1

The Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo

Current Perspectives on the Negotiation of Power in
Post-Roman Iberia

Sabine Panzram

The legacy of history

Visigothic kings remain present in Madrid to this day. Athaulf, Euric,

Liuvigild, Swinthila, and Wamba face each other on the Plaza de Oriente;
Gundemar and Chintila can be spotted in the Retiro Park by the ‘Paseo de
las Estatuas’; Alaric, Reccared II, Erwig, and Theodoric meanwhile grace
the balustrade of the royal palace’s eastern facade. These carefully crafted,
life-size statues of white rock (Piedra de Colmenar), obviously part of some
programme, are haphazardly spread across the city, which leads us to the
mid-eighteenth century. After Real Alcázar burned to its foundations on
New Year’s Eve, 1734,1 Philipp V charged the Benedictine Martín Sarmiento
with developing a new palace design. He saw the destruction of the Arabic
residence, previously redesigned by the Trastámara and renovated by the
Habsburgs, as an opportunity to fulf il his desire for a new and impos-
ing form of self-display. The Bourbon faced the challenge of combining
his French dynasty with the older Spanish one in order to demonstrate
legitimacy. By suggesting his so-called Sistema de adornos del Palacio Real
(1743), Sarmiento offered a form of display in which sculptures, frescoes,
and carpets would complement each other in order to display the Catholic
and secular virtues of the Spanish monarchy since antiquity – virtues
such as security, strength, continuity, and piety.2 The sculptures were to
represent the kings – in chronological order – and serve to crown the palace.3
They were to be a symbol, visible to all, of sovereignty’s continuity, and to

1 Chueca Goitia 1998; Sancho Gaspar 2013.

2 Álvarez Barrientos and Herrero Carretero 2002.
3 Ibid., pp. 244–271.

Panzram, S. and P. Pachá (eds.). The Visigothic Kingdom: The Negotiation of Power in Post-Roman
Iberia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2020
doi: 10.5117/9789463720632_ch01
18 Sabine Panzr am

transform the palace into a place of remembrance from which Spain could
be envisioned (pensar España). 4 The Benedictine described in detail what
the statues were to resemble, their clothing as well as such things as their
types of crowns and weaponry. The faces were not be idealized, but true
to nature. This enthusiasm for documentation and didactism can be seen
in the figures of martyrs, saints, and city patrons, such as San Lorenzo,
San Juan de la Cruz, San Isidro, Santa Leocadia, and Santa Teresa, as well
as poets such as Martial, Quintilian, and Lucan, and philosophers such as
Averroes and Maimonides or ‘military types’ such as Viriathus, the Cid,
and Cortés.5 Sarmiento had stones fetched from every quarry in Spain
for the construction, so that the representation of the Iberian Peninsula’s
thirty-two provinces could be realized through a presence from across
the kingdom. The elaborate iconographic programme reflects Sarmiento’s
understanding of his nation’s continuity, which was contingent on its terri-
tory, geography, and ultimately its history. The didactic impetus is obvious:
the Benedictine was convinced of architecture’s ability to unleash positive
effects in the beholder and educate him through the need for guidance and
moral emulation.6 When Charles III reached Madrid, in December 1759, he
found himself facing a huge construction site. He gave priority to completing
the residence, which had been delayed for years, and was able to move in
at the end of 1764. Iconographically, Charles III distanced himself signifi-
cantly from his predecessors’ guidelines. First, he had the statues of all the
Spanish kings who had been erected on the facades as part of Sarmiento’s
programme removed, an order he gave on February 1760, even before his
ceremonial entrance to Madrid.7 They were then distributed across the city’s
gardens – Plaza de Oriente, Sabatini, Retiro, Glorieta de las Pirámides – with
some sent to various cities: Toledo received a few, Burgos, Ronda, Vitoria,
Logroño, and San Fernando de Henares others, while Aranjuez, El Ferrol, and
Pamplona received a few. Charles was not attempting to make the nation an
ideological centre of his sovereignty by didactically instrumentalizing the
royal palace. Rather, his rule sought to raise a universal claim by means of
eulogies and self-dramatization to harken back to antiquity. The discovery
of Herculaneum and Pompeii in the 1740s was propitious, as it served to
validate his buon regno.8 The prologue of the luxurious volume Antichità di

