The Balearic Islands were first colonised by humans during the 3rd millennium BC, around 2500-2300 BC from the Iberian Peninsula or southern France, by people associated with the Bell Beaker culture.[20][21]
Little is recorded on the inhabitants of the islands during classical antiquity, though many legends exist. The story, preserved by Lycophron, that certain shipwrecked Greek Boeotians were cast nude on the islands, was evidently invented to account for the name Gymnesiae (Ancient Greek: Γυμνήσιαι). In addition, Diodorus Siculus writes that the Greeks called the islands Gymnesiae because the inhabitants were naked (γυμνοί) during the summer time.[22] Also, a tradition holds that the islands were colonized by Rhodes after the Trojan War.[11]
The islands had a very mixed population. Several stories describing them as having unusual habits. Some have it that they went naked year-round (a folk etymology claims this inspired the islands’ name), some say they went naked only in the summer, some that they wore only sheepskins—until the Phoenicians arrived and provided them with broad-bordered tunics.
Other stories have it that the inhabitants lived in hollow rocks and artificial caves, that their men were remarkable for their love of women and would trade three or four men to ransom one woman, that they had no gold or silver coin, and forbade the importation of the precious metals—-so that those of them who served as mercenaries took their pay in wine and women instead of money. The Roman Diodorus Siculus described their marriage and funeral customs (v. 18 book 6 chapter 5), noting that Roman observers found those customs peculiar.
In ancient times, the islanders of the Gymnesian Islands (Illes Gimnèsies) constructed talayots, and were famous for their skill with the sling. As slingers, they served as mercenaries, first under the Carthaginians, and afterwards under the Romans. They went into battle ungirt, with only a small buckler, and a javelin burnt at the end, and in some cases tipped with a small iron point; but their effective weapons were their slings, of which each man carried three, wound round his head (Strabo p. 168; Eustath.), or, as seen in other sources, one round the head, one round the body, and one in the hand. (Diodorus) The three slings were of different lengths, for stones of different sizes; the largest they hurled with as much force as if it were flung from a catapult; and they seldom missed their mark. To this exercise, they were trained from infancy, in order to earn their livelihood as mercenary soldiers. It is said that the mothers allowed their children to eat bread only when they had struck it off a post with the sling.[23]
The Phoenicians took possession of the islands in very early times;[24] a remarkable trace of their colonisation is preserved in the town of Mago (Maó in Menorca). After the fall of Carthage in 146 BC, the islands seem to have been virtually independent. Notwithstanding their celebrity in war, the people were generally very quiet and inoffensive.[25] The Romans, however, easily found a pretext for charging them with complicity with the Mediterranean pirates, and they were conquered by Q. Caecilius Metellus, thence surnamed Balearicus, in 123 BC.[26] Metellus settled 3,000 Roman and Spanish colonists on the larger island, and founded the cities of Palma and Pollentia.[27] The islands belonged, under the Roman Empire, to the conventus of Carthago Nova (modern Cartagena), in the province of Hispania Tarraconensis, of which province they formed the fourth district, under the government of a praefectus pro legato. An inscription of the time of Nero mentions the PRAEF. PRAE LEGATO INSULAR. BALIARUM. (Orelli, No. 732, who, with Muratori, reads pro for prae.) They were afterwards made a separate province, called Hispania Balearica, probably in the division of the empire under Constantine.[28]
The two largest islands (the Balearic Islands, in their historical sense) had numerous excellent harbours, though rocky at their mouth, and requiring care in entering them (Strabo, Eustath.; Port Mahon is one of the finest harbours in the world). Both were extremely fertile in all produce, except wine and olive oil.[29] They were celebrated for their cattle, especially for the mules of the lesser island; they had an immense number of rabbits, and were free from all venomous reptiles.[30] Amongst the snails valued by the Romans as a diet was a species from the Balearic isles called cavaticae because they were bred in caves.[31] Their chief mineral product was the red earth, called sinope, which was used by painters.[32] Their resin and pitch are mentioned by Dioscorides.[33] The population of the two islands is stated by Diodorus at 30,000.
The part of the Mediterranean east of Spain, around the Balearic Isles, was called Mare Balearicum,[34] or Sinus Balearicus.
