Hispania

• 1. Introduction

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  Hispania was the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula, a stretch of land so far west that Roman writers sometimes called it Hesperia ultima, meaning the farthest western land. Rome first sent armies there in 218 BC, and what followed was not a quick conquest. It took until 19 BC, more than two centuries later, for the emperor Augustus to finish the job. In between, the peninsula served as a training ground for Roman officers, a proving ground for tactics, and an arena of relentless conflict against the Iberians, the Lusitanians, the Gallaecians, and various Celtic peoples. Yet Hispania was never simply a victim of Roman ambition. It gave the empire three of its emperors. It supplied gold, silver, wheat, olive oil, wine, and fish sauce to the entire Roman world. And its name, transformed through Vulgar Latin, became the root of Spain itself. The questions worth following are these: how did this peninsula become Roman, what did it give Rome in return, and how did the whole structure eventually collapse into something entirely new?

• 2. A Name Without Certainty

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  The Phoenicians were among the earliest outsiders to name the Iberian Peninsula, calling it something that may have meant land of rabbits or hyraxes, land of metals, northern island, or lowland. Roman coins struck under the emperor Hadrian show a female figure with a rabbit at her feet, a detail that the geographer Strabo echoed when he called the peninsula the land of the rabbits. No single interpretation has ever won out. The Greek scholar Ptolemy mapped it; the Roman historian Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, writing in the 1st century BC, attributed the name to an eponymous hero named Hispan. The bishop Isidore of Seville believed the name descended from the pre-Roman name for Seville, Hispalis, while the etymologist Eric Partridge, working centuries later, suggested this hinted at an ancient root, perhaps Iberian or Celtic, whose meaning is now lost. Jesuit scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries such as Larramendi and José Francisco de Isla linked the name to the Basque word ezpain, meaning lip, but also border or edge. What is remarkable about all of these theories is that none of them holds. The evidence in every case rests on resemblances that, as scholars have noted, are likely to be accidental. The origin of Hispania remains, after all this inquiry, unknown. What is clear is that the word survived. Alfonso X of Castile, known as El Sabio or the Wise, commissioned a history between 1260 and 1274 that used España and Españoles to describe the people and place; this work, the Estoria de España, is believed to be the first extended history of Spain written in Old Castilian.

• 3. What Rome Made of the Land

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  Before the Romans arrived, the Iberian Peninsula held untapped mineral and agricultural wealth. Its native peoples outside a few Mediterranean trading ports lived in primitive subsistence economies. Carthaginian occupation and then Roman rule changed that. Hispania became a granary for the empire and a major source of metals. Its harbors exported gold, tin, silver, lead, wool, wheat, olive oil, wine, fish, and garum, a fermented fish sauce prized across the Roman world. Gold mining was the most important industry in the northwest, and its traces survive in archaeological sites such as Las Médulas in Spain and Casais in Ponte de Lima, Portugal. Roman administration was not a single fixed arrangement. After 197 BC the peninsula was divided into two provinces, each run by a praetor: Hispania Citerior, meaning Hither Hispania, and Hispania Ulterior, meaning Farther Hispania. In 27 BC the general Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa reorganized these into three parts, and the emperor Augustus refined that division the same year. The province of Baetica was centered on Corduba, now Córdoba. Lusitania had its capital at Emerita Augusta, now Mérida. Tarraconensis, the largest, was administered from Tarraco, now Tarragona. Rome also improved cities across the peninsula. Lisbon, known as Olissipo, and Tarragona, known as Tarraco, were upgraded. Zaragoza, Mérida, and Valencia were founded or established as Roman centers. By the end of the 1st century, the Romanized Iberian population and the Iberian-born descendants of Roman soldiers and colonists had all achieved full Roman citizenship. Caesar noted that the soldiers of his Second Legion had become so thoroughly absorbed into the local population that they regarded themselves as hispanici.

• 4. Emperors Born in the West

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  Three Roman emperors were born in Hispania: Trajan, who reigned from 98 to 117; Hadrian, who reigned from 117 to 138; and Theodosius, who reigned from 379 to 395. The Gallic rhetorician Latinius Pacatus Drepanius, writing in the 4th century, addressed Hispania directly in a panegyric delivered to Theodosius and read before the Senate in 389. He described the peninsula as a producer of tough soldiers, skilled captains, prolific speakers, luminous bards, judges, and princes, and he named Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius as gifts the province had given to the empire. Christianity reached Hispania in the 1st century and spread in the cities through the 2nd century, though it made little headway in rural areas until the late 4th century, by which time it had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Heretical movements did emerge; the most notable was Priscillianism. Bishops retained strong authority and, when civil governments collapsed in the 5th century, those bishops were the officials who worked to maintain order. The Council of Bishops became a key institution of stability as Roman power began to loosen.

