Spain: A Unique History (9 page)

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 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 massive
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."
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Jacques Fontaine has labeled this "the genesis of the Hispano-Gothic ideology," resulting in "a kind of cultural nationalism."
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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, in fact the first Christian and European state to be 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" 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, famine, and pestilence, but the key presumably lay in the suicidal rivalries within the Visigothic elite, one large sector of which assumed that after winning sizable booty, the Arabs would merely assist them in gaining power and then depart. Yet, once the king had been defeated and killed and much of the elite totally compromised, most of the kingdom collapsed politically without central resistance, thanks in part to the swift initiative of the Arab leadership, just as would be the case more than three centuries later within the more centralized, unified, and sophisticated Anglo-Saxon state after defeat in the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Earlier protracted North African resistance against the Muslims, like that of the inhabitants of the peninsula against the Romans centuries earlier, had been partly predicated on complete decentralization.

As indicated earlier, some historians have tended to view the only successful resistance nucleus emerging in Asturias as something of a spastic knee-jerk reaction by an early medieval remnant of "primitive rebels." This has been called the "indigenous theory" of the origins of the kingdom of Asturias. Crude tribesmen who had supposedly never bowed the knee to the Visigoths soon took up resistance against the Muslims, but the only continuity was local and rather primitive, the people of Asturias exhibiting no very sophisticated political, social, religious, or ideological features, as summarized in the work of Barbero and Vigil.

Since publication of Barbero and Vigil's book, northern Spain has been the object of the most extensive archaeological research that the region has ever known. Beginning with the first major new research project initiated in Asturias in 1980, a new golden age of archaeological investigation opened, soon yielding a rather different picture. Some of the results have been presented most cogently in the analytic synthesis published in 2001 by Luis Ramón Menéndez Bueyes,
Reflexiones críticas sobre el origen del Reino de Asturias
. Recent archaeological research reveals a greater degree of Romanization and of economic integration than had earlier been thought to be the case. Particularly in Asturias, though not so much in Cantabria proper, the structure of much of society turns out not to have differed so totally as had frequently been assumed. There is at least some evidence of political integration, as well. Asturias was one of the several Visigothic duchies, even though rather lightly populated and not fully integrated either socially or politically. The tentative new conclusion is that although the Asturias was not so heavily Romanized as the major areas of the south and east, the region revealed at least somewhat more sophisticated structure and political integration in Visigothic times than had earlier been thought.

This revisionist interpretation finds some evidence of incorporation of all the north, with the intermittent exception of the Basque territory, in the Visigothic system, involving a more complex social structure, greater (even if only partial) Christian identity and some degree of greater cultural sophistication. It concludes that there seem to have been three Visigothic duchies in the north — roughly Galicia, Asturias, and Cantabria — parts of which, at least, provided the structure for a successful struggle against the Muslims. One factor that all agree upon, of course, is the importance of geography, which made the northern mountains the most remote and difficult terrain for foreign conquerors to deal with. On the opposite side of the Islamic world, mountain ranges also turned back Arab conquerors. Six centuries later, the Spanish would face a similar problem in the opposite corner of the peninsula, where the conquest of Granada would constitute the longest, slowest, most costly phase of the Reconquest.

Thus the conundrum of the initiation of serious Christian resistance in the least Christanized part of the peninsula is scant problem for the revisionist interpretation, which finds somewhat more Christian structure there to begin with. Whatever Christian identity and practice already existed was quickly reinforced by the beginning of the first of a series of waves of emigration of Christians from the new Muslim-dominated Al-Andalus (which comprised the greater part of the peninsula), a process recognized by all historians, which would continue intermittently for four centuries, add considerable density to the northern population, and probably a good deal more to its religious identity and intensity. There is even limited evidence of the immigration of North African Christians, as well. All this makes it rather less surprising that within a generation the resistance nucleus organized itself into a monarchy, that it soon developed new contacts with other parts of western Europe, and that it also developed a firm spirit, at least among the elites, of orthodox Roman Catholic religious identity and practice, as this was understood in the eighth century.

What remains quite controversial is the precise role and weight of sectors of the old Visigothic elite and of Visigoths or semi-Visigoths in this process. The old "Germanic thesis" held by historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which posited an unusually heavy concentration of Visigoths in part of what would later be Old Castile prior to the Arab conquest, was seriously challenged during the early twentieth century.

A different approach has been taken by Armando Besga Marroquín, who does not argue for any especial prior presence of Visigoths in the north, but rather, as is tersely indicated in one of the chronicles, that a significant number soon moved to Asturias to form a resistance nucleus, giving the early kingdom a heavily Gothic character.
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We have no evidence of what Sánchez Albornoz called the ideology of "neogoticismo" — so fundamental for subsequent Spanish doctrine and the eventual Grand Narrative — before the ninth century, and no historian would maintain that Asturias represented direct continuity with the old Visigothic order. The kingdom of Asturias was a completely new creation, and the exact ethnic balance among its founders is something that can never be precisely determined. Nonetheless, the arguments of Besga Marroquín and others who emphasize direct Visigothic influences in political and religious affairs, as in culture, cannot be easily dismissed.