by David Keys
Spain had been the Roman Empire’s first major overseas province, and it remained an integral part of the empire for more than six hundred years, from the third century B.C. to the fifth century A.D. But during the fifth century, Rome lost control of the Iberian Peninsula.
The saga started in A.D. 375 when a German tribal confederation, that of the Visigoths (living in what is now southern Romania), was threatened by an Asiatic people, the Huns. The Visigoths asked for and were granted permission to enter the Roman Empire. They were allowed to settle in the Balkans but soon ended up at war with their Roman hosts. In 410 they captured and sacked Rome itself. Despite that, two years later they became allies of the empire and were given the job of subduing four other groups of German barbarians who had invaded the Empire in 406, marched across France, and occupied much of Spain.
The Visigoths succeeded in their Spanish mission and as a reward were granted land in southwest Gaul. However, the Germanic barbarians in Spain soon regrouped, and in 455 Rome asked the Visigoths to intervene again. The barbarians were defeated once more, but in 468 Rome switched sides and formed an alliance with one of the barbarian groups they had asked the Visigoths to subdue.
The Visigoths responded to this Roman treachery by seizing vast tracts of officially Roman territory, thus forming a virtual empire of half of Gaul (including their original territory) and three-quarters of Spain. Because of a parallel Germanic takeover in Italy, the Roman Empire in western Europe collapsed in 476, and like Spain, Italy became an independent Gothic kingdom by 493.
Roughly from 457, therefore, the Visigoths were the major power in Spain. In 508 they lost most of their territories north of the Pyrenees, so that their kingdom was from then on mainly confined to the Iberian Peninsula.
According to their own legends, the Germanic people called the Goths came originally (in or before the first century B.C.) from southern Scandinavia. However, Roman sources record that by the first century A.D. they were settled on the southeast coast of the Baltic Sea around the mouth of the river Vistula. But in the second half of the following century they migrated right across eastern Europe and settled along the north and northwest coast of the Black Sea, an area they then used as a base from which to attack the Roman province of Dacia (modern Romania). In the 270s the Goths forced the Roman Empire to abandon Dacia, and took the territory for themselves. These Gothic raiders became known as the Visigoths (valiant Goths), while those Goths farther east came to be known as Ostrogoths (eastern Goths).
Christianity was first introduced to a small number of Visigoths in the mid–third century A.D. by Christian prisoners who had been captured during raids on Roman Anatolia (modern Turkey). Just over a century later, in 376, the Visigoths were allowed to settle within the Roman Empire, in what is now Serbia. There they were converted to Christianity (as a condition of their admittance to the empire) by a priest of Visigothic origin called Ulfilas, who translated the Bible into Gothic. Ulfilas, however, espoused a non-Catholic form of Christianity known as moderate Arianism—a faith that had imperial backing in 376 but lost that support and became heretical after a Church council held in 381.
Although Christian, Arian theology was fundamentally different from Catholicism. Catholicism taught that Christ and God were both manifestations of the same Godhead—that although they are different and distinct “persons,” they are of the same nature. Arianism, on the other hand, believed that although God was eternal, Christ was not. He was simply the first thing created by God. Moderate Arians said Christ was a supernatural being, but not God in the same sense as God the Father. Radical Arians went further and held that Christ had no divinity at all, and that although an inspiration to humanity, he was merely one of God’s creations. Both these views were seen by Catholics as undermining the central Christian concept that Christ could save sinful humans from eternal damnation. If Christ were not God, that power would be in doubt. It was this Arian dimension that was to affect much of subsequent Visigothic Spanish history.
Appearing first in 542, the plague appears to have had at least two major effects on Visigothic-ruled Spain. As in other areas, it caused substantial social, economic, and political destruction. It also seems to have upset the balance of power between the Visigothic ruling class and their Romano-Spanish subjects.
