As it had been formerly agreed in the negotiations begun in Madrid in the year 1656, upon which this present Treaty is founded, that the Pyrenees Mountains, which anciently divided the Gauls from the Spains, shall henceforth be the division of the two said kingdoms.
—Article 42 of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, November 7, 1659
Today the physical frontiers until now separated six European countries, among them Spain, disappear. Citizens—Europeans or not—who wish to travel from Portugal to Germany, passing through France, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg, will no longer encounter any obstacles or long queues that prevent free circulation.
—El Pais, March 26, 1995
Situated on the Spanish-French border at the French town of Hendaye on the Atlantic coast, L’île des Faisans (Pheasant Island) is not the most obvious setting for a historic meeting between European heads of state, nor does it have any obvious connection to the Pyrenees. Locating it is hard enough. The island is obscured by the cluster of border shops selling two-liter bottles of vodka, flamenco dresses, and towels bearing images of flamenco dancers. Visitors who make the effort will find an unprepossessing mostly tree-covered clump of land of some 1.7 acres (6,820 square meters) in the middle of the Bidassoa River that barely merits the status of an island. Were it not for the stone slabs lining its banks, Pheasant Island would be even smaller than it is. Both Spain and France are responsible for its upkeep, via the local authorities in Irun and Hendaye, and its management changes hands every six months, as it has done for more than three hundred years, to the general indifference of the local population and the rest of the world.
Visitors aren’t allowed onto the island, and there is no obvious reason why anyone would want to visit it. Only a small plaque on the edge of a children’s playground on the opposite bank at Hendaye commemorates the island’s historic contribution to the “stability of Europe,” as a result of the meeting that took place here on November 7, 1659, between Don Luis de Haro and Cardinal Mazarin, the respective foreign ministers of Spain and France. The meeting was part of the negotiations that ended the 1635–59 Franco-Spanish War, and because it was a belated consequence of the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, its deliberations were keenly followed by European kings and princes. In October that year, the exiled Charles II of England made his way to Zaragoza to meet with the Spanish chief minister, Don Luis de Haro, before the meeting, in what proved to be a vain attempt to enlist Spanish assistance for the Catholic cause. “I am very much deceaved in travelling in Spayne, for by all reports I did expect ill cheere and worse lying, and hitherto we have founde both the beds and especially the meate very good,” he wrote. “The only thing I find troublesome is the dust and especially in this towne, there having fallen no rayne on this side the Perineans these 4 months.”1
Most leaders preferred to observe the negotiations from a distance. The French and Spanish monarchs were very conscious of this attention, and they chose a location between the two countries so that their two chief ministers could meet on neutral ground without either of them losing face. Today it is difficult to imagine the elaborate preparations that preceded this strange encounter. These included the construction of a large wooden palace on the island itself and pontoon bridges on either side to allow separate entry from both sides of the river, which led to a suite of private rooms and an enormous central chamber 56 feet (17 meters) long, 28 feet (8.5 meters) wide, and 22 feet (7 meters) high, where doors on either side allowed Haro and Mazarin to enter simultaneously. Here the two ministers sat in chairs placed on either side of a line drawn on the floor to mark the symbolic dividing line between France and Spain and discussed the territorial arrangements that were formally enshrined in the Treaty of the Pyrenees, also known as the Peace of the Pyrenees.
Historians have depicted the treaty as a watershed moment in Spain’s military decline, which confirmed the advent of Louis XIV’s France as the hegemonic European superpower. In exchange for French withdrawal from the Catalan territories south of the Pyrenees and an end to French financial support to Portuguese rebels, France obtained the Catalan province of Roussillon and other parts of historic Catalonia north of the Pyrenees, in addition to further territorial acquisitions in the Low Countries. In addition, Spain agreed to the marriage of Philip IV’s daughter Maria-Theresa and the twenty-two-year-old Louis XIV with a dowry payment of 500,000 gold crowns, to take place in June the following year in the same location.
