Gallaecia

• 1. Introduction

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  Gallaecia enters written history through a few lines of Latin verse in the Punica, a first-century epic by the poet Silius Italicus. The poem describes "Rich Callaecia" sending its young men to fight alongside the Carthaginians. They are skilled in divination, reading the entrails of beasts, the movement of feathers and the shapes of flames. They shout barbarian songs in their native tongue. They stamp the ground in rhythmic dances until it rings. They keep time on the caetra, a small shield used in the region. It is a strange portrait of warriors who double as diviners and dancers. Who were these people, and why did Rome care so much about their corner of the Iberian Peninsula? How did a land of hillforts become a province with governors and cities? And what became of the name once Roman power broke apart?

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• 2. Hillforts and Gold

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  Rome named the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula Callaecia after the Celtic tribes who lived there, the Callaeci, also called Callaecians. Two things drew Roman attention. One was the castros, the system of hillforts that defined the Callaeci's way of life. The other was the lure of the region's gold mines. This culture stretched across present-day Galicia, the north of Portugal, the western part of Asturias, the Bierzo and Sanabria. The classical authors Pomponius Mela and Pliny the Elder both treated it as distinct from the Lusitanian culture to the south. The Greek geographer Strabo listed the Callaicans last among the peoples of the Atlantic coast, after the Vettonians and Vaccaeans. He said they held a very considerable part of the mountainous country and were very hard to fight. Their name carried so much weight, in his telling, that most Lusitanians were by then called Callaicans as well. Strabo also noted that the Durius River, today the Douro, runs through Vaccaean land and can be crossed at the city of Acutia. That river would host the first great clash between the Callaeci and Rome.

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• 3. Conquest by Rome

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  In 137 BC, according to Paulus Orosius, a Callaecian army of 60,000 met Roman forces in a battle on the river Douro. Rome won decisively. The proconsul Decimus Junius Brutus returned home a hero and took the agnomen Callaicus, meaning conqueror of the Callaicoi. These were a Callaecian tribe living in the southernmost part of the region, near the mouth of the Douro. His campaign followed the Atlantic coast as far as the river Limia but went no further than the Miño. It was largely a punitive expedition, launched in the aftermath of the Lusitanian wars. Publius Licinius Crassus pushed into southern Callaecia again in a campaign that ran from 96 to 94 BC. The capital of the Callaici, Portus Cale, was only definitively occupied in 74 BC by Marcus Perpena. In 61 BC, during Julius Caesar's consulship, Rome made its first incursion into northern Callaecia. It was largely a naval campaign along the whole northern coast of Hispania, and it defeated the Callaeci in a battle near Brigantium. The final conquest came during the Cantabrian Wars, fought under the Emperor Augustus from 26 to 19 BC. The resistance was appalling. Some chose collective suicide over surrender. Some mothers killed their children before taking their own lives. Crucified prisoners of war sang triumphant hymns. Captives rose against their guards and made their way home from Gaul. Roman inscriptions and Pliny would later show how carefully the empire kept Callaecia apart from its neighbors.

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• 4. Roman Order

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  Roman inscriptions repeatedly pair two names: Asturia and Callaecia. A legatus iuridici and a procurator are recorded for the two together, and a military cohort was raised from the Astures and the Callaeci. Pliny joins the names in the same way. Yet in Roman administrative terms Callaecia itself was a region formed only by two districts, the conventus Lucensis and the conventus Bracarensis. The zone around Asturica was clearly treated as something else. Each district took its character from a governing center. Lucus Augusti, modern Lugo, administered the Conventus Lucensis. Bracara Augusta, modern Braga, administered the Conventus Bracarensis. Asturica Augusta, modern Astorga, administered the Conventus Asturicensis. Auria, now Ourense, and the port of Cale, now Porto, rounded out the list of Roman cities. In the 3rd century AD, Diocletian created a larger division that gathered the conventus of Callaecia and Asturica, and possibly Cluniense. The new province took the name Callaecia, because that zone was the most populous and important within it. Among its governors, the record preserves one name: Aconius Catullinus Philomatius, who held the title praeses before 338.

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• 5. Suebi and Visigoths

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  On the night of the 31st of December 406 AD, the Vandals, Alans and Suebi swept across the Roman frontier on the Rhine. They pillaged Gaul, then crossed the Pyrenees. Together they began dividing up the Roman provinces of Carthaginiensis, Tarraconensis, Gallaecia and Baetica. The Suebi took part of Gallaecia and later established a kingdom there. In 409, as Roman control collapsed, Suebi conquests turned the Roman convents of Lucense and Bracarense into the Kingdom of Galicia. Hydatius and Gregory of Tours both recorded it as the Galliciense Regnum. When the Vandals and Alans left for North Africa, the Suebi gained control of much of the Iberian Peninsula. Visigothic campaigns then took much of that territory back. The Visigoths won the wars that followed and eventually annexed Gallaecia. By this period the spelling in surviving sources was shifting, as Callaecia evolved into Gallaecia and Gallicia.

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• 6. Refuge in the Mountains

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  Beatus of Liébana, who died in 798, used the name Gallaecia for the Christian part of the Iberian Peninsula. He reserved the name Hispania for the Muslim part. The Visigothic defeat and the Moorish annexation of much of Hispania had left a group of Visigothic states surviving in the northern mountains, Gallaecia among them. The emirs preferred to consolidate the land they had conquered. They never pushed into these highly defended mountains, which had taken the Romans generations to bring under control as well. Gallaecia's reach extended to the court of Charlemagne. Bishops of Gallaecia attended the Council of Frankfurt in 794. According to the Frankish chronicles, Charlemagne received embassies from Alfonso II of Gallaecia during his residence in Aachen. Even in 1029, Sancho III of Navarre called Bermudo III of León "Imperator domus Vermudus in Gallaecia", still tying the ruler of León to the old name.

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