Wednesday 3 March 2021

Visigothic Spain and Continuation of Antiquity

                                        Visigothic chapel, Capela de São Fructuoso, modesto.

Postcolonial attitudes among historians and residues of the Orientalism fad from the Enlightenment period continue to colour the dominant view of the post-Roman Visigothic Kingdom of Spain. Indeed, the Anglosphere has tended to base the view of the Migratory Period upon it's own Saxon experience. There was a clear break in Britannia between Antiquity and the succeeding proto-feudal period. The fact that England speaks a Germanic language today is indicative that Romano-Celtic culture was subject to some attack by marauding tribes. But even back in 1939, when the Sutton Hoo hoard was discovered, perceptions among archaeologists were tempered. Trade centres on the southern coast may have kept many aspects of the Classical civilisation that had preceded the Saxon period. 

The Visigoths certainly deserve no accusations of barbarism. It is true that Alaric sacked Rome and a declined Late Imperial Athens, but even by this time, the Visigoths were a semi-romanised people who were adopting Latin customs and language as foederati. Clichéd condemnations of  Visigothic rule has continued with works such as Thomas Glick's Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages or the absolutely ridiculous work of Emilin Gonzalez Ferrin, Historia general de Al-Andalus, which posits a "peaceful migration of Arabs and Berbers" into Visigothic Hispania. And such theses still find popularity despite their refutation by Charles-Emanuel Dufourcq. It is beyond clear that the popularity of such narratives is part of the post-colonial fascination with non-Eurocentric history that is best exemplified by Edward Said's works on the history of the Arabs. 

The Islamic period in Spain's lack of culture in it's first two centuries is shadowed by the century of rule of the Umayyad Caliphs of Cordoba. The Umayyad family's power had been limited to Cordoba for 2 centuries prior until Abdal Rahman III's reclamation of his ancestral title as Caliph in opposition to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. The great cultural achievements of the Umayyad period in Cordoba and Seville would have been nothing without the influence of the Greeks from the Byzantine Empire. Abdal Rahman III's slaves were instructed in Greek by an Orthodox priest sent by the Emperor in Constantinople on the Caliph's request. On the matter of Aristotelianism which ultimately defined the philosophical trajectory of the West, once again the West was more reliant on the Greeks in Constantinople. Thomas Aquinas read the Latin translations of William of Moerbek commissioned in Corinth. Ibn Rushd(Averroes) read translations of Aristotle from Syriac into Arabic done by Nestorian Christians in Baghdad and Samarra. [i]

Prior to the Islamic conquest, the capital of Toledo had been renovated by the Visigoths from it's old castrum structure on the model of Constantinople. Al-Kortobi, the chronicler of the conquest mentions that Tariq Ibn Ziyad found immense booty in Toledo. "One hundred and twenty copies of the Torah, the Gospels, the Psalms and the book of Moses" alongside precisley "twenty-five royal diadems". And there was yet more, "books treating of the manner of using plants, minerals, and animals, advantageous for man, besides many wonderful talismans, the work of ancient philosophers, and another work on the great art, and its roots and elixirs; all these precious objects, together with an immense quantity of rubies and other coloured gems, stored in golden and silver urns of beautiful workmanship, and ornamented with large pearls, were the fruits of Tariq’s conquest". Later traditionist Ibn Bashkuwal noted that the reason that the Umayyads chose their residence in Cordoba at the former royal palatium of the Visigoths was because of the  “wonderful remains of the Greeks, Romans, and Goths” ; “the interior apartments were so magnificently decorated as to dazzle with the beauty of their ornaments the eyes of beholders.”[ii]

Even the capital of a lesser developed province, Emerita Augusta (Merida) in Lusitania was a bustling and prosperous city during Visigothic times. Roger Collins has noted that a written contemporary source, the Vitas Patrum Emeritensium(Lives of the Meridan Fathers) shows the provincial capital to “enjoying a period of some prosperity in the sixth century”. Education of the Trivium of classical liberal education continued by record of the Bishops in the major cities. St.Leander, a master in Latin convinced the learned Kings Hermengild and Reccared to convert to Chalcedonian Christianity from Arianism. St.Isidore of Seville, aside from theological works, also wrote historical compendia such as the Etmylogiae, a mathematical treatise called De Arithmetica and a musical treatise called De Musica. Conantius of Palencia was integral to the development of music for the Mozarabic rite unique to Toledo, a descendant of the Visigothic rite used prior to the Islamic conquest[iii]. The suspicion of Islamic tolerance in Hispania stems from the adoption of the Maliki school of jurisprudence. Predominant in North Africa today, it is notable for it's rigour and iconoclasm. Even the famous "Moorish" horseshoe arches were developed from the Romano-Visigothic churches built earlier in the 6th and 7th centuries. [iv]

