Spain: A Unique History

Chapter 1: Visigoths and Asturians: “Spaniards”?

1 Visigoths and Asturians “Spaniards”? 43 The Iberian Peninsula entered recorded history with the Roman conquest, after which it became an integral part of the empire. Language, culture, and economic structure all stemmed from Rome, as well as the name “Hispania,” a geographic term for the entire peninsula (which became a distinct “diocese” of the empire after the Diocletian reforms of the fourth century).1 Its society passed through each of the major phases and vicissitudes of the later Roman system, though some of the northern districts were less thoroughly Romanized than the south and east. Spain emerged as a kingdom, if not exactly a state, under the Visigoths in the sixth century, though the Visigothic monarchy was slow to establish general control over the entire peninsula—and even then somewhat uncertainly in part of the north. Later generations would look back to the Visigoths as the first leaders of an independent “Spain,” but in the twentieth century historians would challenge so simple and straightforward an interpretation. By that time the Visigothic kingdom was increasingly interpreted in negative terms of decline, disunity, and general weakness, an interpretative deconstruction that began historiographically well before the deconstruction of Spain in general became fashionable. During the late twentieth century the Anglo-American historian Peter Brown introduced the concept of “Late Antiquity” as a relatively distinct period of historical transition from the ancient world to the Middle Ages. This term has been increasingly accepted as a way to periodize history between the fourth and seventh centuries. Somewhat similarly, it became fashionable during the second half of the twentieth century to reject the classic understanding of the “fall of Rome,” replacing this with a new perspective that saw the Germanic kingdoms as evolutionary successor states, which formed a kind of functional symbiosis with the remains of the Roman world, not overthrowing it so much as reincorporating it in a new quasi-synthesis.2 There is no question that in most of the new kingdoms, Germanic rulers tried to cloak themselves in Roman authority and to maintain much of the existing structures, but there is also no doubt that a real break occurred during the fifth century.3 The break was most complete in Roman Britain, where the old civilization almost totally disappeared, but much less extensive in the peninsulas of Spain and Italy, where at first more of the old order survived. The “Grand Narrative” of Spanish history, as it took full form in the nineteenth century, defined a national identity and a kind of historical purpose and mission, the origins of which were purportedly laid by the Visigoths and developed more extensively by the kingdom of Asturias. Major aspects of this interpretation have varied, most notably between liberal nationalists and Catholic traditionalists during the nineteenth century, but for some time it constituted a meta-interpretation of the Spanish past. The Grand Narrative first began to be questioned in the mood of pessimism that gripped a part of the thinking of late nineteenth-century Spain, even before 1898. Thoroughly rehabilitated and restored by Franco, its last great avatar, it began to be yet more decisively rejected in the era of democratization and autonomies that followed the dictatorship. The political and ideological deconstruction of the Spanish nation that ensued provoked an intense debate that has only accelerated in recent years—the most intense ongoing debate in any Western country, equaled or exceeded only by that of Russia in the 1990s (the chief product of which in Russia has been the neo-authoritarian nationalism of Vladimir Putin). In the 1970s, critics held that the formation of historically continuous Spanish institutions in the kingdom of Asturias during the generation immediately following the Muslim conquest involved a major paradox. The most succinct statement of this position was made by Abilio Barbero and Marcelo Vigil in the small study they published in 1974, Sobre los orígenes sociales de la Reconquista. This appeared on the eve of the democratization of Spain, and for that particular theme represented a climax of the deconstructive trend of interpretation, which had begun in the late Visigoths and Asturians 44 nineteenth century. It posited a paradox, not to say contradiction, in the origins of the resistance nucleus of Asturias during the second quarter of the eighth century. The paradox was supposed to be twofold. On the one hand, independent Hispano-Christian society first arose in what was heretofore the least Romanized and...