4 For this slogan, see Álvarez Barrientos 2006.

5 Álvarez Barrientos and Herrero Carretero 2002, pp. 118–154.
6 Santos Puerto 2002; see also Panzram, in press.
7 Morterero 1972, p. 68.
8 Panzram 2012; Pisani 2013.
Current Perspec tives on the Negotiation of Power 19

Ercolana – which published the paintings, statues, and bronzes – was gifted
to members of the European aristocracy,9 and celebrated him as Hercules.
Charles also secured the services of the notable Anton Raphael Mengs
to decorate the royal palace with ceiling frescoes and historic images.10
This Dresden court painter’s iconography was rooted in an inventory of
images related to Trajan. Meanwhile, Charles’s generous renovation and
beautification, even re-design, of entire neighbourhoods in the capital,11
induced Ramón Pignatelli y Moncayo to compare his achievements with
those of the first Roman empire – perhaps surpassing Augustus!12 Finally,
Charles was inspired by the Roman street network when developing his
Spanish example. In 1787 he organized the colonization of Sierra Morena,
in celebration of which a medal was minted showing him as Romulus, the
city founder.13 In contrast to Sarmiento, Charles was not concerned with
presenting the past as an entirety, as a closed system in order to display a
national identity. By referring to antiquity, he modeled an entire epoch as the
starting point of socio-political transformations at a time of political conflict
and social change, presenting the past as an open frame of reference.14
The nineteenth-century nation state was long in search of itself. After
the Napoleonic wars, those with political responsibilities in European
states strove to accomplish political unity by means of cultural identity.15
Questions arose as to whether a nation defined itself more as a state or a
culture, whether laws and institutions were the crucial elements by which
citizens could govern themselves, or whether a community’s members
needed to possess the same ethnic culture and history. In any case, the
origins of nationalism flourished in parallel with the rise of liberal forces.
The founding edict of the Real Academia de la Historia, which Philipp V had
founded as early as 1738 in response to universities’ untenable conditions,16
charged it with ‘purging’ the nation’s fábulas by publishing a Diccionario
Histórico-crítico-universal de España, and preparing a ‘verdadera Historia

9 Cf. Bayardi, Prodromo delle Antichità d’Ercolano, pts. I–V, 1752, pp. v–xlviii, as well as the
praefatio of the introductory volume on the publication of the papyri found in Herculaneum
by Carlo Maria Rosini, Dissertationis isagogicae ad Herculanensium Voluminum explanationem,
pt. I, 1797.
10 Roettgen 1999 and 2003; Ehrmann 2010.
11 Moleón Gavilanes 2017.
12 Blech 2009, pp. 355–356.
13 Almagro-Gorbea 2012.
14 Späth 2015.
15 Esdaile 2000; Álvarez Junco 2001; Álvarez Junco and Fuente Monge 2013.
16 Almagro-Gorbea and Maier Allende 2003; Anes y Álvarez de Castrillón 2010.
20 Sabine Panzr am

Nacional’.17 Yet the necessary profession that would establish the search
for ‘objective truth’, with the instrument of positivism, only developed
in the course of the nineteenth century. Modesto Lafuente y Zamalloa’s
Historia General de España desde los tiempos más remotos hasta nuestros
días, published in Madrid in thirty books between 1850 and 1866, became
paradigmatic for the developing genre of historical writing. The politically
active journalist-historian claimed that he had been motivated by the
lack of a national history. Until deep into the twentieth century, his work
was accounted ‘la historia nacional por antomasia’;18 his periodization of
Spain’s history into edades – ‘Antigua, Media, Moderna y Contempóranea’
– remains valid to this day. The localization of Spain’s transition from
antiquity to the Middle Ages in the early eighth century, rather than in
the f ifth as in the rest of Europe, is due to his work; he considered the
Arabic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula of more impact than the fall of
the West Roman Empire. He places the beginnings of modernity in the year
1492 and not, as was customary, in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople,
and judged the Catholic kings’ conquest of Granada, the expulsion of the
Jewish inhabitants, and Columbus’s discovery of America to be of more
significance. And lastly, he did not initiate ‘contemporary history’ with
the French Revolution of 1789, as was common practice, but rather with
the Spanish rebellion against Napoleon’s troops in 1808. Even the Spanish
nation’s founding date, which he cites as the III Council of Toledo in 589,
in the fourth book of his opus magnum,19 is still occasionally considered
valid.20 As such it was the Visigoths who founded Spain as a nation. Lafuente
y Zamallao believed that ‘Spaniards’ had existed before the arrival of
Rome, and that it was this culture that ‘hispanicized’ the Romans and
Visigoths and converted the latter to the Catholic faith. It was, however, the
Visigoths who created a monarquía española by introducing the relevant
institutions. Liberals consider not just political, religious, and territorial
unity fundamental, but also the juridical unity gained through the Fuero
Juzgo. Councils functioned like a parliament; it was the Hispano-Gothic
kingdom in which Spain established its constitutional foundations as
those of a ‘state’.

