Basque

The Basques are the indigenous people of the western Pyrenees and the Bay of Biscay, in the seven historic provinces straddling Spain and France, distinguished by Euskara, a language isolate surviving from the pre-Indo-European tongues of ancient Europe; Roman authors knew their ancestors as the Vascones.

In the early Middle Ages their country between the Ebro and the Garonne was called Vasconia, and out of it arose the Kingdom of Pamplona, later Navarre, whose coast Castile seized in 1199 and which itself fell to Spanish armies between 1512 and 1524, while Lower Navarre north of the mountains became a province of France in 1620. The towns and valleys kept their own fueros, the customary laws that also enshrined inheritance by the eldest child.

Basque entered print in 1545, when Bernard Etxepare published the first Basque book, and the French Revolution of 1790 swept away the self-governing institutions of the French Basque provinces.