Spain and Portugal for Visitors

One of the key events in Basque and European history occurred in 778. Charlemagne was on his way back to his Frankish kingdom with an army of twenty-odd thousand Franks which had completely failed to besiege and take Saragossa, or anything else of note in Spain. Hungry for booty, they sacked Pamplona, at the time, essentially a city of pagans (which for some reason meant it was alright). The citizens of Pamplona put the word out, and Basques turned up from everywhere, the Ebro basin, Aquitaine, the Pyrenees, the Rioja. They ambushed the Frankish army in the Roncesvalles pass of the Pyrenees and destroyed its rearguard. Frankish casualties included Charlemagne's favourite Roldan, and the battle and his death were recorded in the famous Chanson de Roldan, with the difference that his victors in the poem are Moors (it being much more acceptable to get beaten by the Moors, famed and feared warriors, than by the Basques, a bunch of mountainmen).

In fact, no-one really knows who the winning army consisted of, and it might indeed have been a coalition of Basques and Moors. Another theory says it was a mass of disgruntled Basques from the Aquitaine region, where the Franks had reinforced their control. Whatever, thereafter not only did the Franks abandon ideas of expanding south, but Charlemagne also established the Spanish March, a no-man's land between Moorish Spain and the Frankish kingdom, in the area south of the Pyrenees. This effectively put a northern limit to Muslim expansion, as well as sowing the seeds which would grow to become Catalonia and the Kingdom of Aragón.

Kingdom of Navarre. By the 820's, the Basque Christian community opposed to the Muslim occupation had grown sufficiently in power that dynasties emerged ruling over what was first called the Kingdom of Pamplona and later the Kingdom of Navarre. This kingdom, which was to be opposed to those of Castile and Aragón, reached its period of greatest power under Sancho III the Great (1000-1035), coinciding with the disintegration of the Córdoba Caliphate into the taifas, minor kingdoms. It was then the largest kingdom in Christian Spain, and included much of Castile and León (to earn his sobriquet, Sancho also introduced Romanesque architecture and established the Camino de Santiago). But by the end of the 11th century, it was beginning to wane, hemmed in by Castile to the west, Aragón to the east and the Muslim taifa of Saragossa to the south. The crowns of Navarre and Aragón were briefly united (by marriage, between 1076 and 1134) under three Basque monarchs, but separated under García IV, son of one of the daughters of El Cid. In 1234, the dynasties of Navarre were extinguished on the death of Sancho VII and to avoid being absorbed by Castile and Aragón, the kingdom of Navarre moved into the political sphere of France. The next three hundred years saw a series of French dynasties more or less related with those on the French throne, until Fernando of Aragón, the male half of the Catholic monarchs, took advantage of a civil war (Navarre only, not the rest of Spain) to invade Navarre. The result was that the part of the kingdom south of the Pyrenees was annexed by Castile. After that, Spanish Navarre was ruled by a Viceroy nominated by the monarch of Castile, also titled "King of Navarre."

The term "Kingdom of Navarre" also survived in the tiny space left to the north of the Pyrenees, and its monarchs went on to marry into the Bourbon dynasty, which was terminated by the French Revolution in 1791, and with it the French title "King of Navarre."

The monarchs of Castile preserved the cortes, parliaments of Navarre, on which the French dynasties had rested. However, the Spanish Bourbon monarchs of the 18th century were great centralizers, and the cortes progressively lost power to the central government. In 1833, the death of Fernando VII led to a thorny problem of succession. Fernando's daughter, Isabel, was crowned queen and because she was a child, her mother, the widowed María Cristina de Borbón-Dos Sicilias, was proclaimed Queen Regent. Fernando's brother, Carlos María Isidro de Borbón y Parma, considered himself to be the legitimate heir to the throne, based on what is called the Salic Law, decreed by Philip V in 1713, which essentially existed to prevent the crown being inherited by females (the long-term goal being to prevent the Hapsburgs marrying their way back into power). The ensuing civil war lasted until 1840, Basques and Navarrans coming down firmly on the losing side of the rebel Carlistas. Analysts have different explanations, but there is no doubt that the Basques felt their liberties and traditions threatened by the liberal centralists (this First Carlist War, as its name implies, did not put an end to the dispute - there were three Carlist wars altogether). For our present purposes, the important result of the First Carlist War was the abolition of the Kingdom of Navarre and the integration of Navarre in Spain as a mere province.