Aragon

Before Castile had emerged from its origins in Leon, the kingdom of Aragon played out a separate role alongside Navarra. Aragon and Navarra alternately dominated the narrow neck of northern Spain between the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean. They were both in an excellent strategic position to do so. Sometimes they were the associates and pawns of greater powers. But in the course of time Aragon grew to dwarf Navarra and all the regions other than Castile.

Physically, modern Aragon comprises the dry, thinly populated provinces of Huesca, Zaragoza and Teruel, which contain hardly more than one million people. Huesca rises up to France in the Pyrenees and lies between Catalonia and Navarra, extending down to the valley of the Ebro at one point. Huesca is Upper Aragon, a land steeply pitched from nearly sea level to eleven thousand feet and overlooked by solitary castles and monasteries. The town of Huesca, the Roman Osca, lies on the lower slope among the foot hills, where it has had strategic military significance through the wars of several millennia. This large province is now mostly pastoral.

Zaragoza is the central province, lying astride the Ebro. The capital city has been an important communications and administra tive center since Caesar Augustus named it after himself. Like Seville and Cordoba, the city of Zaragoza enjoys the advantage of a broad river valley cut into the peninsula. A great deal of the present mercantile and cultural prominence of the city is a heritage of the Moorish occupation. It is a refining, canning and manufac turing center, the only city of importance along the rail and vehicle lines from Barcelona to Madrid. Because of its strategic location it has been involved importantly in the great European, Roman and Arabic power struggles on the peninsula, and because of its size and location it has always been difficult to conquer, as Napoleon discovered.

The third province of Aragon is Teruel, commanding the eastern rim of the central meseta. Teruel is almost identical in size and population with Huesca but its characteristics are more like those of Castile. Except for some iron, coal, sulphur, zinc and manganese, the province depends on semiarid agriculture for a poor existence. Because of its position, it was an almost constant battleground in the civil war, the front lines extending across it for two years. The capital city changed hands several times and was almost entirely destroyed.

Aragon has both an internal and an external history, in this respect differing from most Spanish kingdoms but not from Spain itself. The Aragonese adventure into world politics was a result of the inheritance of the crown by a son of Sancho III of Navarra at the beginning of the eleventh century. After this, united first with Navarra and then with Catalonia, the kings of Aragon began driv ing the Moors south and extending their own rule to Majorca, Minorca, Valencia, Sardinia, Sicily and Naples. The greatest in the line of Aragonese kings was the Emperor Charles V, who merged the houses of Aragon and Castile with the Hapsburgs and became the first great modern monarch and ruler of the first world empire.

Details of the internal history of Aragon are more informative, since they explain the political development of a people. They have been largely unaffected by the dynastic maneuvers of their royal family except to furnish troops, often mercenary, and taxes. The Aragonese is like the Castilian in administrative and military com petence and in his sense of independence, his proud poverty and his deep conviction. Like the Castilian, he is better as ruler or sub ject than as partner. The political association with Catalonia proved a constant irritation to both sides, and each in the end retained his own language, customs and legal processes. The Aragonese has carefully gained and preserved his own rights as well as his culture. His loyalties are held close to his heart. The ancient exclusive rights of his community, town and district, including the administration of justice, were preserved through war and peace and not lost until the eighteenth century as the nation moved toward modern national organization.

Aragon has likewise developed and husbanded its natural resources, and like most of Spain was given its greatest impetus under the skillful hand of the Moor. As a result, irrigation, specialty farming and manufacture have made it possible for people to survive in a country that would seem at first glance to deny human existence. Cereals, grapes, olives and sugar beets are cultivated in the oases and on tiny watered strips. Two great lateral canals were brought out of the Ebro by the Moors, similar to the archaic lateral canal system along the Tigris River in Mesopotamia, with which the Arab rulers of Spain were familiar. The men who have been able to live in the stark places of lower Aragon are mostly farmers, hunters and shepherds of tremendous personal resource against hunger, the thin, cold, penetrating air of winter and the fatigue of unrewarding labor. Yet, surprisingly, hardly a generation has passed since the beginning of recorded time in which the Aragonese have not been at war.