ARAGON. – A region of north-eastern Spain. It is one of the most mountainous regions of Spain, being bordered to the north by the Pyrenees (from the small peak of Anie to the Aneto in the Maladeta group) and to the south and west by extensions of the Iberian system (the sierras of Albarracín, Gúdar, and Javalambre). The Ebro flows through Aragon from north-west to south-east. It has an area of 47,391 sq. km. and a population of 1,037,000. Capital: Saragossa. It comprises the three provinces of Huesca, Saragossa, and Teruel.
The kingdom of Aragon, properly so called, reached its present boundaries at the end of the 12th century. In ancient times Aragon was divided into as many republics as it had cities. It seems that the peoples of this region formed the central part of the great Iberian empire that arose in the Ebro region before the 6th 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 then dominated by the Carthaginians, who shared its conquest with the Romans, taking the Ebro as their 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 Aragon and Narbonensis to Ataulf, king of the Visigoths. Towards the end of the 5th century, after successive invasions and dominations by the Suebi and Vandals, the Roman rule in Aragon, which had lasted six and a half centuries, was completely replaced by that of the Visigoths. The Visigothic monarchy rapidly declined, and Aragon followed the fortunes of the Arab conquest and its various dynasties. During this period many of the Christian inhabitants withdrew into the mountains, from where they began the attempt to reconquer the region, choosing as their leader Iñigo Arista, while the neighbouring Navarrese, led by Pelagius, won the first victories.
According to tradition, the county of Aragon was founded in 780. The kingdom of Aragon, constituted in 1035 by the will of Sancho III, embraced a very restricted territory which was gradually enlarged by further conquests and reached the height of its power with the union with Catalonia 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 Aragon, 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 (c. 300) it appears that bishops from the Tarraconensian region took part. In 380 a synod against Priscillian was held in Saragossa. Funerary inscriptions found near Bolanta bear witness to the presence of Christians even in the northernmost regions of Aragon. At the beginning of the 4th century the figures of the bishop Valerius and 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 bishops disappeared, others, such as that of Saragossa, had an intermittent existence. As the Saracen domination receded, religious life was able to flourish again. Aragon was then ecclesiastically dependent on the archbishops of Eauze and Auch; the Aragonese bishops followed the Christian reconquest and bore the title of Aragoneses 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 San Adriano de Sasabe and that the first of these bishops was Ferreolus (921). The movable limits of this Aragonese bishopric, however, must 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 raised to an archiepiscopal see by John XXII; its suffragan dioceses were Huesca, Tarragona, Pamplona, Calahorra, and Albarracín-Segorbe. This circumscription underwent various changes, due 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, and Albarracín.