Basques

Basque tradition, as collected in the twentieth century chiefly by the priest and ethnographer Jose Miguel de Barandiaran, centres on Mari, a female power who lives in caves and mountain hollows, travels between them through the air, and is associated with weather and with the punishment of lying, theft and pride. Beside her stand Sugaar, a serpent figure, and a body of beings including the lamiak at streams and the basajaun of the forest. How much of this constitutes a pre-Christian system, and how much is nineteenth and twentieth century folk material read as one, is a genuine scholarly question, and the atlas does not overstate the case.

What is documented rather than reconstructed is the persecution. Gustav Henningsen's study of the Basque witch trials of 1609 to 1614 reconstructs the largest witch panic in Spanish history, in which thousands were implicated on both sides of the Pyrenean border and the accused were said to gather at the akelarre. The Spanish Inquisition's own inspector, Alonso de Salazar Frias, reinvestigated the confessions, found that they collapsed under examination, and secured instructions in 1614 that effectively ended witch executions in Spain.

Christianity has been long established here, and Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, was a Basque nobleman of Gipuzkoa.

Euskara is a language isolate. It has no demonstrated relationship to any other living language, and attempts to attach it to Iberian, to Caucasian families or to anything else have not been accepted. That fact has carried a heavy load of speculation about the antiquity of the Basques, and Roger Collins's history is a useful corrective: a language without relatives tells you about the language, not about an unbroken population.

What the record shows is a people occupying the western Pyrenees and the coast at the edge of successive states rather than outside them. Rome had a presence there, the Visigoths and the Franks both campaigned in the region, and the ambush at Roncesvalles in 778 that destroyed Charlemagne's rearguard, and became the Song of Roland, was in the earliest accounts the work of Basques rather than of Muslims.

The Kingdom of Navarre and the provincial fueros gave the Basque territories a distinct legal standing that survived into the nineteenth century and was progressively removed after the Carlist wars. Modern Basque nationalism dates from that removal, and its founder, Sabino Arana, made Catholicism part of his definition of the nation. Euskara, driven out of public use under the Franco regime, is now co-official in the Basque Autonomous Community and in part of Navarre, and is taught through the ikastola school network.