Download PDF | Damián Fernández (editor), Molly Lester (editor), Jamie Wood (editor) - Rome and Byzantium in the Visigothic Kingdom_ Beyond Imitatio Imperii (Late Antique and Early Medieval Iberia)-Amsterdam Univers,2023.
376 Pages
Late Antique and Early Medieval Iberia
Scholarship on the Iberian Peninsula in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages is burgeoning across a variety of disciplines and time periods, but the publication profile of the field remains rather disjointed. No publisher focuses on this area and time period and there is certainly no series devoted to the topic. This series will thus provide a hub for high-quality publications in the field of late antique and early medieval Iberian Studies.
The series moves beyond established chronological dividing lines in scholarship, which segregated Muslim Spain from ‘barbarian’ Spain, and ‘barbarian’ Spain from late Roman Spain. We also seek to be geographically inclusive, encouraging scholarship which explores the north of the peninsula, southern Gaul, and northern Africa insofar as they were integrated administratively, politically, and economically with Hispania in our period.
Acknowledgements
This book originated at a workshop held at Princeton University on 3-4 May 2019, ‘Rome, Byzantium, and the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo: Imitation, Reinvention, or Strategic Adoption?’. We would like to thank the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, the Center for Collaborative History, the Program in the Ancient World, and the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, all at Princeton University, for their generous support.
In particular, we would like to give thanks to Helmut Reimitz for co-ordinating this workshop and to him and Stefan Esders for helping to bring the project to fruition. Northern Illinois University History Department also provided financial support for the production of this volume. Special gratitude must also go to Erin Dailey at Amsterdam University Press for his expert editorial oversight. Erik Goosman of MappaMundi Cartography made an excellent map of the Iberian peninsula, while Sarah Longair traced the map of Mérida in Graham Barrett’s chapter from the original. Finally, the anonymous reviewers provided invaluable and constructive feedback.
Introduction
Damidn Fernandez, Molly Lester, and Jamie Wood
As western Roman society refashioned itself into multiple ‘little Romes’ in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, the Visigothic kingdoms of Toulouse and Toledo actively preserved and transformed much of the Roman world that preceded them. They were not alone in this, as several other kingdoms, including the eastern Roman empire, explored the legacy of Rome while navigating the social, political, and economic shifts that accompanied the transition to the early medieval period. The ‘Romanness’ of such kingdoms, as well as what being Roman actually meant in the post-Roman west, frequently plays a pivotal role in debates about the ‘transformation’ of the Roman world, functioning for some scholars as a key marker of continuity and change across the period.’
In post-Roman Iberia and southern Gaul, scholarly debate over the legacy of Rome in the Visigothic kingdom has long grappled with the survival of Roman (or so-called Germanic) identities and practices and with the importation of Roman traditions from other polities. To a large extent, the modern origins of this debate trace back to discussions of the nature of Visigothic institutions, particularly the controversy over the putative Roman or Germanic origins of Visigothic law.* Those who stressed the Visigoths’ romanitas were also particularly interested in Visigothic relations with the empire in the east. As Céline Martin explores in her contribution to this volume, art historians and archaeologists have long spoken of a ‘Byzantine imprint’ on Iberian evidence, a characterization which scholars eventually extended to political culture as well.
In the twentieth century, the political and diplomatic policies of the Francoist regime strongly shaped Spanish scholarly insistence on Iberian uniqueness within the western Mediterranean and on the markedly ‘imperial’ influences on Visigothic art, culture, and institutions.? Outside of Spain, many Anglophone scholars argued for a strong imperial presence within the Iberian peninsula as well, such as P. D. King’s statement that there are ‘plenty of examples [...] of the constant Byzantine influence in practically every walk of Visigothic life’.4 For those advocating for imperial models, however, the source of these models was far less clear, and scholars debated whether the Visigoths drew on the late Roman empire,5 the Byzantine political centre of Constantinople,® the ‘East’ more generally,’ or closer Byzantine societies such as Ravenna, southern Iberia, or northern Africa.®
In particular, the relationship between the Visigothic kingdom and the Byzantine empire has been the subject of much recent work.? The Byzantine empire was certainly a rival for the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo, and Byzantine presence in southern Iberia led to tension, and even conflict, between the two states. Yet the relationship between Toledo and Constantinople was one of exchange and dialogue as well as conflict. Numerous studies have suggested that, over the sixth and seventh centuries, eastern Roman imperial practices and ideas were adopted in the Visigothic kingdom, a process sometimes referred to in scholarly literature as imitatio imperii. Michael McCormick’s influential Eternal Victory, for instance, argued that some rituals of military victory in Toledo were modelled after Byzantine political ceremonies.
