Product Code Database
Hispania(; ) was the Ancient Rome name for the Iberian Peninsula. Under the Roman Republic, Hispania was divided into two Roman province: Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior. During the Principate, Hispania Ulterior was divided into two new provinces, Baetica and Lusitania, while Hispania Citerior was renamed Hispania Tarraconensis. Subsequently, the western part of Tarraconensis was split off, initially as Hispania Nova, which was later renamed "Callaecia" (or Gallaecia, whence modern Galicia).
From Diocletian's Tetrarchy (AD 293) onwards, the south of the remainder of Tarraconensis was again split off as Carthaginensis, and all of the mainland Hispanic provinces, along with the Balearic Islands and the North African province of Mauretania Tingitana, were later grouped into a Roman diocese headed by a vicarius. The name Hispania was also used in the period of Visigothic rule. The modern place names of Spain and Hispaniola are both derived from Hispania.
Some Roman coins of the Emperor Hadrian, born in Hispania, depict Hispania and a rabbit. Others derive the word from span, meaning 'hidden', and make it indicate "a hidden", that is, "a remote", or "far-distant land".Conrad Malte-Brun, Précis de la géographie universelle, vol. 4 (Paris: Buisson, 1810–29), 318.
Other theories have been proposed. Isidore of Sevilla considered Hispania of Iberian language origin and derived it from the pre-Roman name for Seville, Hispalis. This was revived for instance by the etymologist Eric Partridge (in his work Origins) who felt that this might strongly hint at an ancient name for the country of *Hispa, presumably an Iberian language or Celtic languages root whose meaning is now lost. Hispalis may alternatively derive from Heliopolis (Greek for 'city of the sun'). However, according to modern research by Manuel Pellicer Catalán, the name derives from Phoenician spal 'lowland'. Occasionally Hispania was called Hesperia ultima 'farthest western land' by Roman writers since the name Hesperia 'western land' had already been used by the Greeks to refer to the Italian peninsula.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, Jesuits scholars like Larramendi and José Francisco de Isla tied the name to the Basque language word ezpain 'lip', but also 'border, edge', thus meaning the farthest area or place.Charles Anthon, A System of Ancient and Mediæval Geography for the Use of Schools and Colleges (New York, 1849), 14.
During Antiquity and Middle Ages, the literary texts derive the term Hispania from an eponymous hero named Hispan, who is mentioned for the first time in the work of the Roman historian Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, in the 1st century BC.
Although Hispania is the Latin root for the modern name Spain, the words Spanish for Hispanicus or Hispanic, or Spain for Hispania, are not easily interchangeable, depending on context. The Estoria de España ('The History of Spain') written on the initiative of Alfonso X of Castile El Sabio ('the Wise'), between 1260 and 1274, during the Reconquista ('reconquest') of Spain, is believed to be the first extended history of Spain in Old Spanish using the words España ('Spain') and Españoles ('Spaniards') to refer to Medieval Hispania. The use of Latin Hispania, Castilian España, Catalan language Espanya and Old French Espaigne, among others, to refer to Roman Hispania or Visigothic Hispania was common throughout all the Late Middle Ages.
A document dated 1292 mentions the names of foreigners from Medieval Spain as Gracien d'Espaigne. Latin expressions using Hispania or Hispaniae (e.g. omnes reges Hispaniae) were often used in the Middle Ages, while the Spain Romance languages of the Reconquista use the Romance version interchangeably. In the James Ist Chronicle Llibre dels fets, written between 1208 and 1276, there are many instances of this. The borders of modern Spain do not coincide with those of the Roman province of Hispania or of the Visigothic Kingdom, and thus medieval Spain and modern Spain exist in separate contexts.
The Latin term Hispania, often used during Antiquity and the Low Middle Ages, like with Roman Hispania, as a geography and political name, continued to be used geographically and politically in the Spania, as shown in the expression laus Hispaniae, 'Praise to Hispania', to describe the history of the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula of Isidore of Seville's Historia de regibus Gothorum, Vandalorum et Suevorum:
You are, O Spain, holy and always happy mother of princes and peoples, the most beautiful of all the lands that extend far from the West to India. You, by right, are now the queen of all provinces, from whom the lights are given not only the sunset, but also the East. You are the honor and ornament of the orb and the most illustrious portion of the Earth ... And for this reason, long ago, the golden Rome desired you
In modern history, Spain and Spanish have become increasingly associated with the Kingdom of Spain alone, although this process took several centuries. After the union of the central peninsular Kingdom of Castile with the eastern peninsular Kingdom of Aragon in the 15th century under the Catholic Monarchs in 1492, only Navarra and Portugal were left to complete the whole peninsula under one monarchy. Navarre followed soon after in 1512, and Portugal, after over 400 years as an independent and sovereign nation, in 1580. During this time, the concept of Spain was still unchanged. It was after the restoration of Portugal's independence in 1640 when the concept of Spain started to shift and be applied to all the Peninsula except Portugal.
