A Short History of Hispania

I'm really excited about today's topic of the history of Christianity in Spain. As we did with the Anglo-Saxons and the Franks and the Lombards, we need to zoom in on the area of the Iberian Peninsula and take a look at the political and religious history of Spain in antiquity and the very early Middle Ages to get a footing on what was happening in this important part of Western Christianity. We will start way back and then stop at the end of the Visigothic period. In many ways, two of the most important dates in the history of the Iberian Peninsula are the markers for really our basic historical eras of how time is divided in the Western mind. The conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the armies of Islam in 711 is as good of a date as any for the beginning of the Middle Ages and the final reconquest of the last Islamic stronghold of Granada in 1492 is as good of any marker for the beginning of the early modern period. Today's episode will focus in on the political or secular history of the Iberian Peninsula up to the year 718 and then the next time when we would talk about religious matters of the Peninsula, we'll get into more of the details of how Christianity settled into this area. 718 might seem like an odd year to stop a discussion of the history of Spain. I like that date because it shows a continuity of culture across the years of the Islamic conquest. As a note, I will use the terms Iberia, Iberian Peninsula, or Hispania to refer to this area. Spain is derived from the Roman name for the region, Hispania, but I don't want to confuse it with the modern countries of Spain and Portugal that make up the Peninsula today with the time period we're going to talk about. Each of those countries has a unique and interesting history that we will definitely get into as the history of the papacy progresses. Now let's quickly talk about the geography of the Iberian Peninsula. It's as good of a place to start as any. It has a really interesting geography for not in the grand scope of things a huge place. This geography made it both easy in some parts of the Peninsula for settlement and colonization and really difficult in others. The Iberian Peninsula is the furthest western tip of the Eurasian landmass and it's surrounded on three sides by water as I guess the Peninsula is by definition. It has the Mediterranean Sea on the east side, the Atlantic Ocean on the west side, and the Bay of Biscay on the north side, which is obviously an offshoot of the Atlantic Ocean. This made Hispania very connected to the big trade routes of the time, both Atlantic and Mediterranean routes. This incidentally helped with the spread of Christianity not only in the Peninsula but to all over the world. That is beyond the scope of today's episode but will definitely a part of other episodes. The Iberian Peninsula also has quite a few mountains. Let's just talk about the main mountain chains. A mountain chain in Spanish is called a Sierra and it's really one of the keys to the geography and the history of the Iberian Peninsula as I think we will see. There is a large central plateau that's surrounded by mountains as well. Starting in the north we have the Pyrenees Mountains and this is what is traditionally divided the Hispania or Spain from France. They're not the tallest mountains in Europe and they have a few decent passes but they are defensible and it is a rugged area. This area of the Pyrenees has often been a refuge for some groups when new settlers would arrive in the Peninsula. As we'll see, this is a major theme in the history of the entire region. Next we have the Cantabrian Mountains and they're the northwestern corner of the Peninsula. They're a pretty rugged mountain chain as well. As with the Pyrenees, another area for refuge with a lot of narrow valleys that made it difficult for conquerors to fully subjugate this area. In the south we have the Sierra Nevada which means snow-covered mountain chain in Spanish. They're very tall mountains. They're actually the tallest mountains in Western Europe after the Alps. They're mostly in southern and eastern Spain. These mountains proved difficult to fully conquer and subjugate as well. The Byzantine Empire we will see held out in the 6th and 7th centuries and then the last holdout of the Muslims in Spain in the 1490s was in this area. As I just mentioned for a brief moment or two earlier, the Central Plateau, also known as the Meseta, is really the main agricultural area and is really important if you can control this meseta. It helps to control the whole rest of the Peninsula. As far as rivers go, there are many important rivers that really reach from the blue water, deep into the Peninsula. Some of them are fairly navigable but maybe not as navigable as other rivers in Europe. Many of the key cities of the Peninsula are on these rivers and inland cities like Seville and Toledo were able to connect to blue water through these river systems. Now that we have this geography out of the way, that'll help