Meakin Galicia, the Switzerland of Spain

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-3-7364-1576-8
Verlag: anboco
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 974 Seiten

Ancient Galicia The Geography of Galicia The First Golden Age The Salve Regina The Language of Galicia Pilgrims to Santiago The Architecture of Galicia The Cathedral of Santiago The Pórtico de Gloria Sculptured Capitals The Royal Hospital The Colegiata de Sar La Coruña Emigration Rosalia Castro Santiago de Compostela Galicia's Livestock Padron La Bellísima Noya Pontevedra Vigo and Tuy Orense Monforte and Lugo Betanzos and Ferrol The Great Monasteries of Galicia Trees, Fruits, and Flowers Dives Callaecia Bibliography

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meakin, Annette M. B.

Leseproben

CHAPTER I

ANCIENT GALICIA

Ancient Galicia—Never conquered by the Moors—The cradle of Spanish nobility—A goal for pilgrims—Modern writers on Galicia—A rich literature—National traditions—Martial genius—No Basques—Iberian words—Ligurians in Spain—Barrows and tumuli—Druidical stones—Celtic Spain—Derivation of “Galicia”—Scotch and Irish traditions—Julius Cæsar—Phœnician colonies—The Cassiterides—Plato’s theory—Iron implements—Quintus Fabius—Brutus in Galicia—The theatre of Cæsar’s battles—The Roman Legions—The most ancient of all the Spanish kingdoms

GALICIA is the least known and the least written about of all the little kingdoms that go to the making of Spain. Her boundaries have been greatly reduced since the days when the Romans divided the Peninsula into five provinces and called one of them Galicia. In the fourth and fifth centuries, when the Sueves and the Vandals poured into Spain, they made Galicia their centre, and their kingdom extended into what is now the kingdom of Portugal, while Braga, now a Portuguese town, was for a long time the residential city of their kings. At the end of the seventh century King Witiza resided in Galicia, not as its king, but as the companion of his father in the kingdom of the Goths, whose seat was Toledo; it was as governor of Galicia that he resided at Tuy. In the days of the historian Mariana part of his palace was still to be seen there. His father died in 706, and he then became king of the Goths. The irruption of the Saracens in 713 again changed the aspect of the Peninsula, and the limits of Galicia were contracted; but Spanish geographers to this day call her a reino, or kingdom, and divide her into four little provinces—Coruña, Pontevedra, Orense, and Lugo. Like our Wales, Galicia once had kings of her own, and at a later date the title “king of Galicia” was given to the heir to the Spanish throne, just as that of “Prince of Asturias” is given now. It is an interesting fact that Moorish historians speak of that part of the Peninsula which retained the Christian faith during their occupation as “Galicia,” and of all the rest of the territory as “Spain.” Just as Novgorod proudly boasts of never having been conquered by the Tartars when the rest of Russia was subjected to their sway, so Galicia is proud to remember that she, at least, was never conquered by the Moors.

Galicia may justly be called the cradle of the Spanish nobility, for almost all Spain’s proudest families have their roots in Gallegan soil, their titles having been given to their ancestors as a reward for the heroic resistance they offered to the Moors.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Galicia seems to have been left out of count, and to have gradually sunk into oblivion. Even the Spaniards themselves know very little about her to-day. Yet in the Middle Ages her fame as a goal of pilgrims rivalled that of Palestine, not only throughout Spain, but throughout the length and breadth of Christendom; while earlier still, when she bravely resisted Julius Cæsar’s attempt at conquest, she won for herself no little glory.

The small amount of information relative to Galicia which is to be obtained from English and French books is distinctly unfavourable. We are told that her climate is damp and rainy, and that her inhabitants are dull, stubborn, and stupid; while her wonderful history, her exquisite scenery, and her fascinating architecture are barely alluded to, if not passed over in absolute silence. It is to Spanish writers that we must turn for information that is neither superficial nor unreliable.

