Amaya

Amaya is the name of a village (pop. 67) in the municipality of Sotresgudo, Burgos, in Castile-Leon, Spain.The name of the village has Indo-European roots and means "am (ma)" or "mother". The suffix io-ia is also used to form action names or toponyms, implying that the meaning of Amaya or Amaia is "mother city", as it will be called later, "the capital". Other hypothesis is that the name derives from the Proto-Basque or Basque word Amaia, meaning "the end".Amaya was one of the main villages of the Cantabri Celtic tribes, and played a key role in the Cantabrian wars during the Roman conquest of Hispania, and later, during the Visigothic Kingdom, as the capital of the Duchy of Cantabria. Amaya is mentioned in the Chronicle of John of Biclaro, as a town captured by the Visigothic king Liuvigild in 574.According to the Muslim chroniclers, in the year 714, Musa ibn Nusair sacked Amaya for the second time after Tariq did the year before. Peter, the provincial dux, led his people into refuge in the mountains, and after the local noble Pelayo of Asturias in the neighbor region of Asturias started a rebellion against the Berber garrison, Dux Peter as other western Galician nobles supported the election of him as new King or Princeps in the lead against the common enemy.