17 Sempere y Guarinos, Ensayo de una biblioteca española de los mejores escritores del Reynado
de Carlos III, vol. 1, 1787, pp. 63–71. – Almagro-Gorbea 2010.
18 Álvarez Junco and Fuente Monge 2013, esp. 264–283, here p. 265.
19 Lafuente y Zamalloa, Historia General de España desde los tiempos más remotos hasta
nuestros días, 1887.
20 Cañizares Llovera 2008 is an illustrative example.
Current Perspec tives on the Negotiation of Power 21

The possibility of faithfully reproducing an event – whether contemporary

or historical – such as Reccared’s conversion found in historical paintings
or those awarded at the national fine arts exhibits, which took place from
1856, promoted the development of an artistic style, of which the state
became the most important patron.21 José Martí y Monsó’s Concilio III
de Toledo (1892) shows Reccared in a church’s apse, evidently at the mo-
ment when his conversion was announced to members of the council with
Leander’s presence.22 By royal decree, the picture was hung in the senate
on 11 November 1878. In contrast, Antonio Muñoz Degrain’s La Conversión
de Recaredo (1888) captures the moment in which the Visigothic king swore
off Arianism in the presence of his wife, Queen Badda, and Bishop Leander,
in St. Leocadia of Toledo’s basilica on 8 May 589. The artist was concerned
about the realization of the topic: he believed that ‘todo asunto histórico
exige […] un estudio detenido, no sólo de la historia política y social, sino
también de los costumbres, la indumentaria, la manera de ser y los detalles
más nimios’, although he considered his knowledge of the Visigoths limited.23
And yet he still executed the piece, as it was a commission that was to grace
the senate’s Salón de los Pasos Perdidos alongside at least three other pieces:
Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz’ La rendición de Granada (1882), José Moreno
Carbonero’s La entrada de Roger de Flor en Constantinopla (1888), and Juan
Luna y Novico’s El combate naval de Lepanto (1887). The conspectus of these
events – Reccared’s conversion at the Council of Toledo, Granada’s fall, Roger
de Flor’s march into Constantinople, and the naval battle of Lepanto – as
well as the associations they evoked, such as the first political-religious
unity, the crown of Aragón’s victory in the Mediterranean, the end of the
reconquista, unity under the Catholic kings, and the height of imperial power
in Europe, created a reference to a ‘panegírico del nacionalismo español’.24
Not just the senate but also the house of representatives was decorated with
historical paintings. The genres of historiography and historical painting
reveal the search for, and ultimate spread of, a specific conception of the
nation developed through concepts such as autonomy and centralism. An
independent Spain was propagated as one that faced its ‘invaders’ – in Sagunt,
Numantia, or Covadonga, in Zaragoza, or on the 2 and 3 May in Madrid; a
centralized Spain had its roots in Reccared’s conversion, fought for in the

21 Reyero Hermosilla 1989; Díez 1992; Pantorba 1980.

22 López Henares 1980, p. 129; Reyero Hermosilla 1999a.
23 López Henares 1980, pp. 130–131; Díez 1992, pp. 436–437, see also pp. 378–387; Reyero
Hermosilla 1999b, p. 290; cf. Rodríguez García 1966; García Alcaraz 1996.
24 On this, see Reyero Hermosilla 1999c, p. 229; López Henares 1980, pp. 125, 130–131, 132–133,
136–137; Peréz Vejo 2015, esp. pp. 71–77.
22 Sabine Panzr am

battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, or one won from the Catholic kings, and the
‘triumphant’ Spain whose discovery of America became a favourite among
painters. At the end of the long nineteenth century, the view of the past
again embodied a closed system, in which illustrious historical moments
served to construct a national identity.
It is not surprising that the declaration of the Spanish nation’s founding
date should fall in Visigothic times. The history of goticismo began virtually
at the moment when the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo was ended by the
Umayyad’s conquista, i.e. the beginning of the eighth century.25 The Christian
Asturorum regnum claimed its immediate succession, the Castilian crown
viewed itself as part of its tradition, nobles sought to trace their genealogies
back to the Visigoths, and artists attempted to visualize Visigothic daily
life. Muñoz Degrain’s reflections, however, point to the problem that almost
no material evidence from the period existed. The interior of St. Leocadia’s
basilica in La Conversión de Recaredo resembles that of Sant’Apollinare in
Classe and the Visigothic royal couple’s garments echo those of Justinian
and Theodora in San Vitale in Ravenna;26 Recceswinth’s crown was the
only element the painter could base on an original. In 1858, the so-called
treasure trove of Guarrazar surfaced not far from Toledo: votive crowns,
crosses, gems made of gold, studded with semi-precious stones and pearls
appear as artistic craftsmanship in the Byzantine tradition but were made
at Toledo’s court.27 A number of the twelve crowns and eight crosses went
to Paris, but the majority became part of the royal collection. Archaeologist
and art historian José Amador de los Ríos, who headed the Real Academia
de Historia in Madrid and was responsible for the transfer, described them
as representative examples of early medieval, Spanish Catholic art, as the
essence of seventh-century Spanish culture.28 The treasure trove unleashed a
lasting enthusiasm for Visigothic archaeology: Scarcely fifteen archaeological
digs were conducted until the 1940s. The research of the 1930s, led especially
by the prehistorian Julio Martínez Santa Olalla, following his return to Ger-
many and his appointment as head of the Comisaría General de Excavaciones
Arqueológicas, focused on the ‘época de las migraciones germánicas’; this
was clearly a sign of political alliance with national-socialist Germany.29
This association became marginalized after his removal from office in the

25 Álvarez Junco 2001, esp. pp. 35–45 and 420–424; Linehan 2012.

26 Cortés Arrese 2012, esp. pp. 32–43.
27 Perea 2001; Eger 2010; Moreno Martín 2017.
28 Amador de los Ríos 1861, esp. pp. 151–161.
29 Olmo Enciso 1991; Gracia Alonso 2009; Tejerizo García 2017, esp. pp. 123–136.
Current Perspec tives on the Negotiation of Power 23

50s, with scholars subsequently stressing Christianity’s importance for the

Visigothic kingdom’s development.30
The legend of Spain’s origins and its unique status was strengthened
in following decades. Concepts of unity between church and state were
paradigmatically expounded by the universal scholar and intellectual
Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo in his Historia de los Heterodoxos españoles in
1877 (concepts that later allowed Franco to build on). Menéndez Pelayo’s unity
of patria and Catholicism stem from the proselytizing of the apostles, the
uniqueness of the Middle Ages in its succession of conquista and reconquista,
the strong manifestation of the Counter-Reformation, and the hegemony of
a modern, extremely conservative form of Catholicism.31 Franco propagated
dux Reccared’s conversion to Catholicism, which had brought about not just
the dominion’s territorial unity but also, subsequently, its denominational
unity as the origins of the history of a Spain that understood itself as ‘one,
great, free and Catholic’, led by a caudillo. This was accompanied by the
privileging of the region of Castile, in which hispanidad had developed in the
reconquista period. The scholarly tradition supporting this imaginary was
not laid to rest until Franco’s death in 1975. Yet even someone in exile such as
the historian Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz viewed the Middle Ages as the key
epoch. In his significant volume España, un enigma histórico, he located the
roots of Spanish identity in ninth-century Asturia, which had regarded itself
as the bastion of the last Visigoth kingdom.32 An ‘historiographical revolution’
in the study of Spanish history, and thus of antiquity, was unleashed by the
dictator’s death.33 A democratic Spain, after all, could never utilize what
the dictatorship had propagated as an historical benchmark of national
identity – the Visigothic period and Castile. Instead, the reference was
to Rome – as a Roman province now able to imagine a future as a region
within the European community.34 The first systematic archaeological
digs, begun in the 1980s in Tarragona, Córdoba, and Mérida, carved their
way not just into remnants of the provincial capitals of Roman Hispania,
but to Europe as well.
The scientific interest in the Visigothic period was therefore free – with-
out any clear aim such as creating identity, legitimizing socio-political
organizational forms, or institutional pressure regarding methodological

