4

Scholars, Pilgrims, and Troubadours

           Since it is proper that those who have drunk of any philosophical nectar love each other, and that anyone who might have anything rare, precious, and useful which is known to others, should impart it generously . . . [we] have been zealous to investigate if we had anything of this sort, which we might present to you, who test through experience, as something sweet and delicious.

     —Petrus Alphonsi, Epistola ad peripateticos¹

The Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1901–92) is more widely associated with his pioneering studies of everyday life and urban spaces than with mountains or the Pyrenees. But even though Lefebvre spent much of his working life in Paris, he was born in Hagetmau near Pau, in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, and died at his mother’s house in the village of Navarrenx in Béarn. In addition to two doctoral theses on the Pyrenees, he also wrote a book, Pyrénées (1965), in which he acknowledged his intellectual debt to “this region, in which I endured heavy clerical conformism, [which] had nourished and sustained all the heretical currents: From Arianism brought by the Visigoths to Albigensian and Cathar heresies to Protestantism to Jansenism.”² For Lefebvre, the Pyrenees did not refer merely to the mountains themselves, but to a broader “meridional” space encompassing a wide swathe of southern France and reaching as far south as Barcelona. This “heretical periphery” was a crucial component of his intellectual formation and an identity that he defined as “Occitan, that is to say, peripheral—and global.”

Lefebvre’s celebration of his Pyrenean borderland heritage might seem idiosyncratic to some, but his invocation of a “peripheral” space that was also connected culturally and intellectually to the wider world is in many ways a more accurate depiction of the actual place of the Pyrenees in history than the endless references to “gloomy masses” and impenetrable barriers that have so often been attached to them. Consider the Benedictine monastery of Santa María de Ripoll, in the foothills of the Catalan Pyrenees. Established around 879 by Wilfred the Hairy, the Count of Urgell and the “founder of Catalonia,” the monastery is one of the great ecclesiastical buildings of the early Spanish March. It is most famously associated with the formidable scholar-statesman Abbot Oliba Cabreta of Ripoll (971–1046). Among his many intellectual achievements, Oliba was one of the promoters of the Peace and Truce of God movement, which resulted in the agreement by the Latin church to impose limits on feudal violence in 1027—one of the first attempts in history to impose rules and conducts on the treatment of “civilians” and noncombatants in war.

Oliba also presided over the expansion of the Ripoll monastery’s library and scriptorium. At its peak in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, the scriptorium contained a number of Arabic translations of Greek and Latin manuscripts that were being translated back into Latin by local monks. In the second half of the tenth century a precocious French monk named Gerbert of Aurillac came to the monastery to study there. Gerbert went on to become one of the great intellectuals of Dark Ages Europe, and his remarkable interaction with the intellectual culture of “Saracen” Iberia suggests a very different role that the Marca Hispanica once played in European history than the one that the Pyrenees have traditionally been associated with.³

The Mathematical Pope

Gerbert’s Iberian journey began in 967, when the abbot of the local monastery in Aurillac in south-central France entreated a Catalan nobleman named Count Borrell II of Barcelona to take Gerbert back to Catalonia to find “men proficient in the arts.” Gerbert would have been only around twelve years old then, but the novice monk’s prodigious grasp of Latin, logic, philosophy, and mathematics had already outstripped his teachers’ knowledge and abilities. The abbot of Aurillac clearly believed that new intellectual horizons were more likely to be found south of the Pyrenees, and Borrell accepted his request. As a result Gerbert was placed under the tutelage of Atto, (died 971) the warrior-bishop of Vic in Catalonia, where he quickly immersed himself in the vibrant polyglot culture of the Marca Hispanica, with its fusion of Arab, Jewish, and Christian influences. The young monk also became acquainted with the stream of translated classical Greek, Roman, Persian, and Sanskrit manuscripts that were making their way into the Umayyad caliphate of Córdoba from Damascus and Baghdad.

Gerbert’s studies in Catalonia had a decisive impact on his intellectual development, particularly on his understanding of the four disciplines pertaining to the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. In addition to discovering the nine Arabic numerals and zero for the first time, he also became familiar with the calculating device called the abacus. Gerbert may have learned how to use the astrolabe—a spherical device for calculating time and position developed by Arab scientists—which became the main navigational device until the development of the compass.