us understand some of the historical overview of the Peninsula a little bit better. If we go back to pre-Roman history, there were just many peoples who had lived in the Peninsula. Being that it really was a crossroads into Europe and North Africa, you had the Iberians. They probably moved northward from North Africa. Then the Celts, where early Celtic culture spread all over Central and Western Europe, came in from the north. You had the Basques, or as they call themselves, the Escaladun. They may be the last remnants of the early Europeans before the arrival of the Indo-European groups. They're almost undoubtedly connected to that. They speak their own unique language, Basque or Euskera. They have an incredibly rich history. The Basques were able to remain independent from nearly all other settlers. A good deal of the original Basque area slowly got chipped away and Romanized but when they became isolated in the mountainous areas that divide France from Spain, they were able to exist in this border and mostly in Spain and a bit to the north in France, where they were probably connected to the pre-Roman era group called the Aquitanians. But because of how much their area in the Pyrenees, especially the western part of the Pyrenees, they were able to maintain their own unique culture. These Basques were thorn in the sides to the Visigoths, and to the Franks, and to the Muslims, and to the Romans. They just found a way of always having challenging relationships. They had a challenging relationship with the Spanish kingdoms of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, all the way up to the modern period in Francoist Spain and so forth. Now they have a bit of independence and it's not quite as contentious of a relationship but there again that's another issue we might get into in way later episodes. Also in this pre-Roman era we had the Phoenicians and the Greeks. Both played roles in setting up trading colonies along the coastal regions. Then you of course wind up with the Romans, then the Germanic groups. Both the Romans and the Germanic groups will be very important as we progress through this episode. Just going through, we've looked at the groups, let's look at just what was going on in this very short history of the Iberian Peninsula. You'll likely know most of this but I'll put it up in a form that will help us in our own investigation and conversation into the Christianization of the Iberian Peninsula. There's just so many great stories here I can't do justice to really any of them but I'll skim through to set up the scene for our own needs here. Now you could probably go back to the Neanderthals. Some of the last bands of Neanderthals are actually believed to have lived in the area of the Iberian Peninsula but so that's cool but let's fast forward a few tens of thousands of years. This area of the Iberian Peninsula became the home to hunters and gatherers during the Ice Age. There's a really interesting book that looks at this time called Before Orion by an author named Bernie Taylor. I had the author on for an episode of the Beyond the Big Screen podcast and I very well may have him on for another episode relating to the Bible but I really highly suggest this book. You can get it on Amazon. It was really good and it told a very interesting story of the hunter-gatherers in the Iberian Peninsula. A couple of thousand years roll along and the Celts as we said they came in from the north. The Iberians came in almost certainly from the south and they formed a kind of a hybrid culture called the Celt-Iberian civilization. Then the Phoenicians and the Greeks set up their trading colonies. The Iberian Peninsula itself was full of natural resources and it was good for agricultural trading. On top of all that it was a good stopping off point for further trading into northern Europe. Hooking around you could go from Phoenicia where the Phoenicians were from right in eastern the eastern far eastern Mediterranean. They could sail across the Mediterranean, stop off here, stop off there, have a set up a really solid trading post in the Iberian Peninsula. Then they could hook around into the Atlantic and go to points north particularly Britain. Britain was so important because it was one of the few places where tin was readily available. Now you don't think of it but tin was an incredibly important resource in these early times. Tin was a resource that was needed to make copper alloys. Copper ore is fairly abundant as far as mineral deposits go across Europe, Africa, and Asia. With some technology you don't really need too fancy of a technology. A wood fire can actually smelt copper out of copper ore. It's not you could do it in your campfire. Now copper is a beautiful metal and it's wonderful for jewelry and all sorts of stuff like that but it's not very durable. But once it's mixed with this tin and a couple of other things and allows it makes alloys that are much more durable and useful for tools and weapons. The problem with that is there's really only two major sources