30 Díaz-Andreu García and Ramírez Sánchez 2004; Tejerizo García 2016.

31 Menéndez Pelayo 1948, pp. 507–508, also Kamen 2006.
32 Sánchez-Albornoz 1956.
33 On this see Díaz-Andreu García 1993 as well as 1995; Bowes and Kulikowski 2005.
34 Porcel 1992; Díaz-Andreu García 1993; Wulff Alonso and Álvarez Martí-Aguilar 2003.
24 Sabine Panzr am

guidelines.35 Urban archaeology’s activities were linked with a conceptional

debate that called into question ancient history’s periodization on the
Iberian Peninsula and demanded a paradigm change. In 1982, the ancient
historian and archaeologist Javier Arce, in his El último siglo de la España
romana (284–409), presented sketches of the political, bureaucratic, military,
economic, and religious history of a century that had not even counted as
worthy of history.36 He wrote provocatively and critically, demanding an
interpretation of the archaeological evidence freed from historiographical
transmission. This former interpretation had referred to the latter and had
confirmed the dominating interpretational pattern of the so-successfully
Romanized Hispanic province’s decay and decadence as early as the late
third century, instead of its functioning as a correcting force. He postulated
continuity, not change – up to and even past 409 ad. He argued that the
Hispanic provinces should be inserted into the context of the empire, rather
than classifying them as an imperial annexation with no relevance for Rome.
The archaeological findings and epigraphic evidence underline the necessity
for a shift in perspective, since continuity can be verified for the supposedly
‘crisis-laden’ third century, while a ‘slow change’ seems to have dominated
the fourth, finally followed by the transformation of urban topographies
in the fifth.37 The dimensions of the finds made interdisciplinary work
the condition sine qua non;38 the traditionally separate research of the
centuries through different disciplines – i.e. the romanistas jurisdiction
over Roman Spain and the mundo germánico specialists for the following
centuries – proved obsolete. If archaeologists and construction researchers,
epigraphists, and historians (whether of pre-, early, ancient, or medieval
history) fail to work together, neither the constructional nor socio-historical
developments can be studied à la longue. The centuries after the invasions
of the Suebi, Vandals, and Alans in 409, and after the III Council of Toledo in
589, which scholars had previously viewed as the pre-history of the glorious
period of the seventh-century reges Visigothorum,39 now became part of
the ‘(post-)history’ of the Roman Empire. Only once the years 284, 409, and
589 had lost their status as all-decisive turning points was any analysis of
transformation processes from an ancient-history perspective up to the
year 711 (and beyond) possible.

35 Linehan 2012, esp. 44–47; Álvarez Junco and Fuente Monge 2013, esp. pp. 405–437.
36 Arce 2009 [orig. 1982].
37 See also the case studies in Beltrán Fortes and Rodríguez Gutiérrez 2012.
38 For extensive information on this development, see Panzram 2017 and 2019.
39 For example, Orlandis Rovira 1987; García Moreno 1989; Thompson 1969; Collins 2004.
Current Perspec tives on the Negotiation of Power 25