In December 970 Gerbert traveled to Rome with his mentors Count Borrell and Bishop Atto, where the Holy Roman emperor Otto I assigned him as tutor to his son. In 972 Gerbert took up a new post at the cathedral school of Reims, where he began to disseminate some of the mathematical and astronomical theories he had imbibed in Catalonia to a wider audience. Gerbert soon established a reputation as an innovative teacher, with a penchant for ingenious pedagogical devices in the classroom such as the monochord, a single string over a sounding box, which he used to demonstrate the mathematical relationship between musical harmonies and different pitches. He revamped the old Roman abacus, with a smaller and simplified version that incorporated Arabic numerals for the first time in Europe.

In addition to writing a textbook on geometry and demonstrating the use of the astrolabe, Gerbert also created a six-note musical scale, invented a water-powered church organ, and devised mathematical poem puzzles, such as the carmen figuratum, or “figurative poem,” which he gave to his former pupil and friend Otto II. These innovations were not always favorably viewed in a Christian world where the spirit of intellectual curiosity was still encircled—and to some extent policed—by dogmatism and superstition. Some clerics regarded Gerbert as a necromancer and claimed that his inventions were the result of magic rather than science. Others alleged darkly that he had consorted with Saracen magicians and witches in Iberia. In the twelfth century, William of Malmesbury claimed that Gerbert had “surpassed Ptolemy with the astrolabe, and Alcandraeus in astronomy, and Julius Firmicus in judicial astrology” in Iberia, where he also learned “what the singing of birds portended; there he acquired the art of calling up spirits from hell: in short, whatever hurtful or salutary, human curiousity has discovered.” In the course of these travels, the English historian claimed that Gerbert had sold his soul to the devil, who helped him steal a book from a mysterious Saracen philosopher and escape to France where he learned to cast “the head of a statue” that could supposedly predict the future.⁴

Such accusations did not deter the Holy Roman emperor Otto II from appointing his former tutor Pope Sylvester II in 999. The appointment proved to be short-lived. In 1002, Gerbert and his mentor were driven from office by the Roman populace. Gerbert died the following year, on May 12, 1003, revered by his friends and students, but still subject to dark rumors regarding the forbidden knowledge that he had acquired south of the Pyrenees, whose repercussions can still be felt by generations of mathematicians and computer programmers.

Translators

Both the reasons for Gerbert’s journey to Iberia and the ideas and knowledge that he brought back with him suggest that the Spanish March did not always signify to contemporary Christians what it later came to symbolize for generations of historians. In the centuries that followed, many Christian scholars followed his footsteps to Spain in search of books, manuscripts, and ideas that were not available elsewhere in Europe. These journeys were part of the cultural and intellectual diffusion that led, as the historian Philip Khuri Hitti puts it, “from the portals of Toledo through the Pyrenees . . . through the Provence and the Alpine passes into Lorraine, Germany and Central Europe as well as across the Channel into England.”⁵ This movement of ideas reached a peak in the twelfth century, according to the medievalist John Tolan, when “a wave of Arabic texts, swept north through the Pyrenees, changing the intellectual map of Europe,”⁶ and European scholars from across the continent traveled to Iberia to work at the translation school established by Archbishop Raymond in Toledo in 1126. These scholars included men like Gerard of Cremona, Adelard of Bath, Hermann of Carinthia, Daniel of Morley, and Robert of Ketton, all of whom traveled to Iberia and brought back translations of Arabic manuscripts or Greek and Latin treatises on algebra, medicine, and philosophy that had been translated into Arabic.

Many of them crossed the Pyrenees to reach their destinations, and such journeys are often ignored or forgotten, not only because there is a general reluctance to accept that Islam may have played a positive role in Europe’s intellectual development, but also because the representations of the Pyrenees as an “impassable” barrier against the movement of ideas do not allow for the possibility of interactions of this kind. For many of these scholars, however, the Pyrenean frontier was not a barrier between civilization and savagery, but a gateway to an Arab/Islamic cultural milieu that was more conducive to the spirit of scientific inquiry than the countries they came from.

Such sentiments were not universal. The Huesca-born Jewish convert to Christianity Moses of Huesca, better known as Petrus Alfonsi (ca. 1062–1110), became court physician to Henry I, the son of William the Conqueror. Alfonsi also wrote the bestselling Priestly Tales, a compilation of didactic stories that some scholars believe constituted the template for The Canterbury Tales and The Decamaron. Born in Huesca, a town that had been under Muslim control only ten years before his baptism in 1106, Alfonsi received an Arab/Jewish/Islamic education before his conversion, but he remained bitterly hostile to Islam and Judaism and wrote two influential tracts condemning both faiths that were widely read in Christian Europe.

