Aragon

ARAGON. - 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 Maladetta group), it is furrowed to the south and west by extensions of the Iberian system (the sierras of Albarracín, Gódar and Javalambre). The Ebro crosses A. from north-west to south-east. It has an area of 47,391 sq. km. with 1,037,000 inhabitants. Capital: Saragossa. It comprises the three provinces of Huesca, Saragossa and Teruel.

The kingdom of A. properly so called reached its present boundaries at the end of the 12th 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 region of the Ebro before the 6th century B.C., and that Osca (Huesca) was its principal city. The empire, however, was already dissolved before the arrival of the Romans. It was then dominated by the Carthaginians, who divided its conquest with the Romans, taking the Ebro as the line of demarcation, and it was included in the Roman province of Hispania citerior or Tarraconensis (197 B.C.). Saragossa, the ancient Salduba, took the name of Caesaraugusta from Augustus, who founded there a colony of veterans and made it the capital of seven conventus iuridici grouping the various surrounding populations. In 412 the emperor Honorius ceded A. and Narbonensis to Ataulf, king of the Visigoths. Towards the end of the 5th century, after successive Suevian and Vandal invasions and dominations, Roman rule in A., which had lasted six and a half centuries, was totally replaced by Visigothic rule. The Visigothic monarchy declined rapidly and A. followed the fortunes of the Arab conquest and of its various dynasties. During this period many of the Christian inhabitants withdrew to the mountains, whence they began the attempt to reconquer the region, choosing Íñigo Arista as their leader, while the neighbouring Navarrese, led by Pelagius, obtained the first victories.

According to tradition, the county of A. would have been founded in 780. The kingdom of A., established in 1035 by the testament of Sancho III, embraced a very restricted territory which was gradually enlarged by further conquests and reached the zenith of its power with the union with Catalonia that took place in 1162, under Alfonso II. It had a special political and administrative organization and its own laws and privileges, some of which still exist and form what is improperly called the formal Aragonese law. In 1469, with 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 is attested in the 2nd century by Irenaeus and Tertullian, and in the 3rd century by the persecutions of Decius and Valerian. References to the first Christian community of Saragossa are found in the letter of St. Cyprian to the bishop Felix who presided over it (254). From the Acts of the Council of Elvira (ca. 300) the participation of bishops of the Tarraconensian region emerges. In 380 the Synod against Priscillian was held in Saragossa. Funerary inscriptions found near Boltana testify to the presence of Christians also in the more northern regions of A. At the beginning of the 4th century the figures of the bishop Valerius and of St. Vincent appear. Towards the end of the 6th 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 Saragossa.

The Arab invasion destroyed the ecclesiastical organization; many bishoprics disappeared, others, such as that of Saragossa, had an intermittent life. As the Saracen domination withdrew, religious life was able to flourish again. A. then depended ecclesiastically on the archbishops of Eauze and Auch; the Aragonese bishops followed the Christian conquest and bore the title of Aragonenses without having a geographically circumscribed diocese, at least until the reconstitution of the episcopal see of Huesca (1096): it seems that they resided for some time at S. Adriano di Sasave and that the first of these bishops was Ferreolus (921). The shifting limits of this Aragonese bishopric must however always be considered as included 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 of 25 March 1154. In 1118 the diocese of Saragossa was re-established, and in 1318 it was elevated to an archiepiscopal see by John XXII; its suffragan dioceses were Huesca, Tarragona, Pamplona, Calahorra and Albarracin-Segorbe. This circumscription underwent various changes, owing to the erection of new bishoprics and new metropolitan sees. At present the ecclesiastical province of Saragossa is composed of seven dioceses: Tarragona, Tudela, Pamplona, Jaca, Huesca, Barbastro, Teruel, Albarracin.

Noemi Crostarosa Scipioni