CHAPTER I GREEN VALLEY AND GREY PLAIN T HE Valley's name is Iraurgi, with all its vowels active, and it lies at the heart of Guipúzcoa, the only one of the four Basque countries of Spain which has remained completely and impenitently Basque. Here the everyday language of the people is still the mysterious tongue spoken by their ancestors two thousand years ago, a tongue the delight and despair of philologists, French, English, German, who have never been able to trace the least connection between it and any other language spoken on earth.1 Anthropologists have been equally defeated in their efforts to place the Basque people. They remain unique. Guipúzcoa looks to France across the Bidasoa, a river more full of sanguinary history than of water. Beyond is the French Pays Basque where also a dialect of the language without kith or kin is still in use. The Pays Basque was once part of the Kingdom of Navarre, which straddled the Pyrenees and belonged both to France and to Spain geographically.2 In shape, Guipúzcoa bears a curious 1 As a specimen of it here is the Pater Noster in Guipúzcoan Basque: Aita gurea zerueta zaudena, santifikatua izan bedi zure izena, betor gugana zure erreinua, egin bedi zure borondatea zeruan bezela lurrean. Emaiguzu gaur gure eguneroko ogia, barka zazkiguzu gure zorrak guk geren zordonai barkatzen diegun bezela, ez gaitzazu utzi tentazioan erortzen. It will be observed that there are some borrowings from Latin and the Romance languages. This was the mother tongue of St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Xavier, though they both also learned Castilian Spanish in their youth, as do the Guipúzcoan Basques at the present time. The first man to attempt a formal Basque grammar was the Jesuit Manuel de Larramendi, who wrote it in Spanish and called it optimistically, El Imposible vencido, the Impossible Vanquished. That was in 1729, and the victory is not yet. 2 The name Navarre is pure Basque—nava, a plain encircled by mountains, and erri, meaning country. The Spanish language borrowed the nava to describe much of the Peninsular scenery, most famous being the Navas de Tolosa on the high road from Granada to Madrid, site of a tremendous Christian victory over the Moslems in A.D. 1212. resemblance to broad-breasted Spain leaning on its two seas, and the Iraurgi Valley is so green because the Bay of Biscay, less than ten miles to the north, sends it frequent tributes of rain. The Valley returns the compliment by means of its pleasant river, the Urola, which winds into the Bay at Zumaya, after a long struggle through the mountains. It would be possible to fit Guipúzcoa eight times into Yorkshire, and have room to spare. For a country so small it has been given more than its fair share of mountains. Indeed, five-sixths of it is mountain, not giants of Alpine stature, but substantial Snowdons and Helvellyns. To-day, little electric trains from San Sebastián clatter cheerfully round the mountains or through them, six tunnels in ten miles being about the average, until they reach Zumaya, when they turn inland and stop, on their way to remoter destinations, at a station marked Loyola. This name, like all Basque ones, is what geographers would describe as toponomical and declares to those who have the skill to interpret its syllables the nature of the area bearing it. Loyola and Urola are closely connected names, and Basque philologists are now in complete agreement about both of them. Ur is Basque for water, ol is a suffix signifying abundance, and a is the definite article, the abundance of water, which is a very sensible name for a river. Though now tamed to some extent by canals, the Urola, like its big brother the Ebro, is a hasty-tempered, unpredictable river which often breaks out of its banks and drowns part of the Valley. But this habit was not without its compensation, for it created through the centuries a richly fertile deposit of mud or loam. Loi is Basque for loam, ol again is a suffix meaning abundance or profusion, and a is the definite article, the abundance of loam. That is the lowly, earthy, unromantic derivation of a name as celebrated as any in history. There are other Loyolas in the Basque countries (to the Basques Euskalerria) which have nothing whatever to do with sanctity, but simply indicate the nature of the soil.1 1 One of those Loyolas is on the outskirts of San Sebastián, applied to an alluvial deposit of that city's river, the Urumea. The true derivation of the name and many other useful odds and ends of remote Basque and Ignatian history were first brought to light in the eighteenth century by a good and devoted scholar named Gabriel Henao, who called his book Averiguaciones de The good earth of Loyola and the good husbandry of the farming family that tilled it brought them in course of time prosperity and power among their valley neighbours. Another family named Oñaz, whose farm and manor house lay on the slopes of a hill about a mile from Loyola, also came into prominence. The two families intermarried during the Middle Ages, and when the Oñaz branch failed not long afterwards, the Loyolas inherited their name and their property. Both families acquired an early reputation for pugnacity and aggressiveness, usually at the expense of their blood-brothers, the Basques of Navarre. The Navarros, with their proud military traditions dating from the time when their king, Sancho the Great, ruled the whole of non-Moorish Spain, were not people to view raids on their flocks and herds dispassionately. With their French allies they invaded Guipúzcoa, burnt the town of Berastegui and marched on Tolosa. The Guipúzcoanos were ready for them. Suspicious of the power and expansive ambitions of Navarre, they had entered into voluntary union with Castile in A.D. 1200. The Castilians rallied to their aid and battle was given in September of the year 1321 at a place named Beotibar in the mountains near Tolosa. The defenders knew every trick of mountain warfare and showered on the heads of the enemy, caught in a defile, masses of rock and other missiles, until they fled in confusion. The victory was long celebrated in the songs and ballads of Guipúzcoa and Castile and, according to those lively but not excessively reliable sources, the paladins of the day were seven brothers of the Oñaz-Loyola family.1 This was las Antiguedades de Cantabria-Investigations into the Antiquities of Cantabria. Cantabria was the old Roman name for the Basque countries, and still survives in the Spanish name for the Bay of Biscay, Mar Cantábrico. Henao was a Jesuit of Valladolid. Many of the documents which he discovered and used no longer exist, which gives an additional importance to his work. A revised and expanded edition of it was issued at Tolosa (Guipúzcoa) in seven volumes in 1894, by the Basque priest and scholar, Miguel Villalta, an engagingly fervent patriot, but no artist at arranging the contents of a book. 1 Henao-Villalta, Averiguaciones, VI, pp. 266-7, 274; Leturia, El Gentilhombre Iñigo López de Loyola, 2 ed., Barcelona-Madrid, 1949, pp. 58-60. Father Leturia (died 1955) was the most eminent of all modern authorities on the early life of St. Ignatius. |