One of their readers was Peter the Venerable, the abbot of the powerful monastic order of Cluny, who traveled to Castile and Galicia through Navarre in 1141 to receive a donation and endowment of two monasteries for his order from King Alfonso VII. Peter’s Iberian journey also had a more unusual purpose. Inspired in part by Petrus Alfonsi’s diatribes, he commissioned a team of learned Latin scholars in Castile “with entreaty and high fee” to translate a number of Arabic texts, including the Koran.⁷ These efforts were intended not to promote interfaith dialogue but to combat a religion that Peter regarded as intrinsically abhorrent. His efforts nevertheless resulted in Robert of Ketton’s annotated Latin translation of the Koran, which Peter’s secretary took back with him to France, thereby providing Christian Europe with its first translated version of the Koran and its first analysis—however jaundiced—of its essential precepts.

Scientists in the twenty-first century might recognize kindred spirits in men like Gerard of Cremona, Adelard of Bath, Muhammad al-Khwarizmi, or Maimonides. But others will struggle to remember that there was once a time when Christian and Jewish scholars made their way through lonely Pyrenean mountain passes carrying translations and manuscripts in their baggage, their heads full of algebraic formulae and philosophical questions that they were unable to answer in their own countries. We have no descriptions from these scholars of their Pyrenean journeys, but some of them, like Peter and his secretary, would have made their way through the same mountain passes that have so often been described as inaccessible or impassable barriers to the movement of men and ideas, and they would have stayed at the inns, monasteries, and guesthouses established along what had already become one of the great institutions in the Christian religious calendar.

The Way

The origins of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela date back to the ninth century, when a trickle of European pilgrims first began to make their way southward to Galicia to pay homage to the shrine of Saint James. According to the eleventh-century Historia Turpini, or Pseudo-Turpin, one of the five books that make up the Liber Sancti Jacobi in the archive of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, Saint James appeared to Charlemagne in a dream and revealed the road to his tomb at the end of a field of stars. There is no evidence that Charlemagne ever went to Galicia, but thousands of the pilgrims who made their way to Santiago de Compostela believed that he had. By the twelfth century, thousands of men and women from all walks of life undertook the difficult and often perilous journey to Santiago de Compostela, which could cover between 1,250 and 3,700 miles (2,000 and 6,000 kilometers) and last the best part of a year.

Some traveled as members of pilgrimage fraternities and societies. Others went at their own behest to do penance or gain remission for their sins, or in the hope of achieving a miraculous cure for themselves or a relative. Kings and queens, merchants and prostitutes, and condemned prisoners, peasants, and serfs all took part in this arduous and sometimes dangerous journey, whose principal routes led through the Pyrenees. The majority crossed the mountains through the “French route,” from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to the Cize Pass and Roncesvalles in Navarre, or via the “Aragonese routes,” across the Somport or Portalet Pass.

For many of these pilgrims, mountains were already places to be dreaded, and the Pyrenees would have been a daunting and even terrifying ordeal. In his twelfth-century pilgrim’s “guidebook” known as the Codex Calixtinus, the French monk Aimeric de Picaud describes the Cize Pass as a “very high mountain” whose “height is such that it seems to touch the sky: to him who climbs it, it seems as if he was able to touch the sky with his hand.”⁸ The mountains were not the only obstacle the pilgrims faced. The Codex frequently condemns the ferrymen and toll keepers along the pilgrimage route, who charged extortionate fees for transporting pilgrims across rivers and streams in overloaded boats. Those who refused to pay were beaten with sticks, and some ferrymen even stripped the clothes and possessions from unfortunate travelers who drowned while making these crossings.

Not surprisingly, the Codex is lavish in its praise of the clerics, monarchs, and “roadmen” who built bridges, restored and maintained roads, or paid for their construction, thus enabling pilgrims to avoid such predators. Artfully promoted by the Catholic Church and the powerful Cluniac monastery, the pilgrimage helped restore and consolidate the connections between the Mozarabic Church and Latin Christendom, and it also became another instrument of cultural transmission and diffusion, as pious rulers and monastic orders commissioned churches, monasteries, sanctuaries, and hospices along the main pilgrimage routes, all of which attracted artists and craftsmen from across Europe.

