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Ten: The Impact of Christianity in the Fifth Century
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Ten The Impact of Christianity in the Fifth Century 215 ˙ erhaps the most revelatory consequence of treating the archaeological record as an autonomous source of evidence comes in our understanding of Spanish Christianity. If we take the literary evidence as normative, Spain appears to have been dominated by Christianity and its controversies from the very start of the fourth century. The tiny corpus of HispanoRoman authors demands that inference and scholars have long accepted it. Taken on its own terms, however, the archaeological record suggests a very different story: the world of the fourth-century Spanish city was essentially that of the early empire, physically and socially. The church, its authority, and its social functions remained on the physical margins of the town. This physical marginality continued even as the role of the Christian hierarchy, particularly the role of the bishop within the urban community, grew in importance. Change came only in the middle or later fifth century, with the result that the old high imperial landscape disappeared forever. The disappearance of imperial government and the presence of a new barbarian population may well have hastened such changes. But the physical Christianization of the landscape was the strongest catalyst for social change in Spain since the first trauma of Roman conquest . During the fifth century, Christianity dissolved the old urban environment and the old patterns of Hispano-Roman social behavior embedded in it. Christianity began as an extramural cult, patronized by urban Christians, but not within a town’s walls. Over time, Christian belief and the need to participate in Christian rituals drew a larger section of each town’s citizens to spend a larger portion of their lives outside the city walls. Eventually, this had a corrosive effect on the old townscape as its central monuments became less and less socially meaningful. As the classical townscape ceased to have social significance , it became disused or was reused, until finally it was appropriated by the church. Spanish towns were monumentalized again, but this time on a Christian pattern. The heart of the city returned to where it had been during the years of romanization, but where the old civic forum had lain there was now the city’s main church instead. Christian Origins Pious hope places the origin of Spanish Christianity in apostolic times, but the earliest genuine evidence is literary and comes from the third century, when a letter of Cyprian testifies to the existence of several Spanish episcopal sees.1 In a letter of 254, Cyprian, with thirty-six other bishops gathered in synod, addressed the schism that had emerged among Spanish bishops.2 This had been triggered by the Decian persecution, which brought out in Spain the same sort of passions and controversies that persecution engendered in Christian communities everywhere. The basic problem was simple: how rigorous should the church be with those who had compromised their Christian beliefs in time of persecution? In Spain, the question centered on the treatment of the bishops Martialis and Basilides, one the bishop of Mérida, the other of León and Astorga, though it is impossible to know which bishop belonged to which see.3 Having compromised with imperial officials during the persecution, they were deposed by their communities, which then elected new bishops, one Sabinus replacing Basilides and one Felix probably replacing Martialis.4 When the deposed bishops, having made their case to the new Roman bishop Stephen, attempted to reassert their episcopal powers over their flocks, the newly elected bishops appealed—perhaps in person—to an African synod headed by Cyprian.5 Another Felix, this one a ChrisLate Roman Spain and Its Cities 216 [34.228.7.237] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:09 GMT) tian layman of Zaragoza, also wrote to the synod to defend the new bishops and corroborate the evidence of Martialis’s and Basilides’s apostasy. Addressing the congregations of the cities in question, Cyprian and his colleagues upheld the strictness of canonical teaching on this point and agreed that bishops who had lapsed into apostasy must indeed be treated as having become laymen, though we do not actually know what became of the Spanish clergymen named in Cyprian’s letter. In fact, the glimpse of Spanish affairs that the letter offers raises rather more questions than it can answer. While it tells us that certain congregations of Spanish Christians had regular relations with both Rome and Carthage, we know nothing about their size. Despite the tendency to treat the...