The Pyrenees

by Hilaire Belloc

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.