With this short narration, a complete dossier devoted to this people ends, within a chapter describing the ethnic groups and the areas through which the Camino de Santiago passes from Tours to Compostela.
In 1137, Aimeric Picaud included in the fifth volume of the Calixtinus Codex, the well-known Pilgrim’s Guide, a text devoted to explaining the origin of the Basques in historical terms. With this short narration, a complete dossier devoted to this people ends, within a chapter describing the ethnic groups and the areas through which the Camino de Santiago passes from Tours to Compostela.
Something tells us that Aimeric had a special interest in the subject when we see that the space devoted to the Basques in this chapter occupies three quarters of the total, leaving the meager remainder for all other peoples. But more than this disproportionality is the content of a report itself surprising, where extremely valuable linguistic and anthropological notes appear along with inconsiderate value judgments and insults of the worst note.
This is the immediate context of a story presented as an oral tradition whose express function is to explain the similarities between the Basques and the Irish as the fruit of a phylogenetic relationship.
His argument, in summary, tells of how Julius Caesar, to pay tribute to the peoples of Hispania, sent Irish mercenaries there with orders to exterminate the men and take their wives and land. Once disembarked, they occupy an area characterized by four terms, Bayonne, Oca, Zaragoza and Barcelona. The mercenaries are defeated and forced by the Castilians to retreat behind the Montes de Oca, to an area largely coterminous with the Vasconia of the 12th century, where they succeed in carrying out the plan for which they were sent, together with the native women a new city with a mixed character, the Basque.
At first glance, everything in this story is unique and shocking, so it’s not surprising that it hasn’t been taken into account, not as a source of real events, but not even as an echo of an existing tradition.
Among the components of his argument are, however, the main elements of the first stories of the origin of the rule of Biscay – these are at least accepted as local traditions – written in the 14th and 15th centuries by the Count of Barcelos and Lope García de salazar . These coinciding plot elements are encoded in the will to submit to an indigenous people by a foreign power; the resistance and its eventual victory; and the birth of a mixed manorial line in which a native component is mixed with a British one.
What changes in Aimeric’s story from the stories of Barcelos and Salazar and gives it a totally different aspect, on the one hand, is the historical setting, Roman in the former, medieval in the latter. On the other hand, the fact that the Basques, or their ancestors, do not play the role of the attacked native in this story, but that of the foreign invader. Finally, Aimeric refers to the birth of an entire city, while Barcelos and Salazar limit themselves to the foundation of a stately lineage.
Compared to the tales of Barcelos and Salazar, whose even minor variations seem to respond to a single tradition, Aimeric’s, much more complex, is not exactly a verbatim piece of local folklore, but a personal composition, also aimed at a negative propaganda. The analysis of the themes mixed in it reveals several surprises in terms of origin:
The theme of a war, developed on the borders of the Montes de Oca and which has the Castilians as anachronistic (in a Roman setting!) winners, is the adaptation of a tradition that arose in Castile itself in the context of wars with which Navarre was faced. in the 11th and 12th centuries, and this also has its late echoes in the Poema de Fernán González.
In it, the Montes de Oca are presented as one of the ancestral borders of the county of Castilla. This is incorrect, as the boundary between Castile and Navarre was not established there until the 11th century.
In addition, the Poema de Fernán González itself tells of two battles between Castilians and Navarrezen (Valpierre and Era Degollada), won by the former, which never took place. Among other things, because in the time of Count Fernán González, relations between Castile and Navarre were always friendly.
As in the case of the Montes de Oca, these are minstrel inventions made in the 1950s. XI or XII, when an almost permanent conflict between Castile and Navarre is verified, and that they have been transferred to earlier situations of their historical present.
The theme of a quadrangular region as the first place where the Basque ancestors settled seems to be of Basque origin. We also find it, under the name of Carpentania, mixed with the myth of Túbal, the grandson of Noah and the first settler of Spain after the flood, according to Jiménez de Rada and Alfonso X. This is said to have been made up in Navarre in the XI-XII century, and have as precedent the square area of the Spanoguascones, according to the Ravenate Cosmography (7th century), and even the description of Aquitaine as a parallelogram in Strabo’s Geography (1st century).
Faced with these traditional themes, the questions of the Basque-Irish kinship and the contrast between pure and mestizo peoples are Aimeric’s own speculations, or common in the intellectual and courtly circles (Anglo-Franco-Norman) in which he moved, and which he shared with Godfrey of Monmouth. This author, the famous creator of the Arthurian question, dealt with both theories in his Historia Regum Britanniae, and these are not his only coincidences with Aimeric. A strict contemporary of his, there are plenty of signs of a literary and even personal closeness between the two.
All these themes present in Aimeric’s story, the result of scientific or popular fabrication, have nothing historical about them. Nevertheless, they place our author in a prominent position among those responsible for telling the origin of the Basques, since two centuries before he already collected the essential elements of the traditions accepted as his own – that is, the legends from the Biscayan rule of Barcelos (14th century) and Salazar (15th century), accepted by Basque historiography until the 15th century. XIX–.
However, one last theme remains, the theme that represents the Basque ancestors as foreign soldiers in the service of Rome. This extreme, unacceptable in the light of the assumption that the Basque people are a people who have been settled in the region since the Neolithic, even since the Paleolithic, is nevertheless perfectly consistent with the alternative theory of the late vasconization.
This theory defends that the Basques (that is, the Basque speakers) came to the Spanish Vasconia (Basque Country + Navarre) from Aquitaine, in Roman times and precisely by the Romans. With the collapse of the empire, they would have taken control of the region.
This hypothesis, recently revived based mainly on linguistic and archaeological data and analysis, agrees with Aimeric that the first arrival of Basques in the region was at the hands of Rome as an integral part of its armies.
This article was published in The Conversation
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