A paradigm shift, new approaches

This volume locates itself in this tradition of ‘breaking away’ and wants to
provide a contribution to Visigothic research on the Iberian Peninsula in
two respects, thematically and methodologically. Its perspective is that of
a young, dynamic research field open to developments at the intersection
between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages that has been developing
internationally since the 1990s and consistently works in an interdisciplinary
manner. Thematically, the ‘negotiations of power’ point to the revision of a
central category – ‘power’ – which has traditionally been used to postulate
the establishment of Toledo’s hegemony, yet has failed to explain why the
central power’s expansion went hand in hand with a weakening of its
hegemonic structures, which made possible the Umayyad’s conquista.
On the basis of an understanding of ‘power’ in the sense of Max Weber,
these contributions seek to understand afresh the relationship between
the centre and the periphery, between the monarch and the aristocracy,
by positing agency for everyone involved in this process and inquiring into
its realization. Methodologically, this volume is breaking new ground by
taking seriously the Mediterranean world’s unity from Marcus Aurelius
to Muhammad, already postulated by Peter Brown in the early 1970s, and
implementing it on the foundation of new approaches to periodization. If
one sets the ‘long late antiquity’ as one’s period of study, 40 then it is only
consistent to examine the causes of the ‘power question’ in the Visigothic
period from Roman late antiquity to the time of the Umayyads, in order to
critically question the current debate about the end, change, continuity, or
transformation of Roman antiquity. 41
The contributions that accept this challenge of revising the traditional
narrative come from four different research fields – ‘Concepts of Central
and Local Power’, ‘Power, Identity, and Ethnicity’, ‘Representations of Power’,
‘Power and Church’. They are introduced with a prologue by Laurent Brassous
and concluded with an epilogue by Julián M. Ortega Ortega, with Paulo
Pachá finishing with an analysis of this thematic and methodological shift
in perspective. The picture the classical archaeologist Laurent Brassous
paints of the Iberian Peninsula ‘the day before’, that is, before the arrival

40 Brown 1971; cf. the more recent Brown, Bowersock, Cameron et al. 1997; Cameron 2002;
Marcone 2008.
41 A convincing narrative of the Iberian Peninsula in the ‘long late antiquity’ can be found
in Arce’s trilogy of Arce 2007, 2011; see also, now, the archaeological perspective of Martínez
Jiménez, Sastre de Diego, and Tejerizo García 2018.
26 Sabine Panzr am

of Germanic ethnicities in the early fifth century, in many ways points to

the Hispania of the imperial period, but in others to post-Roman Iberia. The
constituents of Rome’s power – those approximately 400 cities – continued
to function as references; they retained their traditional acceptance of
agency and at most gradually adapted to the unique aspects of their region.
Their respective hinterlands continued to determine the territory’s division;
their elites dominated political discourse and occupied key positions in the
socio-economic constellation. The cities neither decadently crumbled in the
‘crisis of the third century’, nor did they suffer from the ‘barbarian’ invasions
and be eleminated by the Vandals, Visigoths, and other ethnicities. Their
strength and importance as carriers of sovereignty remained unbroken in
these centuries. Their urbanism was characterized, not by destruction, but
transformation; their social elites’ functions, not by change, but continuity.
Confronted by this new picture, which the archaeological evidence especially
suggests, the ancient history scholar Javier Arce takes a detailed look at the
arrival and settlement of the Visigoths, in the first article from the ‘Concepts
of Central and Local Power’ research field. He utilizes literary findings to
ask not just when and how many came, but for what reasons, where and
how they settled, as well as who they actually were. He believes they were
a poly-ethnic grouping – thanks to the length of their migration and their
stay in Aquitania (more than a hundred years) – and argues that it is hardly
possible to speak of Goths in Hispania. They fully took on the ‘Roman way
of life’ in the sixth and seventh centuries, while only the elite retained any
awareness of a Gothic identity. The archaeologists Jaime Vizcaíno Sánchez
and Luis A. García Blánquez also question the established consensus, in this
case in relation to the Visigoths’ territorial spread. New findings from graves
in Senda de Granada (Murcia), in the vicinity of the Roman provincial capital
Carthago Nova, suggest that Visigoths settled in southeastern Hispania as
early as the late fifth century. Researchers have so far assumed that they
only arrived in the context of the Byzantine expansion in the mid-sixth
century. Paulo Pachá and Sebastian Steinbach both examine questions of
challenges of central and local power, Pácha with a focus on the bishops and
Steinbach through the example of the military. The ancient historian Paulo
Pachá argues that the councils called in by the Visigothic church from 400
ad onward in Toledo served one primary function – to politically integrate
the local powers, which at that time were mostly the episcopal sovereignties
that had politically established themselves in the cities. Using the example
of Mérida, Seville, and Córdoba he utilizes an analysis of the council records
to show that the bishops relinquished their political independence in the
course of the seventh century. Yet this attitude was not the result of any
Current Perspec tives on the Negotiation of Power 27

