The Pyrenees

by Hilaire Belloc

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.