of tin in the ancient world. One was in Britain and one was Afghanistan. So pretty farly separated places and places that are really far from the core area of the Bronze Age. The Iberian Peninsula was a good transit point for these eastern Mediterranean folks to get into northern Europe. An offshoot of the Phoenicians if you will were the Carthaginians and they became a really powerhouse in the area of North Africa. Carthage as you would imagine. They set up shop in the Iberian peninsulas for many of the same reasons that the rest did. The Celts and the Celtiberians and the Iberians. You can see that many cultures were going to the Iberian Peninsula and meeting there. Really making things an interesting melting pot. Now this is where our Romans hit the scene. They entered the peninsula in the 200s BCE. They came with a vengeance too. They were looking to conquer it. They got into a lot of fights, a lot of political arrangements. Their main concern initially was taking out the Carthaginians. Then they slowly absorbed, conquered, fought the other groups. It took almost into this common era AD time to fully conquer the peninsula. Several areas like the Basque land and the northwestern corner proved difficult to fully pacify. And as we will see this Basque country and what will later be called Asturias or Galicia will come up again often in this episode. The Romans organized and reorganized the province of what they called Hispania several times over the next several hundred years when they were in control. They initially divided the peninsula into two pieces focused on the two coastal areas, a western coast and an eastern coast. By the time of Diocletian in the early 300s, there were five to six provinces. And I'll describe them of terms in the modern geopolitical boundaries. You had firstly Baetica and that was the southern Spain around modern Andalusia. Then you had Lusitania for kind of moving in a clockwise direction. That was mostly modern Portugal, about two thirds of the country of the southern section of the country. Then you have Galicia which is modern day Galicia or Galicia Spain and about a third of northern Portugal. The rest of Portugal that wasn't Lusitania. Then you had Terraconensis which was the northeastern corner of Spain really along the Basque countries in the Pyrenees, Catalonia, on and off again the Balearic Islands would become a part of this Terraconensis. Eventually they would become independent of Terraconensis though. And then there was Cartogenensis which was basically central east coast of the modern state of Spain. Now and again Mauritania in the northwestern corner of Africa would be included administratively with Hispania. They really had a similar geography and climate to the southern Iberian Peninsula and there was generally a lot of cultural overlap during certain periods as well. A lot of travel. It was very easy to get from one point to the other. Hispania would see a gradual process of romanization. You know the usual story we hear everywhere where the Romans came. They started in the coastal areas. The cities romanized faster and more completely. The countryside and the remoter areas took longer to get to absorb this romanization. In a place like the Iberian Peninsula you had places holdouts like the Basque Country and other mountainous regions which the romanization was very light on. But we can say with decent confidence that by the 3rd-4th century Hispania was a very romanized place. It fully adopted Roman and Latin culture and there was Christianity in there for sure. Like I said we'll zoom into this Christianity but you can see where a lot of the trends that we've been talking about are in full effect here. Hispania was really quite agricultural. There were many large farms which would be called latifundia. After Diocletian's so-called reforms, free-holding small landowners were absorbed by the large landowning magnates. Diocletian's reforms and Constantine's reforms kept the Roman Empire afloat for some time in the 300s. But also due to the Diocletian reforms, you know my opinion on those reforms, the economy just contracted. The city shrank and travel became more difficult especially commercial travel. This just wasn't in Hispania as we well know it was across the entire empire. This whole trend more affected the west more so than the east but Hispania was hit fairly hard by all this because it was so reliant on trade. In the 300s and the 400s the Germanic groups are now on the move. Invasions into Hispania started as early as the 400s. Groups that had been long settled on the north of the imperial border started getting pushed by even meaner groups coming from the east such as the Huns. The Roman Empire was weakened from the inside economically, demographically because of diseases and so forth just as the threat started to mount from the outside. I mean in the big scheme of things those peoples like the Huns were getting affected by a lot of the plague and environmental concerns that were happening and that's why they were