Béarnais, Catalan and Aragonese, an historical fact quite certain—though
no document proves it—is the extreme antiquity of these classes of men.
That all Pyrenean history reposes upon their separate existence must be
evident to anyone who has watched the commercial manner, the mercantile
vivacity, the whole mentality of the Catalan, and has contrasted it with
the quiet chivalry of Aragon. Different military fortunes, different
economic outlets, and different accidents of central government may
possibly account within the historic period for the contrast between
the Aragonese and the people of Béarn, Bigorre, or Comminges. No such
forces can account for the gulf that cuts off the Catalan and the Basque
at either end of the chain from the inhabitants of its high central
portion. Infinite time is the maker of states, and two thousand years
could never have determined societies so sharply separate. We must regard
their constant and immemorial presence in the Pyrenees as the first and
enduring principle to guide us in the history of those mountains.
From this fundamental truth, which leads the prehistoric into the
historic, one must proceed to another political fact of high importance,
which is that while the watershed of the range has but partially
separated customs and local thought, and that only in the centre of the
range, it has necessarily served as a political boundary whenever a high
civilization found it necessary to establish such a strict line. The
boundary and the watershed may not exactly coincide—they do not exactly
coincide even in the highly organized condition of modern society; but in
the two historical periods of strict policy, the Roman and our own, the
crest of the range has marked, and marks, an obvious boundary for most
of its length. The political distinction between Hispania and Gaul cut
the Basque nation into two, following the mountains from Roncesvalles
to the Pic d’Anie: it cut the Catalan people into two, following the
water parting from the two Nogueras to the Mediterranean. It followed
the central chain, indifferent to the similarity or difference between
the northern and the southern valleys. To-day the political distinction
between Spain and France follows nearly the same line.
The reason of this was, and is, twofold. First, that a clear physical
boundary easily definable and of its nature permanent—the crest of a
chain, a broad river, or what not—necessarily recommends itself to a
bureaucracy in search of simplicity and economy in the work of a great
political machine. We see it in the new countries to-day, where the
instinct of organized government for easily definable and exact limits
takes refuge in establishing parallels of latitude as state boundaries
in the absence of marked physical lines. Secondly, in the case of
mountains, and especially of mountains as sharp and as boldly set as are
the Pyrenees, the fatigue of climbing, the absence of carriageways, made
each valley dependent for its connexion with the central government upon
some town of the plains, and the authority of a provincial magistrate
could not but run, as ran the physical instruments of his rule, up from
Huesca northward to Sallent—for instance, or up from Jaca to Canfranc,
and so to the summit of the ridge; or up from Oloron southward to Accous,
and so to Urdos. As the messengers, writs, powers of each proceeded, the
way would become harder, the progress more doubtful. It was obvious and
necessary that the boundary of either jurisdiction should lie upon the
pass. And though the inhabitants of the northern and the southern valleys
might be accustomed to a regular intercourse across the crest, the Roman
agents of a distant central government could not but have depended upon
cities far removed to the south and to the north of the watershed, as
to-day the police of Tardets, let us say, and of Isaba, two towns of one
speech, refer respectively through Pau and through Pamplona to Paris and
to Madrid.
It is in the interplay of these two jarring political forces, the
permanent national seats of Basque, Catalan, etc., and the use of the
range as a political or official boundary, that the political character
of the Pyrenees resides; and as their history begins with the Romans,
to whom we owe the first knowledge of the Pyrenean people and the first
use of the Pyrenean boundary, it will be well to consider it under
territories divided as the Romans divided them, by the main range, and to
follow first the development of the northern slope.
