The Cantabri (, Kantabroi) or Ancient Cantabrians were a pre-Ancient Rome people and large tribal federation that lived in the northern coastal region of ancient Iberia in the second half of the first millennium BC. These peoples and their territories were incorporated into the Roman Province of Hispania Tarraconensis in 19 BC, following the Cantabrian Wars.
Name
Cantabri is a Latinized form of a local name, presumably meaning "Highlanders" and deriving from the reconstructed root *
cant- ("mountain") in Ancient Ligurian.
[Martino, Roma contra Cantabros y Astures – Nueva lectura de las fuentes (1982), p. 18.] During the High and Late Middle Ages, as well as Modern Period, the name refers usually to the Basques.
Geography
Cantabria, the land of the Cantabri, originally comprised much of the highlands of the northern Spanish Atlantic coast, including the whole of modern
Cantabria province, eastern
Asturias, nearby mountainous regions of Castile and León, the northern of province of Palencia and province of Burgos and northeast of province of León. Following the
Roman Empire conquest, this area was, however, much reduced, making up only
Cantabria and eastern
Asturias.
History
Origins
The ancestors of the Cantabri were thought by the Romans to have migrated to the Iberian Peninsula around the 4th Century BC,
[Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, III, 29.][Strabo, Geographica, III, 4, 12.] and were said by them to be more mixed than most peninsular Celtic peoples. By the 1st century BC they comprised eleven or so tribes—
Avarigines, ,
Camarici or Tamarici, Concani,
Coniaci or
Conisci,
Morecani,
Noegi,
Orgenomesci,
Plentuisii,
Salaeni,
Vadinienses, and
Vellici or
Velliques—gathered into a tribal confederacy with the town of
Aracillum (Castro de Espina del Gallego, Sierra del Escudo – Cantabria), located at the strategic
Besaya river valley, as their capital. Other important Cantabrian hillforts included
Villeca/Vellica ( – Palencia),
Bergida (Castro de
Monte Bernorio – Palencia) and
Amaya/Amaia ( – Burgos).
A detailed analysis of place-names in ancient Cantabria shows a strong Celtic element along with an almost equally strong "Para-Celtic" element (both Indo-European) and thus disproves the idea of a substantial pre-Indo-European or Basque presence in the region.
Early history
Regarded as savage and untamable mountaineers, the Cantabri long defied the Roman legions and made a name for themselves for their independent spirit and freedom. Indeed, Cantabri warriors were regarded as being tough and fierce fighters,
[Florus, Epitomae Historiae Romanae, II, 33, 46-47.] suitable for mercenary employment,
[Silius Italicus, Punica, V, 192.] but prone to banditry.
[Strabo, Geographica, III, 3, 8.]
The earliest references to them are found in the texts of ancient historians such as Livy[Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, 27: 43-49.] and Polybius,[Polybius, Istorion, 11: 1-3.] who mention Cantabrian mercenaries in Ancient Carthage service in the late 3rd century BC. During the 2nd Punic War, a Cantabrian mercenary contingent is mentioned in Hannibal's army,[Silius Italicus, Punica, III, 325-343.] whilst another Cantabri mercenary band led by a chieftain named Larus was recruited by Mago Barca and fought in Celtiberia against the propraetor Marcus Junius Silanus in 207 BC.[Silius Italicus, Punica, XVI, 46-65.] That same year, other Cantabrian mercenaries fought alongside the Astures' at the Battle of the Metaurus, and later Cantabrian war-bands fought for the Vaccaei and Celtiberians in the Celtiberian Wars of the 2nd century BC.
Another author, Cornelius Nepos,[Cornelius Nepos, De Viris Illustribus, 47.] claims that the Cantabrian tribes first submitted to Rome upon Cato the Elder's campaigns in Celtiberia in 195 BC.[Though most modern historians have cast serious doubts upon the veracity of this particular episode, since other sources (Livy, Appian, Polybius) don't mention it at all.] In any case, such was their reputation that when a battered Roman army under Roman consul Gaius Hostilius Mancinus was besieging Numantia in 137 BC, the rumor of the approach of a large combined Cantabri-Vaccaei relief force was enough to cause the rout of 20,000 panic-stricken Roman legionaries, forcing Mancinus to surrender under humiliating peace terms.[Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus, 5, 4.][Appian, Romaika, 83.]
