Cantabri in 218 B.C.

Cantabri — Spring 218 BC · The Unconquered Mountaineers.

The Cantabri — the fierce, unconquered mountain people of the far northern coast of Iberia, dwelling on the Atlantic-facing slopes and in the deep valleys of the high range that takes its name from them. They are no kingdom but a confederacy of hard upland clans — the Orgenomesci, the Coniaci, the Avariginoi and the Salaeni — herders, hunters and raiders who hold their narrow glens against all comers. They are proverbial among the southern peoples for their wildness and for a stubborn refusal to bow that no power has yet overcome: not the Carthaginians who command the silver south, not the Greek traders of the coasts, not yet the distant Romans. Behind the screen of their mountains they keep their own ways — strange to outsiders, who tell of a people where daughters inherit and brothers are married off by their sisters — and they answer the lowland world chiefly with the spear. In 218 BC, as Hannibal marches for Italy far to the south, the Cantabri remain entirely their own masters in their hill-forts above the sea.

While Carthage and Rome contend for the warm and wealthy south, the cold north keeps to itself. The Cantabri hold the seaward mountains beyond the reach of every great power — a country of granite ridges, rain-soaked forests and short rivers running down to the ocean, too poor in silver and too hard in its men to be worth the conquering. There is no king here and no capital, only the clans in their fastnesses: the Orgenomesci and the Coniaci of the inland heights, the Avariginoi of the river valleys, the Salaeni of the rugged shore. They live by their herds, their hunting and their raiding, fortify their hilltops, and reckon their wealth in cattle and in courage. Outsiders find them savage — they wash, it is said, in stale urine, and reckon inheritance through their women — but none has mastered them. That reckoning will come only in the far distance, when a Caesar turns the whole might of Rome against these hills; for now, the Cantabri are free.