Plague reduced tax revenue by killing off both taxpayers and tax collectors. As well as killing large numbers of ordinary people, it also wiped out a large number of individuals of great personal, political, and military power. In history, the creation of an abnormally large number of vacancies at the top most frequently creates a large bout of competitive—and often violent—activity to fill them.
And as for the relationship between ruler and ruled, this too appears to have been upset by the depredations of the plague. The population of Visigothic-ruled Spain on the eve of the plague was around four million, only three hundred thousand of whom were Visigoths. So demographic reductions would have been absorbed relatively painlessly by the majority Romano-Spanish population, but not so easily by the already much smaller ruling Visigoths.
A combination of all these factors likely played a role in tipping Spain into chaos in the years immediately following the plague outbreak. During the sixth and seventh centuries, only four Visigothic kings were murdered, yet three of those four assassinations took place in the twelve-year period that followed the outbreak of plague. King Theudis was murdered in his palace in Toledo in 548. Theudigisel was done to death while drunk at a banquet in Seville in 549. His successor, Agila, was murdered by his own troops in 555. Being a Visigothic king was most certainly a risky business in the mid–sixth century.
The first plague epidemic and its immediate aftermath (roughly 545–552) was also characterized by political disintegration. The Romano-Spanish urban population of Cordoba—probably led by the local senate—rose in revolt against the Visigothic-ruled Spanish state in or slightly before 550. King Agila tried to suppress the revolt and failed miserably, losing his son, his royal treasure, and most of his army as a result. Other urban revolts in Orense, Asturias, and Cantabria (all in the north) probably also broke out at this time, although the historical sources refer to them only when these uprisings (along with the Cordoba revolt) were being brought to an end two decades later. A sixth-century revolt of a somewhat different flavor broke out in 551 when a Visigothic nobleman called Athanagild, taking advantage of Visigothic royal weakness, seized Seville and challenged King Agila for the throne.
The Roman imperial authorities, who controlled much of the Mediterranean at this time, had seized control of Ceuta on the southern side of the Strait of Gibraltar in 534 and doubtless had been waiting patiently for an opportunity to reconquer Spain—a land the empire had not ruled for some eighty years. The mid-sixth-century chaos in Spain—and more specifically the revolt in which Athanagild played a role—gave them the opportunity they had been waiting for. In late 551 the rebel Visigoth appealed to the Roman emperor Justinian for help. The emperor, eighteen hundred miles away in Constantinople, responded immediately, and a Roman army landed in Spain (probably in or near Malaga) in June 552. At the battle of Seville later that summer, the combined imperial and rebel forces defeated Agila, who was forced to retreat.
At this stage, the imperial forces acted merely as Athanagild’s allies, but having established a bridgehead in Spain, they were not content to play second fiddle to a barbarian rebel for long. Thus in 555 the Romans are believed to have launched a second invasion of Spain, this time seizing the great coastal city of Cartagena directly from the much-weakened King Agila. It must have been a surprise attack, and it probably dismayed Athanagild just as much as it upset Agila, inasmuch as it turned the Romans from Athanagild’s allies into rivals for control of Spain. For Agila, it spelled the end; the loss of Cartagena appears to have disgraced him totally.
And so it was that in March 555 Spanish history was turned on its head. The rebel Athanagild disowned his alliance with the Romans, and at the royal headquarters in
Merida, Agila was murdered by his own men, who then proceeded to proclaim their enemy, the rebel Athanagild, as king.
The united Visigothic forces were now able to at least stem the Roman advance, but for the next seventy years, they were unable to expel them from Spain.
* * *
Roman Spain formed part of a resurgent—almost reborn—Roman Empire. The modern public perception of the Roman imperial system is that it died, at least in the west, in the fifth century A.D. Most people’s image of the end of the empire is colored both by its retreat from its British provinces in A.D. 410 and the Goths’ sack of Rome in the same year, vividly described by the immortal Gibbon.
