Basque History of the World Read online

  Once the Basques turned to Christianity, they became, and have remained, the most devout Catholics in Europe. But because Basques keep their traditions, these devout Catholics have many strange practices, symbols, and beliefs. Basques have had a persistent belief in the existence of jentillak, gentiles, non-Christians who wander the woods and remote rural areas with terrifying pre-Christian magical powers. Some rural Basques still believe that an ax stored in the house with the blade up protects the house from lightning. Bread blessed on Saint Agatha Day is believed to protect against fire, and bread from Saint Blaise Day guards against floods. If this bread or blessed salt is fed to animals, these creatures will protect the house.

  IN THE EARLY YEARS of Christianity, hermitism was a common phenomenon, not only in the Basque region but throughout northern Iberia. Devout men lived harsh, ascetic existences alone in mountain huts. In the year 800, one such hermit in the northwestern Galicia region of Iberia saw a shaft of brilliant light. Following this beam, he came upon a Roman cemetery. Under the shaft of light he found a small mausoleum concealed by overgrown vines, weeds, and shrubs. Since beams of celestial light don’t lead to just anyone’s grave, he concluded that this must have been the burial place of Saint James, Santiago, brother of John the Divine. The cemetery became known as Campus Stellae, the star field, and later Compostela.

  Silkscreen with relief by Eduardo Chillida for Amnesty International. Note the use of a circle with a line through it, a reference to the ancient Basque symbol.

  According to legend, James, one of the first disciples chosen by Jesus, after the crucifixion went off to a distant land, sometimes specified as Iberia, to find converts. Having failed, he returned to Jerusalem, where he was beheaded by Herod, who refused to allow his burial. Christians gathered up his remains at night, placing them in a marble sepulchre, which they sent to sea aboard an unmanned boat. According to early Christian legend, the ship was guided by an angel to the kingdom of the Asturians, which is an area between Basqueland and Galicia.

  The Church confirmed the hermit’s finding in Galicia and had a church built over the spot. As the legend grew, an outbreak of miracles and visions was reported from Compostela. Sometimes Saint James was portrayed as a pilgrim and sometimes as a Moor-slaying knight. It was the age of Moor slaying, and many of the miracles and legends had to do with the triumph of Christianity over Islam. Much evidence even suggests that the French had fabricated the legends about Santiago, or his body, going off to Galicia, because they wanted to rally Christendom to defend northern Spain. One legend from the time claimed that Charlemagne himself, the great anti-Moorish warrior who died in 814, had found the body of Santiago in Galicia.

  Just as it had become a fashion to demonstrate faith by making the journey to Jerusalem, thereby asserting that it was a Christian and not a Muslim place, it became a fashion to make a pilgrimage to Christian-held Galicia in Moorish Iberia and to pray at the tomb of Saint James. After the Muslims seized the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in the late eleventh century and pilgrims stopped going to the Middle East, Santiago de Compostela became the leading Christian pilgrimage.

  Pilgrims came from throughout Europe, especially from France. Some did not go by choice but were ordered as penance for some blasphemy or crime. Affluent criminals would hire impoverished people to make the pilgrimage on their behalf.

  All of the European routes to Santiago passed through Basqueland. Some pilgrims crossed into Aragón and then traveled across Navarra, resting at the eighth-century monastery of Leyre, which means “eagerness to overcome” in Euskera. Today, seventh-century Gregorian chants are sung there seven times a day, before God alone or the occasional visitors, by exquisite voices selected from among the resident Benedictines. Other pilgrims took the coastal route from Labourd, crossing the mouth of the Bidasoa at Hendaye, to the cathedral town of Fuenterrabia across the bay and continuing along the coastlines of Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya. Still others crossed into Basse Navarre, resting at St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port before climbing through the narrow pass to Roncesvalles.

  Because scallops are abundant in Santiago, the scallop shell became their symbol, which is why scallops are known in French as coquilles Saint Jacques, Saint James shells. Even today, pilgrims are seen in St-Jean-Pied-de-Port with scallop shells on their backpacks, buying supplies before continuing into the mountains.