In April 1560, the Spanish royal painter Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez arrived at Pheasant Island, in his capacity as palace marshal, to oversee the preparations on the Spanish side. Velázquez spent seventy-two days decorating the palace and overseeing the royal party’s travel arrangements before the infanta was formally given away on June 7. That same day Velázquez contracted tertian fever; he died on August 6, at the age of sixty-one.2 The meeting between the bride and groom was captured by the French artist Jacques Laumosnier, in a painting that gives some indication of the preparations that may have hastened the great Spanish painter’s premature death. In it Philip IV can be seen handing over his daughter to the extravagantly well-dressed Louis XIV, who is wearing stockings and bows on his ankles and is surrounded by equally foppish and well-turned-out courtiers and officials. The room is draped with carpets, velvet or satin curtains, and a landscape tapestry of the Pyrenees that might have been painted by Velázquez himself.
The advent of the Pyrenean border: Jacques Laumosnier, Meeting of Louis XIV of France and Philip IV of Spain in the Isle of Pheasants, 1659. Note the mountains on the backdrop—possibly painted by Velazquez (Musée de Tessé, public domain, Wikimedia Commons).
In fact the infanta had already been married in a church in Fuenterrabía with Haro acting as the Sun King’s proxy, because the glacial norms of Hapsburg court etiquette did not allow the young bride to cross the river unmarried, and the French king was not permitted to cross the river to marry her. When the princess had been handed over, the two kings knelt on cushions on either side of the line on the floor, where they kissed the Bible and a crucifix and swore to uphold the treaty’s provisions, before Louis swept his bride away to solemnize the marriage in a church in Saint-Jean-de-Luz.
Both kings presented the treaty as a generous and statesmanlike concession to their war-weary subjects, but the “peace” enshrined in the treaty did not last long. Within seven years France and Spain were at war again, in part because the bankrupt Spanish court had not paid the infanta’s dowry. If the Treaty of the Pyrenees did not bring much peace, it nevertheless laid the basis for one of Europe’s most enduring state borders, whose essential features were to remain unchanged for more than three hundred years. The treaty also confirmed the historic role of the Pyrenees as one of Europe’s emblematic “natural” frontiers and its evolution into what the nineteenth-century geographer Élisée Reclus once called “one of the most perfect political boundaries in the world.”3
The Spanish March
This “perfection” was already evident, long before the French and Spanish monarchs took the first steps toward formalizing their mutual border. In Natural History, Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE) notes that “the frontier between the Spanish and the Gallic provinces is formed by the mountains of the Pyrenees, with headlands projecting into the two seas on either side.”4 At that time the mountains constituted an administrative boundary between the two Roman provinces of Narbonnese Gaul to the north and Tarraconensis (Hispania Citerior) in the south, which the Romans sought to regulate and control by establishing fortresses and customs points at the main Pyrenean mountain passes, known as claustrae and clausurae, or “doors” and “closed passages.”
These defenses were initially intended to protect Rome against military incursions from Iberia, particularly from Carthage. During the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, the Claustrae Pyrenai assumed a new role as a defensive perimeter that protected Hispania against invasion from barbarian tribes to the north. When Hispania was overrun by the Visigoths in the fifth century CE, the Pyrenees became a dividing line between Visigothic Spain and the Frankish Empire. Following the Arab-Berber conquest of Visigothic Spain that began in 711, the Pyrenees acquired a new role as a strategic/religious frontier between the Franks and Moorish Iberia. In 732 the emir of Córdoba, Abd-al-Rahman, led a large raiding expedition across the Pyrenees through the Roncesvalles Pass that was halted in a series of engagements at Tours and Poitiers by a Frankish army under the command of the Frankish king Charles Martel “the Hammer”—a victory that the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon and countless others have cited as a decisive event in the history of Europe.