In the Mesolithic period, beginning in the 10th millennium BC, the Allerød Oscillation occurred. This was an interstadial Glaciation that lessened the harsh conditions of the Ice Age. The populations sheltered in Iberian Peninsula (descendants of the Cro-Magnon) migrated and recolonized all of Western Europe. In this period one finds the Azilian culture in Southern France and Northern Iberia (to the mouth of the Douro river), as well as the Muge Culture in the Tagus valley.
The Neolithic brought changes to the human landscape of Iberia (from the 5th millennium BC onwards), with the development of agriculture and the beginning of the Megalith. This spread to most of Europe and had one of its oldest and main centres in the territory of modern Portugal, as well as the Chalcolithic and Beaker culture cultures.
During the 1st millennium BC, in the Bronze Age, the first wave of migrations into Iberia of speakers of Indo-European languages occurred. These were later (7th and 5th centuries BC) followed by others that can be identified as . Eventually urban cultures developed in southern Iberia, such as Tartessos, influenced by the colonization of coastal Mediterranean Iberia, with strong competition from the Ancient Greece colonization. These two processes defined Iberia's cultural landscape – Mediterranean towards the southeast and Continental in the northwest.
Romanization proceeded quickly in some regions where there are references to the togati, and very slowly in others, after the time of Augustus, and Hispania was divided into three separately governed provinces, and nine provinces by the 4th century. More importantly, Hispania was for 500 years part of a cosmopolitan world empire bound together by law, language, and the Roman road. But the impact of Hispania on the newcomers was also substantial. Caesar wrote that the soldiers from the Second Legion had become Hispanicized and regarded themselves as hispanici.
The Romans improved existing cities, such as Lisbon ( Olissipo) and Tarragona ( Tarraco), established Zaragoza ( Caesaraugusta), Mérida ( Augusta Emerita), and Valencia ( Valentia), and reduced other native cities to mere villages. The peninsula's economy expanded under Roman tutelage. Hispania served as a granary and a major source of metals for the Roman market, and its harbors exported gold, tin, silver, lead, wool, wheat, olive oil, wine, fish, and garum. Agricultural production increased with the introduction of irrigation projects, some of which remain in use today. The Romanized Iberian populations and the Iberian-born descendants of Roman soldiers and colonists had all achieved the status of full Roman citizenship by the end of the 1st century. The Iberian denarii, also called argentum oscense by Roman soldiers, circulated until the 1st century BC, after which it was replaced by Roman coins.
Hispania was separated into two provinces (in 197 BC), each ruled by a praetor: Hispania Citerior ("Hither Hispania") and Hispania Ulterior ("Farther Hispania"). The long wars of conquest lasted two centuries, and only by the time of Augustus did Ancient Rome manage to control Hispania Ulterior. Hispania was divided into three provinces in the 1st century BC. In the imperial era, three Roman emperors were born in Hispania: Trajan (r. 98–117), Hadrian (r. 117–138), and Theodosius I (r. 379–395).
In the 4th century, Latinius Pacatus Drepanius, a Gallic rhetorician, dedicated part of his work to the depiction of the geography, climate and inhabitants of the peninsula, writing:
This Hispania produces tough soldiers, very skilled captains, prolific speakers, luminous bards. It is a mother of judges and princes; it has given Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius I to the Empire.
Christianity was introduced into Hispania in the 1st century, and it became popular in the cities in the 2nd century. However, little headway was made in the countryside, until the late 4th century, by which time Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire. Some Christian heresy emerged in Hispania, most notably Priscillianism, but overall the local bishops remained subordinate to the Pope. Bishops who had official civil as well as ecclesiastical status in the late empire continued to exercise their authority to maintain order when civil governments broke down there in the 5th century. The Council of Bishops became an important instrument of stability during the ascendancy of the Visigoths. The last vestiges of (Western·classical) Roman rule ended in 472.
In an effort to retrieve the region, the Western Roman emperor, Honorius (r. 395–423), promised the Visigoths a home in southwest Gaul if they destroyed the invaders in Spain. They all but wiped out the Silingi and Alans. The remnant joined the Asding Vandals who had settled first in the northwest with the Sueves but south to Baetica. It is a mystery why the Visigoths were recalled by patrician Constantius (who in 418 married Honorius' sister who had been married briefly to the Visigothic king Ataulf). The Visigoths, the remnants of the two tribes who joined them and the Sueves were confined to a small area in the northwest of the peninsula. The diocese may even have been re-established with its capital at Mérida in 418.Kulikowski, M. "The Career of the 'comes Hispanarum' Asterius", Phoenix, 2000a, 54: 123–141. The Roman attempt under General Castorius to dislodge the Vandals from Cordoba failed in 422.
