Basque History of the World Read Online Free PDF

Basques tolerating occupation without armed resistance. But the reason appears to be that the Romans, intent on more fertile parts of Iberia, learned to coexist with the Basques, and the Basques came to learn that Roman occupation did not threaten their language, culture, or legal traditions. The Romans came to understand that the Basques could be pacified by special conditions of autonomy. The Basques paid no tribute and had no military occupation. Most important of all, they were not ruled directly by a Roman code of law but were allowed to govern themselves under their own tradition-based system of law. The Romans asked little more from Basques than free passage between southern Gaul and the lands beyond the Ebro.
    The Basques were left to their beloved sense of themselves, surrounded by an empire to which they didn’t belong, speaking a language that none of their neighbors understood.
    Crowded into steep, narrow valleys, their society was organized around control of the limited workable land. The needs of this cramped agricultural existence made Basque social structures different from those of societies that lived in ample expanses. The bottomland by the river was usually owned communally. Rights to grazing on the good slopes were administered by local Basque rule.
    Leaving the Basques content in their mountains, the Romans conquered the Ebro and fought with each other over it. In 82 B.C., two Roman factions began a ten-year war for control of the Ebro. Sertorius, a battle-scarred warrior, proud of having lost one eye in combat, seized the valley with some local support. In a previous campaign against the Celts, Sertorius had learned enough Celtic to pass himself off in the enemy camp, and he boasted of his ability to penetrate local cultures. But in 75 B.C., the handsome and elegant Pompey, a favorite of Rome and commander of the forces loyal to the emperor, retook the Ebro and founded a town on a tributary, the River Arga. It was to be a strategic fortress, controlling both the plains south to the Ebro and important passes to the north through the Pyrenees. The town, which Pompey, with unflinching immodesty, named Pompaelo, also was intended to be a great outpost of Roman civilization. Later it became known in Spanish as Pamplona.
    The few surviving fragments of Pompaelo do not suggest great Roman architecture, but even if it was only a provincial town of the empire, marble-pillared villas, temples, and baths built by the Romans must have been dazzling to the wild mountain Vascones.
    At the time of Christ, Strabo wrote of three cities: Pamplona; Calahorra, which Pompey captured from the Celts the year he founded Pamplona; and Oiasona, of unknown origin and today called Oiartzun, a town located between San Sebastián and the French border. To the north, a military base called Lapurdum, thought to have been at the present-day site of Bayonne, began to grow into an urban center.
    Roman cities became important to the Basques because the Romans also built an excellent road system connecting all of Vasconia, so that farmers and shepherds could bring their goods to the Roman-built cities to be sold. The Vascones learned to grow Roman crops such as grapes and olives for the Roman market. Rural Basque communities started decorating their villages with Roman mosaics and Roman-style monuments.
    Basque mercenaries defended the far borders of the Roman Empire. Basques who fought well for the empire were offered Roman citizenship, a rare distinction until Caracalla, Roman emperor in 211, granted it to all the Empire. A Basque unit served in England, based in present-day Northumberland, and Basques helped defend Hadrian’s Wall, which stretched across northern England to keep the Picts and other Celts out. Plutarch wrote that Gaius Marius, the antipatrician commander in whose name the one-eyed Sertorius had taken the Ebro, freed enslaved prisoners of war and made them his personal, fiercely loyal bodyguard. This force was composed