The historical origins of the French Pyrenees are sharply divided in
history by that wall which cuts off all that Rome _made_ from all that
Rome _inherited_. Rome made of the barbarians a new world, but before
she began that task Rome had inherited everywhere within a march of
the Mediterranean a belt of land whose civilization was similar to,
always as old as, and sometimes older than, her own. It was a municipal
civilization dependent upon the arts and religion proper to a city
state. It built, whether temples or ships, as Rome would build them: it
was one thing; it is almost one thing to-day; and its bond at Antioch
as at Saguntum, at Marseilles as at Athens or Alexandria, was, and is,
the universal water of the Mediterranean. To such cities and their
territories Rome fell heir. Little proceeded from her to them save
first the sense of unity, and later the Faith, and of the whole system,
the belt which stretches from Valencia to Genoa, now broadening to the
plains of Nemosus (Nîmes), now narrowing to the rocky ledge of the Portus
Veneris (Port Vendres), concerns the first evidence of Pyrenean history;
for it was from a corner of this belt—between Tarragona and Narbonne—that
the advance of civilization inland and along the Chain proceeded.
A century before the four imperial centuries which made our Christian
world, a century before Augustus Cæsar, Rome had fully occupied and
impressed that soil—to the south Gerona and the Catalan fields, to the
north the rich floor which lies under the Canigou and has come to be
called the _Rousillon_. Thence the Roman advance north of the hills
proceeded. The chief town of the sea-plain—whose name “Illiberis” is so
strongly Basque in form—Rome took for the central municipality of that
plain, and made it the capital of the coastal district. This hill and
citadel, at which Hannibal had halted a hundred years before, preserved
as a bishopric for thirteen hundred years a memory of the Roman order.
Constantine formed its diocese, rebuilt it, gave it his mother’s name of
Helena. The sea by which it lived has withdrawn from it. It has sunk to
be a little country town, “Elne.” Roscino which lay also upon the coast
march of Hannibal, has sunk to something smaller still, yet, by some
accident, gave the province, in the dark ages, its name of Roussillon
which it still retains. These two towns, the fruitful plain about them,
the Port of Venus (which is now Port Vendres), formed the municipal
structure of this district, the last corner of the great province whose
headship lay at Narbonne. Its nominal boundaries included all the vale
of the Tet; it extended as far as now extends the Catalan language, and
was bounded, as that is bounded, by the great form of the Carlitte and
its high lakes and snows. All between that mountain and the sea, all the
eastern decline of the range and the slope north of it, was ancient land,
and had been ploughed and held and walled by men of the Mediterranean
civilization long before Rome inherited it.
With the much longer stretch that runs from the upper Ariège to the
Atlantic it was very different. This was of what Rome made, not of what
Rome inherited. Before the coming of Roman government it was barbarous,
and the many tribes or petty states, whose number various guesses of
antiquity record (they were perhaps as numerous in their subdivision as
the valleys), stand in three main groups when first the civilization to
the east of them began to record their existence: these three were first
the Convenæ, south of Toulouse, and all about the upper waters of the
Garonne. Next to these came the Auscians, and finally, over the Basque
end of the hills towards the ocean, was the seat of the Tarbelli.
The whole point of view of antiquity differed from ours in speaking of
such tribes, nor is it easy to pick out from the scraps of observation
that have come down to us the kind of information that we want. Sometimes
a name survives, sometimes it does not; sometimes we get a hint of a
variety of race, most often we lack it. It is the very meagreness and
eccentricity of the information upon a barbarous race and custom which
affords such opportunities to our dons for those forms of speculation
which they love to put forward as dogma, the most absurd example of
which, perhaps, is the interpretation and enlargement of Tacitus’
“Germania.” It is therefore exceedingly difficult to know of what
kind were these people beyond the old Roman pale. We do not know what
language they spoke. We only know that, like other Gallic communities,
they centred round fortified places, that their pacification was easy,
and that, like everything else in Western Europe, they were of an
unchangeable kind.
The whole district between the Garonne and the Pyrenees came to be
called, during the first four centuries of our era, “The Nine Peoples.”
The Convenæ are early noted to have attached to them upon their right and
upon their left, to east and to west, the Consevanni and the Bigerriones.
The first of these were (to follow the high authority of Duchesne)
organized as early as the first century; what is now St. Lizier was their
old capital and later their bishopric, which takes its present name from
Glycerius, a saint of the sixth century. They held all those hills of
which St. Girons close by is now the centre. The Bigerriones are not
heard of until the mention of them in the Notitia of the fourth century.