  Basse Navarre is very different from the pretty farmland of neighboring Labourd. It has a wild look with reddish ferns on the slopes and, on the crests, rough rock outcroppings like huge, gray jagged teeth. The last refuge, where pilgrims arrived to prepare for the crossing, was the walled town of St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port. In early morning light the pilgrims would leave the red stone gate traveling toward the steep green pastures that looked soft as chenille against the Pyrenees. The mountains in the morning seemed to form a colossal wall with gauzelike fog draped over the peaks. But there is a path through the wall from the little village of Arnéguy, up to Valcarlos where Charlemagne had waited for Roland, down again past little waterfalls and streams and up again to the heights of Ibañeta and then down once more to the pines of Roncesvalles, where in 1127 a resting home for pilgrims was built, a home which still stands today.

  Centuries of passing pilgrims brought Romanesque architecture to Basqueland with its huge scale and carvings and ornaments, depicting biblical lessons to instruct travelers. The pilgrimage also spread French ideas. Many French pilgrims settled in the region, and monasteries in the Spanish Basque provinces came to have more in common with those of France than those of the rest of Iberia. When the monastery of Leyre decided to build a new church, the design was taken from Limousin. Perhaps the ultimate expression of the growing French influence was in the thirteenth century, when the royal house of Navarra, devoid of heirs, turned to French families to continue the monarchy.

  Arnéguy in the early twentieth century. The small stone bridge is the border between France and Spain.

  Yet in spite of this seemingly considerable openness to the French, Aimeric de Picaud warned pilgrims that they would be poorly received by the Basques. This twelfth-century French monk—the same man who concluded that Basques were of Scottish descent because they wore skirts—wrote a five-volume work, probably with the backing of the influential Cluny monastery in Burgundy, collecting all the stories, legends, and miracles connected with Saint James and including practical information for traveling pilgrims. This work, the Liber Sancti Jacobi, which is still kept at the cathedral of Compostela, became widely known in medieval Europe as the Codex of Calixtus. The latter title comes from a story circulated by Aimeric de Picaud, which is today dismissed as a complete fabrication, that Pope Calixtus II sent the text for editorial comment to the patriarch of Jerusalem and the archbishop of Santiago. Approval of the text, according to Aimeric de Picaud, arrived in the form of a vision.

  Included in this divine text is a section on “the crimes of the bad innkeepers along the way of my apostle.” According to Aimeric, the Basques, and especially the Navarrese, were crude, spoke primitively, and were given to crime. The Codex describes them as “enemies of our French people. A Basque or Navarrese would do in a French man for a copper coin.” He recounted how pilgrims would find themselves surrounded by Basques demanding payment. If they refused, they would be stripped and robbed and sometimes, he claimed, killed.

  Aimeric made numerous references to wanton sexuality. “When the Navarrese get excited, the man shows the woman and the woman shows the man, that which they should keep concealed. The Navarrese fornicate shamelessly with animals. They say that a Navarrese keeps his mule and his mare chained up to keep others from enjoying them.”

  Aimeric de Picaud came from the Poitiers region and lived during the time of the Crusades, the Chanson de Roland, and considerable anti-Muslim frenzy. As pilgrims climbed through the pass to the heights of Ibañeta, now the famous site of Roland’s death, and down to the hospice at Roncesvalles, taking time to contemplate in the pine woods where the Basque ambushers once hid, a
n understandable confusion about Basques and Muslims may have translated into anti-Basque sentiment.

  In any event, no other record of the nature of Basque relationships with mules is to be found, and while a few stories of occasional unscrupulous innkeepers have been written, clearly the Codex exaggerated. Aimeric de Picaud himself may have had some bad experiences while traveling. Whatever the reason, no people have ever paid so dearly for negative coverage in a travel book. The Codex was widely circulated, and in 1179 the French Church called for the excommunication of “Basques and Navarrese, who practice such cruelties to Christians, laying waste like infidels, sparing neither elderly, orphans, widows, or children.” In that epoch, a comparison to infidels was the harshest condemnation.

