By the year 1050, a Benedictine monk living in the heart of the mountains of Europe drew an oval circle in the scroll with red, yellow and blue paintings, and gradually he was patiently drawing the image of the space around him and the time he lived, with the greatest accuracy possible, also trying to explain the Revelation of the Christian religion. This monk, the Liébena Beato, made one of the oldest maps we know, and on one shore of the European continent, north of the Pyrenees, he wrote the following word: DDasconia.

In Las Landas, the map has been stored in a manuscript of the former Saint Server monastery in Gascuña, next to the Aturri River, and is probably one of the oldest references in the territory where the Basque Country is located in a cartographic material. The Beato represented all the continents around the sea a thousand years ago, and the Sun and the Moon around them, as if the Earth were flat. Because maps have served to reflect reality itself through the centuries, or to bring reality to your own ideas.

Imago Vasconiae is the world map of Saint Server. Euskal Herria: Atlas of Historical Cartography (Txalaparta, 2024) is the second map that appears in the presentation of the work, the first is that of the Abauntz stone, made a few thousand years earlier (see table below). This collection, composed by the writer José Mari Esparza and the researcher Ramón Oleaga, aims to fill a great gap in the history of this town. Both experts in the field, with long experience in the field of mapping research, are a work of many years and many hours.

“In the first election we discover in some way thousands of examples that reflect our territory, to a greater or lesser extent,” explained Oleaga in the presentation of the collection. Catalogues of libraries and museums in many countries, as well as the funds of specialized institutions such as the Cartographic Institute of Catalonia or the National Geographic Institute (IGN), have been emptied for this purpose. From this “grosera” approach, a corpus of almost 800 maps was formed and for the atlas more than 300 have been selected, “which in our opinion account for the representation our people have had throughout history”, explains the investigador.El result is a careful
color edition of almost 450 pages, so as not to lose the smallest detail of each map, with explanations in Basque, French, Spanish and English. The work has been edited by the editorial Txalaparta and thanks to the funding of Laboral Kutxa.

But the atlas does not attach importance to the cover it gathers, but to its content and intentionality. In fact, although several catalogs had previously been published on maps of the Basque Country, the authors claim that there was a lack of a work covering the territory in a context of globality. Thus, according to Esparza, the atlas “will help to understand the evolution of Vasconia throughout history.” Since the creation of cartography, it has not been a mere science of measuring and explaining the land, but a tool of political action.

Projections of a spherical world

It's hard to tell what the first map you created can be. Numerous examples carved or drawn in stone indicate that hunters and collectors men were aware of the space they already surrounded in Prehistory. In the Middle East we can find murals to represent the cities of ancient civilizations, as well as what was said before Imago Mundi (World Map): The Babylonian grid from the 4th century to. C. offers a mythological view of the Earth. In China, maps dating before the Qin Dynasty have appeared on archaeological excavations.

Later, Greeks and Romans used cartographic techniques for military use. Greek astronomer Claudio Ptolemy offered in the second century guidelines and materials for the development of full maps in Geography, with thousands of toponyms. In the following centuries Ptolemy was a fundamental reference for many mappers, and for example, when in the 15th century his work was first printed, the names of genes and places of classical sources appear in the Basque territories.

The maps realized with religious cosmological views of monasteries were ordered in the Middle Ages – such as the Blessed of Liébena-, but from the 16th century the expansionism of the European powers brought with it the proliferation of nautical or Portuguese charts, strategic and fundamental for the conquest of new territories. The emperors ordered the experienced cartographers to accurately define the lands and seas of their empires and kept them as a secret treasure, only in the hands of the military.

At a time when racism and European acism reached their peak, in the nineteenth century, cartography became a powerful instrument of domination and exploitation. Before the Scottish explorers determined the gigantic copper and cobalt pits, Leopoldo II.ak of Belgium was engaged in the genocide of the Congo, for example. The hotlines of the geopolitical map of Africa are nothing more than the vivid scars of colonialism. And they have come to us on a Eurocentric scale since in 1569 the Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator disseminated the amorphous projection of the world, which shows Europe and North America as if they were larger, that image has triumphed, a symbol of the time when the white man dominated the world.

“This time cannot be eternalized using time and time again the geographic image of the world created by that minority,” wrote filmmaker and historian Arno Peters. Said and done: In 1974, half a century ago, he drew what he considered to be a fairer map of the world. The Earth plan based on the projection of Peters has been translated into eleven languages since then, also to Basque.