They must have held Bigorre, and the three valleys which I have called
the valleys of Tarbes. Tarbes—then Turba—was their capital, and was and
is their bishopric.
The Auscians do not concern us. They and the three groups into which
they are later distinguished held the western plains and foot hills.
The Tarbelli held both the foot hills and the mountains of the
west; their capital was at Dax. They also split into, or are later
recognized as three separate groups, making up with the two other
sets of three “The Nine Peoples,” under which title all this country
below the Pyrenees became permanently known. But of the three only
the _Civitas Benarnensium_, whence we get the name Béarn, and the
_Civitas Elloronensium_, with its capital at Iloro, which has become
Oloron, concern us. The capital and soon the bishopric of the _Civitas
Benarnensium_ was at Lescar, as far as we can make out, and Lescar
bore the chief sanctity in Béarn until that country was swept by the
Reformation. The sovereigns of Béarn were buried there, even the
Protestant sovereigns, and it remained a bishopric, whose bishop was the
President of the Parliament of Béarn, until the Revolution; but it was
the Reformation which destroyed its original character of a capital.
We have, therefore with the earliest ages of our civilization, five
peoples holding the northern Pyrenees, the Consevanni, the Convenæ, the
people of Bigorre, the Béarnese, and the Elloronians.
It is remarkable that in such a list, our Roman originators and their
geographers overlooked the Basques. The category ends precisely at the
present limit of the Basque tongue. For the Val d’Aspe, of which Oloron
is the town, is the first French-speaking valley. Why it is that we hear
nothing of the Basques it is difficult to say, especially as the second
of the great Roman military roads went right through their country.
Bayonne, which is the Basque’s town of the plains on the north, is heard
of in the fifth century. It has a garrison; but no bishopric until the
tenth. Pamplona, which is their town on the south, was known before the
beginnings of our Christian history. But the Basques themselves are not
known to us from the Romans. The name of the Consevanni survives locally.
The country round St. Girons is still all one country-side and called
the “Conserans.” Of the Convenæ we have a pleasant legend in St. Jerome
telling how Pompey got together all the brigands of the mountains, drove
them northward hither, and forced them into a garrison (a stronghold
which, like Lyons and the rest, was one of the many “Lugdunums”). It was
destroyed early in the dark ages, and later revived by St. Bertrand,
a little way off in his Episcopal town. Their name survives in the
district of Comminges. The Béarnese name of course survives and so does
the Bigorrean, while the Elloronean, though no longer the title of a
district, is preserved in the town name of Oloron.
All this country, not only that of the five tribes along the mountains,
but the whole territory occupied by the nine peoples (who afterwards
became twelve), lay in a profound peace under Roman rule, and we may
be certain of its increasing wealth throughout the first four great
formative centuries of our era.
The advance of Rome upon the Spanish side was of a very different kind.
Rome, after the Carthaginian wars, inherited broad belts of civilized
and half civilized land. All the Mediterranean slope below the mouth of
the Ebro, and a belt quite three days’ marches wide inland to the north
of that river, was full of ancient populated towns, alive with the full
civilization common to every shore of the inland sea. So, we may be
certain, were the broad plains of the south where the most complete and
earliest absorption of the Celt-Iberian in Roman speech and ideas took
place. The advance into the north-west and therefore along the Pyrenees
covered more than a century of strict and perpetual warfare, which was
intermixed by the civil wars of the Roman commanders. The extremities of
the Asturias were reached in the century before the birth of our Lord,
but the advance was not, as upon the north, a rapid expansion beyond the
old boundaries. It took the form of siege after siege and battle after
battle, in which those numerous and crushing defeats, which Rome (like
every truly military power) reckoned to be a necessary part of history,
interrupted the slow progress of her law. The Celt-Iberian towns were
walled and strong; their resistance was painful and tenacious; there was
no sudden illumination of a willing people by a new culture, such as had
taken place in Gaul, rather was northern Spain kneaded by generations of
warfare into the stuff of the Empire.