imposition by Toledo, but the product of a negotiation process between the

powers that had been going on for centuries. The medieval historian’s case
study of the magnate Paulus’s rebellion against King Wamba in 673 shows
that strong separatist efforts nevertheless existed in the empire: Paulus
knew that Septimania and Tarraconensis were behind him. However, Julian
of Toledo’s description of the events leaves no doubt of the rightful king’s
victory, who also practised clementia and refrained from executing the rebels.
The contributions from the second research field –‘Power, Identity, and
Ethnicity’ – take up the current debate about identity and ethnicity, focusing
on power relations in the Visigothic kingdom. Herwig Wolfram, medievalist,
questions how one could stay Gothic without a Gothic king and answers
‘by looking for a new one’ – a Gothic magnate, a foreign king, or else the
Roman emperor. A series of factors had proven decisive for the formation
of identity, factors such as the lex Gothica, which guarantied juridical and
socio-economic status, language, faith, and more, but not only a monarchical
institution. Manuel Koch, an ancient historian, answers the question of who
the Visigoths in the kingdom of Toledo were on the basis of a case study of
the Vitas Sanctorum Patrum Emeretensium, written around 635. Although
researchers have traditionally assumed that the ethnic grouping of Visigoths
ruled as elites over Hispano-Romans nominating such characteristics as
names, religion, and laws, recent scholarship has shown that this supposed
ethnic boundary dissolved quickly, if it ever existed at all. The term ‘Gothus’
manifested an awareness of a Visigothic identity, but one that rested not on
genealogy but through membership in the kingdom’s social and political
elite. That is, one was not part of the elite because one was Gothic, but
one could become Gothic if a member of the elite. Lastly, Christoph Eger
postulates the existence of a Visigothic kingdom without Visigoths. The
pre-historian postulates this on the basis of a revision of archaeological
findings: the grave fields of Meseta. Although the burials there cannot be
wholly identified with a Visigothic ethnic identity, elements of the garb and
burial practices should be taken as evidence of the presence of emigrated
barbarians, at least in the occupancy’s early phase. This, he argues, questions
not just what relationship existed between them and the Visigoths, but what
we actually know about clothing and its significance in Visigothic Hispania:
who wore or could wear certain garb of foreign provenance. These questions
turned the examination of the so-called Visigothic grave fields of Meseta
into a challenge, one that must be faced if one is to adequately grasp its
historic significance. Javier Martínez Jiménez moves this array of questions
to urban contexts. The classical archaeologist postulates the existence of a
civic identity as a form of self-representation beyond any ethnic duality, one
28 Sabine Panzr am

more attractive because it was open and integrating rather than closed and
exclusive, and thus open to change. Urban communities, he argues, were
ultimately more significant social groupings than ethnically rooted ones.
For a fundamental understanding of how the Visigothic state functioned,
he suggests replacing Gothic-Roman duality with that of monarchy-citizen.
While the first two section’s contributions ask how power was negotiated
and how the Visigoths manifested these structures in their relationships with
various social groupings, the third section is concerned with the reproduc-
tion of power in representative forms: the organization of a landscape, the
minting of coins, the development of a literary form, and the development
of an ‘epigraphic habit’. The archaeologist Lauro Olmo Enciso shows that the
new founding of Recopolis in 578 ad signified a political act, a demonstration
of power in a moment of political consolidation and the development of a
tax system. However, the city’s founding also re-structured the territory
through the installation of a new road network, rural settlements, and the
reorganization of the agrarian system. Recopolis was to become the region’s
dynamic urban centre for almost two and a half centuries, uniting political,
administrative, and fiscal functions, and ‘disciplining’ the landscape as a
social space. Liuvigild doubly manifested his power. As a numismatician,
Ruth Pliego lays out the various possibilities for depicting power offered
through the minting of coins. The Visigoths’ minting hewed closely to that of
Rome; they imitated and transformed Roman iconography with innovative
characteristics that reflect the regnum’s development in the years from the
first settlement to the Ummayad conquista from around 418 to about 71.
The tremissis first consisted of romanitas (Victory motif), but then adopted
Christian motifs (such ‘Cross-on-steps’ motif) revealing a desire to express
‘sanctified’ power. The emergence of a specific type of literature proves
as significant as that of city founding and coin minting: Michael J. Kelly
analyses the Liber Iudiciorum (also known as the Lex Visigothorum) that
Recceswinth enacted in 653 as a ‘legal-literary text’. The medieval historian
postulates that this body of laws represents a literary character, part of a
historical narrative inherent to law. He compares two versions of this nar-
rative – those of Recceswinth and Ervig – and how strongly these depended
on concrete historic circumstances, as the Liber Iudiciorum is significant
not just as a juridical text but also as a historical narrative. In addition to
the power of individual books stood that of inscriptions both in public and
in restricted spaces. The epigraphist Javier de Santiago Fernandéz shows
how the Visigothic kingdom’s elites – both ecclesiastical and civil – used
epigraphic monuments for the purposes of self-representation. Both sought to
display their privileged social position in the medium of grave, construction,
Current Perspec tives on the Negotiation of Power 29