pushing into northern China and the Roman Empire. But that squeezing was pushing the Germanic groups up against the Roman Empire that was already weakened by all these other trends. The Germanic tribes were really unsettled at the border. They were not nomadic people. They were a settled people and now they were on the move because they were getting chased out of their long held homelands. These groups were not always unfriendly. They were long time federates and allies of Rome in many circumstances. They wanted protection from the Huns and these other groups. Rome was just unable and in many cases unwilling to help. So the Germanic groups started to enter Roman territory en masse in the late 300s and the early 400s. That's how the first set of Germanic tribes get into Hispania. Most of them were Aryan Christians. They spoke an eastern Germanic language with the exception of the Alans. First we have the Vandals and they were divided into two tribes, the Siling and the Hasding tribes. They were possibly from southern Scandinavia and there is some evidence from this but they came into the empire in the early 400s for the same reason all these other tribes did. They moved their way into Iberia. Eventually they were pushed to the south of the peninsula and the east by the Visigoths. They were able to win a battle which allowed the southern tribes of Vandals to flee to North Africa where they set up a major kingdom there that would last a few hundred years, 150-ish, 200 years. Next we have the Alans and the Alans were not Germanic. They were a real Aryan tribe as in Iranian tribe. Their name Alan actually derives from Aryan. Aryan is also the root for Iran and actually Ireland. It's a proto-Germanic word that goes way back that means noble and has different meanings. They were descendants of the Scythian tribes of antiquity. Some of them probably did practice Aryan Christianity. Aryan as in Aries not to be confused with Aryan. They probably also had a mix of traditional pagan religions just like a lot of the Germanic groups did. They eventually teamed up with the Vandals in Hispania. They participated in defeating the Huns with the Vandals and the Romans at the Battle of the Cantilunian Fields in northeastern Gaul. The Visigoths were also major participants. This Battle of the Cantilunian Fields really stopped the advance of Attila the Hun into Europe and marked the high water point of the Hunnic Empire under Attila. These Alans didn't make much of a mark in western Europe. The eastern version of the Alan tribes would eventually settle in the Caucasus and become eastern Orthodox Christians. They're the modern day Ossetians and they speak a language that's, you know, separated by thousands of years but similar in a descendant of the Alan language. One of the few things that the Alans may have actually put a big stamp on is the name of the area of Spain called Catalonia which may have derived from Goth Alania or possibly just Gothlandia but it's a kind of a cool story anyways. The Visigoths as we said they pushed out the Alans with the Vandals so in the many cases the Alans either just were absorbed into the Visigothic communities wiped out in battles or they were when the ones who went with the Vandals were absorbed into Vandal culture. Then we go back to these Basques. I really love talking about the Basques. They of course continued to be a presence. They're there today. The Romans as we said they really pushed in on the traditional Basque areas and really for the most part the Basques in many areas were completely Romanized especially the ones in the the places the Romans really wanted like the northern Meseta. If you really want to learn more about the Basques there's a great book called The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky. He writes a lot of great books on history so if you're really interested in learning more I would go turn to that book. Now we have the Swabies or the Swabies. They're attested to as far back as Julius Caesar. They were originally from somewhere in southern Scandinavia area which it's kind of cop out to say that these Germanic groups are from southern Scandinavia because really going back into when the Germanic groups initially broke off from the Indo-European tribes that's where they all settled and spread from but there may have been in a time of late antiquity they may have lived in southern Scandinavia. They moved around the area of Gaul and its environs and they were defeated by Rome. They eventually settled into the area of more or less modern Slovakia which was kind of outside of the Roman Empire but again they were pushed by these Huns and these other groups from the east and kept moving. They moved through Roman Gaul looting and generally just trying to get by and survive. Eventually they settled into the western Iberian Peninsula and set up their kingdom. In the early 400s they were a mix of Catholic Christians and Pagans but then they converted to Arianism and politically they probably did this to make the Visigoths happy and