When the work was accomplished, it was complete throughout the
Peninsula; and though the silent strength of the Basques prevented the
Roman language from invading their valleys, the administration of the
whole territory south of the Pyrenees must have been as exact and as
bureaucratic as that to the north of it. There was, however, this great
difference due to local topography between the Spanish and the French
hills, that the municipalities upon which Rome stretched her power, as
upon pegs, were less common, were farther apart, and approached less
nearly to the central ridge upon the southern than upon the northern
side. What you see to-day south of the Pyrenees is what you might have
seen at any time in the last 2000 years—a very few scattered towns,
still the centres of government, and all the rest rare isolated villages
living their own life, free from the criminal, and, by a regular
payment of small taxes, half independent of the civil law. Alone of the
true mountain sites, Jaca in the middle, Pamplona and Urgel at either
extremity, were bishoprics. Huesca, St. Laurence’s town, a fourth centre,
is in the plains. For the rest the confused storm of hills ending in
those parallel ranges, pushed right out on to the burnt flats of the
Ebro, forbade the establishment of a municipal civilization.
Upon all this land to the north and to the south of the mountains came,
after five hundred years of a high civilization, the slow decline of
culture, and the infiltration of the barbarians. In a sense the nominal
divisions between the barbaric kingdoms has its importance, for they
help us to understand changes of dynasty and of custom. But they were of
no political effect. The mass of the people knew little of the chance
soldiers who, with their mixed retinues of Roman, Breton, German, Slav,
and the rest—some able, some not able to read the letters of Rome—sat in
the old seats of office, issued their writs through the still surviving
Roman Bureaucracy and from palaces which were but those of decayed Roman
governors.
For the greater part of Western Europe, and especially of Gaul, this
process of decay was one into which Europe slowly dipped as into a bath
of sleep, and out of which it rose more rapidly through the energy of the
Crusades and of the renewed Pontificate into the splendour of the Middle
Ages. But the Pyrenees suffered in this matter a peculiar fate. When
Spain was overrun by the Mohammedan, and when in the first generation
of the eighth century the Asiatic with his alien creed and morals had
even swept for a moment into Gaul, the Pyrenees became a march: at
first the rampart, later, when they were fully held, the bastion of our
civilization against its chief peril. It is this episode by which the
Pyrenees became the military base of the advance against Islam—an episode
covering the whole life of Charlemagne and after him the ninth, tenth,
and eleventh centuries—which gives them their legendary atmosphere and
fills all their names with romance.
The northern slope, during the long business by which Gaul became itself
again, was but a remote border province. The new life of Gaul, after
the shock which had so nearly destroyed Europe was over, sprang from
Paris. The influence of Paris radiating upon every side built up again
accuracy of knowledge, unity of government, and general law. To this
influence the Pyrenees seemed the most remote of boundaries. The valleys
were little affected by the growth of the French Monarchy; they remained
for centuries broken into a maze of half-republican customs, of tiny
independent lordships, guarded and menaced by separate and jealous walled
municipalities upon the plains—all of this vaguely and slowly coalesced
into larger districts, doubtful of their sovereignty and perpetually
struggling upon their boundaries and their sub-boundaries.
In this development nothing was more striking than the way in which this
remote border at first looked rather to the south, where the interest of
religious war was ever present, than to the north, whence government was
slowly coming towards it. The French Pyrenees fought and felt with the
whole range, not with the plains. Jaca in the worst time, when it was
the only mountain bishopric free from the Mohammedan, counselled with
and was perhaps suffragan to Eauze. Urgel sat in the provincial Synod of
Narbonne. As the success of the Reconquista pushed the noise of crusade
further and further from the range, the northern valleys looked more
and more towards their northern towns. Their nominal allegiances grew
stricter—as of Foix to Toulouse—and every French bishopric was bound
more and more to its northern metropolitan, the Spanish sees to the new
metropolitans of the Ebro.
