Late Roman Spain and Its Cities

One: The Creation of Roman Spain

One The Creation of Roman Spain 1 ~ oman Spain was a world full of cities, shaped by its hundreds of urban territories. This was every bit as much the case in late antiquity as it had been during the high imperial period. Students of late antiquity tend to lump Spain together with Gaul or Britain, as part of the western provinces generally, but the depth and breadth of Spanish urbanism meant it had far more in common with Italy or North Africa.1 Spain was the Roman Republic’s first great imperial venture overseas. Thus the Roman influence lasted longer and ran much deeper in Spain than in other parts of the Latin West. At the heart of that impact lay the cities and the political geography they created. The emperor Augustus consciously shaped the Spanish provinces around urban territories. Most Spanish civitates were not, as in Gaul, old tribal territories under a new administrative mask; they were small administrative units whose urban centers, within seventy years of Augustus’s death, had gained privileged status under Roman law, as municipia. They were also the engine that drove the process by which Spain became Roman. For that reason, Spain’s urban geography survived the disappearance of the empire that had brought it into being. Between three hundred and four hundred cities dotted the Spanish landscape of the high empire. Apart from a few parts of the Gallaecian northwest, the Spanish provinces looked very similar to Italy after the Social War and the enfranchisement of Cisalpina. The unit that defined political, administrative, and social geography was the autonomous urban center and its dependent territory. Very few substantial centers of population lacked autonomy or were administered from some other city. The vast civitates of the Tres Galliae, within which several large towns might exist along with the administrative civitas-capital, simply did not exist in Spain, where the terms civitas and municipium were functionally interchangeable by the second century. It was, in consequence , the municipalities that knitted the peninsula together and that controlled it on behalf of the imperial government in which they participated . Most of these cities did not fall off the map in late antiquity, although they leave fewer traces in the historical record. Instead, they remained the essential units of control, not just for the imperial government and its various would-be successors, but also for local elites who maintained the Roman ideal of a political life based on the city until the days of the Córdoban caliphate. Roman Conquest and Romanization The Roman conquest of Spain took more than two hundred years, and by the time it was complete, Rome itself had undergone the profound change from republic to empire. The Roman Republic was drawn into the peninsula on account of its wars with Carthage, and so far as the Roman state and its leaders were concerned, Spain remained of purely military interest until the time of Augustus.2 The wars against Hannibal began in Spain, when in 218 B.C. Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio landed with an army at the Greek city of Emporion, modern Ampurias in Catalonia . Their peninsular phase lasted until 206, when the younger Publius Cornelius Scipio, later called Africanus after his victory over Hannibal at Zama, expelled the Carthaginians from Spain. Scipio’s victorious campaigns had driven deep into the Spanish interior, and in the valley of the Guadalquivir river, close to modern Seville, Scipio founded Italica as a settlement for his wounded veterans. Tarragona, a hundred miles down the coast from Ampurias and the Roman base after 217, would become one of Roman Spain’s greatest cities. The years of fighting had brought with them not just the legions, but also Late Roman Spain and Its Cities 2 the train of civilians—camp followers and supply contractors—that trailed all Roman armies. The Spanish campaigns had also led to numerous encounters with indigenous peoples who had entered the Punic war as allies of either Rome or Carthage. Obligations to both nascent Roman communities and different peninsular groups soon made it impossible for the Roman state to withdraw from Spain even had it wanted to. There is no reason to think that it did, given the competitive nature of Roman imperialism.3 Roman politicians needed military successes abroad to enhance their status at home; Spain, with its numberless tribal units, proved an ideal environment for generals seeking glory. Moreover, the...