The War of the Bands: A Century of Basque Blood Feuds and Urban Chaos
In the Late Middle Ages, the western Basque Country was consumed by a sprawling civil war. Aristocratic factions, known as bandos, waged relentless battles for honor and power. These conflicts, fueled by ancient family rivalries and shifting political alliances, only ceased when royal authority finally crushed the warring noble houses.
The War of the Bands was not a single conflict but a series of interconnected blood feuds spanning the Basque Country, Cantabria, Gascony, and Navarre. The primary historical record of this era comes from Lope García de Salazar’s c.1471 work, Las Bienandanças e fortunas. These wars were driven by aristocratic networks of familial alliances that sought dominance across three kingdoms, a situation exacerbated by the political instability following the Castilian Civil War of 1351–1369.
Urban centers like Bilbao and Bermeo became battlegrounds for wealthy families, while the countryside was dominated by the landed nobility, whose feuds often stretched back centuries. For instance, the Legizamon and Zamudiano families had been enemies since 1270. Violence was pervasive; the Legizamon and Zurbarán families fought in the streets of Bilbao in 1362 and again in the market of Bermeo in 1413, continuing their struggle without truce until 1433. These urban skirmishes, while frequent, were often less lethal than the pitched battles in the countryside, where private wars could result in hundreds of deaths.
The conflict reached a peak of brutality in the early 15th century. In 1420, the Gamboinos attacked the Oñaz family manor on Christmas, killing the head of the house and nine others in a fire. This triggered a cycle of retaliation involving wider networks of allies. By 1446, the Gamboinos and their allies, the Balda, clashed with the Oñaz and Lezcano at Zumarraga, resulting in the deaths of seventy men and twelve leaders. The violence only subsided when royalist hermandades, acting under the authority of the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, intervened. In 1457, the hermandades finally brought the Gamboino-Oñaz feud to an end by seizing their manors and expelling their leaders from Guipúzcoa.
Source: War of the Bands
