Kingdom of Navarre

An ambush remembered as an epic

formationDrafted from Scott, History of the Moorish Empire in Europe, Volume 1 (1904)

Charlemagne invaded Spain in 778 and reached Zaragoza before troubles back in France forced him to withdraw. Recrossing the Pyrenees, his army passed through the valley of Roncesvalles, where Basque fighters - not Muslim ones, whatever a later French epic would claim - fell on his rearguard and destroyed it in the mountains. No Muslim force took part in the fight at all; the Basques who ambushed the Franks were themselves Christians, hostile to any foreign army crossing their own land regardless of its faith. It was this disaster that gave the world the Chanson de Roland, a poem that turned a Basque ambush into a war against Islam it had never actually been.

Scott, History of the Moorish Empire in Europe, Volume 1 (1904) · Jean Fouquet · Public domain

A second Roncesvalles, and a kingdom's own beginning

Decades later, an army under the Frankish counts Eblus and Asenarius took Pamplona and began withdrawing through the very same pass, confident the danger was behind them. It was not. A combined force of Basque mountaineers and allies from Muslim Córdoba - a treaty had secured Córdoba's support in exchange for free passage south of the Pyrenees - cut the retreating Franks to pieces a second time. This victory, by one historian's own account, was contemporaneous with the mountain country's assertion of real independence and political organization of its own.

Scott, History of the Moorish Empire in Europe, Volume 1 (1904) · Hayden Soloviev · CC BY 4.0

A name without a secure date

Just when a kingdom actually emerged from these wars is not clear from the sources: tradition credits an early king or chief named Íñigo Arista, but the first ruler either source consulted can name with real confidence is Sancho García, reigning from 905. Navarre and its neighbor Aragon shared a common origin in the legends of the period, and by the close of the tenth century Navarre had absorbed Aragon outright - a union that would last only until the next century's own great king divided his inheritance again.

A kingdom briefly the size of Christian Spain

peakDrafted from Chapman, A History of Spain, Founded on the Historia de España y de la Civilización Española of Rafael Altamira (1918)

Sancho III came to a Navarre that already included Aragon, and spent his reign extending it further still. When the Cordovan caliphate finally collapsed into fractured taifa kingdoms, Sancho intervened successfully in the wars among the Christian states themselves, uniting Castile and León under his own authority. Since he already ruled Navarre, Aragon and the Basque provinces on both the Spanish and French sides of the Pyrenees, only Galicia - where the kings of León had taken refuge - and the counties of Catalonia remained outside his power in the entire Christian north.

Chapman, A History of Spain, Founded on the Historia de España y de la Civilización Española of Rafael Altamira (1918) · Kent Wang · CC BY-SA 4.0

A moment that might have changed everything

For one brief moment, nearly the whole of Christian Spain answered to a single king. It could have been, in the judgment of one historian, an important turning point in the peninsula's own history - a step toward a unified Spanish state centuries before such a thing actually existed. But the idea of Spanish nationhood was not yet ready for it, and neither, in truth, was Sancho's own confederation: it held together only as long as he personally held it.

Undoing the work of a lifetime

At his death in 1035, Sancho did what every strong king who preceded him in this pattern seemed doomed to do - he divided his own inheritance among his sons. Navarre, Castile and Aragon emerged from that division as separate kingdoms, Castile and Aragon entering independent existence for the first time as a direct result. The peninsula's work toward unity had to begin again almost from nothing, and Navarre itself, once the seed from which two future great powers grew, would spend the centuries that followed shrinking in their shadow rather than growing to match them.

A crown that kept changing houses

contractionDrafted from Chapman, A History of Spain, Founded on the Historia de España y de la Civilización Española of Rafael Altamira (1918)

Navarre never regained anything like Sancho the Great's own reach. Wedged between Castile, Aragon and France, its crown passed by marriage and inheritance through one foreign house after another - by 1285 it had become, outright, a province of the French crown, and stayed one until 1328, when the death of Charles IV of France without a male heir let it recover its own separate existence under the house of Evreux.

Chapman, A History of Spain, Founded on the Historia de España y de la Civilización Española of Rafael Altamira (1918) · Jorab · CC BY 3.0

A prince, a poisoned sister, and a throne enthroned by force

That same pattern of a crown passing through foreign hands repeated inside Navarre's own royal family when it produced its own succession crisis. Charles of Viana, heir to both Navarre and, through his father Juan II, to Aragon itself, died before he could inherit either - a death Aragon's own nobility blamed on Juan's second wife. The throne of Navarre should then have passed to Charles's sister Blanche; instead her own father had her imprisoned, and she died in captivity soon after, by one account poisoned on her sister's own orders. That younger sister, Leonor, was enthroned in Blanche's place, and her marriage to the count of Foix installed a new dynasty on a throne two of its own predecessors had just died fighting over.

A dynasty too short-lived to matter

The house of Foix did not hold Navarre for long. Wedged as always between larger neighbors and now further weakened by the manner of its own accession, the kingdom entered the sixteenth century without the strength to withstand what came next - a conquest that would end, within a generation of Leonor's own coronation, the independence Navarre had kept, in one reduced form or another, since the wars that first produced it.

