Jaca has legends of its battle at the very beginning of the Independence, before Charlemagne had come to the rescue, and from all the valleys of the Sobrarbe, bands of men must have been perpetually volunteering for skirmishes down into the plains. Navarre was the natural leader of the movement, the largest and the most fertile belt of Christian land, but the little lordship upon the Aragon, fighting down south and east towards the Ebro, the western count of the Asturias fighting down south and west, cut off the advance of the Basques; and though Navarre in the period of birth and turmoil which is that of Gregory VII’s reform of the Papacy, of the establishment in England and in Sicily of Norman power, and of preparation for the Crusade, was the head of all the southern Pyrenees and called itself an “Empire,” it was blocked by the double line of advance, and the Basques, upon the foundation of whose tenacity and courage, as upon a pivot, the Reconquest had proceeded, took little more part in the wars; but the Basque strip of Navarre gave its first king to Aragon, and the son of that first king, Sancho, raided so far as Huesca and was killed beneath its walls; his son again, Peter, took the town two years later just as the hosts of Europe were gathering for that first great march upon Jerusalem which threw open the curtain of the Middle Ages; and his son, Alfonso (who had united in one crown Leon and Aragon), went forward under his great name of the Batallador, and twenty years later (1119) swept into Saragossa, the last of the Mohammedan strongholds in the north.
Thus were the west and the centre of the Spanish slope recovered for our race and civilization.
Meanwhile Catalonia upon the east had been since Charlemagne, since the early ninth century, a march of Christendom; but it was not until the same creative period which had brought forth the leadership of Navarre and the advance from Aragon, the Normans, Hildebrand, and the resurrection of Europe, that Catalonia began to go forward. Its first true monarch was Berenguer the Old, who lived round and about the date of Hastings, and was first master of the whole province. He also founded and maintained the Cortes of Barcelona. His son, for a moment, raided the Balearics, and when he died Catalonia and Aragon, united under one crown, saw the alien finally driven from these mountains. All the plain from far beyond the base of the hills was now permanently held by strong and united kingships which pressed forward to the Ebro valley, and finally saved all the Spanish province of Europe. A lifetime later, the last of the foreign armies had been broken at Navas de Tolosa. Far off in the south Islam lingered, tolerated and on sufferance, but Spain was reconquered. For just 500 years Spain, a quarter of all that makes up our civilization, had lain in peril between our religion and the other.
I have said that with the thirteenth century, the Albigensian crusade upon the north, the destruction of Islam upon the south (the two successes were contemporaneous), the Pyrenees ceased for ever to be a march between two civilizations, and became a mere political boundary between two provinces of Europe; and I have said that the nature of that boundary was finally fixed in the seventeenth century, or rather during a period which stretches from the close of the sixteenth to just after the middle of the seventeenth.
Plan K.
If that political boundary be examined to-day it will be found to coincide with the watershed, save at certain particular points, the character of which merits examination.
I take for my boundaries, as throughout this book, Mount Urtioga on the west, and the beginning of the Alberes on the east, which may conveniently be placed at the Couloum.