At last an issue was joined between Northern and Southern France of the
first moment to the unity of Gaul itself and of all Christendom. The
Crusades, the knowledge of the East, the awakening of the intelligence
and of its appetites, had bred throughout the wealthy towns of what had
been from the beginning Roman land, a desire to be rid of the restraints
of fixed religion. The South of France began to move towards its pagan
past. It was a movement which had already had its strange echo in the
north, a movement which in England had only been pulled up at the last
moment by the martyrdom of St. Thomas. Here in Gaul, in the sunlight,
and backed by so much gold, the rational and sensual revolt became a
larger thing, and when various sources of disruption, speculation,
and achievement had met in one stream, it was commonly called the
_Albigensian_ movement. The issue was decided, after heavy fighting, in
the early thirteenth century, and the victory was with the cause of the
unity of Europe. Toulouse (the true centre of the storm) and its lord
were conquered. Northern barons swept down, held no small part of the
southern land, and from that time onward the French Pyrenees are normally
dependent on Paris.
Two exceptions survived, the straddle of the Basque across the chain and
the straddle of the Catalan. The Basque had his country of Navarre upon
either side of the chain; with it went Béarn, and these were independent
of the French crown. The Catalan, able to traverse the chain by the flat
floor of the Cerdagne, preserved the unity of his mountain province, and
the Roussillon counted with Spain. Apart from this easy passage into the
Roussillon from the south, by way of the Cerdagne, the isolation of the
Roussillon was the more easily accomplished from the long spur of the
Corbieres, which runs north and east towards the sea and cuts off from
France the wealthy plain of which Elne had once been, Perpignan had later
become, the capital.
This arrangement endured, in name at least, until the seventeenth
century. The last heir of Navarre was also the heir nearest to the French
throne at the close of the religious wars, and as Henry IV of France he
united the two crowns. A man who, as a boy, might have rejoiced at that
union, could have lived to see, under Mazarin, the signing of the Treaty
of the Pyrenees, which gave the Roussillon also to the French Crown. The
date of this final arrangement coincided with what is ironically called
“The Restoration” in England: this date, which definitely closed the
power of the English Monarchy, and substituted for it the power of a
wealthy oligarchic class, coincides throughout Europe with the struggle
between absolute central government for the equal service of all, and
local aristocratic custom. In England the latter conquered; in Spain and
France the debate was decided in favour of the former.
Such centralized governments could but further define and insist upon
a new boundary, and from that time onward, for 250 years that is, the
Pyrenees have been once more as they were under the clear administration
of Rome, a fixed political boundary; and, save certain exceptions
that will be mentioned later, everything north of the chain has been
administered from Paris, and has slowly accepted, side by side with
the local tongue, the tongue of Northern France and the habit of a
centralized French government.
South of the chain the process by which Christendom recrystallized out of
the flux of the dark ages, followed a different course; it was a process
to which Spain owes all her national characteristics, for out of the
mountains a Spanish nation was formed, and from its various communities,
as from roots, the Catholic kingships grew southward until they once more
reached Gibraltar.
To understand this process, it is necessary to consider factors absent in
the topography of the Gaulish plains, and especially the factor of that
unconquerable tangle of mountains which occupies all the north-western
triangle of the Peninsula.
The ocean boundaries of the Iberian quadrilateral are nearly square to
the points of the compass. It is not so with the internal divisions that
mark off its central part. Here the edges of the high and arid plateaux,
the deep trenches of the rivers, the mountain ranges, the boundaries
of the plains at their feet, run slantways from north-east to the
south-west. This slant determined the boundaries of Mohammedan expansion,
while the Asiatics and Africans still retained the energy to advance;
it determined the successive frontiers of the Reconquest, as our race
slowly ousted the invader and reached at last the sea-coast of Granada.
The Arab and the Moor were masters of Narbonne and all the Roussillon on
the east, when, on the west, they could not cross the mouth of the Mulio
a hundred miles to the south. They were at Jaca within a day’s march of
the watershed along the Roman Road, when, to the immediate west of it,
they could not hold Fuente; they could not even reach Pamplona, though
that western town is two marches at least from the main crest. Toledo was
reconquered a generation before Saragossa, though Saragossa is by nearly
two degrees more northerly, because Toledo was west of Saragossa. The
last Mohammedan kingdom was crowded, after the thirteenth century, into
the extreme south-east, as the surviving remnant of the free Europeans of
the Peninsula had been crowded into the extreme north-west in the eighth.