"Spaniards"?
The Iberian Peninsula entered recorded history with the Roman conquest, after which it became an integral part of the empire. Language, culture, and economic structure all stemmed from Rome, as well as the name "Hispania," a geographic term for the entire peninsula (which became a distinct "diocese" of the empire after the Diocletian reforms of the fourth century).1 Its society passed through each of the major
phases and vicissitudes of the later Roman system, though some of the northern districts were less thoroughly Romanized than the south and east.
Spain emerged as a kingdom, if not exactly a state, under the Visigoths in the sixth century, though the Visigothic monarchy was slow to establish general control over the entire peninsula — and even then somewhat uncertainly in part of the north. Later generations would look back to the Visigoths as the first leaders of an independent "Spain," but in the twentieth century historians would challenge so simple and straightforward an interpretation. By that time the Visigothic kingdom was increasingly interpreted in negative terms of decline, disunity, and general weakness, an interpretative deconstruction that began historiographically well before the deconstruction of Spain in general became fashionable.
American historian Peter Brown introduced the concept of "Late Antiquity" as a relatively distinct period of historical transition from the ancient world to the Middle Ages. This term has been increasingly accepted as a way to periodize history between the fourth and seventh centuries. Somewhat similarly, it became fashionable during the second half of the twentieth century to reject the classic understanding of the "fall of Rome," replacing this with a new perspective that saw the Germanic kingdoms as evolutionary successor states, which formed a kind of functional symbiosis with the remains of the Roman world, not overthrowing it so much as reincorporating it in a new quasi-synthesis.2
There is no question that in most of the new kingdoms, Germanic rulers tried to cloak themselves in Roman authority and to maintain much of the existing structures, but there is also no doubt that a real break occurred during the fifth century.3 The break
was most complete in Roman Britain, where the old civilization almost totally disappeared, but much less extensive in the peninsulas of Spain and Italy, where at first more of the old order survived.
The "Grand Narrative" of Spanish history, as it took full form in the nineteenth century, defined a national identity and a kind of historical purpose and mission, the origins of which were purportedly laid by the Visigoths and developed more extensively by the kingdom of Asturias. Major aspects of this interpretation have varied, most notably between liberal nationalists and Catholic traditionalists during the nineteenth century, but for some time it constituted a meta-interpretation of the Spanish past. The Grand Narrative first began to be questioned in the mood of
Narrative first began to be questioned in the mood of pessimism that gripped a part of the thinking of late nineteenth-century Spain, even before 1898. Thoroughly rehabilitated and restored by Franco, its last great avatar, it began to be yet more decisively rejected in the era of democratization and autonomies that followed the dictatorship. The political and ideological deconstruction of the Spanish nation that ensued provoked an intense debate that has only accelerated in recent years — the most intense ongoing debate in any Western country, equaled or exceeded only by that of Russia in the 1990s (the chief product of which in Russia has been the neo- authoritarian nationalism of Vladimir Putin).
In the 1970s, critics held that the formation of historically continuous Spanish institutions in the kingdom of Asturias during the generation immediately following the Muslim conquest involved a major paradox. The most succinct statement of this position was made by Abilio Barbero and Marcelo Vigil in the small study they published in 1974, Sobre los orígenes sociales de la Reconquista. This
appeared on the eve of the democratization of Spain, and for that particular theme represented a climax of the deconstructive trend of interpretation, which had begun in the late nineteenth century. It posited a paradox, not to say contradiction, in the origins of the resistance nucleus of Asturias during the second quarter of the eighth century.
The paradox was supposed to be twofold. On the one hand, independent Hispano-Christian society first arose in what was heretofore the least Romanized and Christianized part of the peninsula, with the exception of the Basque region. On the other hand,
the "neo-Gothic ideal," which emerged as a kind of political doctrine among the Asturian elite by the end of the ninth century, was held to have had the scantiest historical basis in Asturias itself, for the greater Asturian-Cantabrian region, as putatively one of the least Romanized districts, was said to have possessed little or no Visigothic political structure or identity. It was allegedly the home almost exclusively of semiprimitive autochthonous peoples, whose society was scarcely more than tribal in structure and who had had little to do with the Visigothic state at all, having never been effectively conquered or integrated by it.
Though some historians rejected this interpretation, or at least its most extreme version, it commanded a wide audience after the death of Franco, fitting nicely the mood of diversity and pluralism of the years of the democratization.4 During that era the Grand Narrative
of Spanish history, which had found its earliest limited expression in the Asturias of Alfonso el Casto and reached its height in nineteenth-century Spanish nationalism — both liberal and rightist — and in the doctrines of the Franco regime, was rejected politically and broadly deconstructed historiographically. Moreover, this reinterpretation could not easily be challenged by new historical research, for the sources on the last years of Visigothic history are the weakest of the entire Visigothic period, while the principal documentary sources for the history of the kingdom of Asturias consist of only three chronicles.
