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Twelve: The New World of the Sixth Century
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Twelve The New World of the Sixth Century 287 † he social and physical landscape of the Spain that Leovigild drew together under his rule is obscure, much more so than that of earlier periods. The literary evidence, almost entirely ecclesiastical, allows certain inferences about the life of a few specific places, chiefly Mérida and the parts of rural Cantabria in which the monk Aemilianus was active. Yet this is undoubtedly the period in which the medieval map of Spain was being drawn. In place of the several hundred civitates of the imperial period, we find a new and simpler ecclesiastical geography. The Nomina hispanarum sedium, which probably has a seventh-century base text, shows us about eighty episcopal civitates, roughly the same number attested in the conciliar records of the seventh century.1 The seventh century, in other words had very nearly arrived at the world of the twelfth-century Liber censuum, with its sixty-seven Spanish cities. This is a far cry from the Spain of the Antonine Itinerary, which lists more than a hundred civitates even while leaving out at least a third of the peninsula’s land mass.2 It is beyond our power to recover when this drastic simplification of the Spanish administrative map took place.3 In the middle of the fifth century, Spain was still working within the recognizable, and very small, limits of the imperial civitates .4 By the seventh century, the landscape resembled that of con- temporary—or indeed also imperial—Gaul, while the bronze municipal laws of defunct cities made their way into the shops of metal workers to be melted down.5 How that transformation took place we cannot say. Archaeology, for its part, is not a great deal more enlightening for the course of the Spanish sixth century. The archaeology of the sixth through eighth centuries is relatively immature and until recently attracted no interest beyond documenting a Visigothic and Byzantine presence in the peninsula. This perspective has begun to change, but problems intrinsic to sixth-century material evidence make it resistant to interpretation. For one thing, traditional means of establishing site chronology cease to be feasible: the typology of African terra sigillata grows vaguer from the middle of the fifth century and becomes useless after the middle of the sixth century, when African imports to Spain decline to statistical insignificance.6 The only coins found with any regularity are bronzes of Theodosius and his sons, the last to reach the peninsula in quantity and therefore in circulation for a very long time. Typologies of church plans and the items of personal adornment sometimes found in graves are no substitute. Worse, there is a near total absence of monumental building in the manner of earlier centuries, including even the earlier part of the fifth. Rubble or wooden structures of indeterminate, squarish shape are much harder to interpret than are well-understood types of the late imperial era. As the tradition of monumental construction fades and ceramic imports from Africa shrink to a nullity, we lose the yardsticks by which we have traditionally measured economic and social prosperity. Sixthcentury Spain looks impoverished by the standards of earlier centuries , and it is very difficult for us to characterize these changes as anything other than an absolute decline. The hints and whispers of the material evidence suggest that the last remnants of classical urbanism disappeared from the Spanish landscape by the end of the sixth century . The cities no longer looked much like they had in the early fifth century and before, while the social behaviors that had taken the Roman cityscape as their background had more or less ceased in favor of church-centered activity. No great crisis is necessary to explain these changes, and the countryside seems to have changed rather less than the cities.7 Nevertheless, if the sixth century witnesses quite definiLate Roman Spain and Its Cities 288 [54.225.1.66] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 02:30 GMT) tively the end of classical urbanism in Spain, that by no means implies the disappearance of a new sort of city life—what we may call early medieval urbanism—which kept the city, its demographic concentrations and its ability to organize the territory around it, as the dynamic motor of Spanish life. The Life of the Cities We can only make sense of sixth-century political history in terms of the cities over which Frankish kings, Gothic nobles, and Byzantine generals fought...