Others have suggested that Visigothic kings’ reforms of the Visigothic monarchy were in conversation with late Roman and Byzantine emperorship,” and several scholars have argued that Toledo became a smaller version of Constantinople in its topography and its conception as a capital city.” Studies of the intellectual, religious, and material culture of the Iberian peninsula have also emphasized the strong cultural and economic ties that bound Hispania to Byzantine territories, especially Africa, as well as the impact of Byzantine religious debates on Iberian ecclesiastics.’ Finally, some have suggested that Visigothic anti-Judaism in the seventh century was related to a desire to imperialize the monarchy or even to emulate the anti-Jewish policies of Byzantine emperors such as Heraclius."4
As suggested by recent characterizations of Visigothic Iberia as imperial or ‘Byzantinizing’, however, scholars must continue to question and refine their assumptions about the nature of Visigothic engagement with Rome more broadly and with Byzantium in particular. As a case in point, the popular characterization of Visigothic practices as imitatio imperii risks conceptually simplifying a dynamic process of exchange. The idea of ‘imitation’ can lead to misrepresenting people of post-imperial Iberia as passive recipients of Byzantine norms, and many features of Visigothic cultural and political life as derivative mirror images of Byzantine models.
Such a conceptualization of the relationship could lead to applying outdated ‘Romanization’ models to the post-Roman kingdoms, with Constantinople replacing Rome as the imperial centre acting upon a range of provincial peripheries. Such a position is incompatible with the historical evidence, and recent scholarship has increasingly begun to demonstrate that while individual and collective actors certainly adopted Roman and Byzantine ideas and practices, they did so via a process of intelligent, creative, and strategic adaptation.” Iberian actors were not simply preserving or importing imperial traditions and legacies: they resignified these ideas and practices within contexts specific to Visigothic society. In other words, Visigothic customs were not an uncritical adoption and imitatio of contemporary Roman models (an ‘acculturation’ model), but unique interpretations of acommon pool of symbols, practices, and institutions that formed the legacy of Rome.
We must also be wary of oversimplifying what was ‘Roman’ about the Roman models for Visigothic kingdoms. As mentioned above and explored more fully in Martin’s contribution, scholars have historically considered multiple Romes when searching for origins and models of imperializing tendencies. Although ‘Rome’ could certainly relate to the contemporary eastern Roman empire or to the Roman empire of the past, it could also refer to various parts of the eastern empire outside of the Constantinopolitan centre.”
Nor was Rome exclusively associated with empire in the early medieval world: the city of Rome and the Roman popes, both past and present, had their own unique relationships with the Iberian peninsula.” And ultimately, characterizing Visigothic practices as imitatio imperii leans towards presenting Rome as outside of or even oppositional to Visigothic culture. We must recall the deep history of Visigothic relations with Romans, and that a range of different ‘Gothic’ groups had been part of the Roman world for several centuries.’® Exchange long predated the foundation of the kingdoms of Toulouse and Toledo. Although we should be wary of over-Romanizing the Visigoths and indirectly implying Roman cultural superiority, any discussion of imitatio imperii must acknowledge the rich web of traditions and customs that were already present in Gothic societies, including the long-established Roman provincial traditions of Gaul and Spain.
The essays in this volume seek to explore engagement with Rome and Byzantium in the Visigothic kingdoms without falling back onto imitatio imperiias a blanket explanatory model. Instead, the authors emphasize how Iberian and Gallic actors continually resignified and redefined Rome over the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries and uncover the multiple meanings and uses of Rome that circulated in the Visigothic worlds.
Authors have taken a variety of approaches and draw on a wide range of sources, from the legal and canonical sources that have long been the staple of Visigothic studies to under-appreciated texts such as the passiones and material artefacts that speak to everyday and elite interactions with the Byzantine world. We do not claim to be comprehensive in our coverage, but we have tried to be inclusive as part of an effort to capture the rich variety of Visigothic-era engagement with Rome and Byzantium.