The Cantabrian Wars
In the early 1st century BC, the Cantabri began to play a double game by lending their services to individual Roman generals on occasion but, at same time, supported rebellions within Roman Spanish provinces and carried out raids in times of unrest. This opportunistic policy led the Cantabri to initially side with Quintus Sertorius during the
,
[Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico, III: 23-24; 26.] but at the final phase of the conflict they shifted their allegiance to
Pompey, continuing to follow the Pompeian cause until the defeat of their generals' Lucius Afranius and
Marcus Petreius at the battle of Ilerda (Lérida) in 49 BC.
[Julius Caesar, De Bello Civili, I: 43-46.][Lucan, Pharsalia, IV: 8-10.] In between, the Cantabri had unsuccessfully intervened in the
Gallic Wars by sending in 56 BC an allegedly 40,000-strong army to help the
Aquitani tribes of
Aquitania Gaul against the legate Publius Crassus, the son of
Marcus Crassus serving under
Julius Caesar, who succeeded in overpowering and destroying the combined Cantabri-Aquitani force of 50,000 men in their own camp and slaughtered 38,000 of them.
[Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico, 3, 23.][Paulus Orosius, Historiae Adversos Paganos, 6: 8, 7.]
Under the leadership of the chieftain Corocotta, the Cantabri’s own predatory raids on the Vaccaei, Turmodigi and Autrigones,[Paulus Orosius, Historiae Adversos Paganos, 6: 21, 1.] whose rich territories they coveted according to Florus,[Florus, Epitomae Historiae Romanae, 2: 33, 46.] coupled with their backing of a Vaccaei anti-Roman revolt in 29 BC, ultimately led to the outbreak of the First Cantabrian Wars ( Bellum Cantabricum), which resulted in their conquest and partial annihilation by Emperor Augustus.[Suetonius, Augustus, 21. - Tiberius saw his first military experience in the campaign against the Cantabri of 25 BC, as a tribune of the soldiers ( Tiberius, 9).] The remaining Cantabrian population and their tribal lands were absorbed into the Hispania Citerior province.[Strabo, Geographica, III, 4, 20.]
Nevertheless, the harsh measures devised by Augustus and implemented by his Legatus Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa to pacify the province in the aftermath of the campaign only contributed to further instability in Cantabria. Near-constant tribal uprisings (including a serious slave revolt in 20 BC that quickly spread to neighboring Asturias)[Cassius Dio, Romaiké Historia, 54: 11, 1.] and guerrilla warfare continued to plague the Cantabrian lands until the early 1st century AD, when the region was granted a form of local self-rule upon being included in the new Hispania Tarraconensis province.
Romanization
Although the Romans founded colonies and established military garrisons at
Castra Legio Pisoraca (camp of
Legio IIII Macedonica –
Palencia),
Octaviolca (near
Valdeolea – Cantabria) and
Iuliobriga (
Retortillo –
Reinosa), Cantabria never became fully romanized and its people preserved many aspects of
Celtic language, religion and culture well into the Roman period. The Cantabri did not lose their warrior skills either, providing auxiliary troops (
Auxilia) that served in two identified infantry cohorts (
cohortes quingenariae peditatae –
Cohors I Cantabrorum,
Cohors II Cantabrorum) and in some cavalry units (
Ala Hispanorum,
Ala I Augusta,
Ala Pannoniorum,
Ala Batavorum or
Baetasiorum,
Cohors I Latobicorum) to the Roman Imperial army for decades, and these troops participated in Emperor
Claudius' invasion of Britain in AD 43–60.