the Visigoths were active missionaries to the Germanic groups to get them to convert to Arianism. At its maximum size the kingdom was mostly encompassed that Roman province of Galicia and reached into Lusitania maybe about halfway into modern-day Portugal. So as far as these kingdoms go it was a pretty major player. Over the decades it was pushed back by the Visigoths into Galicia proper the modern upper corner western northwestern corner of the peninsula. By the 580s Leovigild or Leovigild king of the Visigoths finally took out the last Swabian king. So that's a not too bad of a run for a good 150ish years of a kingdom to go. The Swabies had a particular hairstyle called the Swabian knot. It was a really intricate braid wrapped up in a bun on the side of the head of males. The bigger and more intricate and wild I guess you could say the braid and the bun were the more powerful the warrior the leader was. It's not particularly important piece of fact or history but I thought it was really interesting and you should you can go and look up the pictures of them they're really cool and there's a guy who has a modern website where he did one with this hair. Now we get to the heart of the matter the Visigoths. They lived north of the Danube probably originally from that northern Germany southern Scandinavia area we talked so much about. They were Aryan Christians and they lived in that area where Wulfilas was actually from. We had a whole episode on Wulfilas and in the next episode we'll get into him more so I'll just leave it at that. In the year 376 they settled in the empire. They were settled in the empire with the little help of the Romans but then things went really sour with the Romans. In 378 you have the Battle of Adrianople which was a disaster for the Roman Empire. In the 380s and the 390s they're beaten up pretty badly by Theodosius the emperor who was actually from Hispania himself. By the early 400s they had moved to the Balkans. They had settled a little bit but then moved. They conquered Athens for a bit in the late 390s. That was an interesting stopover. Then in 410 they besieged and sacked Rome. After the sack of Rome by about the year 500 they had wrestled about two-thirds of the southern part of Gaul from the Romans. Then they pushed into Hispania and they conquered almost all of Hispania. They pushed the Alans and the Vandals out all together. They bottled up the Basques and then pushed the Swabies up into the northern western corner of the peninsula. They would just continually chip away at their kingdom too. At this point the Visigothic capital was based in Toulouse in southern Gaul. Powerful Germanic tribes from the north began to push in on the Visigoths and push them south out of Gaul in the 1500s. There was a major battle near Poitiers of all places which broke Visigothic power in Gaul. The Franks took over control of Toulouse which is in the southern section of Gaul. Then the Franks basically took over the rest of the Visigothic holdings in that Gaul modern day France area. The Franks even pushed their advance into Hispania proper. The great king of the Ostrogoths Theodoric gave the Visigoths a lifeline though and he made the Visigoths a protectorate of his powerful Ostrogothic Italian kingdom. The Franks backed off for the time being and this area sort of settled out. Along the way the Visigoths made law codes that were specifically for Goths and had a separate one for the Hispano-Roman population and it really served to keep the population split. The Ostrogoths did something very similar. Now the Franks on the other hand were much more likely and much more prone to incorporating themselves with the Romans. They really blended their cultures together which maybe allowed them to be more successful you could argue. Roman and Gothic laws would finally be synthesized together in the middle of the 7th century. This law code made universal legal rights and as in the middle ages obligations for the Hispano-Roman population and the Visigoths. Now in the meanwhile the Byzantines get involved. They always do. Justinian IV planned to reconquer the west for the Roman Empire. Ironically it really ended the last vestiges of Roman institutions in the west. If you want to take a time where you know you take that 476 date for the end of the Roman Empire and it's useful in its sorts but really the end of the Roman Empire was when this Italian wars by the Byzantines versus the Ostrogoths winds up finally ending. The first step was the Byzantines took out the Vandals in North Africa and they did that pretty quickly in the 533 to 534 time span. If you want to learn a little bit more you can go watch the recent video about the fall of Christian North Africa I helped produce for the study of antiquity in the middle ages on YouTube. Nick Barksdale did an incredible job on this video. I mean that this is one of the best videos I've done with him and I know we'll have plenty more but I really did enjoy this one. The Byzantines gained control of an effective area of modern-day