ARAGONA. – Region of north-eastern Spain. It is among the most mountainous regions of Spain because, bounded to the north by the Pyrenees (from the peak of Anie to that of Aneto in the Maladeta group), it is crossed to the south and west by extensions of the Iberian system (the sierras of Albarracín, Gódar, and Jalavambre). The Ebro crosses A. from north-west to south-east. It has an area of 47,391 sq. km. and 1,037,000 inhabitants. Capital: Saragozza. It comprises the three provinces of Huesca, Saragozza, and Teruel.
The kingdom of A. properly so called reached its present boundaries at the end of the twelfth century. In ancient times A. was divided into as many republics as it had cities. It seems that the peoples of this region constituted the central part of the great Iberian empire that arose in the Ebro region before the sixth century B.C., and that Osca (Huesca) was its principal city. The empire, however, had already dissolved before the arrival of the Romans. It was subsequently ruled by the Carthaginians, who divided its conquest with the Romans, taking the Ebro as the demarcation line, and it was incorporated into the Roman province of Hispania citerior or Tarraconensis (197 B.C.). Saragozza, ancient Salduba, took the name Cesaraugusta from Augustus, who founded there a colony of veterans and made it the capital of seven Conventus juridici grouping together the various surrounding populations. In 412 the emperor Honorius ceded A. and Narbonensis to Ataulf, king of the Visigoths. Toward the end of the fifth century, after successive invasions and Suevic and Vandal dominations, Roman rule in A., which had lasted six and a half centuries, was completely replaced by Visigothic rule. The Visigothic monarchy rapidly declined, and A. followed the vicissitudes of the Arab conquest and its various dynasties. During this period many of the Christian inhabitants withdrew to the mountains, from which they began the attempt to reconquer the region, choosing Íñigo Arista as their leader, while the neighboring Navarrese, led by Pelagius, achieved the first victories.
According to tradition, the county of A. was founded in 780. The kingdom of A., established in 1035 by the will of Sancho III, encompassed a very restricted territory that gradually expanded through further conquests and reached the height of its power with its union with Catalonia in 1162, under Alfonso II. It had a special political and administrative organization, as well as its own laws and privileges, some of which still exist and constitute what is improperly called Aragonese formal law. In 1469, through the marriage between the heir of A., Ferdinand, and Isabella the Catholic, queen of Castile and León, the two kingdoms were united (1479), forming the nucleus of the present Spanish state.
Christianity spread very early in Spain, as attested in the second century by Irenaeus and Tertullian, and in the third century by the persecutions of Decius and Valerian. Some information about the first Christian community of Saragozza is found in the letter of St. Cyprian to the bishop Felix, who presided over it (254). The Acts of the Council of Elvira (ca. 300) record the participation of bishops from the Tarraconese region. In 380 the Synod against Priscillian was celebrated in Saragozza. Funerary inscriptions discovered near Boltana testify to the presence of Christians even in the northernmost regions of A. At the beginning of the fourth century the figures of Bishop Valerius and St. Vincent appear. Toward the end of the sixth century important monasteries arose, among them the Asanense, now in the diocese of Barbastro, founded by St. Victorian, and that of the Twelve Apostles in Saragozza.
The Arab invasion destroyed the ecclesiastical organization; many bishoprics disappeared, while others, such as that of Saragozza, had an intermittent existence. As Saracen rule withdrew, religious life was able to flourish again. At that time A. was ecclesiastically dependent on the archbishops of Eauze and Auch; the Aragonese bishops followed the Christian conquest and bore the title of Aragonenses without having a geographically delimited diocese, at least until the restoration of the episcopal see of Huesca (1096). They seem to have resided for some time at S. Adriano di Sasave, and the first of these bishops was Ferreolus (921). The shifting boundaries of this Aragonese bishopric must, however, always be considered as falling within those of the present diocese of Jaca. The ecclesiastical province of Tarragona was reconstituted in 1118 by Gelasius II, and its suffragan dioceses are indicated in a bull of Anastasius IV dated March 25, 1154. In 1118 the diocese of Saragozza was restored; in 1318 it was raised to an archiepiscopal see by John XXII. Its suffragan dioceses were Huesca, Tarragona, Pamplona, Calahorra, and Albarracin-Segorbe. This circumscription underwent various changes through the erection of new bishoprics and new metropolitan sees. At present the ecclesiastical province of Saragozza consists of seven dioceses: Tarragona, Tudela, Pamplona, Jaca, Huesca, Barbastro, Teruel, Albarracin.
Noemi Crostarosa Scipioni