Basque History of the World

by Mark Kurlansky

  Not all his romances were as pretty. Away from queens and princesses, his appetite for women seemed insatiable, and he was often violent and abusive to them, frequently brawling with other men over them. In his later life when he was given to confessions, he also admitted to criminal acts. He once allowed an innocent man to be convicted of a robbery he committed. He and his only religious brother stood trial for an incident involving a killing. They both escaped by pleading clerical immunity, which in Iñigo’s case was a fabrication.

  NAVARRA, THE ONE missing piece in Ferdinand’s puzzle, remained independent But in spite of its important role in the victorious Reconquista, the 700-year-old Kingdom of Navarra was weak. It had grown in the Middle Ages by shifting with and against the Moors, and in the eleventh century, Navarra had become the dominant kingdom of northern Spain. Under the rule of Sancho III, Sancho the Great, the Basques, for the only time in history, had expanded their rule far beyond their traditional territory. Almost unique in Europe, Basques for most of history had no territorial ambitions. But Sancho doubled Basque territory. Under his reign not only had Navarra ruled Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya and taken Alava from Castile, but Sancho also had crossed the Ebro and taken Burgos and other parts of Castile.

  Thirty years after his death, most of this land had been lost. In 1234, ninety-nine years after his death, the ruling Basque family had no more heirs, and the Navarrese turned to the French House of Champagne for a ruling family.

  Ferdinand wanted this little Basque kingdom with the French rulers. By then, they had gone through two French families and were now being ruled weakly by the House of Foix, Ferdinand’s new in-laws. In 1512, Ferdinand, who always insisted that the primary enemy was France, persuaded the Navarrese to let him enter their kingdom, claiming to be on his way to invade France. But he never engaged the French. Instead, he drove the ruling de Foix monarchs, Catherine and Jean d’Albret, across the Pyrenees, where they became king and queen of the little splinter kingdom of Basse Navarre.

  Ferdinand, by repeatedly pledging to respect the Fueros, was able to take Pamplona without a fight. The rest of Navarra below the Pyrenees, seeing that Ferdinand would respect the rule of the Fueros, accepted him as king. Spain, with the exception of the Portuguese kingdom, was complete.

  But the Navarrese were finding it difficult to be a mere province of this new Castilian-constructed peninsula-wide nation. They had been an independent country for seven centuries. Militant new movements pressed for a closer adherence to the ancient Foral laws. Others worked with an independence movement, based in Basse Navarre, whose goal was to reunite the two parts.

  Ferdinand feared that after he died, his grandson, Charles, the boy from Flanders who did not even speak Spanish, would start losing the pieces he had so carefully put together. The first to go would be the Basques of Navarra. Navarra needed to be cemented to Spain. And so Ferdinand decided to make it a part of Castile. Attempting to win over the Navarrese to the idea, he made Charles swear to respect the Fueros and granted Navarra administrative autonomy within Castile.

  In 1516 Ferdinand was in a deep depression. According to some accounts, Germana fed him “aphrodisiacs” to lift his spirits, though it is not clear what substance that might have been. On January 23, he died. Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, who presided at the reading of Ferdinand’s will, was soon to lose favor in court, and, in August 1517, he too suddenly died.

  At the age of twenty-five, lacking a patron, Iñigo left his pretty court and went to serve his cousin, the viceroy of Navarra. He tried to continue his vain, self-indulgent court life, but this was a difficult time in the history of Navarra.

  The deposed Catherine and Jean d’Albret, Ferdinand’s inlaws in Basse Navarre, decided that Ferdinand’s death was the moment to retake their kingdom. Jean d’Albret led an army from St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port up through the rocky pass to Ibañeta and there, in that historic and deceptively serene pine forest that descends to Roncesvalles, met spectacular defeat.

  D’Albret, the last king of Navarra, died that year, like Ferdinand, in deep depression. Catherine, the queen-in-exile, died the following February. The only Basque kingdom in history ceased to exist.