An examination of the roots of the kingdom of Asturias should begin with the Visigothic monarchy, which preceded it. For nearly a hundred years, the
which preceded it. For nearly a hundred years, the latter was viewed by most commentators as a semi- incoherent failure, whose sudden downfall merely reflected its internal social and political divisions and general decadence, so that its ruin became almost inevitable. The achievements and influence of its cultural superstar, San Isidoro of Seville, were seen as a unique exception that otherwise merely proved the rule. More recently, however, historians have viewed this attitude as originating, at least in part, in the cultural pessimism of Spain at the close of the nineteenth century.
For most of the twentieth century, the Visigothic state was given credit for establishing its sovereignty over the peninsula and for eventually adopting Catholic orthodoxy, but for little else. The Grand Narrative had lauded it for building the political and religious unity of Spain, but the tendency among twentieth-century historians was to judge it a decadent failure in social, cultural, and political terms. Disparagement of the Visigothic era was not new. It had been begun as early as the eighth century by French Carolingians, the first to propagate the myth that Roman culture had been almost totally submerged by "barbarian invasions," introducing the concept, if not quite the term, of "dark ages" overtaking western Europe after the collapse of Rome.
Research on the Visigoths enjoys a venerable tradition in Spain, and for long it centered on the history of law, on the one hand, and of church history and patristics, on the other. In 1941, two years after the Civil War, the young historian Alfonso García Gallo published a major one-hundred-page article in the first
new number of the Anuario de la Historia del Derecho Español, which challenged traditional
understanding of the origins of Visigothic law. The major figures in that field, led by Eduardo de Hinojosa and later by Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, had emphasized the centrality of Germanic law, whereas García Gallo argued on the basis of considerable evidence that what was known in western Europe as "Roman vulgar law" was more nearly the basis of Visigothic law codes.5
The Visigoths had long been recognized as the most Romanized of the Germanic peoples, and — unlike the Franks, Germans, Angles, Saxons, Burgundians, or Lombards — had never replaced the Latin name of their territory with their own. García Gallo's reinterpretation, however, considerably broadened understanding of the post-Roman character of certain Visigothic institutions, and which to some degree has been substantiated by subsequent research. Moreover, coming as it did during the high triumphal phase of early Francoism, it accorded nicely with the dominant political ideology, which was pleased to alter the origins of the conventional Grand Narrative in a more directly Roman-Hispanic southwest European, less Germanic, direction. The fact that the most recent research in Germany itself had underscored the persistence of Roman vulgar law in the various Germanic kingdoms only gave this greater credibility. At that stage the regime encouraged the friendliest of relations with Nazi Germany, but preferred a less Germanized version of the national Grand Narrative.
kingdom took place in the last two decades of the century, most notably among foreign scholars. The British Hispanist Roger Collins accused previous commentators of what he termed "virtually a 'slave- mentality,' induced by a priori acceptance of the necessary inferiority of Visigothic Spain." 6 A
significant role has been played by the French Hispanist Jacques Fontaine, the leading living authority on San Isidoro,7 though one of its first
manifestations was the international conference on "Visigothic Spain: New Approaches," held at University College, Dublin, in 1975.8 This reevaluation
gives the Visigoths credit for "holding together for over a century the largest undivided political unit in seventh-century Europe," for having extended political organization rather more thoroughly across the peninsula's north than had earlier been thought, for building some degree of politico-administrative structure, and for having expelled Byzantine invaders.9
It is now increasingly recognized that Visigothic Spain maintained a higher level of learning and culture than any other large part of western Europe except for Italy, and that the Visigothic clergy was generally the best-educated to be found in continental western Europe, however relative such a qualification must be. During the seventh century the Visigothic church was generally recognized in Latin Christendom as the leader in ecclesiastical law, in church discipline, and even, to some extent, in theology. Its church law, administration, and liturgical forms were widely copied, the collection of church regulations known as
Hispana circulating extensively in western Europe.
One German scholar has recently called it the most advanced example of a church in one of the Germanic
advanced example of a church in one of the Germanic kingdoms.10 Moreover, secular Visigothic law was
well developed in comparison with neighboring kingdoms, the seventh-century legal codification of Recesvinto, known variously as Forum Iudicum and Liber Iudiciorum, and to medieval Castilians as the Fuero Juzgo, was the most extensive and relatively
sophisticated Western law code of its time, and in various ways was followed in all the Visigothic successor states — even in Catalonia — for some six centuries.11
The Visigothic church and monarchy were the first to present the ideal of the "Christian monarchy," thus the true heir of Rome and equal, at least, to the Byzantine empire. By the seventh century, the ruler had become sacralized as more than a mere earthly ruler and was the first Western ruler to receive the royal unction upon coronation. The close association between church and state that existed from the late sixth century has long been emphasized, and earlier gave rise to erroneous judgments by foreign scholars about the roots of what they termed "Spanish theocracy." That relationship was in fact rather more caesaropapist than theocratic, but there is no doubt that the church came to have a major role in the late Visigothic system, in a manner distinct from that of the church in any other contemporary state. It did indeed have an important political and, later, administrative function, and the Councils of Toledo involved the church in formulating a primitive kind of constitutional law, though the latter was often honored only in the breach. In all, the Visigothic church became virtually a national church, whose connections with Rome continued to exist but were somewhat limited.