Several authors explore how Visigothic rulers used and interpreted Roman customs and legacies. Beginning in the Visigothic kingdom of Toulouse, Ian Wood and Merle Eisenberg investigate how Visigothic kings engaged with the traditions and practices of the fifth-century western Roman empire. Long before the reign of Leovigild, whom traditional historiography considered as the ‘imperializing’ king par excellence, Ian Wood traces developments in court etiquette in Toulouse that were rooted in contemporary Roman practices, focusing in particular on resonances between Roman (imperial, provincial, military) and Visigothic royal banqueting. Moving to the early sixth century, Eisenberg problematizes scholarly categorizations of ‘imitative’ and ‘pseudo-imperial’ Visigothic coinage, arguing that despite formal similarities in numismatic imagery, Alaric II's minting and monetary reforms were due to internal transformations of the Visigothic state in southern Gaul rather than to a basic desire to mimic Roman practice.
Royally driven engagement with Roman and Byzantine traditions continued in the sixth- and seventh-century kingdom of Toledo. By comparing imperial and Visigothic laws prescribing the punishment of exile, Margarita Vallejo Girvés suggests that Visigothic reliance on Roman law in royal legislation did not preclude selective adaptation and even abandonment of Roman punitive practices to adapt law to a new economy of punishment. Such adaptability also characterizes elite consumption of Byzantine material culture, and in her exploration of the incorporation of a deluxe (perhaps even imperial) Byzantine cross into King Recceswinth’s famous votive crown, Cecily Hilsdale demonstrates how the original meaning and usage of the cross was simultaneously activated and redefined in its new setting. Damian Fernandez re-evaluates sixth- and seventh-century applications of Roman and Byzantine notions of capitalhood in the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo. He argues that terminological similarities in references to Rome, Constantinople, and Toledo as urbes regiae in Visigothic sources does not mean that Visigothic actors had the same understanding of capitalhood as their Roman predecessors and contemporaries. Instead, they relied on Roman terminology for specifically local purposes.
Iberian churchmen, of course, availed themselves of Roman legacies as well, and the contributions of Molly Lester, Erica Buchberger, and David Addison focus on ecclesiastical and clerical actors who plumbed the Roman past—and present—to articulate and address contemporary concerns. Turning to the Christian liturgy, Lester examines Iberian adoptions of eastern and Roman liturgical practices to unpack when and why bishops proudly identified Roman antecedents for their rites as well as when they obscured them.
Erica Buchberger explores how Isidore of Seville maintained and massaged classical Roman ethnic terms and categories to apply the Roman past to his post-Roman reality. David Addison turns to the Visigothic-era passiones of Roman martyrs to demonstrate how early medieval hagiographers recreated an urban Roman and Christian past. By making this past come alive for Visigothic audiences, Addison reminds us that Roman-era martyrdoms remained a living memory long after they had ceased in practice, reshaping how that past was viewed by contemporaries.
Connections with the Roman past and the Byzantine present were not restricted to royal and episcopal elites—they also found expression in multiple local and regional contexts. Hagiography has long been recognized for its potential to unmask the workings of the small worlds of Late Antiquity, and Santiago Castellanos advises us to look beyond explicit Visigothic recognition of Roman heritage to understand how Roman institutions and social structures implicitly shaped Iberian saints’ worlds. While Castellanos explores Romanness (or lack thereof) in the lives of sixth- and seventh-century saints, Jamie Wood and Graham Barrett encourage us to move beyond the centre, focusing on urban elites and humble consumers.
Barrett reappraises evidence associated with the bishopric of Mérida and its interactions with the Visigothic kings in the late sixth century, concluding that conflicts that have long been viewed as confessional in origin may be better interpreted as the result of late Roman-style factional politics within the city. Jamie Wood deploys ceramics, inscriptions, and hagiography to explore connections between the southwestern cities of Mérida and Mértola and the Byzantine worlds of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, arguing that we must look to local and regional elites if we are to understand the mechanics of interactivity.
Finally, Iberian adaptation and resignification of Roman legacies did not end with the collapse of the Visigothic monarchy in the early eighth century. While later Arabic and Latin textual accounts respectively advocated for sharp breaks and strong continuities with the Roman and Visigothic past, Ann Christys uses early Andalusi Arabic coins and lead seals to explore how Arab and Berber actors selectively mobilized eastern Roman minting practices. Like the Visigoths before them, Andalusi elites navigated several Roman models, including the Byzantine East, the formerly Byzantine North Africa, and Visigothic Hispania itself.
