Part 5

The lack of moisture on the central Spanish slope, by the way, is not a little aided by the curious formation of the frontier of Navarre, and the separation between the Basques and the Aragonese; this consists in a long ridge of high land, the upper part of which is known as the Sierra Longa, which runs south and a little west from the Pic d’Anie. The effect of this lack of moisture and excess of heat upon the central Spanish side is not only felt on the heights of the mountain, but also and more particularly when one approaches the Plains. These in France are northern in type, full of greenery, and amply watered. In Spain, on the contrary, they are quite arid, and if one comes in to Huesca by train upon a September evening, and looks out the next morning over the flats that run up to the Sierra de Guara, one has all the impressions of a desert, though these lands are heavy corn-bearing lands in the summer.

Finally, the third, or eastern, section of the hills is Mediterranean in character throughout. The Canigou is much more heavily watered than the Sierra del Cadi, its corresponding Spanish height. But the olives on the lower slopes, the carpet of vineyards on the flats, the presence everywhere of bright insects, the quality of the light and the aridity of everything which does not happen to be planted with trees, give to this eastern corner of the Pyrenees the same aspect that you may notice on the Mediterranean hills of Southern France, Liguria, or Algeria or the Balearic Islands, for all these landscapes are of one kind, and binding them all together is not only their burnt red look, but also that tideless intense blue of the Mediterranean, the hot white towns, and everywhere the lateen sail upon the coasts.

These differences of climate also determine the seasons in which the mountains may best be visited, for the Basque district is at your service (especially in its western part) from the spring to the late autumn of the year; the central valleys can be everywhere travelled in only from late June to mid-September; the eastern end, again, from the Segre and beyond it, is open to you from spring to autumn.

[Illustration]

II

THE POLITICAL CHARACTER OF THE PYRENEES

[Illustration]

The Political character of the Pyrenees corresponds to the Physical character which has been described. The high crest is the bond and division, from the beginning, between two societies which are connected by such common social habits as mountains impose—which therefore fall under similar local customs, which have a common jealousy of the civilized power on the plains below them, and which support each other in a tacit way against the stranger, yet which, from the beginning, have different governments and (especially in the high central part) deal with different corporate traditions—to the north the Béarnese, to the south Aragon. The easier passes to the west and the east of the chain permit a more or less homogeneous community to straddle across either end of the mountains, and to hold upon both slopes the sea roads that pass along the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The people thus astraddle of the eastern end have come to be called the _Catalans_. That astraddle of the western, a highly distinct group of men with language, traditions, and physical characteristics wholly their own, has always been known by some title closely resembling their modern name of _Basques_.

The foundation, therefore, upon which Pyrenean History is built, or (to use another metaphor), the germ from which it has developed and which explains its course, is a tripartite division of the inhabitants, corresponding, as I shall presently show, to the physical features of the chain: an eastern or Catalan, a western or Basque, and a central group whose characteristic it is to subdivide according to the deep valleys into which it is separated, but which falls into two main societies, the one north of the chain which becomes the group of French counties whose typical government is Béarn, the other south of the chain, which assumes at last for its title “The Kingdom of Aragon.”

The first matter to be noticed with regard to this tripartite division is the exactitude of its boundaries. One might imagine that the language, the habits, and the clear characteristics of any group would merge easily into those of its neighbours upon either side. This is not the case. The Basque type—much the most particular—ceases abruptly upon the watershed between the Gave d’Oloron and the Gave d’Aspe to the north of the range, upon the watershed between the Veral and the Esca to the south of it. The Catalans, with a dialect, mind, and dress wholly their own, are found to the _north_ from the sea up to the Col de Puymorens, and everywhere east of the Carlitte mountains; in the Ariège valley and just over these heights, and on the further side of that Col, they are changed. To the _south_ of the range they extend everywhere from the sea to the valley of the Ribagorza. Cross westward from that Catalan valley to the Esera. There, after hours of scrambling, down by the rocks and deserted tarns, you may towards evening find a man; that man will show the slow gestures, the silence, and the elaborate courtesy of Aragon.