The Christian Pyrenees

Evidence of their work can still be found all over the Pyrenees: in the cemeteries of medieval pilgrims who died of plague while crossing the Somport Pass; in the delicate stone carving of two angels carrying the Greek letters for the first two letters of Jesus’s name on a twelfth-century Romanesque church built by the people of Assouste for the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage; in the Romanesque capitals on the San Juan de la Peña monastery that was built into an Aragonese mountainside in the early Middle Ages; in churches, chapels, monuments, and sanctuaries that were built even in the most remote settings, such as the Abbey of Saint-Martín-du-Canigou, in the present-day département of the Pyrénées-Orientales in southern France.

Perched on a steep mountain in the shadow of Mount Canigou, only a few miles from the Spanish border, the abbey is reached either by a stomach-churning drive in a jeep up the dirt road that wraps its way around the mountain or by a steep walk up through pine forest. Those who make the walk will be rewarded by the splendid little complex of two Romanesque churches and a cloister, whose stone walls rise like an extension of the rock face on which it was built, offering panoramic views of the crags and forests of the Canigou massif. The abbey was founded in 1009 by Wilfred Count of Cerdanya (970–1050). In 1035 Wilfred became a monk and retired to the monastery, where he lived until his death fifteen years later. The following year his fellow monks sent one of their number on a special journey to solicit prayers for his salvation. The anonymous emissary recorded his journey on a parchment, on which representatives of more than one hundred monasteries and churches wrote pious tributes to the abbey’s deceased founder.

As a result we know that the monk walked through many of the valleys of the Eastern Pyrenees before turning northward toward Carcassonne. He then continued onto Poitiers, Tours, Orléans, and Paris, walking onward to Maastricht, Aachen, Coblenz, and Metz, before finally turning back toward Canigou and Saint-Martín. Even in their isolated mountain retreat, the monks of Saint-Martín-du-Canigou were able to send one of their members more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) from his Pyrenean home, knowing that he would be received en route by people who understood his language and his concerns, and confident that he would afterward be able to return safely to the savage frontier that, even then, was far closer to the rest of Europe than historians have often claimed.⁹

The Christianization of the Pyrenees was not limited to the main Pyrenean pilgrimage routes. As Christian rulers and religious institutions extended and consolidated their control over the Spanish March, they also set out to stamp their mark on the Pyrenees themselves. At first sight there is little to distinguish the Vall de Boí, in the Alta Ribagorça region of Catalonia, from many similar Pyrenean valleys. To the north, the valley is dominated by the serrated peaks of the high Pyrenees that separate Spain from France. Most visitors approach it from the south through a wild Arizona-like landscape of rust-colored canyons, turquoise rivers, and flat-topped rugged hills, dotted with the high-walled medieval villages and fortresses that testify to the region’s previous significance as a frontier zone.

The main point of attraction in the Vall de Boí lies in the nine Romanesque churches that were built up and down the valley in the eleventh and twelfth centuries with the help of artists and builders from Lombardy, which have transformed the valley into a World Heritage Site. This sought-after designation is a tribute to what UNESCO calls the “profound cultural interchange across medieval Europe, and in particular across the mountain barrier of the Pyrenees” in this period. These small mountain churches are exquisite constructions, built with the simplicity and lack of ostentation that distinguish Romanesque churches from the overbearing Gothic churches and cathedrals that would later come to dominate so many Spanish towns and villages. The Church of San Clemente in the village of Taüll is one of the finest in the valley, with its rounded stone walls and its rectangular bell tower layered with narrow arched windows and the blind arches known as Lombard bands.

The apse at San Clemente once contained a fresco painted by the anonymous artist known as the Master of Taüll around 1123. Like many Romanesque frescos, the original is in the National Museum of Catalan Art in Barcelona, but the church projects a skillful remapping of the fresco onto the walls for visitors. One afternoon I watched these bare stone walls lit up by the gloriously expressive image of Christ Pantocrator surrounded by saints and angels, in a sumptuous blaze of purple and terracotta. It wasn’t necessary to be religious to be moved by this display, or to admire the Master of Taüll and his fellow artists who left such beautiful images and buildings in places where very few people at the time would have been able to see them.

Sant Climent de Taüll (Photo by Xavigivax, September 9, 2007, Wikimedia Commons).