Individually, the essays make significant interventions, but the volume as a whole makes three major contributions. First, it builds on recent scholarship to disaggregate further what ‘Rome’ could mean in a Visigothic context. Instead of concentrating on one particular model of Romanness, the essays present multiple temporally and spatially diverse visions of Romanness that Iberian actors used to understand, mould, and influence their social worlds. Some contributions explore Visigothic engagement with the Roman past, showing how classical and imperial memories and concepts were put to work in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. Others consider Visigothic relationships with contemporary Roman polities, examining how practices, materials, and institutions from the fifth-century western empire and the sixth- and seventh-century eastern empire simultaneously evoked their original context and, when recontextualized in Hispania, generated new meanings.
In particular, the volume reinforces the idea that Byzantium was not, nor was it regarded as, a homogenous entity identified exclusively with Constantinople. In North Africa, Iberia, and Italy there were western Mediterranean iterations of the Byzantine empire, the inhabitants of which interacted with the people of Visigothic Hispania across the period. And finally, the city of Rome exerted a strong conceptual and ecclesiastical presence in the early medieval world, and Visigothic Christians and rulers continually had to negotiate their relationship to the Apostolic See. Taken together, the chapters remind us that the Visigoths had before them a constellation of ‘Romes’ across the Mediterranean and that such imperial, provincial, and local reimaginings of Roman past and Byzantine present were not mutually exclusive of one another.
Second, the volume suggests that unpacking the concept of imitatio imperii requires not only a disaggregation of ‘Rome’ as a source for and a product of resignification, but also a disaggregation of ‘Visigothic Hispania’. Studies of Visigothic Hispania frequently focus on royal and ecclesiastical centres and authorities. Of course, kings and bishops are the best documented actors in Visigothic history: they have certainly not been ignored in past scholarship, and several essays in this volume speak to ongoing royal and episcopal engagement with Roman traditions and legacies. But like the Byzantine empire, the Visigothic kingdom was not monolithic.
The fifthcentury kingdom of Toulouse differed in many ways from the sixth- and seventh-century kingdom in Iberia. Moreover, Visigothic scholarship is increasingly interested in individual bishops and local elites outside of Toledo, who had their own agendas and contexts that did not necessarily align with political and ecclesiastical centres. Outside of capital cities and powerful urban centres such as Toledo, Braga, and Mérida, actors in what are often considered peripheral areas interacted with the Roman and Byzantine worlds, their day-to-day contacts inscribed in saints’ lives and material culture. By exploring areas that were not under direct Visigothic control and the experiences of local and regional elites, what begins to emerge are a multiplicity of centres and peripheries operating at a variety of levels across the peninsula.
Finally, the essays illustrate the wide variety of mediums through which Visigothic engagement with the Roman and Byzantine worlds took place. As indicated above, scholarship has traditionally prioritized examining imitatio imperi( in political and material terms, and several authors in this collection of essays take up these threads from a variety of perspectives. From practices such as banqueting, lawgiving, the minting of coinage, and rhetorics of capitalhood, many essays look at royal reuse of the RomanByzantine legacy and its present instantiations.
This focus on kings carries through in examinations of material culture, particularly the material production of votive crowns and coins. But material culture went beyond the royal centre, and noble production of seals in post-Visigothic Iberia and local trade can demonstrate how more lowly actors in provincial contexts interacted materially with the worlds of Rome and Byzantium. Finally, many essays move beyond political and material considerations. From religious ideologies and practices to conceptions of ethnicity and the underlying social structures of the Roman world, the chapters in this volume show that the engagement with ‘Rome’ was far more diverse and complex than models based on concepts of influence or imitation allow.
The mediums of engaging with Romanness, and the explicit uses as well as eloquent silences, reveal that Gallic and Iberian actors did not have a fixed—or necessarily a very clear—idea about what ‘Rome’ was in the past or the present, or about the uses to which it could be put. If anything, the contributions to this volume show that they may have had multiple, coexisting, and highly contingent notions of ‘Rome’. It should be clear that this volume was not designed to find the ‘true’ Rome, or to discover a single Visigothic view, conceptualization, or experience of the late antique or Byzantine empire. The chapters reveal the plurality and flexibility of the concept of romanitas, and the production of new discourses in rapidly changing contexts in southern Gaul and Hispania across the course of three centuries.
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