However, in the second quarter of the sixth century, the Roman emperor, Justinian, launched an extraordinary project, the reconquest of the western lands. In the main, his policy was to act opportunistically—to seize territory when and if he saw weakness and when he perceived opportunity. And that is just how the far south of Spain became part of the empire once again, with the opening provided by Athanagild’s revolt.
Justinian succeeded in seizing back for the empire not only southern Spain but also North Africa, Italy, all the islands of the western Mediterranean (Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, and the Balearics), and the territories now known as Bosnia and Croatia. In thirty years he increased the empire’s size by some 50 percent, so that it once again stretched from the borders of Persia to the Atlantic Ocean. Although the expanded imperial system lost its Spanish territory in 625, Justinian’s sixth-century Roman reconquest of the western lands was not finally extinguished until the Normans seized southern Italy more than four centuries later, in 1050.
The Roman reconquest of parts of southern Spain, therefore, brought a revived empire to the very doorstep (or, indeed, halfway into the front hall) of Visigothic Spain. The governor-general of the new Roman province gloried in the title of the “master of the soldiers in Spain” and reported directly to the emperor in Constantinople. However, important textual evidence has survived suggesting that the pope also exercised a degree of unofficial influence over him.
The Roman province (known as Spania) also controlled a significant portion of Visigothic Spain’s trade, for it occupied around seven hundred miles of coastline, including several key ports.¹ The importance of Spania to subsequent Spanish history has usually been underestimated. The surviving evidence strongly indicates that it had crucial direct and indirect effects on Visigothic Spain. Spania tended to act as a sort of political and cultural magnet, distorting the direction of events in the rest of the Iberian Peninsula.
A whole series of these distortions had the cumulative effect of altering the balance of power in the Visigothic world. Although there is no conclusive evidence of any direct connection, the first probable consequence on the wider political scene of the Roman intervention was the decision by the Visigoths’ enemies in the western Iberian Peninsula, the kingdom of the Sueves, to convert from Arianism to Catholicism.² The conversion took place in the 550s at virtually the same time as, or very shortly after, the Roman intervention and subsequent invasion of Visigothic Spain.
The Visigoths were, of course, Arian, while the Roman Empire was staunchly Catholic. So the Suevian conversion would have been seen by the Visigoths as a hostile pro-Roman move at a time when the Visigothic kingdom was discomfited by a Catholic empire. Then, of course, it had been the Roman intervention that had ultimately led to the demise of King Agila, who was probably the most anti-Catholic of all Visigothic monarchs. It was he who appears to have been responsible for initiating the ban on Catholic Church councils—a ban that lasted some three and a half decades. Agila was admittedly replaced by another Arian, but one who, prior to the second phase of the Roman intervention, had been prepared to ally himself with a Catholic empire against his Arian king.
And then there was the native Romano-Spanish anti-Visigothic revolt in Cordoba that erupted in or probably shortly before 550. It is very likely that that insurrection would have been snuffed out in the 550s or 560s if the Roman seizure of southern Spain had not occurred. As it was, the Cordoban rebel ministate formed a sizable independent Catholic enclave sandwiched between Roman imperial and Visigothic territory. It certainly would have had some community of interest with the Catholic Romans and the Roman presence probably helped prolong its independence.
The Roman-Visigothic border was an open frontier. Private individuals, merchants, clergy, and others passed freely through it. So, without doubt, the presence of a substantial imperial Roman community in the occupied province led to much-increased trade with the eastern Mediterranean world, not only by Spania but also (via the province’s two major ports, Malaga and Cartagena) Visigothic Spain itself. This has been detected archaeologically, with Gothic fashions in clothing beginning to disappear in the late sixth century. The Visigoths seem also to have been much taken with eastern Mediterranean ideas of urbanism. In 578 and 580 the Visigothic king, Leovigild, became the only Germanic ruler in Europe to start founding new cities, and although he almost certainly peopled them with Visigoths, he decided to give them Greek and Latin names. The first city he established was in honor of his youngest son, Reccared, and he called it Reccopolis (the city of Reccared).³ Leovigild was almost certainly aping the name of the capital of the Roman Empire, Constantinopolis (Constantinople), which had been named after its founder, Emperor Constantine.
