The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [55]
The Basques had jauntxos. Between the voyages of Columbus and the eighteenth century, jauntxos amassed great wealth from grain speculation and agricultural expansion spurred by Latin American products and trade. But in the eighteenth century the prices of agricultural products plunged, and the jauntxos maintained their profits at the expense of the poor farmer.
Neither the wealth nor industry that was changing urban life reached the agricultural sector. Into the twentieth century, soil was still being turned by Basque women using the two-pronged laia, the basque hoe.
The most striking feature of modern industrial Bilbao is at the end of most any downtown street: The green, steep slopes of the Basque countryside can be seen with shepherds tending grazing flocks. Bilbao is an urban population surrounded by a rural one. Farming families look down from their low-pitched, red-tile-roofed country houses into the busy streets of the largest, most industrial Basque city. The baserritarrak look down at the scrambling kaletarrak.
Farm women with laias, photographed by Eulalia Abaitua Allende Salazar. Born in Bilbao in 1853, she began documenting Basque life during the Second Carlist War. She died at the age of ninety in 1943. (Euskal Arkeologia, Etnografia eta Kondaira Museoa, Bilbao)
In 1801, Simón Bernardo de Zamácola, a jauntxo, approached the regional Basque government, the Juntas Generales, meeting in Guernica. Zamácola wanted to break the trade monopoly of the Bilbao commercial class, which had exclusive rights to the port of Bilbao. He proposed that the Juntas open and manage a new port in Abando, which is today part of Bilbao.
The Juntas sent Zamácola to the next step, the required Royal approval from Madrid for a new port Madrid named its terms: The Basques could have their port, but in exchange they would have to agree to perform Spanish military service. The explosion that this counteroffer produced in Bilbao in 1804 has become known as the Zamacolada.
The Zamacolada of 1804 was a miniwar in Bilbao. Spanish troops occupied state buildings, closed down the Juntas, suspended self-rule, and held the city under a state of siege for three years until yet another war broke out—this time against Napoleon.
NOWHERE IN SPAIN was there more loyalty to the Spanish monarchy, and more hostility to the antimonarchist, anticleric reforms of French republicanism, than in Navarra. Oddly, the Spanish kings did not share the ferocity of their supporters. In February 1808, when a Napoleonic army climbed through the pass over the ghosts of Roncesvalles and down to Pamplona, it met little resistance because the Spanish monarchy had declared the French to be allies. In March, Charles IV abdicated and fled to France. His son, Ferdinand VII, sought only to be a servile puppet to Napoleon. But, reasoning that a relative was more dependable than a collaborator, Napoleon forced Ferdinand to step down and made his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte, ruler instead.
On May 2, 1808, a date remembered in Spanish history as Dos de Mayo, the Madrid citizenry rose up against the French. A French ruler was one step too far, which is why the six-year Iberian war—the Spanish, Portuguese, and British against Napoleon—is called the Spanish War of Independence. Most combatants were fighting to keep Napoleon from incorporating Spain into his growing empire. But the Navarrese fought for the monarchy itself. Ferdinand, the pathetic prince who had capitulated, was referred to by the Navarrese as El Deseado, the longed-for.
Though Pamplona remained in French hands for most of the war, Napoleonic troops had to contend with relentless Basque guerrilla attacks from the mountains. The first of the guerrilla movements was organized at the mouth of the Roncesvalles pass in Valcarlos.
Napoleon had originally shown contempt for local Basques. His troops had harassed them when