Aristocrats and Statehood in Western Iberia, 300–600 C.E. by Damián Fernández (review)

"Caesar's sun fell out of the sky and whoso hearkened right could only hear the plunging of the nations in the night"—G. K. Chesterton. The collapse of the western Roman Empire and its effects are rightly one of the great focuses of debate in early medieval history. The volume under review looks at that process in one specific area—the north and west of the Iberian peninsula, here styled "Atlantic Iberia." Fernández presents his book as a diptych with its two halves dealing with the late Roman and the immediate post-Roman periods, respectively. These two halves are further each sub-divided into three sections dealing with urban morphology, the aristocracy of the day, and the economy. Every section is broadly equal in size and concludes with a general summary of its argument. This planning is designed to allow the reader to compare the same topics easily across both periods and succeeds admirably in its purpose. There is a good general introduction, but the overall conclusion is somewhat cursory and rather brusque. The style of writing is clear and for the most part devoid of jargon, though there are some oddities: "archaeological Christianity," for example, does not mean "archaeological remains of Christianity."

Fernández certainly detects changes across his chosen time-frame, but argues that these did not come about through a sudden trauma, preferring instead to see them occurring incrementally over time. He is also insistent that the aristocracy of the area were active players in the processes which took part in their locality rather than merely passive victims of distant events. While no form of evidence is neglected, the approach is mainly archaeological and many a reader, including this reviewer, will owe a debt of gratitude to Fernández for drawing to their attention the wealth of fascinating sites that this region offers for analysis. Fernández is cautious with his evidence and often bemoans, particularly in the post-Roman period, that there is not sufficient evidence from which to make firm generalizations. Such caution is to be welcomed and makes the positivistic arguments that there are all the more persuasive. Sometimes, however, a little more speculation would have been welcome to avoid an occasional sense of aporia.

Fernández sees the towns of late Roman Atlantic Iberia as definitely Roman, (though his attempts to detect a particular late Roman urban landscape are perhaps a little less successful and need more development) and part of a uniform imperial culture. He draws a picture of a region of urban sites, albeit fewer in number than those found elsewhere in the peninsula, enclosed by walls built in the period. A little more could have been made of the size of the areas that were enclosed by these walls, and the damage done by them to previous urban structures and why this was allowed. In the countryside large villas flourished. Those who dominated this landscape are what Fernández styles an "unprovincial aristocracy" which was entirely engaged with imperial rule and sought legitimation through such participation in it. Fernández argues well that this was true of all the aristocracy of the region and not merely senators of whom he assumes, probably correctly, that there were but few. The Roman and "unprovincial" nature of the region for Fernández extends to its economy where he sees the fundus as the basic unit of production. The state and large estates are seen as working in relative harmony rather than the former necessarily being the nemesis of the latter. Fernández concedes that the range of markets reached by these landowners was declining, but sees them pursuing essentially the same strategies as their predecessors though on a more local and regional as opposed to empire-wide scale.

For Fernández, the greatest change in the post-Roman period is one of fragmentation of this relatively uniform world...