  IN 1517, with great reluctance, Charles came to Spain to ceremoniously tour his kingdom, region by region, as a monarch was expected to do. Before he ever reached Navarra, his other grandfather, Emperor Maximilian, died, and the new King Carlos I was off to Germany to become Emperor Charles V, the new Holy Roman Emperor. In his absence, rebellion broke out in towns throughout Iberia. The Basques of Navarra started to demand their independence.

  The king of France, Francis I, was not a Basque sympathizer but a frustrated young man who also had wanted to be the Holy Roman Emperor. Now, to spite Charles, he took on the cause of Henri d’Albret, son of Catherine and Jean. On April 15, 1521, Hernán Perez, the mayor of Behobia, a Guipúzcoan border town on the Bidasoa, reported, “King Jean’s son is raising a mighty army with the help of the King of France to march on Navarra, and he is bringing seven thousand Germans and formidable artillery.”

  Germans, Basques, as well as volunteers from neighboring Gascony and Béarn—in all an army of 12,000 men with twenty-six pieces of heavy artillery—overran St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the stone-walled mountain village on a fog-bound crook of the Nive. Once again, a French army climbed through the narrow pass to Roncesvalles and dropped down the piney slopes toward Pamplona.

  This time they met no resistance. As they approached, Basque villagers overthrew their towns and joined the invading army. When they reached Pamplona, the townspeople opened the gates for them. Castilians fled the city, while the Navarrese sacked the ducal palace, tearing down the Spanish coat of arms. It was a great day for the Basques—or at least, for some of the Basques.

  At this moment, pro-Castilian reinforcements arrived from Guipúzcoa under the command of Martín de Loyola, Iñigo’s brother. Iñigo joined him. They were part of a larger Castilian force that tried to liberate Juana and her daughter, Iñigo’s fantasy princess, Catalina, from their dank Tordesillas castle where local rebels were holding them hostage.

  While most of the Navarrese saw the French-led army in Pamplona as liberators, these Guipúzcoans saw them as invaders. Martin was so disgusted with what to him was a betrayal by the townspeople that he refused to enter the city. Iñigo and some of his men entered the fortress, the unfinished castle Ferdinand had ordered before his death. As they went in, others were fleeing. He persuaded the commander to stay and fight. In his autobiography, which he wrote in the third person several decades later, Iñigo noted, “While everyone else clearly saw that they could not defend themselves and thought that they should surrender to save their lives, he offered so many reasons to the fortress’s commander that he talked them into defending it.” Though in the service of a mad cause, this was one of the first indications that Iñigo had an extraordinary ability to lead.

  Iñigo and the commander, holding nothing with which to bargain but the castle they were ill-equipped to defend, emerged to meet with the French commander. To Iñigo, all compromise was cowardly, and, refusing to surrender, he walked back into the fortress. As he awaited the bombardment, no priest being present, he said his confession, presumably a lengthy and colorful list of transgressions, to a fellow defender. He was ready to die.

  The castle held for several days until the heavy artillery could be moved into place. Six hours of bombardment opened a breach in a wall. Iñigo, sword drawn, was about to fight to the death when a cannonball struck him in the legs.

  The castle fell, and the French had Navarra. Then, repeating Charlemagne’s mistake, they needlessly antagonized the Basques on their way into Castile by pillaging the Navarrese town of Los Arcos for several days. The Castilians, desperately trying to recruit an army to meet the French, were suddenly awash with Basque volunteers. Navarra was quickly retaken, never again to be regarded as a nation.

  IÑIGO WAS TAKEN prisoner by the French, who performed surgery on his legs, administered last rites
, and sent him home to Guipúzcoa by litter over mountain paths, covering the thirty miles from Pamplona to Azpeitia in ten agonizing days. There Spanish doctors operated on him again. In Iñigo’s own words, “Again he went through this butchery.” His condition continued to worsen, and he was again given last rites. Eventually, he healed, but his leg had not been set right and was misshapen, with a bone sticking out in a grizzly manner. Despite being warned that it would cause excruciating pain, he insisted on having the protuberance cut off because, longing to resume his life as a handsome young courtier, he could not accept the idea of a disfiguring injury. After this horrid third operation, he was trussed up and told he could not move for months. Unable to sleep at night from pain, he stared at the ceiling and began reflecting on his life.