In 581 the king founded a second Gothic city, and again he chose a Roman-style name, Victoriacum (Victory).4 At around the same time, Leovigild started adopting imperial eastern-Roman court ritual in his royal palace in Toledo.
But by far the biggest way in which the Roman province distorted the progress of Visigothic history was its involvement in a second revolt against the Visigothic monarchy, which broke out in 580. Not only was the insurrection of great political importance for subsequent Spanish history, it was also arguably one of the most tragic in personal terms.
The saga started in the year 578 when the Visigothic king, Leovigild, decided to marry his oldest son, Hermenegild, to the daughter of the Frankish ruler, Sigibert. The Franks were Catholics, but Leovigild presumably hoped that Sigibert’s daughter—a princess called Ingundis—would convert to Arianism. After all, he must have reasoned, Visigothic princesses who married Frankish royals had always converted to the Frankish religion, Catholicism.
However, on arrival in the Visigothic capital, Toledo, Ingundis—who was barely twelve years old and might have been expected to be fairly malleable—refused point-blank to convert. Leovigild’s second wife, Goisuintha (Hermenegild’s stepmother), was, because of dynastic intermarriage, also Princess Ingundis’ grandmother. But she failed to display any grandmotherly love and patience and proceeded to use somewhat unconventional methods of persuasion to convince the young princess of the rightness of Arian theology. Goisuintha started off by pulling the girl’s hair, then graduated to hurling her to the ground and kicking her till she bled. When the stubborn twelve-year-old would still not comply, Goisuintha had her taken outside, stripped, and thrown in a fish pond. But still the princess stood her ground.
Whether partly because of these appalling personal antagonisms or for totally different reasons, the king decided to put Hermenegild in charge of the province of Baetica, a strategically key region bordering on the Roman-held south. Accordingly, Hermenegild and his young wife then left Toledo to take up residence in the main city of Baetica, Seville. There, the tables were turned. The princess joined forces with a leading Catholic monk called Leander (the brother of the local bishop, or possibly even the bishop-elect) to persuade her husband to convert from Arianism to Catholicism. Remarkably, they succeeded. For the heir to the throne to take such action in obvious defiance of his father’s wishes was a direct challenge to the Visigothic state and monarchy.
Traditionally, Visigoths had defined their national identity through their religion (Arianism) and their language (Gothic), while the subject population, the native Romano-Spaniards, had defined their identity in similar
terms (Catholic faith and Latin language).5 Visigothic Spain was, in effect, a binational state. Indeed, it even had two legal systems—one for the ruling Gothic-Spanish nation (the Visigoths) and one for the native Romano-Spanish nation. Intermarriage between the two was illegal. It was a sort of apartheid, although the Romano-Spaniards were certainly not oppressed and lived in relative freedom, even controlling (at municipal level) most of the towns.
Whether he intended it to be or not, Prince Hermenegild’s conversion was therefore a challenge to the political system as a whole. The king desperately tried to avert disaster by attempting to open negotiations with his errant son, but the prince would not even discuss the issue. Instead, Hermenegild sent Leander off to the Roman emperor in Constantinople to ask for help. The prince then took to calling himself king (of what is not clear; presumably just of Baetica) and started minting his own coins. Hermenegild controlled two of Visigothic Spain’s five provincial capitals, Seville and Merida, and formed an alliance with the Roman Empire and the Kingdom of the Sueves. It is likely also that thousands of Visigoths in Baetica also converted to Catholicism along with their leader.
Initially Hermenegild was doubtful about converting, and it is probable that if Baetica had not been adjacent to imperial Roman territory and Roman military strengths, he would not have taken such an enormous risk.6
