Northern Basque Country - History

History

The Northern Basque Country was for long largely undifferentiated from other areas of what is now Gascony. When Caesar conquered Gaul he found all the region south and west of the Garonne inhabited by a people known as the Aquitani, who were not Celtic and are modernly regarded as Basques (see Aquitanian language). In the early Roman times, the region was first known as Aquitania, and later, when the name Aquitania was extended until the Loire river, as Novempopulania or Aquitania Tertia.

After the Basque rebellions against Roman feudalism in the late 4th and 5th century, the area eventually formed part of the independent Duchy of Vasconia, a blur ethnic polity stretching south of the Garonne River that broke up from the 8th to 9th century under the pressure of Normand raids and feudalism. In the early 9th century, the County of Vasconia was created extending around the Adour River. At this point, Basque language was losing ground to vulgar and written Latin and was increasingly confined to the lands around the Pyrénées. Since 963, the town Saint-Sever is mentioned as "caput vasconiae", interpreted by some as "limit of Vasconia", while others take it as "prominence of Vasconia" on account of its location on a hill overlooking the plains of Vasconia.

In this period northern Basques surely participated in the successive battles of Roncevaux against the Franks, in 778, 812 and 824.

Count Sans Sancion fought against the Franks again between 848 and 858 eventually becoming Duke of Vasconia.

In 1020 Gascony ceded its juridsiction over Labourd, then also including Lower Navarre, to Sancho the Great of Pamplona. This monarch made it a Viscounty in 1023. The area became disputed by the Angevin Dukes of Aquitaine until 1191 when Sancho the Wise and Richard Lionheart agreed to divide the country, Labourd remaining under Angevin sovereignty and Lower Navarre under Navarrese control.

Meanwhile, Soule (Zuberoa) was constituted as an independent viscounty, generally supported by Navarre against the pretensions of the Counts of Béarn, though at times also it admitted a certain Angevin overlordship.

With the end of the Hundred Years' War, Labourd and Soule passed to the Crown of France as autonomous provinces (pays d'êtat).

After the conquest of Upper Navarre by Castile in 1512–21, the still independent north-Pyrenean part of Navarre took the lead of the Huguenot party in the French Wars of Religion. In this time the Bible was first translated into the Basque language. Eventually Henry III of Navarre became King of France but kept Navarre as a formally independent state, until in 1610 this separation was suppressed. In 1634, Axular gives in his literary work Gero a rough description of the extent of Basque at the time, with the language comprising all the provinces now known as Basque Country "and so many other places".

The three Northern Basque provinces still enjoyed great autonomy until the French Revolution suppressed it radically, as it did elsewhere in France, eventually creating the department of Pyrénées-Atlantiques, half Basque and half Gascon (Bearn, another sovereignty linked to the crown of France).