The Visigoths, owing to their small numbers(1-2%) of the population of Hispania also assimilated fully into the general population. The Codex Revisus of Leovigild abolished the separation of laws for the Gothic and Roman population and allowed intermarriage. Administrative structures were identical to the days of the Roman administration, with cities ruled by comes, assisted by assessores who formed a curia answerable to the Kings in Toledo. Even before the landmark Lex, the Breviary of Alaric in 507 demonstrates  that juridicial literature was entirely Roman in the 6th century[v]. Theodoric II, who had served under Aetius at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, was noted for his culture and kept a Roman prime minister, Leo of Narbonne and hosted Lampridius, a poet and master of rhetoric at his court when it was centred in Toulouse. We also have records that state that the cities of the Levante coastline, Carthaginensis(Cartagena) and Valentia(Valencia) were home to a silk-making industry and a sizeable population of Syrians, evidence of lively economic activity with the Eastern Roman Empire[vi]. The Visigoths also built cities, an uncommon occurrence in Western Europe since the 3rd century. The ruins of Reccopolis are not alone, a city called Victoriacum was also built along with Oligius(modern Olite) and Luceo(Lugo). [vii]

Medieval annalists do report a great famine during the reign of Erwig in the 680's, less than three decades before the invasion by Tariq. It is very possible that Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz's idea of protofeudalism in Hispania could have been caused by legislation implemented by Erwig in response to massive depopulation. The claim of the annalists was that nearly half the population of the Kingdom died as a result. We are now more and more sure that the aristocratic system of the Visigoths, which had meant that the Kingdom was an elective monarchy since the extinction of the Balti royal line in 531, had meant that there were three rival kings around the invasion. We have some evidence of a rivalry between Achila II and Roderic. A possible third rival named Oppas may have also been a pretender. The break between the conquests of Andalusia and the Ebro Valley may explain that the regions were ruled by two different rulers. Roderic's distrust of Jews has also led historian Bernard Bachrach to posit a triple alliance between the figure of Achila, the Jews and the Berber invaders to topple Roderic[viii]

Contemporary Muslim chroniclers gleefully write of the buildings of mosques with materials from demolished churches, reminiscent of the destruction wrought by the Mamelukes in Delhi that culminated in the building of the complex of Qutbuddin Aibak. The mosque and in the complex may have been built from the stone quarried from 27 Hindu and Jain temples. Not to forget the havoc wreaked by Bakthiyar Ghilzai in Bihar and Bengal that led to the near-erasure of the philosophico-religious system from it's cultural heartland. Patterns emerge. 

 

Perhaps the old myths should die and we will stop disparaging our forebears. 



[i]  Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th centuries) (London: Routledge, 1998)


[ii] Al-Makkari in The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain by Ahmed Ibn Mohammed al-Makkari, trans. Pascual de Gayangos (1840; rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1964), vol. 1, Appendix D, xlv.


[iii] Dag Norberg, Manuel pratique de latin médiéval (Paris: Picard, 1968), trans. online by R. H. Johnson, at http://homepages.wmich.edu/~johnsorh/MedievalLatin/Norberg/spain.html

 

[iv] “E. A. Thompson, “The Barbarian Kingdoms in Gaul and Spain,” Nottingham Mediaeval Studies, 7 (1963), pp. 4n,

 

[v] Catlos, Brian A. Kingdoms of faith : a new history of Islamic Spain (First ed.). New York, N.Y pg.91

 

[vi] “Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne (English ed., London, 1938), p. 31”

 

[vii] E.A. Thompson, as above pg.11

 

[viii] Bernard S. Bachrach; A Reassessment of Visigothic Jewish Policy, 589–711, The American Historical Review, Volume 78, Issue 1, 1 February 1973

 




No comments:

Post a Comment

The complex nature of Peace

(L) A young D'Ors on the Left in 1938, fighting in the Tercio de Requetes Burgos in the Spanish Civil War  (R) D'Ors with mentor and...