... ... II. KINGS OF THE ASTURIAS AND LEON III. THE HOUSES OF ARAGON AND BARCELONA IV. KINGS OF CASTILE AND OF LEON, 1027-1230 V. ROYAL HOUSES OF SPAIN AND ENGLAND VI. KINGS OF CASTILE AND ARAGON ... HISTORY OF SPAIN. CHAPTER I. THE CELTIBERIANS. I.-Pre-historic Times. THE earliest inhabitants of the Spanish Peninsula of whom we have any knowledge, whether from history or from tradition, are the Celts and the Iberians.1 Of the origin of the Celts, intimately connected as they are with ourselves or our ancestors in Britain, we know but very little. Of the Iberians and of their origin, we know practically nothing at all. Established in the Peninsula previous to the Celtic immigration, they are found at the earliest dawn of Spanish history occupying a considerable part of that romantic country to which they have given the name of Iberia. Their earliest settlements are said to have been on the eastern and southern coasts of the Peninsula ; but they have ever been specially identified with those more interesting districts among the mountains in north-western Spain, of which the inhabitants have been known at various times as Iberians, Cantabrians and Basques. When they arrived, how they travelled, whom they dispossessed, even tradition does not presume to say, though tradition, in the pages of many Spanish historiographers, tells of the exploits on Spanish soil of Hercules,3 1 The Iberians are said by many Spanish writers to have been immigrants into Spain from Asia Minor, or the Eastern Mediterranean. But that the Iberians of Spain are the children of the Iberians of the Caucasus is at best an historic fancy, unsupported by anything that can be called evidence. 2 See Appendix I. THE BASQUES. 3 Hercules, the Phoenician Melkarth, is in a special manner identified with the southern coast of Spain. He is still considered the founder, and in some sense the patron of Cadiz; his effigy, grappling with two lions, is borne upon the city arms and his pillars, with the proud motto, Plus Ultra, are displayed upon the celebrated Spanish dollar, and are said to have suggested the well known sign $. See Pliny, Hist., Nat., xxxvi., 5. Erythea, the scene of the legendary labour of the recovery of the oxen of Geryon, is usually taken to signify Spain. A Bacchus, Osiris, Atlas, Nebuchadnezzar, and even of the patriarch Noah. Tubal, indeed, son of Japhet, is said by some of these Spanish enthusiasts,' upon the uncertair. authority of Josephus, to have been the father of the Iberians. And Setubalia, which, according to Masdeu,2 was one of the ancient names of Spain, is derived by him from that of the Patriarch. The same word, whatever be its origin, no doubt survives in the town of Setubal in modern Portugal. Coming it may be from the East, the Iberians would naturally have established their first colonies on the eastern coasts of Spain; and they may have occupied Catalonia and Aragon, and given their names to the great river Ebro,* before they arrived at the westerninost limit of their wanderings, on the shores of the wide Atlantic, and made their home amid the mountains in which, alone among the peoples and nations of Europe, they have maintained the freedom and the purity of their race for three thousand years. For in Spain the Iberian blood has constantly prevailed over that of the Celts and Phoenicians, the Carthaginians and Romans, the Goths and the Moors, by whom the country has been successively occupied, from Carthagena to Finisterre, and it still flows in its greatest purity in the veins of the ever hardy mountaineers of modern Cantabria. But if our knowledge of the works and ways of the ancient Iberians is so very imperfect, our information as to the Celts is scarcely more satisfactory.5 The Celtic immigrants probably entered Spain from Gaul along the shores of the Bay of Biscay, and finding no lodgement in the Basque provinces, already occupied, it may be, by the Iberians, they extended themselves 1 Josephus, Hist. Jud., I. 6, and Ant. Jud., lib. xi., cap. 12, quoting the Indica of Megasthenes. Cf. Genesis x., 2-5. The most ingenious of all the Spanish historians is a certain Señor Ferreras, who, unable to satisfy himself as to time and manner of the early peopling of Spain, suggests (tom. I., c. 1), that the first inhabitants may have come by air, or dropped down from heaven! 2 Lafuente, I., 290-293. Mariana, lib. I. Masdeu, II., 66 & 251. Strabo, I. 2, 27. Wentworth Webster, Spain, pp. 70-75. 