It is not known why so many artists left the Italian lakes region to work abroad in this period, or what led them to these remote mountain valleys, but the most logical explanation is that there was work available. There was clearly a market for their skills in what the Burgundian chronicler and historian Rodolfus Glaber (985–1047) once called the “white cloak of churches” that spread over “all the earth, but especially in Italy and Gaul” in the early Middle Ages.¹⁰ In commisioning such buildings in the Pyrenees, Christian rulers and clerics not only demonstrated their own piety; they also demonstrated the power of the church over the mountains themselves, and these efforts were not limited to chapels, churches, and sanctuaries. As the Codex suggested, the building of bridges was regarded as a pious and a practical endeavor, which the religious and secular authorities were often eager to associate themselves with. One of the most eminent bridge builders of the Catalan March was Hermengaudius, later Saint Ermengol, who first enters history as archdeacon of the diocese of Urgell in 1002.

In the course of his relatively short career, Ermengol performed a number of what his biographer calls “hydraulic miracles” along the Segre River. On one occasion the Segre was spating after heavy rain and threatening to overflow, whereupon Ermengol fell down on his knees “begging Christ that the force of the river might turn away from the Virgin Mother” and crying out, “O water, do you dare to perform this sacrilege so that you might break up the estate of the church because you are bored with your usual path? Desist from this crime, violator, I challenge you in the divine name to hear my prayer.”¹¹ The next day the waters subsided, and Ermengol was able to continue the construction of a bridge across the Segre. In 1035 the then bishop of Urgell was less fortunate when a bridge that he was helping to build across the same river collapsed at a place called Bar on the banks of the Segre, and Ermengol fell into the river and cracked his skull on a rock and died. The bridge was not built until 1076, but it lasted until its final collapse in 1985.

Songs of Love

The cultural traffic across the Pyrenees during the Middle Ages was not simply a by-product of religion. Secular cultural influences also made their way across the mountains, often by the most unlikely routes. Today there is little to distinguish the dusty Aragonese city of Barbastro, in the Pyrenean foothills beneath the Sierra de Guara, from many other Spanish cities. The surrounding landscape is mostly concealed by anonymous blocks of flats and traffic-bound streets that give little indication of the ancient origins of a Celtiberian city that preceded the Roman Empire. According to some literary scholars, however, this dusty, nondescript city may have played a peripheral role in one of the great European literary movements of the Middle Ages. In The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (1987), the late Cuban American medievalist María Rosa Menocal argued that the troubadour poetry that flourished in Provence between 1095 and 1295 was inspired by the Arabic musical and literary culture of Al-Andalus, and that the word “troubadour” originated from the Arabic word taraba (to sing) or tarab (song).

Menocal found precedents for troubadour song in the muwash-shahas, or “ring songs,” of Moorish Iberia, which fused classical Arabic verses with refrains or choruses sung in colloquial Arabic or even Hebrew and Mozarabic Latin. Like other proponents of the “Arab origins” theory of troubadour poetry, Menocal cited an obscure episode that took place in Barbastro in the summer of 1064, when a Catalan-Aragonese army, supported by a contingent of Norman, Burgundian, and French knights, laid siege to what was then one of the last remaining Moorish redoubts in the Spanish March.

There is some debate among historians over the purpose of this assault. Some scholars contend that it was a “crusade before the crusades,” carried out with the approval of the papacy; others describe it as a routine border raid in search of plunder. Whatever its motivations, the siege had dire consequences for the inhabitants of Barbastro. After negotiating a truce that allowed the population to leave, the Christians reneged and proceeded to massacre the male inhabitants before embarking on a spree of rape and pillage. Some French knights then “went native” and proceeded to dress and eat like Moors. According to the Moorish chronicler Ibn Hayyan (987–1075), the besiegers of Barbastro “received a house with all that it contained, women, children and furniture,” and a Jewish emissary sent to the city to ransom some of its more prominent captives found one “crusader” in Moorish dress seated on a divan and surrounded by Moslem waiting girls, one of whom played the lute and sang to entertain their guest.¹²

This “waiting girl” was most likely one of the singing girls, or qiyan, who had become a fixture of Muslim courts in Iberia and were also popular with Iberian Christian rulers. Such entertainers were trained to sing and dance, and they were also expected to play what the historian Roger Boase has called “the role of the courtly beloved . . . coquettish and modest, demanding and deceptive, raising hopes but rarely fulfilling them.”¹³ Between five hundred and five thousand of these slave girls may have been carried back across the Pyrenees from Barbastro as slaves by the marauding Christians, and many of them went on to become lute-playing singers at courts in southern France. Some of these qiyan ended up at the court of William VIII, Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Poitiers (1025–86), one of the Christian commanders at Barbastro. William’s son William VII (1071–1127) became the most famous early proponent of the Provençal troubadour boom that spread through southern Europe between the late eleventh and thirteenth centuries, and which reached its apotheosis in the “courts of love” established by William’s great-grandaughter Eleanor of Aquitaine (ca. 1122–1204) in Poitiers. Ezra Pound referred indirectly to this episode in his Canto VIII: “And Poictiers, you know Guillaume Poictiers / had brought the song up out of Spain / With the singers and viels.”

