Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 14.djvu/204

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SPAIN


176


SPAIN


There are Piarist colleges at Madrid, Barcelona, Va- lencia, Saragossa, etc., besides others at less important centres of population. In recent times some of the older orders which are not primarily teaching orders, such as the Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Lazarists, have estabhshed boarding schools. In technical, commercial, and primary teaching, the Brothers of the Christian Schools of St. John Baptist de La Salle and Pere Champagnat's IVIarist Brothers have attained a position of great importance; their establishments in Spain are numerous and have be- come more so since their expulsion from France. The Christian Brothers now have 53 colleges in Spain; the Marists, 67. The education of girls is to a great extent under the care of a number of congregations of rehgious women, who have boarding and half -boarding schools as well as day schools, The principal are: The Religious de la Ensenanza (Society of Our Lady) of Bl. Lestonac, who have 12 cloistered pensions. The Visitandines of St. Jeanne Frangoise Fremoit de Chantal, established in Spain since 1758. The Re- ligious of the Sacred Heart of Bl. Barat, with 15 houses, estabhshed in Spain since 1846. The Reh- gious of Jesus and Mary, founded by M. Thevenet, entered Spain in 1850. The Ursulines have a col- lege at MoUna de Arag6n (New Castile), and there are some colleges of the EngUsh Ladies and of Our Lady of Loreto. There are, in addition to these, numerous small schools for girls and many religious congrega- tions for women — in particular, Carmehte Tertiaries, Franciscan Tertiaries, Augustinians, and Sisters of Charity.

III. History. — The old historians say that Spain was populated by the children of Tubal and of Tarsis, son and grandson of Japhet. These were the Ibe- rians, who were divided into Iberians proper and Tai-- tesians; the latter, in the South; the former, in the North. Some have held that the Iberians were Basques, and consequently were of the LTralo-Altaic, or Mongoloid, race, as the similarity of the Basque with the Finnish languages would seem to indicate. However this may be, the Iberians and Tartesians appear to have formed the aboriginal population, and the Celts, who occupied a great part of France, Great Britain, and Irehmd, would seem to have come in upon them by way of the Bay of Biscay. The colli- sion of the two races produced the population which later settlers and conquerors found in Spain: Celts in the North and West, Iberians in the East and South, and in the centre (Aragon and part of Castile) Celtiberians, whose very name indicates a fusion of the two races — no doubt, after a great deal of conflict.

It is very remarkable that the differences of lan- guage in the Iberian Peninsula still, partially, corres- pond to this first distribution of the inhabiting races. In the regions of the pure Iberians, Catalan is spoken, with its dialects, the Valencian and Balearic; in the regions conquered by the Celts, the languages are Gallego, Portuguese, and the bable of Asturiaa; in the Celtiberian and Tartesian portions, Castilian. This fact seems to support the theory of Padre Lorenzo Hervas y Panduro, that races, even when they change their grammar, never entirely change their own way of pronouncing the language which they use. Upon these first strata of population, which may be con- sidered aboriginal, were superimposed the colonLsts and conquerors. The colonists were Greeks and Phoenicians; the conquerors, Carthaginians, Romans, Goths, and Arabs. Taking this as a guide, Spanish history may he divided into jx'riods as follows: A. Colonies in Celtiberian Spain; B. Carthaginian Spain (third century B. c.);C. Roman Spaii\ (tliird century B. c, to fifth century of our era); D. V'isigotliic iMoii- archy (fifth to eighth century); E. Ar.ib Spain and Kingdoms of the Reconquest (eighth to fifteenth cen- tury); F. The Unification of Spain (fifteenth century to the present time).


A. Colonies. — The Phoenicians, who colonized all the Mediterranean coasts, estabhshed a great many colonies, or factories, in the South of Spain — Carteya, Calpe, Malaga, Sexi, and chief of aU, Gades (Cddiz), the centre of their power in Spain and their cult of Hercules, which is symbohzed on the Gaditanian coins. Soon after the Phoenicians, the Greeks began establishing their colonies, the chief colonizers being the Rhodians at Rosas, south of Cape Creus (910 B.C.), the Phocians, at Emporium (Ampurias, the present name, or Ampurdan, being derived from Emporitanum) and at Artemisium (Denia, from Diana, another name for Artemis), and the Zacynth- ians, who founded Saguntum and populated Iviza, giving it the name of Ophiusa.

B. Carthaginian Spain. — The Carthaginians set- tled in the Balearic Isles in the seventh century b. c. In the sixth century, having aided the Phoenicians of Cadiz against the Tartesians, they took possession of that city and began trading in Baetica. After the First Punic War they sought to indemnify them- selves for their losses in Sicily by conquering Spain. The conquest was begun by Hamilcar Barca, and ex- tended as far as the Ebro; theu; too, began that struggle of the Spaniards for independence which was to last until the nineteenth century of the Christian Era. Istolacius and Indortes, the former a Celtic chieftain, the latter chief of certain Celtiberian tribes of the Ebro, rai.sed an army, according to Diodorus Siculus, of 50,000 men; but they were defeated and condemned to death. However, Orison, another Iberian chief, achieved the rout and death of Hamil- car at Ehce, or Elche (230). Hasdrubal, the founder of Cartagena, (New Carthage) , was assassinated by a slave, and Hannibal, to complete the conquest of Spain, laid siege to Saguntum, which city then im- mortahzed itself by its heroic act of self-destruction. The issue of the Second Punic War caused the Car- thaginians to lose Spain, and the Romans succeeded to their mastery of the country.

C. Roman Spain. — But the Spaniards showed no more docility to the Romans than to the Carthagin- ians. Indibil and Mandonius commenced that course of resistance which ended only when Spain had been romanized — vanquished not so much by the arms as by the superior civihzation of Rome, a culture which Spain assimilated to such a degree as to produce rhetoricians hke Quintihan, poets like Lucan, Mar- tial, and Silius Itahcus, philosophers like Seneca, and emperors like Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius. Noteworthy among the wars of the Spaniards against Roman domination are those of Viriathus (150-140 B. c), a Lusitanian chieftain; the struggle of Nu- mantia (133), which imitated the example set by Sa- guntum; that of Sertorius, a partisan of Marius, who was proscribed by SuUa, fled to Spain, and there put himself at the head of the Spaniards. Sertorius did more than anyone else to romanize the country; he gave it Roman institutions, and founded at Huesca a high school with Greek and Latin teachers. After this, although the Spaniards took the side of Pompey against Csesar, resistance to the Roman power as such was confined to the Cantabri and the Asturias, who were conquered, though not subdued, in the time of Augustus. The Romans at first divided their Span- ish territories into Hither and Further Spain (His- pania Citerior, Ulterior), taking the Ebro as dividing fine, but Augustus divided the country into Tarraco- nensis, Lusitania, and Ba-lira. Spain is covered with Roman remains, jiarticularly aqueducts and bridges, but the most i)cnetr:iting Hoinan intlu<'nce was lin- guistic, giving to (lie inh:il)itants a neo-Latin tongue, which lias siir\ived in great perfection in Castile and, with greater niodilie.-itions, owing to the aspirated utterance, in the E;ust.

Under the Roman domination Spain received Chris- tianitv. There is a venerable tradition that the