3 This Setubal has been conventionally anglicised into St. Ubes. I do not know if any more sacred origin has been discovered for this etymological Saint ! The etymology of Ebro is very uncertain. Romey and the French writers generally would assign to it a Celtic origin, as Aber = a confluence of rivers; a root to be found in such English names as Aberdeen, Aberdovey, &c. Others would derive it from the Basque Ibaia = running water. It would seem in any case to be connected with Iberia. The word 18mp, for the river, and Iẞnpes, for the Spaniards generally, are met with at least as early as the Periplus of Scylax, compiled probably about B.C. 350; or according to Fabricius, Bibl. Græc., lib. iv., c. 2, as early as B. C. 520. See the editions of this early geographer by Gronovius (1700) pp. 3 and 179, and that of the Marquis Fortia d'Urban (Paris, 1845), p. 321. Cf. Æ. Hübner, Monumenta Lingua Iberica (1893); Prolog. lxxv. and p. 220, and Romey, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. 1, cap. i., and tom. 11, Appendix I. Except of course as regards the language, over the plains of northern Spain, and occupied the wilder south-west country, afterwards known as Lusitania.' That Lusitania was peopled by Celts at the earliest times of which we have any historic or even traditional knowledge, is at least tolerably certain. How they reached that ancient far west of Europe is more than uncertain; it is impossible to ascertain. The fact is, that with the exception of one or two words in Herodotus and Scylax, and an incorrect and doubtful description of part of the east and south coasts by Eratosthenes, we know nothing certain of Spain nor of the tribes that inhabited it, until after the fall of Saguntum. From this time, thanks to Livy and Appian, to Polybius and Florus and other Roman historians, we have some slight knowledge of the south and south-eastern districts; and as the Roman conquests were extended we hear something of the tribes and districts of the interior. But we are told that as late as the time of Cato the Censor the greater number of the independent tribes who inhabited the north and west of the Peninsula were as yet scarcely known to the Romans, even by name. And although after the fall of Numantia the Central Provinces as well as Southern and Eastern Spain had become more or less rapidly Romanized,3 we have no detailed information of the tribes and tribal divisions of the Peninsula until the time of Strabo, whose Geography was written in all probability within twenty years after the commencement of the Christian era. By this time, as he tells us, the Southern Provincials had not only been converted to Roman manners, "The heights in the north of Spain whence the Tagus, Durius, and Minius flow towards the sea, and whence on the other side smaller rivers carry their waters towards the Ebro, were inhabited by Celts who were also called Celtiberians; other Celts bearing the name of Celtici dwelt in Algarbia and the Portuguese Estremadura; and others again inhabited the Province of Entre Douro e Minho in the north of Portugal. These three Celtic nations were quite isolated in Spain. The Celtiberians were not pure Celts, but, as even their name indicates, a mixture of Celts and Iberians: but the Celts in Portugal are expressly stated to have been pure Celts."-Niebuhr, Lectures on Ancient and Modern Geography and Ethnography, II., 280, 281. 2 Masdeu, following other Spanish historians, devotes an entire chapter or book (lib. III.), of sixty pages, to proving or asserting that the Spanish Celts are more ancient than those of France, and that Celtic Gaul was colonized from Celtic Spain as late as the third century before Christ. This author derives the Celts from Tubal, and the Iberians from his nephew Tarsis; and asserts that these Iberians, migrating northwards in the fourteenth century before Christ, over-ran France, descended into Italy, and thus founded the Roman Empire. Cf. Masdeu, II., 126. Martial, himself a Spaniard, boasts of his descent "ex Iberis et Celtis genitus."-lib. X., ep. 65. Cf. IV. 55. See also Depping, Hist. d'Espagne, I., pp. 21-45; and Debrosses, Hist. Romaine, II., 134. 3 The wars in Spain of Sertorius and of Cæsar were, in a great measure, Roman civil wars; nor did they change to any considerable extent the nature of the Imperial dominion in Spain from the fall of Numantia, B.C. 133, to the final conquest or pacification of the Asturias in A.D. 19. 4 Books I. to IV. were published about that time, |