchange, Ferdinand had promised the Basques that up to the Ebro, their ancient laws, the Fueros, were to be respected. Throughout their history, the Basques have been willing to compromise their independence as long as they could have self-rule by their traditional laws. Like the language, the laws are an essential part of Basque identity. For unknown numbers of centuries, these laws were based on custom and, unlike Roman law, had no formal code. In the twelfth century these traditions were, for the first time, written into a legal code. The Spanish language was used because Spanish was thought of as the language of legal codes, and they became known as the Fueros, a Spanish word meaning “codified local customs.” Many other parts of Iberia, including Castile, had fueros, but nowhere were they as extensive or as revered as in Navarra and the Basque provinces.
The first article of the Fueros of Navarra states that the Fueros are “customs and practices, written and non-written,” that guarantee “justice to the poor as to the rich.” They comprised both commercial and criminal law, addressing a wide range of subjects, including the purity of cider, the exploitation of minerals, the laws of inheritance, the administration of farmland, crimes and punishments, and a notably more progressive view of human rights than was recognized in Castilian law.
A Basque assembly, the Juntas Generales, met under an oak tree at Guernica, to legislate and rule on Foral law. The meetings predate the written code. Meeting-oaks had been established in several Vizcayan towns but the Guernica sessions, which lasted two or three