  The Basques ever since have been chained to an enduring image as brutal, unfriendly, mercenary, and untrustworthy. The habit of distinguishing between “Christians” and Basques also endured.

  WHEN A PEOPLE of strange practices and bad reputation collides with an age of intolerance, disaster seems inevitable. The time of the Protestant Reformation, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was such a period.

  The Inquisition had been created in medieval Aragón to guard the purity of the Church. Less than twenty years before the final defeat of the Muslims, it was reorganized and brought to Castile. After the victory of the Reconquista, Isabella extended its authority to the Spanish Empire from Sicily through Latin America. Other countries also had inquisitions, papal courts of inquiry. But the Spanish Inquisition was different because it was not controlled by Rome. The inquisitor general was appointed by the king of Spain, confirmed by the pope, and left to act however he saw fit. He had his own secret police, his own ministry, La Suprema, and his own prisons, ominously known as las cárceles secretas, secret prison cells.

  All Inquisition officials and employees were sworn to secrecy, and all witnesses and accused were ordered to remain silent. The archives were closed. Not even the king could make inquiries about Inquisition proceedings except for financial matters, since the crown was owed a share of confiscated property. The accused, held incommunicado, vanished from sight for years with no explanation. Agents of the Inquisition were unpaid, but the coveted positions offered prestige, power, and privilege, including complete immunity from secular authority.

  The Inquisition began hunting for hidden Jews following a 1391 order to convert to Christianity. In 1492, Jews were given four months to leave lands that had been family homes for almost a millennium in some cases. “We order them by the end of July to leave all the kingdoms and fiefdoms and never return,” said the decree. After the mass expulsion, the primary preoccupation of the Inquisition was uncovering clandestine Jews and Muslims. The Muslims, hidden Moors, were called Convertis, Moriscos, or Moriscotes. The hidden Jews were called Tornidoros or Marranos—pigs.

  Some 300,000 people were expelled from Castile and Aragón. If they lived in western Castile, they fled to Portugal; from the south they went to Morocco; and from Aragón to Basque country. Basques on both sides of the border, being by then exemplary Catholics, cooperated, often with enthusiasm, in the hunt for Moriscos and Marranos.

  Unlike Spain, France allowed Jews, though their activities and living areas were severely restricted. But Convertis and Marranos, hidden Muslims and Jews from Spain, were illegal. Nevertheless, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a considerable population of Marranos from Portugal settled in French Basqueland, and the persistent accusation was that they engaged in contraband with Spain. In the late sixteenth century, French authorities were expressing great alarm over this discovery, even though smuggling had long been the stock-in-trade of the Basques without ever alarming anyone.

  A Portuguese named Farcian Vaez was arrested in Labourd for Judaism, and it was reported that two bags of counterfeit money were found on him. According to his confession, probably forced, not only was he Jewish, but “all the Portuguese who pass through St-Jean-de-Luz practice Judaism and buy merchandise to sell in Spain.” He said the merchandise was purchased with counterfeit money made in Flanders.

  In St.-Jean-de-Luz, the local clergy even suspected other priests, such as the Portuguese Father Antonio Leguel. Leguel was the only priest from whom his Portuguese community would receive the sacraments. He seemed an odd priest in that he never worked on Saturdays, and he was later exposed as a clandestine Jew. Local clergy knew to look for people who did not work on Saturdays or who made unleavened bread. Many Marranos made unleavened bread all year to avoid arousing suspicion at Passover time.

  The Tribunal of Logroño, the regional tribunal of the Inquisition responsible for Spanish Basqueland, expressed the same frustration as have most institutions that have tried to control Spanish Basqueland: They could not control the French side. The Inquisition harbored a particular suspicion of Basques because they straddled the border. In 1567, an inquisitor reported from San Sebastián that the Basques were too close to the French and even spoke their language. In 1609, Léon de Araníbar, the abbot of Urdax, near the Dancharia pass that leads from the mountains of Navarra across the border to the woods of St. Pée, complained that mule caravans from Bayonne and St.-Jean-de-Luz could pass right under monastery walls and travel as far as Pamplona without anyone stopping them to search for heretical books.