San Isidoro has long been recognized as the great Western polymath of his age, and indeed was the most influential Spanish scholar of all time. His massi ve Etymologies were still being laboriously
copied out by hand seven centuries later. Though not a major theologian, he was the last great patristic figure of Late Antiquity. Isidoro played a crucial political ideological role, as well, for he was the first to define fully the terms of the new "Christian monarchy," an "empire" — meaning a totally independent state — not beholden either to old Rome or to the Eastern Roman Empire. In the Isidorean doctrine, the Visigothic monarchy represented a new kind of state and culture that sought but failed to achieve a sort of synthesis of Western Christianity and classical culture, the latter of course subordinated to the former. He spoke of the new kingdom as the "patria" of "the peoples of all Hispania," now joined in the united "patria of the Goths," and on one occasion referred to them as "a chosen people." 12 Jacques Fontaine has
labeled this "the genesis of the Hispano-Gothic ideology," resulting in "a kind of cultural nationalism."
13 Isidoro's approach differed from that of his quasi-
contemporary, Pope Gregory the Great, in that it was optimistic, whereas that of Gregory had been eschatological. Gregory had been relatively suspicious of profane culture, whereas Isidoro sought to incorporate it as much as possible, seeking a via media between yesterday and today. Fontaine claims, perhaps with a little exaggeration, that he achieved "an original and firm vision of universal history," in which the Christian monarchy followed Rome in a positive line of historical development.14 This Regnum Gothorum was a precisely defined territory,
exactly defined geographically. None of its contemporaries had such definition, either in doctrine or in territory, while in late Visigothic times Hispania
was sometimes shortened to Spania, and the rulers
were sometimes called reges Spaniae.
One of the most contested points in interpreting late Visigothic society is the issue of ethnic integration. It was long assumed that a basic weakness lay in the continuing division between German Visigoths on the one hand, and Hispano-Romans or other native population on the other. Some non-Spanish specialists during the past generation have come to discount this, seeing instead a broad fusion of elites, and perhaps of much of the ordinary population as well, after the ban on intermarriage ended in the sixth century. The Fourth Council of Toledo in 633 referred to the population at large as part of a single gens et patria, just as the Seventh Council, thirteen years later,
spoke of the kingdom as a whole as the gens et patria Gothorum.15 After this there are no further
references to a distinct "Roman" population. The Gothic language itself ceased to be used, even by the highest Visigothic elite, though the majority of children for which there is any record, even from more ordinary families, were given Gothic names.
This newer conclusion does not presume any sort of homogenization, much less any strong sense of harmony in society at large. Not only did the Visigothic high aristocracy maintain control of power, but by the late seventh century social tensions seem to have been increasing. Slavery persisted, there was more complaint than ever about the number of runaway slaves, and severe economic problems heightened
pressures toward forms of enserfinent for part of the free rural population. Spanish historians, especially, have been impressed by the severity of internal problems and are more skeptical about the degree of ethnic fusion. This remains an open question, difficult to resolve due to the paucity of evidence. Moreover, by the final generation of the Visigothic era, the tendency of the elite to assume settled territorial status seems to have created a growing equivalence with the native Hispanic elite, oriented toward land and wealth, and the maintenance of a patrimonial status, with less and less concern for military service, a factor in the military decline of the monarchy.
Américo Castro titled one brief section of his magnum opus "The Visigoths were not Spaniards," and in the fullest sense this is doubtless correct, but they did create the first political Spain, and at least began the process of forming a specific Spanish society, even though that process was far from complete by 700. They presided over a religious culture that was highly developed for that era, and also had begun to form a special kind of ideology and royal identity, so that at one point in the seventh century the Visigothic monarchy represented as fully developed a political and religious model as could be found in the West. Moreover, the Visigothic form of elite society — the military aristocracy — would remain the dominant elite form of Spain for the next millennium and more, until the nineteenth century.
The great failure of the Visigothic kingdom was not so much military as political; dissidence among elite aristocratic families could rarely be controlled for more than a decade or so at a time. The efforts by church leaders and a few others to "constitutionalize"
church leaders and a few others to "constitutionalize" succession to the crown, creating the most elaborate succession mechanism of any Christian state at that time, failed. Consequently the key to the Islamic conquest-part of which was not technically a military "conquest" lay in the conditions of civil war, which reemerged in 710-11. A century and a half earlier, in 554, one Visigothic faction that claimed the throne had called in Byzantine military assistance, leading to the Byzantine occupation of the whole southeastern part of the peninsula for three-quarters of a century, before it was reconquered. The next reconquest would take much longer.
The Arab takeover of Spain was proportionately the fastest and most mysterious of all the extensive Islamic conquests. Major parts of less-developed North Africa resisted for decades before they finally succumbed. Later, seeing the fate of the Visigoths, the Merovingian French would resist far more vigorously. There is no doubt that peninsular society had been weakened in recent decades by drought,