BASQUE COUNTRY

BASQUE COUNTRY. The lands inhabited by Basque speakers extended between the Adouritz River in southwestern France and the Nervion River in northeastern Spain, comprising most of the western flanks of the Pyrenees Mountains. The Ebro River functioned as a traditional boundary between Basque lands and the kingdom of Castile.

On the Spanish side, Basque provinces included Araba (Alava), Biskaia (Vizcaya), Gipuzkoa (Guipúzcoa), and Nafarroa (Navarre in French, Navarra in Spanish). The provinces under French rule were Lapurdi (Labourd), Soule (Zuberoa), and Benafarroa (Basse-Navarre).

After the final annexation of Navarre to the Spanish crown in the 1510s, the Basque settlements consolidated their loyalty to either Castile or France, with the Bidasoa River as the natural border between the two monarchies. The borders between France and Spain, however, remained particularly blurry in the Basque lands, where jurisdictional disputes arose at the ecclesiastic, provincial, and municipal levels.

Basque common law and political autonomy were traditionally recognized on both sides of the Bidasoa River. In 1452 and 1526 Bizkaian customary laws were recognized in the Fuero Viejo and Fuero Nuevo.

Each town or village had full autonomy and elected its own representatives every year in the churchyard or anteiglesia, with wide jurisdiction in economic, political, and military affairs. Rivalries between bordering villages were not unusual, especially regarding access to natural resources (stone, wood, coal, salt, water) and rights of use and exploitation in grazing lands.

The farmstead (baserri or caserío) was the most important institution in the Basque lands and functioned with economic and political autonomy. Farmsteads (baserriak) were small units of land farmed by men and women to produce and harvest corn, apples, fodder, wheat, milk, honey, poultry, and nuts. Outside the baserri boundaries, each unit normally raised sheep and goats and had the right to exploit municipal resources. Baserriak were deemed indivisible and therefore inherited by only one member of the family the following generation, according to traditional rules that varied across villages and regions.

The most important cities in the Basque area were the ports, given the mercantile and maritime character of Basque enterprises. Shipbuilding and trade with northern Europe and Spanish America were vital economic activities. From the sixteenth century on, Basque merchants traded silver, iron, sugar, and manufactured goods in a transatlantic circuit that extended from Belgium and France to Spanish America and the Philippines. Large-scale fishing, in particular whale and cod, comprised another important activity and required major investments, planning, and management. Bilbo (Bilbao), Donostia (San Sebastián), and Bayonne were the most important towns, and each developed strong local elites based upon a wide range of activities, from shipbuilding to colonial trade and whale fisheries.

Significant emigration to the Americas was a permanent feature in the Basque lands after 1492. Basques were prominent colonial merchants, soldiers, miners, royal officers, ecclesiastical authorities, scribes, lawyers, and doctors. They were also involved in rural enterprises, especially sugar and cacao production.

Basques also played a prominent role in the Spanish monarchy's European affairs, especially in the church, royal bureaucracy, and military. Prominent Basques in the early modern era could be found on all continents, starting with Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits in Rome, Saint Francis Xavier, missionary in the Far East, Juan de Oñate and Francisco de Urdinola, colonizers of Northern Mexico and what became the southwestern United States, and Juan de Garay, refounder of Buenos Aires.

BASQUE COUNTRY

BIBLIOGRAPHY