  The tribunal agreed that there was a problem with the area that was “under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Bayonne.” The tribunal explained, “The majority of the priests are French; and we cannot entrust the affairs of the Holy Office to them.”

  The Inquisition decided to plant its own spy in the St.-Jean-de-Luz Jewish community. Ironically, the French frequently and illogically complained that Marranos in their midst were spying for Spain. Now the Inquisition hired Marcos de Llumbre, a St.-Jean-de-Luz resident from San Sebastián, to pose as a Marrano and spy for Spain. But posing as a Jew posing as a Christian proved difficult, and the Jews of St.-Jean-de-Luz quickly saw through de Llumbre’s attempts to infiltrate their community.

  In 1602, yielding to popular pressure, the French king Henri IV ordered all Portuguese Jews out of Labourd in a month. A process of expulsion, town by town, began with Bayonne but was never effective since the Jews would just move to the next town. But Jews from Bayonne and St.-Jean-de-Luz began immigrating to Baltic cities with more open and accepting societies. Others resettled in other parts of France, including St Esprit, a neighborhood of Bayonne designated as a Jewish ghetto because, being on the opposite bank of the Adour, it was out of Basqueland and in the region of Landes.

  THE COUNTER-REFORMATION, so staunchly backed by the Jesuits, had ushered in the great age of persecution. The Council of Trent met in the Italian Alps between 1545 and 1563 and, recognizing that the Protestants were not going to come back to the Church without military force, defined the Catholic position. The council was supposed to usher in a reform of the Church, but only the most orthodox elements won the debates. Once the Church had redefined itself and irrevocably drawn the lines between Catholic and Protestant, the Christian world was found to be in an epidemic of heresy.

  Now there were not only the Jews and the Muslims to flush out, but the Protestants, who in turn were having their own heresy hunts in the north. And there were the Bohemians (Gypsies) and Cagots.

  Cagots were descendants of the Visigoths. The original Cagots may have been lepers, or perhaps just had a psoriasis-like skin disease. Outcasts in France, they were driven to the southwest, into Basqueland, and Cagot ghettos emerged in St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, by the nearby deep green valley of the Aldudes, and in the port of Ciboure, which was on the wrong side of the river in St.-Jean-de-Luz. Water touched by Cagots was considered contaminated, and they were barred from all trades involving food, including agriculture. They became noted for their carpentry.

  Until the early seventeenth century, despite their pariah status, Cagots were considered good Christians and were protected by the Church. But in 1609, Judge Pierre De Lancre, French Basqueland’s most rabid witch hunter, said at
his infamous St.-Jean-de-Luz witch trial that Cagots and Bohemians, both residing across the river in Ciboure, were consorting with the devil.

  “Wandering Bohemians are part-devils,” De Lancre said of Gypsies. “I say these nationless long-hairs are not Egyptian, nor from the Kingdom of Bohemia, and are born everywhere while passing through countries, in the fields and under a tree, and dance and juggle like at a witches’ sabbath.”

  No one who could be identified as distinct and different was safe in this age. It is inevitable that in such an era, the Church would also grow concerned about Basque heresy. In past times of intolerance, Basques had been lumped with other undesirable groups. In fourteenth-century Huesca, an area east of Navarra, an ordinance forbade the speaking of “Alavan, Basque, or Hebrew” in the market place. The Basques had accepted the persecution of Jews, Muslims, Lutherans, Gypsies, and Cagots. They should have been able to see that they would be next.

  BY THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, witchcraft should have seemed a ridiculously old-fashioned accusation. In 787, Charlemagne had outlawed the execution of witches and made it a capital crime to burn a witch. A tenth-century Church law, Canon Episcopi, demanded that priests preach against belief in witchcraft as superstition. By the fourteenth century, stories of witchcraft were widely dismissed among educated circles as a primitive belief of peasants.

  But by the late sixteenth century, the Canon Episcopi, which had been universal Church law, was being circumvented by the claim that society was faced with a new and more virulent form of witchcraft and therefore the old laws did not apply. Witches, poor rural women, were consorting with the devil just like the Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Gypsies, Lutherans, and Cagots.