• 5. The Germanic Unraveling

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  Four tribes crossed the Rhine in 406, and from that movement the collapse of Roman Hispania began. After three years of destruction across northern and western Gaul, the Germanic Buri, Suevi, and Vandals, along with the Sarmatian Alans, entered Iberia in September or October 409 at the invitation of Gerontius, a Roman usurper. The Suevi settled in Gallaecia, the area now corresponding to modern Galicia and northern Portugal. The Alans took Lusitania, the territory now corresponding to the Alentejo and Algarve regions of Portugal. The Silingi Vandals briefly held parts of the south in the province of Baetica. The Western Roman emperor Honorius, who reigned from 395 to 423, struck a deal with the Visigoths: clear out the invaders and receive a home in southwest Gaul. The Visigoths destroyed the Silingi and Alans almost entirely. But the promised clean sweep of Iberia never arrived. Roman attempts to recover control continued through the 5th century, with General Castorius failing to dislodge the Vandals from Cordoba in 422. The Vandals and Alans crossed to North Africa in 429, and their departure allowed Rome to recover roughly 90 percent of the Iberian Peninsula for a period. That recovery did not hold. After the death of the emperor Majorian in 461, Roman authority collapsed except in Tarraconensis, the northeastern corner. The Visigoths occupied Tarragona in 472, an act that marked the effective end of Western Roman rule in the peninsula. The last vestiges of Roman governance there ended in 472.

• 6. The Visigothic Inheritance

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  The Visigoths who took Hispania were a Germanic people whose kingdom had been based in southwest Gaul. In 484 they established Toledo as their capital. Successive Visigothic kings governed as patricians holding imperial commissions, ruling nominally in the name of the Roman emperor. In 585 they conquered the Suebic Kingdom of Galicia and brought nearly all of Hispania under a single authority. The bishop Isidore of Seville wrote in his Historia Gothorum that it was under Visigothic rule that the concept of peninsular unity was first articulated, and the phrase Mother Hispania first spoken. He identified Suinthila as the first Visigothic monarch under whose reign Hispania was treated as a Gothic nation. But unity was always fragile. Civil war, royal assassinations, and usurpation were commonplace. Bloody family feuds went unchecked. The Visigoths had learned the machinery of the Roman state but not the ability to run it to their advantage. The absence of a fixed hereditary rule of succession meant that rival factions repeatedly invited foreign powers into internal disputes, drawing in the Greeks, the Franks, and eventually the Muslims. The most persistent internal tension was religious. The native Hispano-Romans followed Chalcedonian Christianity; their Visigothic rulers were Arians, whom the Hispano-Romans considered heretical. In 589, the Visigothic ruler Recared renounced Arianism before the Council of Bishops at Toledo and accepted the Catholic faith. That act fused the Visigothic monarchy and the native population in a new alliance. The earliest known representation of Christ in Spanish religious art was found in a Visigothic hermitage called Santa Maria de Lara. Throughout all of this, Latin continued as the language of government and commerce, and native Hispano-Romans continued to run the civil administration on behalf of their Visigothic overlords. The Byzantine emperor Justinian I, taking advantage of a succession struggle between the Visigothic kings Agila and Athanagild, sent an army under Liberius that briefly reclaimed a narrow coastal strip along the Mediterranean, roughly corresponding to the old province of Baetica, calling it Spania. It did not last long.

• 7. Climate and the Long Arc

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  Precipitation in Roman Hispania was unusually high during what researchers call the Iberian-Roman Humid Period. That period had three phases: the most humid interval ran from 550 to 190 BC; an arid interval followed from 190 BC to 150 AD; and another humid period ran from 150 to 350 AD. The climate shaped campaigns. In 134 BC the army of Scipio Aemilianus in Spain was forced to march at night because the heat was so extreme that horses and mules died of thirst. Earlier, in 181 BC, heavy spring rains had prevented the Celtiberians from breaking a Roman siege of Contrebia. Through the 2nd century AD, warm temperatures dominated especially along the northern mountain coast, punctuated by cooler spells roughly between 155 and 180. After around 200 AD temperatures became more variable, trending toward cool. These climatic shifts ran beneath the surface of every military and administrative decision taken on the peninsula, influencing harvests, movements, and the pace of Romanization. The word Hispania itself left a more durable mark than any of the empires that used it: it is the Latin root from which the modern names Spain and Hispaniola both descend.