  At first he read tales of knights, popular books of the period. But then he began reading about the lives of saints. He was especially moved by Saint Francis. He began having visions, one night seeing the Virgin Mary and the Christ child. The next morning, no longer the knight of Doña María or the infanta Catalina, he decided to be a knight of the Virgin.

  His legs healed, though his right leg remained inches shorter than his left and he was to have a permanent limp. He became a restless religious pilgrim and, for a time, a hermit He went to Rome and even was able to get an audience with Pope Adrian VI. But back in Spain he was arrested by the Inquisition. It was now the late 1520s, and the Spanish Inquisition was vigilant of heretical practices. Iñigo had shown far too much interest in various occult practices and worse, the Kabala and other magical teachings of Jews and Arabs. Released after three weeks of interrogation, he was barred from preaching.

  Silenced in Spain, he decided to put aside preaching and went to Paris, where his Basque ways and hybrid beliefs would have little chance of a following, to study at the famous theological faculty. He so overloaded his donkey with books that he had to walk alongside on his damaged leg for two months to reach the capital. There, although a battle-scarred veteran of almost forty, he lived a student life, studying Latin, making his home in a shack on Rue St. Jacques, a main thoroughfare past the university area, the Latin Quarter. It was there that he received a degree in Latin as Ignatius and kept the Latin name.

  The sixteenth-century Latin Quarter attracted other restless religious men from around Europe, and Ignatius gathered around him a small group of Spanish, French, and Basque students. Among them was Francisco de Jassu y Javier, a tall young Basque and champion high jumper who excelled at sports and was regularly seen playing by Notre Dame on the Ile de Cité. A seemingly lighthearted man, his craving for athletic excellence belied the trauma of a difficult childhood. He was a political exile from Navarra whose family had been loyal to the d’Albrets. His father had died fighting the Spanish, and his brothers had been imprisoned. Now he was rooming with Iñigo, a fellow Basque who had fought against their people.

  When Iñigo, a natural leader who was consumed with his new religion, formed the small Latin Quarter group, Francisco laughed at him, found his sayings trite and his vows of poverty ridiculous. The once vain Iñigo, now lame and aging, showed a new tolerance for this tall young athlete whose family had been his enemies in war. Two decades later, Iñigo’s secretary would write that Iñigo referred to Francisco as “the roughest clay he ever had to knead.” According to legend, after two years of intellectual jousting, with Francisco mocking the less educated Iñigo’s attempts to preach, and Iñigo flattering the younger man’s vanity, Iñigo finally won him over.

  On August 15, 1534, Iñigo and his group of seven founded their new order, the Society of Jesus, otherwise known as the Jesuits. The founding ceremony, typically Jesuit and, perhaps, typically Basque, took place by a crypt in Montmartre, a subterranean site beneath the hill north of Paris, said to be of pagan significance. The Jesuits, whose vows were simply chastity, poverty, and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, would become known for a tendency toward the occult but also for their strict discipline. They shunned the wearing of habits and renounced loyalty to local Church hierarchy. But they were fiercely loyal to the pope, leading the orthodox Counter-Reformation that tried to reclaim Protestant populations. True to the traditions of the Loyola family, the head of the order bears the title of general.

  Ignatius was one of the Catholic Church’s great mystics, given to visions and trances. His eyes would run with tears for hours as he tried to recite prayers. The Jesuits became the first worldwide order, accomplishing more than Queen Isabella’s knights ever had to carry out her dream of spreading Catholicism to the new global Spanish Empire. In his battle against the Reformation, Ignatius made Jesuits in the tradition of medieval romance, knights who went forth in the world to conquer lands for the Church. Francisco, known as Francis Xavier, was his leading knight. Once the handsome and gregarious Francis, still only thirty-four, sailed from Lisbon for Asia in 1541, Ignatius would never see him again. Francis was a missionary in Japan, the Molucca Islands, and Malaysia, and died in 1552 en route to China. He is remembered as the patron saint of missionaries. After his death, other Jesuits went to Africa, to the Caribbean, and to the Americas.