Tunisia and Carthage with this conquest of the Vandals and they really had nominal control of the entire Maghreb or the section of North Africa but I mean I'm talking about really nominal. The Berbers and you had holdout Vandals and just very little practical control but you know they could put their stamp on the map. Next the Byzantines set their sight on reconquering Italy from the Ostrogoths and this just creates a really several decades long mess just terrible stuff. During this time the local Visigothic leaders in southern Spain invited Byzantines to help them out with a conflict with other Visigoths. The Byzantine army arrived in Baetica in 552. The Byzantine area of control expanded and contracted and it was difficult for the Visigoths to push the Byzantines out because they were really lodged in the Sierra Nevada and this Baetic mountain chain that just made it very difficult to fully conquer them. Campaigns chipped away at the Byzantines until they were finally pushed off the peninsula in the mid 620s. So in the whole grand scheme of things Byzantine Spain lasted about 70 years. After that the Byzantines would still control the Balearic Islands until the Arab conquest so they hung on quite a long time. We're going to zoom in there was a lot of Visigothic kings and if you listen to David Cott's History of Spain you can learn a lot more about them in detail and thank you again David for your introduction to this episode. The two kings we're going to talk about are Leovigild and his son Rechored. You'll see these names spelled in almost infinite different ways but they were both really important politically and religiously. Leovigild reigned during the 560s and the 580s. He moved the capital of Visigothic kingdom to Toledo. He really did a lot to stabilize the kingdom. He minted his own coinage and this is a first for the Visigoths using a Byzantine style of coinage but with his own likeness. Then after Leovigild you have Rechored who reigned from the 580s until 601. He's one of the longer most stable runs of kingship in Visigothic history. Leovigild's one of his main claims to fame is that he tried to make all of Hispania into Aryan Christians. Really kind of a hybrid compromise Aryanism-Catholicism. Rechored went in the complete opposite direction and went and converted the whole kingdom to Catholicism and made it the official religion. Now politically both Leovigild and Rechored's regnal periods bound Visigothic and Hispania together politically and religiously. That was really their big goal. Get everybody together kind of like what the Franks were doing. He really wanted to make the Visigothic and Hispano-Romans a one combined people and a culture. Kind of moving away from that standard Visigothic overlord that didn't engage with the people. They both wanted to link the church and the state very closely together. Really of all the other kingdoms in the Western Roman Empire you could really only say the Byzantines had as close of a relationship between church and state as the Visigoths did. The Visigoths had a very difficult relationship with the Jews as well. Rechored was sort of neutral in his relations but other Visigothic kings made all sorts of laws to Jews and Hispania. Now the 600s, that really marks the decline of the Visigothic kingdoms. You just had many bad kings and the good ones were really few and far between. They had succession troubles from one king to the next. A lot of conflict among the nobles. Just a ton of internal conflict amongst all the different levels of aristocracy. There's not a lot of nitty-gritty of primary sources on this but you get the general gist that it wasn't all happy-go-lucky in there. Now we get to the Arab conquest. This I promise will be very short but I also promise that we will get into it in much much more detail later on because I love this period of history. Now I'll skip over the details of the Islamic side of the story today. I don't want this episode to turn into like a 10-hour series by itself. We'll look into that side of the story and we've kind of danced around it with our talk with Scott Rank and that video episode that's also audio if you want to go listen to the audio about the conquest of northern Africa by the Islamic armies. We have touched on all these various issues but I really want to wrap up the story of the Visigoths today and you wrap up the story whenever we talk about the Arab conquests. The Arabs just completely swept over the Vandals and Carthage. They probably absorbed some of the Vandal nobility. Arianism, especially certain versions of Arianism, was not a huge leap to Islam religiously. The Arabs were also able to pretty easily absorb the Berber tribes. There had been a continued and constant conflict between the Vandals and the Berbers for that long time so it didn't it wasn't a huge shock and that the Berbers had a lot of conflict with the Romans for centuries too that the Berbers weren't feeling too too linked up with either the Vandals or the Greco-Roman population. Then we have this odd