The mountain ridges which divide these various peoples are sufficient to mark their boundaries; but they do not suffice to explain why the Catalan, the Basque, the Aragonese, the Béarnais should cease suddenly here or there. True, the high lateral ridges which are so striking a peculiarity of the Pyrenees form barriers with difficulty passed, but these barriers are found just as high and just as precipitous and savage between two valleys of the same speech and nation as between two of different allegiance. Thus the wild jumble of mountains, “the Enchanted Range,” cuts off the Catalans of Esterri from the Catalans of the Ribagorzana. To pass them is something of a feat for anyone not of these hills—for much of the year they are closed to the native inhabitants. Their passage is hardly more of a task or more precipitous than the passage from Aragonese Venasque to Aragonese Bielsa, or from Béarnais Gabas, in the Val d’Ossau, to Béarnais Urdos, in the Val d’Aspe.

An explanation of the unity which rules over each group, Basque, Central and Catalan, can only be given by referring each to the plains at the mouths of the valleys. It is the towns at the entry of these plains that form the markets and rallying places of the mountaineers and that determine their groupings. Oloron is the link between the two Béarnais valleys I have mentioned. Urgel binds Catalan Andorra to Catalan Esterri. Why, however, the groups should lie exactly where they do it is impossible to determine, for no records reach beyond the Romans. All we can say is that the Pic d’Anie, the first high peak eastward from the Mediterranean, forms the boundary stone of the Basques, as it does the chief physical mark dividing the high central ridge from the easier western passes; that the tangle of difficult and impossible peaks just eastward of the Maladetta are the boundary of Catalan south of the range, the similar but less abrupt tangle of the Carlitte, their boundary upon the north. How these nations arose, whence they wandered, whether their differentiation has arisen upon the spot out of an earlier homogeneity or is due to the conflict of invaders—of all this we know nothing.

The place names of the Pyrenees, like those of all Spain, and half Gascony, do indeed afford a curious speculation which arises from the high proportion of names that are certainly _Basque_, though out of Basque territory. Of this language I shall write later: for my present purpose the point I would desire the reader to note is the sharp contrast which exists between that idiom and the idioms around it. There is no mistaking a Basque word, and yet these are found in all the Pyrenean range and to the north and south of them in a hundred place names, attached to hills, rivers and towns where Basque has been unknown throughout all recorded history. It is even plausibly suggested that the Latin “Vascones,” the French “Gascon” is equivalent to “Basque,” and the late Mr. York Powell, the Regius Professor of History at Oxford, would say in speaking upon this matter that “Gascon was Latin spoken by Basques.” He possessed that type of education, rare or unknown in our universities, which made him capable of individual judgment in departments of living knowledge where his colleagues could but repeat words taught them from a book. This quality reposed upon a wide acquaintance with all matters of European interest. His diverse reading and considerable travel enabled him to balance human evidence in a way hopeless to his less fortunate neighbours in the University, and his conclusion on this important detail of history has always recurred to me when I have examined some new point in the early history of these mountains. There must, however, be set against the general conclusion that the Basques are the remnant of a people once universal from the Garonne to the Pyrenees, and throughout the Iberian Peninsula, the fact that they present a marked physical type utterly distinct from others upon every side. That a race of such a character, vigorous, attached to the soil, in no way nomadic, should have abandoned a large territory is difficult to believe; moreover, there is no case in all the recorded history of Western Europe of one people ousting another, and the process is manifestly physically impossible, save among nomads. Jews or Arabs could propagate and even believe such a theory. To Europeans it is laughable: the peasants and cities of Europe never have been, nor ever can be, largely displaced.

All we know is that these place names exist throughout Spain and all over the Pyrenees, and that the million or so who speak the language whence such names are derived now occupy a tiny corner only of the vast territory over which those names are spread. The rest is guesswork.

Ignorant as we are of the origin of the differentiation between Basque, 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.