or dedicatory inscriptions, thus building on Roman tradition. Workshops

made use of traditional techniques, using iconographical elements but also
occasionally composing the texts in verse to draw reader’s attention. Differ-
ent forms of representing power have their own codes and specific impacts.
A city founding or an epigraphic monument is always both a representative
form of power and a given power relationship.
These forms of power are equally true for the institution of the church,
whose relationship the fourth research field – ‘Power and Church’ – ad-
dresses. The prehistorian Rafael Barroso Cabrera examines the relationships
between political power and episcopal authority in the early Visigothic
kingdom of Toledo, positing the signif icance of Theudis for its genesis
instead of what researchers have usually attributed to Liuvigild’s military
successes and Reccared’s political talent. Although Theudis did not succeed
in establishing a kingdom within the diocesis Hispaniarum’s borders, his
cooperation with the bishops first made Toledo into the Carthaginensis’s
metropolitan seat and then gave it primacy over Hispania. Isabel Sánchez
Ramos and Jorge Mórin de Pablos examine the capital from an archaeological
perspective and trace both the city’s administrative and its ecclesiastical
topography (officium palatinum, praetorium/episcopal see of St. Mary, the
ecclesia praetorensis of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and the martyrial
basilica of St. Leocadia). They also make reference to the surrounding land’s
villae (Los Hitos, Melque, and Guarrazar), to monasteries known only from
literary transmissions, but also to so-called private churches. They argue
Byzantium’s influence on architecture and sculptures to a greater extent
than has been usual. The classical philologist Markus Mülke’s article on
Martin of Braga refers to the Visigothic kingdom as a member of diverse
networks. The bishop of Dumio and Bracara, who guided the Arians to the
Catholic faith, was held up as a model for Suebi and Visigoths alike for his
fides catholica, due to classic tradition and, spatially, to his relationship to
Gaul, Rome, and Constantinople. His ‘internationality’, rooted in his literary
production (Capitula Martini, Apophthegmata Patrum, De trina mersione,
De ira, and the three extant pieces of verse), differed significantly from that
of his contemporaries. Finally, the ancient historian Jamie Wood examines
bishops as key figures in the transition from Roman to post-Roman Hispania.
He compares bishops in Byzantine with those in Visigothic Spain. Both, he
argues, fought for authority and secured external help. This, however, was
less about defending themselves from external oppression and more about
pressure coming from various parties within their own cities. He writes that
episcopal elections are particularly well suited to revealing the potential
fragility of local power structures. His analysis of the Vitas Sanctorum
30 Sabine Panzr am

Patrum Emeritensium, as well as of several letters exchanged between Pope

Gregory I and John, Byzantium’s representative in Spania, make clear that
bishops were forced to permanently negotiate their positions – between
church and state, between central and local powers.
For ‘the day after’ the Ummayads conquered the Iberian Peninsula,
the Islamic scholar Julián M. Ortega Ortega paints a picture of the af-
fected regions that has next to nothing to do with the ‘savage kingdom’
(regnum efferum) spoken of in an anonymous chronicle from 754. Instead,
events such as the distribution of booty, the closure of agreements, the
distribution of land to veterans, and the establishment of a tax system
indicate the complexity of a system of distribution that was the result of
an elaborate process of negotiation. The locus lay in negotiating power
not just between conquerors and the conquered, but also between various
groupings (Arabs and Berbers, the army and the emirates, the emirates
and the caliphs).

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About the author

Sabine Panzram is Professor of Ancient History at Hamburg University (Ger-

many). She focuses on social history of power in the Western M
­ editerranean,
and in particular on urban history in the Iberian Peninsula. Currently she
is preparing a study on Christendom without the Church: The Genesis of an
Institution in the Dioecesis Hispaniarum (4th to 7th centuries).