This defeat halted the Moorish advance northward. By 739 the Franks had driven the Muslims from Narbonne, and the Pyrenees became a strategic barrier between Latin Christendom and the emirate of Al-Andalus and was subject to sporadic raiding from both sides. In 778 Charles’s grandson Charlemagne (742–814) made a more concerted attempt to push the frontier southward to the Ebro River when he accepted an invitation from the Muslim governor of Barcelona, Sulaiman Yaqzan ibn al-Arabi, to assist a rebellion in Zaragoza against the Umayyad rulers of Al-Andalus. Two Frankish armies converged on Zaragoza, expecting the gates of the city to be opened to them by al-Arabi’s fellow conspirators. When the governor of Zaragoza refused to open the city gates, the city was briefly placed under siege, before an anti-Frankish revolt in Saxony forced Charlemagne to march his armies northward once again.
During their retreat, the Franks sacked Pamplona as compensation, and shortly afterward their rear guard was ambushed and destroyed by vengeful Basques at the Roncesvalles Pass in the Pyrenees. In the aftermath of this disastrous campaign, the Franks refrained from further major military incursions and set out instead to create a Christian buffer zone on the southern side of the Pyrenees, governed by an assortment of counts, viscounts, marquises, and monastic orders under Frankish protection.
This zone became known as the Limes Hispanicus—the Spanish Marches. The Pyrenees were only one component of an amorphous march, or border region, that extended from Narbonne and Montpellier in the north and into Navarre, Aragon, and Catalonia, and its boundaries were rarely stable, as Iberian Christian rulers extended their power across northern Spain and proceeded to drive the Moors southward. Beyond the castles, watchtowers, and fortified towns that guarded the main strategic points and mountain passes lay a “debatable land” over which neither Muslim nor Christian rulers had full control. To the eleventh-century Almoravid rulers of Al-Andalus, the northern thagr—march or frontier—was a lawless and godless territory, fit only for the most devout and ascetic holy warriors, known in Arabic as rabita, whom they deployed there to defend it against the infidel. Christian rulers often viewed the march in similar terms. In 1057 the monks of Sant Cugat—only 19 miles (31 kilometers) from Barcelona—called for defensive positions to be erected “in barren marches and in solitary places, against the pagans [Muslims]” in a frontier zone they called the marca última—a place of “great terror and trembling” inhabited by “perverse and blasphemous men.”5
By this time most of northern Spain was firmly under Christian control, and the Pyrenees, along with their western extension in the Cantabrian Mountains, had become a base for the Christian resurgence that would ultimately drive Islam from Spain. As early as 870 the Catalan count Guifré el Pelós, or “Wilfred the Hairy,” was made Count of Urgell by Charlemagne’s grandson and established a powerful independent dynasty in the Catalan march, with its seat of power in Barcelona. In the tenth and eleventh centuries the Pyrenees had essentially lost their strategic significance, as the Christian rulers of Navarre, Aragon, and Catalonia consolidated their control over northern Spain and increasingly asserted their independence against their Frankish protectors.
By the thirteenth century the notion of the Spanish Marches as an Islamic/Christian frontier had become a historical anachronism. Yet it was not until after the unification of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon in the last decades of the fifteenth century, and the fall of the last Moorish enclave of Granada in 1492, that the Pyrenees really began their evolution into the military and political frontier between Spain and France. During the reign of Philip II of Spain (1556–98), the Pyrenees underwent yet another metamorphosis into a “frontier of heresy” between Counter-Reformation Spain and the Huguenot-dominated statelet of Béarn. Even then, the Pyrenean frontier continued to constitute a “debatable” state border. Until 1512 the Kingdom of Navarre straddled both sides of the Pyrenees, with its capital in Pamplona. That year Ferdinand of Aragon sent an invading force into Navarre and began a war that would ultimately result in the annexation of all Navarrese territories south of the Pyrenees in 1525. Until 1640, the “composite monarchy” known as the Crown of Aragon—which included the Principality of Catalonia—encompassed territories north and south of the Pyrenees. That year Catalonia rebelled against Castilian rule and appealed to France for military support in what became known as the Reapers’ War—a decision the Catalans later had cause to regret, when French troops established a permanent presence in the Cerdagne and Roussillon and proceeded from occupation toward annexation.