A people, eleven names

What about the Basques? Where and how do we stand in the trenches of cartography? From the 18th century on, for a people to be recognized as a subject or at least seen, it was essential to appear in charts and maps, since it was a people “without history” that did not exist without that window.

The territory in which the Basques lived has been called in a thousand ways in the past by their foreign eyes. Estrabón described over two thousand years ago: “...beyond there is the people of the Basques, and there is Pompelon, all as to say Pompeyópolis...”, he explained. A century later, in 1571, Joanes Leizarraga first wrote the word Heuscal-herria, translating the New Testament.

In other “maps of the time, we will see Navarre or Navarre to call the entire territory,” explains Esparza in Imago Vasconiae, while in the 19th century, the travels of anthropologists and linguists led to the publication of an increasingly abundant cartography, but “the Castilian names of the territory multiplied instead of unifying them,” says the writer Tafallés.

In late April 1801, the Prussian intellectual and diplomat Wilhem Humboldt began his second trip to the Basque Country from Paris. Two years earlier, when he first passed through these territories, he was impressed by the language and customs of the Basques: “Despite living within the two borders of France and Spain, they have a very special character and form,” he wrote in Die Bask’s book. But when applying comparative anthropology, Humboldt immediately realized the situation and destiny of the Basques: “This unfortunate people has also lost the unity of their name,” he explained, and then made a firm statement: “All the dispersed people in the French Basque Country, in the Basque provinces and in Navarre: the Basques are”.

Like Esparza, the professor of the UPV/EHU Joseba Agirreazkuenaga, who has dressed the atlas of historical context, has also been made significant that curse of the name that Humboldt has manifested, because Joanes Etxeberri de Sara and other authors speak of the Basques for a long time and without complexes, “even the name of Euskal”

According to Agirreazkuenaga “these subjects and agents, the Basques, are not timeless, nor ‘natural’, and they live in a space that has been graphically depicted in various maps and that, through stories and stories, they own themselves. In this way, more or less, they have demonstrated their own conscience, their own sympathy.” Therefore, maps are also a way of existing: as Father Manuel Larramendi tried in the 18th century to improve the vocabulary and grammar for the Basque Country, it is fair to create a map for the Basques to be part of our history.

The zoom of the maps is approaching

Maps, names, images and intertwined symbols, Esparza and Oleaga, as a puzzle, have created a complex photograph in Imago Vasconiae, as if there were some historical coordinates of Euskal Herria.

The Atlas begins with maps based on the information of Ptolemy, then the nautical charts with the names Biscaya and Biscai prevail. In this first section there are also the maps that determine the merinity of the kingdom of Navarre, both north and south of the Pyrenean ports. For example, an image of the prestigious cartographer Giacomo Cantelli, made in Rome in 1690, refers to Baja Navarra, Zuberoa and Lapurdi on the map of Navarra, as well as to a territory called “parte della Biscaia” (Bizkaia area), in the Cantabrian margin.

The nineteenth century was immersed in numerous conflicts and then more glorious maps were multiplied to meet the military needs of the great armies. But the liberal currents delved into the true being of peoples to state nations, and as a result, often the territories of the Basque Country appeared fragmented in those maps. However, there were exceptions, such as that made in 1817 by the British engraver Aaron Arrousmith on the occasion of the War of Independence: a yellowish and thick line runs along the banks of four provinces to represent the almost equal profile of the current Southern Basque Country.

Gradually, as Oleaga says, “as it advances in historical times, maps, like a photographic ‘zoom’, approach and improve scales and details.”

So we got to 20th century cartography, which brought a whole imaginary created by nationalism. In 1905 the Map of the Basque Country was published in Paris, a very extensive name since the San Sebastian Floral Games of 1894, with the seven provinces of the Basque Country. That was followed by many others, of course. The choreographic map of the Euskaleri’ko Charter by José Luis Zumárraga contained over 400 drawings reflecting the Basque Country of the 1930s. This map was reedited with great success by the Municipal Savings Bank of San Sebastian 50 years later, in 1983, and hung in numerous houses in Euskal Herria, just out of the Franco regime.

The latest map of the Imago Vasconiae collection is a tourist map of Ipar Euskal Herria in 2021. Now we're moving here and there thanks to the digital geographic search engines of the applications that we have on our mobile. But historical cartography remains a powerful weapon, as Sparza was once told, because “a people without atlas is a people without identity documents.”