Medieval period Late Roman and early Islamic eras
The Vandals under Genseric conquered the Islands sometime between 461 and 468 during their war on the Roman Empire. However, in late 533 or early 534, following the Battle of Ad Decimum, the troops of Belisarius reestablished control of the islands for the Romans. Imperial power receded precipitately in the western Mediterranean after the fall of Carthage and the Exarchate of Africa to the Umayyad Caliphate in 698, and in 707 the islands submitted to the terms of an Umayyad fleet, which allowed the residents to maintain their traditions and religion as well as a high degree of autonomy. Now nominally both Byzantine and Umayyad, the de facto independent islands occupied a strategic and profitable grey area between the competing religions and kingdoms of the western Mediterranean. The prosperous islands were thoroughly sacked by the Swedish Viking King Björn Ironside and his brother Hastein during their Mediterranean raid of 859–862.
Middle eastern genetic legacy in the paternal and maternal gene pools of Chuetas
J. F. Ferragut, C. Ramon, J. A. Castro, A. Amorim, L. Alvarez & A. Picornell Scientific Reports volume 10, Article number: 21428 (2020)
Abstract Chuetas are a group of descendants of Majorcan Crypto-Jews (Balearic Islands, Spain) who were socially stigmatized and segregated by their Majorcan neighbours until recently; generating a community that, although after the seventeenth century no longer contained Judaic religious elements, maintained strong group cohesion, Jewishness consciousness, and endogamy. Collective memory fixed 15 surnames as a most important defining element of Chueta families. Previous studies demonstrated Chuetas were a differentiated population, with a considerable proportion of their original genetic make-up. Genetic data of Y-chromosome polymorphism and mtDNA control region showed, in Chuetas’ paternal lineages, high prevalence of haplogroups J2-M172 (33%) and J1-M267 (18%). In maternal lineages, the Chuetas hallmark is the presence of a new sub-branching of the rare haplogroup R0a2m as their modal haplogroup (21%). Genetic diversity in both Y-chromosome and mtDNA indicates the Chueta community has managed to avoid the expected heterogeneity decrease in their gene pool after centuries of isolation and inbreeding. Moreover, the composition of their uniparentally transmitted lineages demonstrates a remarkable signature of Middle Eastern ancestry—despite some degree of host admixture—confirming Chuetas have retained over the centuries a considerable degree of ancestral genetic signature along with the cultural memory of their Jewish origin.
Introduction Jewish communities in the Balearic Islands date back to the fifth century AD. With the Christian conquest of Majorca in 1229, their physical survival was guaranteed, despite social and religious pressures forcing their conversion to Christianity between 1391 and 1435. Consequently, there were officially no more Jews in Majorca nearly 60 years before the Edict of Expulsion by the Catholic Kings in 1492. Many of these converted Jews were integrated in the general population; however, a few families remained in the ghetto and secretly adhered to Judaism, forming a Crypto-Jewish community which was persecuted by the Inquisition (fifteenth–seventeenth centuries)2. The last “Autos de Fe” in 1691 put a stop to their hidden Jewish religious practices, and this population of convicts and their descendants came to be known as Chuetas, a word probably derived from the Catalan for Jew3, with their social stigma and segregation (imposed by their Majorcan neighbours) continuing until the mid-twentieth century. There was a definitive point of inflection when Majorca opened to tourism, as the arrival of newcomers (Spaniards or foreigners) who had no knowledge of the status of Chuetas led to a decrease in anti-Chueta prejudice. Therefore, Chuetas were an isolated population with very scarce intermarriage with the Majorcan host population until recently4. One of the most important defining elements of this group is that they bear one of the 15 surnames of converso lineages (Aguiló, Bonnín, Cortès, Fortesa, Fuster, Martí, Miró, Picó, Pinya, Pomar, Segura, Tarongí, Valentí, Valleriola, and Valls) targeted by the inquisitorial sentences for Crypto-Judaism in the last quarter of the seventeenth century5. Some of these surnames are common in other Spanish regions, where they are not related to Judaism. In Majorca, however, they have been fixed in the collective memory by their identification as Chueta families.
The frequency in Chuetas of haplogroups rarely found in neighbouring populations—E1b-M78, Q1-P36.2, G-M201, and R1a1a-M17 (14, 10, 8, and 4%, respectively)—could also mean that they might have been present in the original Jewish Majorcan gene pool.
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