Caristii in 218 B.C.

Caristii — Spring 218 BC · A Hill People of the Northern Sea.

The Caristii — a people of the green, rain-washed hills of the far north of Iberia, between the rivers Nervión and Deba on the inner curve of the great northern gulf. Theirs is a Vasconic-speaking world, kin in tongue and custom to the wider family of mountain peoples of the western Pyrenees and the Cantabrian seaboard, and quite unlike the Carthaginian-touched Iberians of the warm south. They are no kingdom and no league of cities, but a knot of clans set between the Autrigones on one hand and the Varduli on the other — herders of cattle, goats and swine, tillers of small mountain fields, and dwellers in stone-walled hillforts perched on the heights. In 218 BC, while Hannibal storms northward toward the Ebro and beyond, the Caristii sit far outside the storm: their forests and steep valleys offer no road for armies, and no foreign banner has ever flown over their hills.

The great war that is gathering in the south — Hannibal at Saguntum, the long march toward the Ebro and the passes beyond — barely stirs the air of the northern hills. The Caristii live on the far side of the Iberian world from all of it: behind them lies only the cold northern sea, before them the wall of the Cantabrian mountains, and between the two a narrow, broken country of wooded ridges and short rivers running down to the gulf. No power has conquered them; none has much reason to try, for their land is poor in the silver and grain that draw armies, and rich only in pasture, timber and rain. They keep to their own counsel and their own quarrels — clan against clan, raid for raid — defending their heights against their neighbours far more than against any distant empire. In 218 they are exactly what they have long been: an independent upland people, watching the wider world from a great and quiet distance.