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 CASTILE AND ENGLAND VI. KINGS of CASTILE AND ARAGON APPENDICES- LIBRAR HISTORY OF SPAIN. CHAPTER I. THE CELTIBERIANS. I.-Pre-historic Times. THE earliest inhabitants of the Spanish Peninsula of whom we 1The 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 coasts 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. nezzar, and even of the patriarch Noah. Tubal, indeed, son of Japhet, is said by some of these Spanish enthusiasts,1 upon the uncertain 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 westermost 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,5 1Josephus, 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 and 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 ! 4 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, etc. Others would derive it from the Basque Ibaia = running water. It would seem in any case to be connected with Iberia. The word Iẞmp, 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. E. Hübner, Monumenta Lingua Iberica (1893); Prolog., lxxv., and p. 220, and Romey, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. i., cap. i., and tom. ii., Appendix I. This, so far as it infers that the modern Basques are identical with the ancient Iberians, is at least open to considerable question. It is true that placenames with Basque roots are to be found all over Spain; but the assumption that therefore the Iberians spoke Basque does not at all follow, as the names had been given in all probability by the Basque-speaking primitive inhabitants before the Iberians, perhaps a people speaking a Sanscrit tongue, arrived in the country. So far from the Iberians withstanding the Celts, it is more probable that in Cartha But if our knowledge of the works and ways of the ancient Iberians is so very imperfect, our information as to the Cells is scarcely more satisfactory, except of course as regards the language. The Celtic immigrants probably entered Spain from Gaul along the shores of the bay of Biscay, and finding no lodgment in the Basque provinces, already occupied, it may be, by the Iberians, they extended themselves over the plains of northern Spain, and occupied the wilder southwest country, afterwards known as Lusitania.1 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 ginian times the mass of the population of Central Spain consisted of a fusion of the two peoples, speaking some form of Sanscrit, more or less closely allied to what we know as Celtic; the original Basque-speaking inhabitants being forced up into the northern mountains where they still remain, and have in course of time engrafted upon their ancient tongue many words-though little or none of the form -of the language of those who had displaced them. It is the opinion of many philologists that the children who were, as St. Augustine tells us, so eager to learn Latin and to forget their mother tongue, did not speak Basque but some Sanscrit form allied to Celtic.-H. 1" 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 PortugueseEstremadura; 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. 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 colonised 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, overran 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. |