A judgment from God at Pampeluna

contractionDrafted from Johnes), Volume II (1849)

The house of Evreux that took Navarre's throne in 1328 held it for nearly a century before the succession crisis that would install the house of Foix, and the reign that dominates that century in the chronicles is not a flattering one. Charles II, who came to the throne in 1349, spent his rule scheming against the French crown he had once been close to - plotting, warring, making peace, and plotting again - and taxing his own Navarrese subjects hard enough that when he summoned sixty deputies from the kingdom's towns to Pampeluna to approve a new tax and they told him plainly the country could not bear it, he had the delegation shut up in a walled orchard on short rations until three of the most determined were beheaded to frighten the rest into submission.

Johnes), Volume II (1849) · Bibliothèque nationale de France · Public domain

An old man's ordinary night

Froissart records what happened next as a story told to him at Foix by people who had been at Pampeluna, and frames it himself as something that "seemed a judgment from God." Charles, then close to sixty and in the habit of having his bed warmed with heated air to make him sweat - a treatment for the effects of what Froissart calls his debaucheries - returned from a night with his mistress shivering with cold and asked his servants to warm his bed as usual. The sheets he was wrapped in caught fire; he was burned, Froissart writes, "as far as his navel," and lingered in agony for fifteen days before dying, no surgeon or physician able to help him. His subjects, Froissart notes dryly, at least escaped the tax he had meant to impose on them.

A nickname the sources themselves argue about

Froissart's own translator adds that the story was not universally accepted even at the time: a letter from the bishop of Dax, Charles's own minister, to the king's sister Queen Blanche describes only the great pain of his final illness, with no mention of any fire at all. Later historians split over the question, some treating the burning sheets as literal fact and others as a moralizing legend attached after the fact to a king already notorious for his scheming. What both sides agreed on, whatever killed him, was the name history had already settled on him: Charles the Bad, a Navarrese king remembered less for any single act of war or treaty than for a reputation for treachery that had outrun the specifics of his own reign by the time he died. His son, crowned Charles III soon after the funeral at Pampeluna, inherited a throne considerably less trusted by its neighbors than the one his father had received in 1349.

Johnes), Volume II (1849) · British Library · Public domain

A kingdom split by the mountains it was named for

endDrafted from Chapman, A History of Spain, Founded on the Historia de España y de la Civilización Española of Rafael Altamira (1918)

The house of Foix that Leonor's marriage had installed proved, in the end, exactly as short-lived as the circumstances of its own accession suggested it might be. In 1512 Ferdinand of Aragon - already king of a neighboring realm that had itself once been part of Navarre's own domain, under Sancho the Great three centuries before - conquered the Spanish portion of the kingdom outright, ending its independence south of the Pyrenees for good.

One kingdom, two fates

The mountains that had sheltered Navarre's own founders now divided its ending as well. French Navarre, the smaller portion north of the Pyrenees, was not part of Ferdinand's conquest and remained for a time under the rule of the same house of Foix that had lost the larger, Spanish kingdom. That rump state did not last as an independent entity either - it presently became a part of the kingdom of France, absorbed rather than conquered, the last piece of a kingdom that had once briefly stretched across nearly the whole of Christian Spain reduced, finally, to a province of its northern neighbor.

Spanish Navarre did not simply disappear into Aragon and Castile the way the conquest's own finality might suggest. What it kept, and for how long, is its own story.

A viceroyalty among captaincies

afterlifeDrafted from Chapman, A History of Spain, Founded on the Historia de España y de la Civilización Española of Rafael Altamira (1918)

Ferdinand's 1512 conquest of Spanish Navarre was not simply an act of arms. The pope sanctioned the taking of the portion of the kingdom lying south of the Pyrenees specifically, and on that sanction Navarre was formally and permanently added to the Spanish domain - a conquest with a paper title behind it, not only a battlefield one.

A kingdom governed, not simply annexed

What Ferdinand actually absorbed was a country whose own kings had never ruled by unchecked will. Chapman notes that in Navarre the administration of justice belonged to the king, but that no king of Navarre could hold court, make war, make peace or agree a truce without first consulting his own nobles - the same constitutional habit of mind that had made Navarre's throne itself an elected, treaty-bound office more than once in its own history. Spain inherited that habit along with the territory, and did not try to erase it.

The one region that kept a viceroy

The clearest evidence of what Navarre kept is administrative rather than military. When the Bourbon kings reorganized Spain's regions under captain-generals during the eighteenth century - Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Galicia, Andalusia and the rest all reduced to that same standard colonial-style command - Navarre alone was left as a viceroyalty, governed under the older and more prestigious title that the rest of Spain's own provinces had long since lost. More than two hundred years after Ferdinand's conquest, a kingdom that no longer had a king of its own still had a form of government no other Spanish region was allowed to keep.

Chapman, A History of Spain, Founded on the Historia de España y de la Civilización Española of Rafael Altamira (1918) · Millars · CC BY-SA 4.0

The half across the mountains

French Navarre, spared the 1512 conquest, followed a quieter path to the same end. It remained for a time under the same house of Foix that had lost the Spanish kingdom, then passed into the kingdom of France outright

• absorbed rather than conquered, the last piece of a realm that had once stretched, under Sancho the Great, across nearly the whole of Christian Spain, ending finally as an ordinary province of France.