Whether or not the “song” really made its way across the Pyrenees from Barbastro in this way, the troubadour culture of Languedoc and Provence subsequently made its way into Spain. Troubadours were extremely popular in medieval Aragon and Catalonia, where many of them found patrons following the papal crusade against the Cathars in the thirteenth century. One of them was Guiraut Riquier (1254–92), the jaded and disillusioned “last troubadour,” who fled his devastated and occupied homeland in Languedoc and rediscovered the “way of true love” first in “joyous Catalonia” and then at the court of King Alfonso the Wise of Castile, where he spent ten years. Riquier and his fellow troubadours were a clear influence on the lyrics and illustrations in the Castilian king’s beautiful song cycle The Canticles of Holy Mary, in which the Virgin Mary becomes the unattainable object of love for a troubadour-protagonist seeking salvation, who may have been Alfonso himself.

All these transactions are part of a movement of ideas in the Middle Ages that once enabled the Hispanophile historian Marcelin Defourneaux to describe the Pyrenees as “not a barrier but a zone of permanent contacts.”¹⁴ The Pyrenees continued to play this role in the centuries that followed, and they often did so in spite of the intentions of the rulers on either side of them. In the late sixteenth century Philip II attempted to transform the Pyrenees into a cordon sanitaire in order to incubate Counter-Reformation Spain against the Lutheran heresy, by preventing the entry of censored books and unwanted people, but the anti-Lutheran repression carried out by the Inquisition within Spain itself was always a more effective barrier to the spread of unwanted religious doctrines than the mountains themselves.

For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Spain simply lacked the resources to prevent the movement of shepherds, smugglers, and migrant workers across the Pyrenees. In 1626 the Spanish royal secretary Fernández de Navarrete lamented the fact that “all the scum of Europe have come to Spain, so that there is hardly a deaf, dumb, lame or blind man in France, Germany, Italy or Flanders, who has not been to Castile.”¹⁵ Many French migrants who settled in Aragon and Catalonia found themselves under suspicion by the Inquisition after they had crossed the mountains because of their real or suspected political allegiances.

Such distinctions are important to acknowledge, because it is too easy to cite the physical barrier of the Pyrenees as a pseudo-explanation for the differences between the societies on either side of them. In Friedrich Schiller’s Don Carlos, Queen Elizabeth of Spain tells her daughter, “We must look beyond the Pyrenees to find upholders of the justice of our cause” when her tyrant husband Philip II refuses to recognize her child. Three years after the play’s first German performance, the reactionary Spanish foreign minister the Conde de Floridablanca declared his intention to set out to “put a cordon on the frontier, as for a plague,” to prevent French revolutionary ideas from entering Spain.¹⁶

For both Schiller and Floridablanca, the Pyrenees were an ideological frontier where ideas could be kept in or kept out, but the mountains were always an imperfect means of achieving such aspirations. Even in the “closed” Spain of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish plays and novels were popular in Northern Europe, where they were translated into French and English. In the eighteenth century, Spanish science students, known as pensionados, continued to study in Paris, Germany, and Central Europe, despite the subsequent suggestions by historians such as the Dunants that the “gloomy masses” of the Pyrenees helped to seal Spain off from the influence of the Enlightenement.

Even real walls rarely achieve such aspirations, and the “natural” border of the Pyrenees was always more porous and accessible than it seemed in retrospect. From the French Revolution to the Spanish Civil War and beyond, Spanish social and political reformers continued to take inspiration from beyond the Pyrenees. If their efforts were sometimes thwarted or slow to take effect, this was due not to the Pyrenean “wall,” but to the prevailing political and social conditions within Spain itself, and to the relationships between the two great states on either side of the mountains, which have often brought violence and conflict across the Pyrenees and into the very heart of them.