The Pyrenees

by Hilaire Belloc

When the work was accomplished, it was complete throughout the Peninsula; and though the silent strength of the Basques prevented the Roman language from invading their valleys, the administration of the whole territory south of the Pyrenees must have been as exact and as bureaucratic as that to the north of it. There was, however, this great difference due to local topography between the Spanish and the French hills, that the municipalities upon which Rome stretched her power, as upon pegs, were less common, were farther apart, and approached less nearly to the central ridge upon the southern than upon the northern side. What you see to-day south of the Pyrenees is what you might have seen at any time in the last 2000 years—a very few scattered towns, still the centres of government, and all the rest rare isolated villages living their own life, free from the criminal, and, by a regular payment of small taxes, half independent of the civil law. Alone of the true mountain sites, Jaca in the middle, Pamplona and Urgel at either extremity, were bishoprics. Huesca, St. Laurence’s town, a fourth centre, is in the plains. For the rest the confused storm of hills ending in those parallel ranges, pushed right out on to the burnt flats of the Ebro, forbade the establishment of a municipal civilization.

Upon all this land to the north and to the south of the mountains came, after five hundred years of a high civilization, the slow decline of culture, and the infiltration of the barbarians. In a sense the nominal divisions between the barbaric kingdoms has its importance, for they help us to understand changes of dynasty and of custom. But they were of no political effect. The mass of the people knew little of the chance soldiers who, with their mixed retinues of Roman, Breton, German, Slav, and the rest—some able, some not able to read the letters of Rome—sat in the old seats of office, issued their writs through the still surviving Roman Bureaucracy and from palaces which were but those of decayed Roman governors.

For the greater part of Western Europe, and especially of Gaul, this process of decay was one into which Europe slowly dipped as into a bath of sleep, and out of which it rose more rapidly through the energy of the Crusades and of the renewed Pontificate into the splendour of the Middle Ages. But the Pyrenees suffered in this matter a peculiar fate. When Spain was overrun by the Mohammedan, and when in the first generation of the eighth century the Asiatic with his alien creed and morals had even swept for a moment into Gaul, the Pyrenees became a march: at first the rampart, later, when they were fully held, the bastion of our civilization against its chief peril. It is this episode by which the Pyrenees became the military base of the advance against Islam—an episode covering the whole life of Charlemagne and after him the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries—which gives them their legendary atmosphere and fills all their names with romance.

The northern slope, during the long business by which Gaul became itself again, was but a remote border province. The new life of Gaul, after the shock which had so nearly destroyed Europe was over, sprang from Paris. The influence of Paris radiating upon every side built up again accuracy of knowledge, unity of government, and general law. To this influence the Pyrenees seemed the most remote of boundaries. The valleys were little affected by the growth of the French Monarchy; they remained for centuries broken into a maze of half-republican customs, of tiny independent lordships, guarded and menaced by separate and jealous walled municipalities upon the plains—all of this vaguely and slowly coalesced into larger districts, doubtful of their sovereignty and perpetually struggling upon their boundaries and their sub-boundaries.

In this development nothing was more striking than the way in which this remote border at first looked rather to the south, where the interest of religious war was ever present, than to the north, whence government was slowly coming towards it. The French Pyrenees fought and felt with the whole range, not with the plains. Jaca in the worst time, when it was the only mountain bishopric free from the Mohammedan, counselled with and was perhaps suffragan to Eauze. Urgel sat in the provincial Synod of Narbonne. As the success of the Reconquista pushed the noise of crusade further and further from the range, the northern valleys looked more and more towards their northern towns. Their nominal allegiances grew stricter—as of Foix to Toulouse—and every French bishopric was bound more and more to its northern metropolitan, the Spanish sees to the new metropolitans of the Ebro.

At last an issue was joined between Northern and Southern France of the first moment to the unity of Gaul itself and of all Christendom. The Crusades, the knowledge of the East, the awakening of the intelligence and of its appetites, had bred throughout the wealthy towns of what had been from the beginning Roman land, a desire to be rid of the restraints of fixed religion. The South of France began to move towards its pagan past. It was a movement which had already had its strange echo in the north, a movement which in England had only been pulled up at the last moment by the martyrdom of St. Thomas. Here in Gaul, in the sunlight, and backed by so much gold, the rational and sensual revolt became a larger thing, and when various sources of disruption, speculation, and achievement had met in one stream, it was commonly called the Albigensian movement. The issue was decided, after heavy fighting, in the early thirteenth century, and the victory was with the cause of the unity of Europe. Toulouse (the true centre of the storm) and its lord were conquered. Northern barons swept down, held no small part of the southern land, and from that time onward the French Pyrenees are normally dependent on Paris.

Two exceptions survived, the straddle of the Basque across the chain and the straddle of the Catalan. The Basque had his country of Navarre upon either side of the chain; with it went Béarn, and these were independent of the French crown. The Catalan, able to traverse the chain by the flat floor of the Cerdagne, preserved the unity of his mountain province, and the Roussillon counted with Spain. Apart from this easy passage into the Roussillon from the south, by way of the Cerdagne, the isolation of the Roussillon was the more easily accomplished from the long spur of the Corbieres, which runs north and east towards the sea and cuts off from France the wealthy plain of which Elne had once been, Perpignan had later become, the capital.

This arrangement endured, in name at least, until the seventeenth century. The last heir of Navarre was also the heir nearest to the French throne at the close of the religious wars, and as Henry IV of France he united the two crowns. A man who, as a boy, might have rejoiced at that union, could have lived to see, under Mazarin, the signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, which gave the Roussillon also to the French Crown. The date of this final arrangement coincided with what is ironically called “The Restoration” in England: this date, which definitely closed the power of the English Monarchy, and substituted for it the power of a wealthy oligarchic class, coincides throughout Europe with the struggle between absolute central government for the equal service of all, and local aristocratic custom. In England the latter conquered; in Spain and France the debate was decided in favour of the former.

Such centralized governments could but further define and insist upon a new boundary, and from that time onward, for 250 years that is, the Pyrenees have been once more as they were under the clear administration of Rome, a fixed political boundary; and, save certain exceptions that will be mentioned later, everything north of the chain has been administered from Paris, and has slowly accepted, side by side with the local tongue, the tongue of Northern France and the habit of a centralized French government.

South of the chain the process by which Christendom recrystallized out of the flux of the dark ages, followed a different course; it was a process to which Spain owes all her national characteristics, for out of the mountains a Spanish nation was formed, and from its various communities, as from roots, the Catholic kingships grew southward until they once more reached Gibraltar.