Gallia Aquitania

The Gallic province whose people were not really Gauls, as the Romans themselves noticed and then ignored when drawing the boundary. Caesar opens his account of the war by dividing Gaul into three parts and says the Aquitani differ from the rest in language, custom and law - the population between the Garonne and the Pyrenees spoke a language related to Basque rather than a Celtic one. Crassus subdued the region in a single campaign in 56 BC while Caesar was occupied elsewhere. When Augustus reorganised Gaul he enlarged the province enormously, pushing it north from the Garonne to the Loire and absorbing Celtic peoples who had nothing in common with the original Aquitani, because a province of the true Aquitani alone would have been too small to administer. The capital was Burdigala, now Bordeaux, a port on the tidal Garonne that grew rich shipping tin, lead and later wine. Vineyards were established in the region under Roman rule and have been worked ever since. Lugdunum Convenarum in the foothills was a substantial spa town. The poet Ausonius came from Bordeaux and tutored an emperor. Diocletian later split the province three ways, and the smallest fragment, Novempopulana, corresponded roughly to the original non-Celtic Aquitania - an administrative admission four centuries late. The linguistic boundary Caesar described survives today as the northern edge of Basque. The province was governed from Burdigala by an imperial legate. Its Atlantic ports handled trade with Britain and Spain. Roman remains at Saintes and Perigueux include amphitheatres. Aquitaine survived as a duchy into the middle ages and passed to England by marriage.

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