Arnauld de Oihenart

Who was Arnauld de Oihenart?

Arnauld de Oihenart was a Basque historian and poet.

Born at Mauléon, he studied law at Bordeaux, where he took his degree in 1612. He practised with Jeanne d'Erdoy, the heiress of a noble family of Saint-Palais, at the bar of the parlement of Navarre. He spent his leisure and his fortune in the search for documents bearing on the old Basque and Béarnese provinces; and the fruits of his studies in the archives of Bayonne, Toulouse, Pau, Périgord and other cities were embodied in forty-five manuscript volumes, which were sent by his son Gabriel to Colbert. Twenty of these are in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris.

Oihenart published in 1625 a Déclaration historique de l'injuste usurpation et retention de la Navarre par les Espagnols and a fragment of a Latin work on the same subject is included in Auguste Galland's Mémoires pour l'histoire de Navarre. His most important work is Notitia utriusque Vasconiae, tum Ibericae, tum Aquitanicae, qua praeter situm regions et alia scitu digna, a description of Gascony and Navarre.