Huesca

Huesca lies on the plain below the Pyrenees, the Muslim Wasqa that the kings of Aragon took in 1096 and made one of their principal cities. Montearagón, the castle-abbey Sancho Ramírez raised above the town, and the royal pantheon of the Romanesque monastery of San Pedro el Viejo recall its royal past. The present cathedral was begun in 1273, when the town reached about eight thousand people, its medieval peak.

The Black Death of 1348 cut the population to about four thousand in the fifteenth century, and building on the cathedral stopped. In 1349 the city ordered that Romance, the Aragonese of the time, be used in the market rather than Hebrew, Arabic or Basque. Peter IV founded a university here in 1354, and during the War of the Two Peters, in 1357–59, the walls were strengthened against a Castilian attack. The council moved into its new Casas de la Ciudad in 1461. Huesca had the third largest Jewish community in Aragon, and the Inquisition tried and burned several judaizers in 1489–90. French troops held the city from 1809 to 1813. Huesca became a provincial capital in 1833.