Mapping the Border
The treaty signed by Haro and Mazarin at the Isle of Pheasants in November 1659 was intended to formalize these territorial acquisitions and establish a more precise and definitive boundary between the two states, with the Pyrenees as its central component. Establishing these divisions proved to be a fraught and complex process. Though Article 42 of the provisional Treaty of the Pyrenees declared that “the Pyrenees Mountains, which anciently divided the Gauls from the Spains, shall henceforth form the division of the two kingdoms,” the practical difficulties in implementing this decision were evident in the mutual decision to appoint commissioners who “shall together in good faith, declare which are the Pyrenees Mountains, which . . . should thereafter divide the two kingdoms, and they shall mark the limits they ought to have.”6
Subsequent attempts to define “which are the Pyrenees Mountains” were not helped by the Spanish negotiators, who were determined to claw back through diplomacy some of what they had lost on the battlefield. In March 1660, French and Spanish commissioners met in the town of Céret in Roussillon, in order to transform the treaty’s provisions into an administrative reality. In addition to Roussillon, France also laid claim to the large swathes of the Catalan Cerdagne and other strategic Pyrenean territories in the Conflent, Vallespir, and Capcir Valleys. The Spanish commissioners disputed these claims, and both sides hearkened to classical geographers to support their respective arguments or refute those of their opponents. Pierre de Marca, the erudite commissioner who governed French-controlled Catalonia during the Reapers’ War, cited Strabo’s and Livy’s ancient references to the Limes Hispanicus to assert historic French rights to the Cerdagne, while the Spanish referred to the same sources to counter these claims. At one point the Spanish commissioners even suggested that the border should consist of what “all those who live in the mountains understand as the dividing line” and asked local shepherds, “Where are the Pyrenees?” to support their view that the territories claimed by France were actually located on the Spanish side of the border.
When the French team refused to back down on its claims to some thirty-three villages in the Cerdagne, the Spanish argued that some of these villages were in fact villas—towns—and that France therefore had no right to them. These acrimonious discussions were still unfolding even as the French and Spanish wedding corteges were converging on Pheasant Island. At the eleventh hour Spain conceded almost everything France had asked for, and the commissioners now began to reconcile “natural frontiers” such as rivers, streams, and other “watersheds” with centuries-old agreements made by local Pyrenean villages and communities regarding rights of pasturage and access to woodlands and water.
Known as traités de lies et passeries (treaties of covenanted entry) in French, or facerías in Spanish, these medieval agreements were originally drawn up by individual Pyrenean villages or federations of villages in order to regulate the pastoral economy and eliminate the potential for violent conflict over access to resources and rights of pasturage. In some cases these local agreements were incorporated into the new border, but where this was not possible or strategically desirable, the frontier simply cut through private land and even through buildings. On the Col de Panissars in the Albères massif of Catalonia, for example, the boundary ran straight through a monastery, leaving the church in France and the monks’ quarters on the Spanish side.
Situated 10 miles (16 kilometers) inside France in the rich farmlands of the Cerdagne Valley, the Pyrenean town of Llívia was the capital of the Cerdagne during the Roman Empire. Connected by road to the Catalan border town of Puigcerdà in the province of Girona, the town is a popular Catalan mountain resort whose attractions include the oldest pharmacy in the world and a museum containing the skeleton of a Barbary ape dating back to 430 to 600 CE, believed to have been the pet of a prestigious local warrior. For more than three hundred years, Llívia’s main claim to fame was its status as a Spanish exclave in France—a categorization that was entirely due to the Treaty of the Pyrenees. It was not included in the French annexation of the Cerdagne because the Spanish commissioners convinced their French counterparts that Llívia was a town, not a village. As a result a special accord was written into the treaty that allowed access to Llívia solely from Puigcerdà, via a single designated road that connected it to Spain.
Long after these negotiations were concluded, the Pyrenean frontier remained a contested border, particularly in the newly annexed Catalan territories, whose inhabitants accepted their new rulers with reluctance. Anti-French rebellions in Roussillon and the Cerdagne were frequent, and French and Spanish armies repeatedly occupied and reoccupied parts of Roussillon during the incessant warring between the two countries. In 1700, on his deathbed, the imbecilic Spanish king Carlos II, the last of the Spanish Hapsburgs, appointed Louis XIV’s grandson Philip, the Duke of Anjou, as heir to the Spanish throne—an announcement that was supposedly greeted by the Sun King with the gleeful observation “The Pyrenees no longer exist!”