Early Middle Ages
The Cantabri re-emerged, as did their neighbors the Astures, amid the chaos of the
Migration Period of the late 4th century. Thenceforward the Cantabri started to be Christianized and were violently crushed by the
Visigoths in the 6th century. However, Cantabria and the Cantabri are heard of many decades later in the context of the Visigoth wars against the
Vascones (late 7th century). They only became fully Latinized in their language and culture after the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century.
Culture
According to Pliny the Elder
[Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, 34, 112; 149; 158.] Cantabria also contained gold, silver, tin, lead and iron mines, as well as magnetite and amber, but little is known about them;
Strabo also mentions salt extraction in mines, such as the ones existent around Cabezón de la Sal, and describes a
couvade in which the mother had to get up and the father go to bed, to be cared for by the mother.
[Strabo, Geographica, III, 4, 17.]
Religion
Literary and epigraphic evidence confirms that, like their
Gallaeci and
Astures neighbors, the Cantabri were polytheistic, worshipping a vast and complex pantheon of male and female Indo-European deities in sacred oak or pine woods, mountains, water-courses and small rural sanctuaries.
Druidism does not appear to have been practiced by the Cantabri, though there is enough evidence for the existence of an organized priestly class who performed elaborated rites, which included ritual steam baths, festive dances, oracles, divination, human and animal sacrifices. In this respect, Strabo[Strabo, Geographica, III, 3, 7.] mentions that the peoples of the north-west sacrificed horses to an unnamed God of War, and both Horace[Horace, Odes, III, 4, 35] and Silius Italicus[Silius Italicus, Hispania, III, 3, 161.] added that the Concani had the custom of drinking the horse’s blood at the ceremony.
Language
According to Leonard A. Curchin, the place-names from ancient Cantabria shows that a majority of names at the time comes from Celtic and other Indo-European languages. This shows that the people there, instead of the believed idea that they could have spoken a Pre-Indo European or
Basque language, they spoke the
Celtic language that was widely used in Iberia at the time. He also shows that Romanisation was weak in the region.
See also
Notes
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F. Bartenstein, Bis ans Ende der bewohnten Welt. Die römische Grenz- und Expansionspolitik in der augusteischen Zeit, Herbert Utz Verlag, München (2014) , pp. 71–127.
-
-
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Diego Santos, Francisco, "Die Integration Nord- und Nordwestspaniens als römische Provinz in der Reichspolitik des Augustus", Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, vol. II,3, Berlin 1975, pp. 523–571.
-
Eutimio Martino, Roma contra Cantabros y Astures – Nueva lectura de las fuentes, Breviarios de la Calle del Pez n. º 33, Diputación provincial de León/Editorial Eal Terrae, Santander (1982)
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Lorrio, Alberto J., Los Celtíberos, Editorial Complutense, Alicante (1997)
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Martín Almagro Gorbea, José María Blázquez Martínez, Michel Reddé, Joaquín González Echegaray, José Luis Ramírez Sádaba, and Eduardo José Peralta Labrador (coord.), Las Guerras Cántabras, Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander (1999)
-
Montenegro Duque, Ángel et alii, Historia de España 2 – colonizaciones y formacion de los pueblos prerromanos, Editorial Gredos, Madrid (1989)
-
Burillo Mozota, Francisco, Los Celtíberos – Etnias y Estados, Crítica, Grijalbo Mondadori, S.A., Barcelona (1998, revised edition 2007)
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Peralta Labrador, Eduardo José (2017a), “Las cohortes cántabras del ejército romano: Cohors I Cantabrorum”, Hispania Antiqva. Revista de Historia Antigua, XLI. Valladolid, Universidad de Valladolid, pp. 131-172. – [1]
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Peralta Labrador, Eduardo José (2017b), “Las cohortes cántabras del ejército romano: Cohors II Cantabrorum”, Hispania Antiqva. Revista de Historia Antigua, XLI. Valladolid, Universidad de Valladolid, pp. 173-209. – [2]
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Kruta, Venceslas, Les Celtes, Histoire et Dictionnaire: Des origines à la Romanization et au Christianisme, Éditions Robert Laffont, Paris (2000)
External links