  In 1556 Ignatius fell ill, this time deteriorating so quickly that he died without receiving last rites. At the time there were 1,000 Jesuits.

  The infanta Catalina, who had become the queen of Portugal, continued to support the Jesuits after Ignatius’s death. In 1622, Loyola was canonized Saint Ignatius and his fellow Basque, Francis Xavier, was canonized alongside him.

  Controversy has always accompanied the order. Known in Latin America as the preachers of revolution, they traveled up the unknown rivers of South America and tried to establish a model Christian society based on collectivism among the indigenous people they found there. In Europe they became, like Iñigo de Loyola, conservative-leaning and friendly to monarchs, although the Spanish Bourbon monarchs distrusted them. The French Bourbon monarchs, however, enlisted them as confessors to the royal house. Many progressive movements were vehemently anti-Jesuit, and their reputation in France was so reactionary that when Emile Zola wrote his famous 1898 defense of Alfred Dreyfus, “J’accuse,” he called the military establishment that had persecuted Dreyfus “This band of Jesuits.”

  Today, with some 25,000 Jesuits in the world, they are the largest Catholic order. They are known throughout the world as builders of schools and promoters of education. Jesuit education has produced revolutionaries and archconservatives. It might have surprised Iñigo that the Jesuits also educated some of the most determined voices of Basque independence.

  Cuba’s Fidel Castro was once asked by a Dominican what he thought of his Jesuit education. “Everything was very dogmatic,” he complained.

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  5: The Basque Billy Goat

  In ancient times and during the Middle Ages, Basques were famous for their skills in the practice of fortune telling; today it can be stated, at the risk of sounding prejudiced, that no one in France is more superstitious than the Basques, except maybe the Bretons.

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  —Francisque Michel, LE PAYS BASQUE, 1857

  AS A SYMBOL OF their new order, the Jesuits chose not a cross but a sun with its rays stretching toward a circular border. The symbol is ubiquitous in Basqueland, although in modern times the number of curved spokes filling the circle has been reduced to four, giving the appearance of a cross—a concession Ignatius de Loyola did not find necessary. This “Basque cross,” as it is frequently called, predates Christianity and is not a cross at all.

  The Basque cross appears to be related to sun worship. The original Basque religion was directly associated with nature— sun gods, moon gods, rock gods, tree gods, mountain gods. Such spirits were often animal-like but sometimes took human form and often were a combination. Residents of different valleys worshiped different spirits. In many valleys, the sun, eguzki, was the eye of God, jainkoaren begi.

  Grave markers that pay homage to the sun have been found in Basqueland dating from the first century B.C. well into medieva
l times. These rough, thick stones tell the story of Basque conversion, displaying every conceivable variation on the sun from concentric circles to starlike bursts. In time, they more and more resembled crosses, and some stones even have a sun on one side and a cross on the other. Traditional rural Basque houses are still built with the doorway facing east, the direction of the rising sun. This is especially true in Labourd, where the winds and rains are westerly, making the east the sheltered part of the house. Even in contemporary abstract art, the two leading Basque sculptors, Eduardo Chillida and Jorge de Oteiza, both use the circle as a central motif. Oteiza, who first came to international prominence in 1958 by winning a sculpture prize in São Paulo for a steel ring with a strip curving through it, explains, “In the circle we have a tie to the sacred form, the solar circle and especially full moons, and such a primitive religious frame-of-mind, which is realized in these little circles, serves to regenerate our moral conscience.”

  The image in the lower right-hand corner is a fresco of the Jesuit seal, circa 1600, from Ignatius Loyola’s room in Rome. The remaining five images are ancient Basque gravestones, the dates of which range from 100 B.C. to A.D. 200 (top row) to after A.D. 833 (lower left-hand corner). The center images are opposite sides of the same stone. (Stones used by permission of Euskal Arkeologia, Etnografia eta Kondaira Museoa, Bilbao)

  But for centuries before contemporary abstract Basque art, these circular sun images, Basque crosses, were carved over the doorways of homes. Carvings of roosters were sometimes added to further greet the rising sun. “Sun, sacred and blessed, rejoin your mother” are the ancient words still repeated in modern times as a bedtime prayer.