There exists in the Spanish language a rich literature relating to Galicia, but a good history of this province has yet to be written. Aguiar began to write one in the thirties of the nineteenth century, but death frustrated the completion of his design, as it did those of several other competent men who had planned a similar task.[1] Aguiar explained in his first volume that he had been led to undertake the work by finding how unjustly and incorrectly Galicia had been treated by earlier writers, and how little she was known to the rest of Spain, in spite of her being one of the most important, one of the most beautiful, and one of the most cultured of the Spanish provinces. He further complained that no historians had ever taken the trouble to visit Galicia, except Ambrosio Morales,[2] whose sole object in doing so was to search for antiquities for the Escurial collection.

Galicia was the province that suffered most from the political unification of Spain; she was the one most sacrificed to the centralisation of political administration, partially, no doubt, in consequence of her position being the most distant and the most isolated one. There are many devoted Gallegans who compare their beloved territory to Finland, to Ireland and Hungary, and are never tired of saying that self-government alone could restore to her the prosperity that has forsaken her shores. They feel that as long as she is governed at a distance and by strangers she can never hope to raise her head.

Less troubled by invaders, less influenced by the Moors than the rest of Spain, Galicia at one time became the centre in which was propagated the purest of Spain’s lyric poetry; she constituted a neo-Gothic society the hearth on which were kindled the earliest flames of Peninsular civilisation;[3] hither came even kings to complete their education, and the language of Galicia—“O crown of fame!”—was the medium chosen by Spain’s greatest troubadours in which to express their poetic thoughts. But Galicia lost her political existence, and with it her culture was also extinguished.

But neither unification nor centralisation have the power to destroy national traditions, and Galicia is still, as one of her children has expressed it, “the land of glorious recollections.” The songs of her bards are still in the hearts of her people, and a passionate love for her mountains, vales, and rivers is perhaps the most marked of all the interesting traits to be found in the Gallegan character.

We were all taught at school, if not in the nursery, that Spain was conquered by the Romans, and later on by the Moors,—all Spain, except one little corner to the north-west,—and some of us have wondered how it came to pass that one little corner of the Peninsula should have succeeded in resisting so stoutly, not only Julius Cæsar, but the Moorish hosts who for eight long centuries held sway over the rest of the land. We have wondered what sort of people the Gallegans were, and whence came their martial genius, and, above all, their unconquerable love of liberty.

Every group of human beings, every town, every nation, leaves to posterity some record of its civil life and of its customs, according to the degree of civilisation in which it lived. These records come down to us preserved in rocks and stones, in hieroglyphics, in Runic characters and in Greek and Latin inscriptions, in lines upon parchment and in rustic dwellings. Such is the book in which our past is written, the book in which every generation has written a page. Some British ethnologists still think that the Basques are the oldest inhabitants of Spain, and that they once spread all over the Peninsula, but, as Barros Sivelo[4] and others have pointed out, that is impossible, for there is no trace of the Basques in the whole of Galicia. On the other hand, it has been proved many times and beyond all doubt that Celtic tribes inhabited that part of Spain for a considerable period. Borrow, after translating the Bible into Basque, strongly opposed the theory that this language was of Celtic origin. As this gifted student of languages spoke Erse, the native language of Ireland, fluently as well as that of the Basques, I think we may consider him a competent judge when he tells us that “perhaps in the whole of Europe it would be difficult to discover two languages which exhibit fewer points of mutual resemblance than the Basque and the Irish.”[5]

The oldest-known inhabitants of Spain were called Iberians. There are many theories about these people as to who they really were and whence they came, the most interesting and probable theory being that of Marcus Varro (who was about ten years older than Cicero), that conscientious historians believed that they were originally Scythian Iberians, and that they made their way from the neighbourhood of Armenia by way of northern Africa to Spain.[6] It is, at any rate, an interesting fact that Georgia also bore the name of Iberia in olden days, and that the hemispheric writing found among the Georgians of the present day is brought to our memory by the appearance of the wonderful hemispheric writing still to be distinctly traced upon the boulders of Galicia. Furthermore, we learn from the chronicle of Idatius, written in the fifth century, that the Roman Emperor Theodosius was born in the town of Cauca, in the province of Galicia.[7] No one can say with certainty where the town of Cauca was situated, but it is thought to have been somewhere between Braga and the river Miño. Now the word cauca in the language of the ancient Scythians meant “white,” and the name of the mountains of Georgia which divide Europe from Asia is “Caucasus,” said to have been given to them on account of their peaks being eternally “white” with...