character of Count Julian. He's mentioned in almost all the Arab chronicles. He might have been a Visigoth but he also possibly could have been a local Byzantine leader of the Sweta community which is directly across from Gibraltar on the African side. I have not been able to figure out a great way to say that name and I've been stumbling over it for quite some time. But that's directly across from Gibraltar so very strategically placed place. Anyways this Count Julian had a major conflict with the contemporary Visigothic king of that time so what he did was he helped the Arabs get a foothold in southern Hispania and which I could say that the Arab armies were just so masterful at getting these footholds and using political situations that were going on they just used them masterfully because they get that foothold and then they were able to expand get another foothold expand and that was maybe part of the reason why they peaked in certain areas too because if they couldn't get that foothold it was hard for them to spread from there. But anyways that's a different conversation for a different day that I would love to talk about. I think that's a really fascinating part of the history of that time is how the Islamic army spread but let's not get sucked into that one when we're trying to wrap up the story of the Visigoths. Now because of Count Julian helping the Arab armies get a foothold in Hispania there was a major victory by the Arab Berber armies in southern Spain called the Battle of Guadalete in 711. The Arab armies moved north and they just didn't stop they just kept going and going and going all the way up into Gaul. They moved incredibly fast. The entire peninsula was under Arab control by the end of 711. They got that foothold in 711 and they were really in control by the end. Now that's not to say that they had an iron grip on the whole place by the end of 711. The control was light on the ground in a lot of places. Local Visigothic leaders, you might even call them a warlord, named Peleo or oftentimes Pelagius lived in the far northwest corner and he started making trouble. He wasn't directly under Arab control. He was more of a client king. Now Peleo is an absolute legendary character in the history of Spain and the Iberian Peninsula. At some point he refused to pay his tribute to the Arabs. The Muslims eventually went and sent an army to set Peleo to heel and make sure he paid up. A bishop named Oppa came with the Muslims to get Peleo to completely submit. The Visigoths, so this shows something important here. The Visigoths already were collaborating with the Muslims, even Visigothic, high-level Visigothic Christian clergy. Like I said, the Arab Umayyads were really great at playing off these local leaderships and these local squabbles. I'd like to share just a little quote from the Chronicle of Alfonso. This is also called the Chronicle of Alfonso III. Chapter 8. Long years moaned in oppression the homeland of the Arabs, and they had to pay their tributes through Escaidillos to the king of Babylon until a king was elected and they affirmed their throne in Cordova, the partition city. The Goths succumbed, some on the edge of the sword and others to the impulses of hunger. However, some loyal ancestry were saved, addressing France and others for the most part. Entered the country of the Asturians and chose their prince, Pelagius, son of Duke Vavilla and royal blood. But as soon as the news came, Saracen sent an innumerable army to Asturias, under the command of Duke Alcama, who invaded Spain with Tariq and Obas, metropolitan bishop of the Hispanic sea, son of the king Egeka, for whose betrayal the Goths perished. Now, the Arab sources say that a small force was sent to bring the leader of a minor local band into line and this was not a big army, just a small deal. Here's a little more from chapter 9 of the Chronicle of Alfonso III and see what you think about this. Pelagius was instructed of his coming. He took refuge in a cave of Mount Tisuba, which has as its cave name of Santa Maria. He was immediately surrounded by the army, and the bishop approached. Obas spoke to him like this, You cannot ignore, brother, how the whole of Spain was constituted under the dominion of the Goths, and if reunited, all their armies did not manage to resist the impetus of the Ishmaelites. How can you just defend yourself in this cave? Listen to my advice, give up on your commitment, so that you get many goods, and in the peace that the Arabs grant you, you can enjoy yours. To this Pelagius said, I will not be friends with the Arabs, nor will I submit to their empire. You do not know that the church of the Lord is compared to the moon, which although it diminishes its shape, recovers the point its primitive greatness. We have confidence in the mercy of God, who will bring out this hill that you have in sight, the health of Hispania and the restoration of the army of the Goths, to may those words of the prophet be fulfilled in us. I will punish their inequities with the rod and with