Other European states regarded the “disappearance” of the Pyrenees and the emergence of a new French superstate with alarm and formed a military alliance to prevent Philip from taking the Spanish throne. The result was the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14, which ended when Philip accepted the Spanish Crown on the condition that he abandon his claims to the French throne. The Pyrenees nevertheless continued to be a periodic zone of conflict between the two states until the early nineteenth century. It was not until 1851 that a French-Spanish commission finally agreed to draw up a definitive border and began the process of mapping the boundary that culminated fifteen years later in the Treaty of Bayonne, on May 26, 1866, “fixing definitively the common frontier of Spain and France.” Two more years of work were required before the commissioners laid the boundary stones that marked this frontier, in accordance with the very precise details contained in the Final Act of Demarcation, such as the instruction that Border Stone 484 should be placed “following the direction of the same wall, which forms an angle of 162 degrees with marker 482 of the French side; and 235 meters away is planted a stone in a bend in the wall.”
The Treaty of Bayonne finally ended any remaining ambiguity regarding the frontier and testified to the new spirit of cooperation between these two historic rivals that rendered the Pyrenees an impediment to trade and commerce. In the early 1840s the French Chamber of Deputies even discussed the possibility of constructing a “canal of the Pyrenees” connecting the Mediterranean to the Atlantic in order to eliminate the longer passage through the Straits of Gibraltar. The capital to finance this project was never raised, and it was eventually made irrelevant by the construction of the Canal Latéral in 1857, which linked Bordeaux to the Canal du Midi at Toulouse, thereby allowing boats to cross France from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.
In the early twentieth century a new attempt was made to transcend the “natural” Pyrenean border, when French and Spanish engineers began to drill a railway tunnel under the mountains through the Somport Pass. On July 18, 1928, the Somport railway was officially opened at the new Canfranc International Railway Station in Aragon, amid great pomp and ceremony. “To find a parallel to the event one would have to imagine the opening of a tunnel between Calais and Dover,” observed the Manchester Guardian that day, “for, despite Louis XIV’s boastful saying, “The Pyrenees no longer exist,’ this chain has always constituted a strategic defence pretty well as formidable as the Channel.”
Following the Spanish Civil War, the Pyrenees once again became a militarized frontier, when the Franco regime fortified the mountains in anticipation of an Allied invasion. It was not until 1995 that the Pyrenees effectively ceased to exist as a political border, following the abolition of Spanish and French customs posts and passport controls as a result of Spain’s accession into the Schengen Area. In March that year I witnessed that transformation firsthand when I visited the Spanish border town of La Jonquera as a BBC radio correspondent. As part of my report I was asked to drive back and forth across the border to see if anyone stopped me or asked for my passport. No one did. Neither the Spanish nor the French police showed any interest in me or anyone else. Today La Jonquera is a sleazy hypercapitalist entrepôt on the former Roman Via Domitia, dominated by giant hypermarkets, booze shops, and erotic supermarkets selling sex toys.
La Jonquera also has the largest brothel in Europe, the Paradise Nightclub, and sex workers are a ubiquitous presence in and around the town, parading up and down the motorway like modern-day sirens in bikinis, heels, and thongs or taking shelter from the sun under parasols near the enormous truck parks on the Spanish side of the frontier. Despite the abolition of the frontier, there are still sufficient differentials on either side of the border in terms of price, supply, and demand to make La Jonquera a sought-after destination for the thousands of consumers who come here. In 2015, however, the border posts remained as empty as they were when I last saw them.
To all practical intents and purposes, the frontier created by Haro and Mazarin at Pheasant Island has become another of Europe’s “dead” borders; it continues to exist only as a line on the map—and in the clichés and metaphorical associations that have been handed down to posterity and that have continued to define the place of the Pyrenees in history.