Late Roman Spain and Its Cities

Seven: Imperial Crisis and Recovery

Seven Imperial Crisis and Recovery 151§ e can begin to study the historical narrative of Roman Spain only as the superstructure of imperial government begins to break down in the peninsula. During the four peaceful centuries that followed Augustus’s organization of the Spanish provinces, only a handful of events are known to us. But beginning in the years of civil war at the start of the fifth century, Spain’s history becomes traceable in some detail . It is a history of the process by which the Spanish provinces, and the Hispano-Roman elites who lived in the Spanish cities, ceased to be part of a larger state governed by a Roman emperor. Between 406 and 418, Spain played an important role in the general imperial crisis of the early fifth century, first as part of the territory of the usurper Constantine III, later as the base of the general Gerontius and his imperial puppet Maximus. Then, after 409, the Vandals, Alans, and Sueves who had crossed the Rhine into Gaul in 405/406 invaded Spain and eventually settled in four of its five provinces. As a result of these developments, contemporaries outside Spain began to take an interest in the peninsula, thus placing it before the historian’s eyes for the first time since the Roman conquest. Between the resolution of the crisis in 418 and the death of Majorian in 461 lie forty years in which the Spanish provinces remained generally subject to imperial government and continued to form part of the political calculus of the western empire. The death of Majorian, however, was also the end of Roman Spain. The grounds for such a statement are straightforward and purely political. Indeed, political criteria are the only suitable yardstick for this sort of problem, for cultural change, whether material or intellectual , is both slow and impossible to quantify. After all, the Spanish intellectual world remained recognizably Roman until at least the seventh century, while change in the material culture of Roman Spain was both gradual and does not correspond to the political history of the peninsula in any helpful way. Political criteria, by contrast, are more useful, for the Roman empire had always been a political as much as a cultural phenomenon, and in the later empire, as we have seen, its political existence came to be coterminous with its administrative existence . Where imperial bureaucrats held office, the empire existed. Where they did not, it did not. Until the reign of Majorian, it was possible both for men to hold imperial office in Spain and for Spaniards to hold office elsewhere in the empire. After Majorian, both possibilities disappeared. When it was no longer possible to hold imperial of- fice in Spain, Spain’s existence as part of the Roman empire had come to an end. This approach is validated by the fact that such fifth-century Romans as Sidonius Apollinaris used it themselves. Sidonius thought that Roman Gaul ended when the emperor ceded Provence to the Goths in 475.1 Without the superstructure of office-holding and rank that went along with imperial authority, Roman Gaul ceased to be. We can readily apply Sidonius’s analysis to Spain, though the peninsula lacked a Sidonius to articulate such a view on its own account. The same approach also helps make sense of the political dynamics of late Roman Spain at the same time as it points up the contrast between a late Roman and post-Roman period. It is, from one perspective, perfectly possible to argue that long before the reign of Majorian, Spain as a whole had been lost to any genuine imperial control, and that the peninsula into which Majorian briefly marched was no more than a Gothic hinterland , largely outside the control of everyone. But to say this ignores the fact that emperors up to Majorian clearly envisaged Spain as part of the empire they ruled, and determined, as time and circumstance Late Roman Spain and Its Cities 152 allowed, to make their power felt. The vicissitudes of politics at ground level may have meant a fairly minimal level of imperial control, but that was a factor endemic to the fifth-century West. However intermittent , the continued participation of imperial officials and the government they represented in the political life of Spain did make a crucial difference. After the death of Majorian, imperial office-holding became impossible in a Spanish diocese to...