The medieval state took form around the city of Pamplona during the first centuries of the Iberian Reconquista. This polity evolved into the Kingdom of Pamplona. A series of partitions and dynastic changes led to a diminution of its territory and to periods of rule by the kings of Aragon β and France β In the 15th century, another dynastic dispute over control by the king of Aragon led to internal divisions and the eventual conquest of the southern part of the kingdom by Ferdinand II of Aragon in permanently annexed in It was annexed by the Courts of Castile to the Crown of Castile in as a separate kingdom with its own Courts and judiciary until The monarchs of this unified state took the title "King of France and Navarre" until its fall in the French Revolution , and again during the Bourbon Restoration from until with a brief interregnum in There are similar earlier toponyms but the first documentation [ 11 ] of Latin navarros appears in Eginhard 's chronicle of the feats of Charles the Great.
Other Royal Frankish Annals give nabarros. The linguist Joan Coromines considers naba as not clearly Basque in origin but as part of a wider pre-Roman substrate.
The kingdom originated in the southern side of the western Pyrenees, in the flatlands around the city of Pamplona. According to Roman geographers such as Pliny the Elder and Livy , these regions were inhabited by the Vascones and other related Vasconic- Aquitanian tribes, a pre- Indo-European group of peoples who inhabited the southern slopes of the western Pyrenees and part of the shore of the Bay of Biscay.
The Romans took full control of the area by 74 BC, but unlike their northern neighbors, the Aquitanians, and other tribes from the Iberian Peninsula, the Vascones negotiated their status within the Roman Empire. It would be under the jurisdiction of the conventus iuridicus of Caesaraugusta modern Zaragoza. The Roman Empire influenced the area in urbanization, language, infrastructure, commerce, and industry. During the Sertorian War , Pompey would command the foundation of a city in Vasconic territory, giving origin to Pompaelo , modern-day Pamplona, founded on a previously existent Vasconic town.
Romanization of the Vascones led to their eventual adoption of forms of Latin that would evolve into the Navarro-Aragonese language, though the Basque language would remain widely spoken, especially in rural and mountainous areas. After the decline of the Western Roman Empire , the Vascones were slow to be incorporated into the Visigothic Kingdom , which was in a civil war that provided the opportunity for the Umayyad conquest of Hispania.