the scourges their sins, but I will not turn away my mercy. So, although to do merits, we abide by this sentence, the most severe sense, we wait on the mercy of the Lord, the restoration of His church and His people, and the fortune of the kingdom. So we despise this crowd of heathens, and we will never mix with them. And so on and so forth. The army swung back into Hispania, and this swing back into Hispania served for a few purposes. A, it was, why not just go and kick this pain in the neck Palaio, beat him up a little bit, get him to fall into line, then solidify all the other gains in Hispania before they move back up into Gaul and take the Franks out again. It was a good idea. What happened is though, Palaio sucked the Arab army that was sent to extract this tribute from him into a network of narrow valleys where they were able to just do hit and run tactic. They could hit the Arabs from the high ground and from the rear. If Christians, our sources are to believe this was a complete and utter rout. The Arab chronicles oftentimes disagree with this assessment, but no matter what happened, several of the Arab commanders such as Alkama were killed in the battle. So there must've been something to it. This right here is the beginning of the kingdom of Asturias, the first independent Spanish kingdom of the middle ages. Traditionally, this battle of Covadonga marks the beginning of the Reconquista, the Spanish and Portuguese, but you could really say in a lot of ways, the Visigothic fight to regain Hispania from the Arabs. This new, I mean, it eventually did happen. A Visigothic, Hispano-Roman country was going to be born. Now much would change in just about every conceivable way in the next 700 years, but the groundwork for the Reconquista and the early modern period Spanish kingdom, all that groundwork's being laid right here. The Visigothic mark on the history of the Iberian peninsula was made. It was fully stamped onto the land and into the culture and the history. To wrap up today, what was the impact and the importance of the Visigothic period? For one thing, we get a huge number of Gothic Germanic surnames and some first names as well. You'll see that there's just a huge number of these Gothic and Germanic surnames that are still popular in Spanish-speaking and even Portugal today. You have Hernando and Hernandez. That S as it's really said is Hernandez, is a patronymic title like the son in English names like Jackson, et cetera. There's the closely related Fernando and Fernandez, Gonzalo, Gonzalez, Rodrigo, Rodriguez, spelled with an S of course. Remember that Antonio, I won't forget. These easy names are usually spelled with a Z in Castilian Spanish, but pronounced with an S sound. In Portuguese, they are spelled with an S sound and pronounced with an S sound. You have the name Gomo, Gomez, Ruiz, Ramiro, Ramirez, Alvaro, Alvarez, my own surname Guerra is quite common in Spanish and Portuguese countries and it derives from a Germanic name as well. There are a couple of first names come in to play from the Visigoths, Alberto, Araberto, Amarigo, Ricardo, Eduardo, et cetera, et cetera. Amarigo is more of an Italian name, but that did come from a Germanic language. Much more in the way of male names than female names though. Not many Gothic and Germanic place names hang along though. Maybe that Gothelania or Gothelandia for Catalonia and a couple of names of a couple of cities, but not a huge impact in that way. Let's talk about some demographics or as much as we can figure out from places that didn't take modern accurate censuses and that sort of thing. At the height with scholars can estimate that there was probably about 200 to 400,000 Visigoths, maybe about a hundred thousand Swaby, but that's in a population of about six to nine million Romans. The combined Germanic population was never more than maybe 8% of the entire peninsula and it was probably really in the two to 4% range. That's probably that that small population is probably why Visigothic faded out as a language and they didn't make a bigger impact on things like place names. Visigothic culture did make a mark, it just wasn't a huge mark. Hispano-Romano culture was just so much more ingrained and so much larger that it was really hard for the Visigoths to make a big impact on that Roman culture. Now this was a ton of history in a relatively short amount of time. If you want to learn more, there are plenty of sources. In a podcast form, as I said, David Cott's History of Spain is an excellent resource. There are a number of great books out there too. In the next episode, we will focus in specifically on the religious story of Hispania. All of this will help us get acclimated to a more medieval world. All of these groups in the west are going to have a very strong pull on the papacy. As new characters move in, we'll talk about them too. Look for a little history of the Slavs in not too long. Islam will also get more of a billing. I'm glad you've come along for this journey and I hope to talk to you next time.