The Vandals and Alans crossed over to North Africa in 429, an event which is considered to have been decisive in hastening the decline of the Western Roman Empire. However, their departure allowed the Romans to recover 90% of the Iberian Peninsula until 439. After the departure of the Vandals only the Sueves remained in a northwest corner of the peninsula. Roman rule which had survived in the eastern quadrant was restored over most of Iberia until the Sueves occupied Mérida in 439, a move which coincides to the Vandal occupation of Carthage late the same year. Rome made attempts to restore control in 446 and 458. Success was temporary.
After the death of emperor Majorian in 461 Roman authority collapsed except in Tarraconensis the northeastern quadrant of the peninsula. The Visigoths, a Germanic tribes, whose kingdom was located in southwest Gaul, took the province when they occupied Tarragona in 472. They also confined the Sueves who had ruled most of the region to Galicia and northern Portugal. In 484 the Visigoths established Toledo as the capital of their kingdom. Successive Visigothic kings ruled Hispania as patricians who held imperial commissions to govern in the name of the Roman emperor. In 585 the Visigoths conquered the Suebic Kingdom of Galicia, and thus controlled almost all of Hispania.
A century later, taking advantage of a struggle for the throne between the Visigothic kings Agila I and Athanagild, the Byzantine Empire Justinian I sent an army under the command of Liberius to take back the peninsula from the Visigoths. This short-lived reconquest recovered only a small strip of land along the Mediterranean coast roughly corresponding to the ancient province of Hispania Baetica, known as Spania.
Under the Visigoths, culture was not as highly developed as it had been under Roman rule, when a goal of higher education had been to prepare gentlemen to take their places in municipal and imperial administration. With the collapse of the imperial administrative super-structure above the provincial level (which was practically moribund) the task of maintaining formal education and government shifted to the Church from the old ruling class of educated aristocrats and gentry. The clergy, for the most part, emerged as the qualified personnel to manage higher administration in concert with local powerful notables who gradually displaced the old town councils. As elsewhere in early medieval Europe, the church in Hispania stood as society's most cohesive institution. The Visigoths are also responsible for the introduction of mainstream Christianity to the Iberian Peninsula; the earliest representation of Christ in Spanish religious art can be found in a Visigothic hermitage, Santa Maria de Lara. It also embodied the continuity of Roman order. Native Hispano-Romans continued to run the civil administration and Latin continued to be the language of government and of commerce on behalf of the Visigoths.E.A. Thompson, The Visigoths in Spain, 1969, pp. 114–131.
Religion was the most persistent source of friction between the Chalcedonian (Catholic) native Hispano-Romans and their Arianism Visigothic overlords, whom the former considered heretical. At times this tension invited open rebellion, and restive factions within the Visigothic aristocracy exploited it to weaken the monarchy. In 589, Recared, a Visigothic ruler, renounced his Arianism before the Council of Bishops at Toledo and accepted Chalcedonian Christianity (Catholic Church), thus assuring an alliance between the Visigothic monarchy and the native Hispano-Romans. This alliance would not mark the last time in the history of the peninsula that political unity would be sought through religious unity.
Court ceremonials – from Constantinople – that proclaimed the imperial sovereignty and unity of the Visigothic state were introduced at Toledo. Still, civil war, royal assassinations, and usurpation were commonplace, and warlords and great landholders assumed wide discretionary powers. Bloody family feuds went unchecked. The Visigoths had acquired and cultivated the apparatus of the Roman state but not the ability to make it operate to their advantage. In the absence of a well-defined hereditary system of succession to the throne, rival factions encouraged foreign intervention by the Greeks, the Franks, and finally the Muslims in internal disputes and in royal elections.
According to Isidore of Seville, it is with the Visigothic domination of Iberia that the idea of a peninsular unity is sought after, and the phrase Mother Hispania is first spoken. Up to that date, Hispania designated all of the peninsula's lands. In Historia Gothorum, the Visigoth Suinthila appears as the first monarch under whose rule Hispania is dealt with as a Goths nation.
In 27 BC, the general and politician Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa divided Hispania into three parts:
The emperor Augustus in that same year returned to make a new division leaving the provinces as follows:
By the 3rd century the emperor Caracalla made a new division which lasted only a short time. He split Hispania Citerior again into two parts, creating the new provinces Provincia Hispania Nova Citerior and Asturiae-Calleciae. In the year 238 the unified province Tarraconensis or Hispania Citerior was re-established.
In the 3rd century, under the Soldier Emperors, Hispania Nova (the northwestern corner of Spain) was split off from Tarraconensis, as a small province but the home of the only permanent legion in Hispania, Legio VII Gemina. After Diocletian Tetrarchy reform in AD 293, the new Diocese of Hispania became one of the four Roman diocese—governed by a vicarius—of the praetorian prefecture of Gaul (also comprising the provinces of Gaul, Germania and Roman Britain), after the abolition of the imperial Tetrarchs under the Western Emperor (in Rome itself, later Ravenna). The diocese, with its capital at Emerita Augusta (modern Mérida), comprised:
Footnotes
Citations
|
|
