Hispania in the Middle Ages was far more than a mere geographical reference. It was a reality, based on a defined cultural profile and sense of identity, that from an early date, had obvious political content.
Carlos de Ayala Martínez
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
The word ‘Spain’ derives from the Latin term Hispania, which in ancient Rome was used to designate an administrative demarcation made up of several provinces and which, as a whole, corresponded to the Iberian Peninsula. An old mythological tradition associated the origin of Hispania with a hero called Hispan, nephew of Hercules and mythical settler of the land to which he gave his name.
The geographical coherence of that administrative demarcation endured after the fall of Rome. Saint Isidore, at the beginning of the 7th century, gives an account of it in his Etymologies: «It is situated between Africa and Gaul, enclosed to the north by the Pyrenees mountains and surrounded by the sea on its other sides». In the same passage, the learned bishop of Seville commented on the other names by which, in addition to Hispania —or its equivalent Spania— the Peninsula was known: Iberia, after the river Ibero (Ebro), which ran through a large part of its territory, and Hesperia, because Hesperus was the name of the westernmost star in the firmament.
The problem lies in determining when this geographical unit becomes something more than a physical space, when it is possible to glimpse feelings of attachment that transform it into a cultural sphere of identification, and even into a political reality to which one belongs and which can be controlled by some faction or other. Or, in other words, when Hispania becomes a ‘patria’, another Latin term meaning the place of origin to which we are naturally attached because it is the land of our fathers.
Once again St Isidore gives us the answer. His Historia Gothorum is preceded by a well-known passage ‘In Praise of Hispania’ (De laude Spaniae), which he describes as «the most beautiful of all the lands that stretch from the West to India». And shortly afterwards, in narrating the vicissitudes of the Gothic kings, he refers to Suintila as the first who «obtained monarchical power over all Hispania» (totius Spaniae intra oceani).
Saint Isidore was exaggerating. Probably not in the sentiment of love for Hispania that he wished to convey, but in projecting an image of the Peninsula as a political unity. The Visigothic monarchy did not manage to structure the whole of Spain under its sole politico-religious leadership. It is true, however, that the idealisation of a united and coherent Hispania that Isidore conceived was indeed perceived in this way —or wanted to be— by those who tried to take it over when the Toledo monarchy collapsed.
This was first attempted by the Umayyad caliphate through its governors of Africa who, in 711, set about conquering the Peninsula. Although the Muslims’ control over it was never fully effective, the fact is that their theoretical perception, and certainly their propaganda, did point in that direction: the Spania of the Visigoths became al-Andalus, a change of name which, evidencing a break in political leadership, came to underline the identity of the territory over which that leadership was to be exercised.
But discontent with Islamic domination soon surfaced, and this discontent, fuelled by fugitives from the south, took the form of a Christian monarchy that was organised in the mountains of northern Cantabria in the 9th century. Soon (ca. 900), this monarchy, with its centre in Oviedo, began to design an ideological strategy of legitimisation based on two points: firstly, that it was the direct heir of the old kingdom of Toledo and, as such, called upon to recover the territorial control that this kingdom had exercised over the whole of Hispania and secondly, that in order to do this, it was obviously necessary to expel the Muslims who had occupied it illegitimately in the name of a false god. The ideology originated in the 10th century in the intellectual efforts of clerics in the service of Alfonso III; only much later —not until the mid-19th century— would this ideology be given the name of «reconquest».
It would be an ideology with a long life that brought many benefits. It served both to justify processes of territorial expansion and to make palatable high levels of concentration of power in the hands of kings who acted as true military warlords. For this reason, the kings of Asturias, who soon settled in León, were not the only ones to use such an effective tool. It was also the Pamplona monarchs in the 10th and 11th centuries who, for their own reasons, also wanted to set themselves up as heirs to the Gothic kings. It was not in vain that an influential contemporary of Sancho III of Pamplona, Abbot Oliba, around 1030 gave the heirs of the Pamplona monarch the unusual title of rex ibericus.
This unitary vision of Hispania, heir to a harmonious and idealised Gothic past, would live on throughout the Middle Ages and even beyond. But it should be noted that this hegemonic argument was not the only image of peninsular reality to be formulated during those centuries. In fact, before the end of the 11th century, it was already evident that more than one concept of political legitimacy, claiming to be based on the same heritage, was operative in the Peninsula. But this made it necessary either to rethink the scheme, denying that Hispania was indeed the birthright of the Gothic monarchy, or simply to admit that this heritage was divisible and, therefore, that instead of speaking of Hispania it was necessary to speak of «the Hispanias» (Hispaniae).
The first option, that of ignoring the Gothic heritage, had various manifestations. One of them, influenced by Frankish-Pontifical influence that was very present in the Peninsula from 1100 onwards, presents Hispania asa part of Christendom. The Muslim occupation was not an attack on the Gothic monarchy, but on the Church as a whole, to which sovereignty over the Peninsula corresponded by virtue of the so-called ‘Donation of Constantine’, an apocryphal document, supposedly issued by the Emperor Constantine, giving all the western lands that had belonged to the former Roman Empire into the hands of the Pope. This gave rise to the idea, present in the Codex Calixtinus, that it was Charlemagne and his faithful archbishop Turpin who liberated the land of Hispania through the crusade.
The kings of León were unwillingly to accept such interference, which deprived them of their highly profitable Visigothic heritage, but neither could they ignore the fact that they were not the only ones to have a legitimate claim to this heritage in the territory of their former monarchy. To overcome this difficulty, and also to neutralise the interference of papal universalism, Alfonso VI assumed the imperial title in 1077, which enabled him to proclaim his hegemony over the other kings. The conquest of Toledo in 1085 was important for this. It was easy for the imperial claim to leadership over the whole Peninsula to be associated from then on with the royal city on the Tagus, the former capital of the unitary Visigothic monarchy. In fact, only two years after the conquest, the chancellery of Alfonso VI proclaimed his status as «emperor over all the nations of Spain» (imperator super omnes Spanie nationes).
The failure of the imperial idea of the kingdom of León after the death of Alfonso VII in 1157 was another blow to the unitary conception of Hispania. The Spain that Menéndez Pidal once defined as that of «the five kingdoms» (Portugal, León, Castile, Navarre and Aragon) was imposed. It was a Hispania inimical to unity, far removed from the Visigothic utopia. This was stated in a curious chronicle, the so-called Liber regum, composed around 1200 in the kingdom of Navarre to justify its political individuality. In this text, Gothic inheritance was declared defunct, and the dynastic legitimacy of Castile, Navarre and Aragon was posited not on the heroic spirit of Covadonga, but on an idealised common ancestry from a mythical race of judges. The idea of a pan-Hispanic empire thus gave way to an individualised notion of kingdoms, each having a specific territory and its own cultural trajectory.
Yet the unifying thread of Gothic heritage was by no means lost. What is more, the definitive union of León and Castile in 1230 served to revive it with a strength that made the new political formation the most powerful realm in the whole of the Peninsula. The ideologues of that unification, the great historians of the 13th century, applied themselves with determination to the task of reviving a glorious and unified Hispania. In the preface to his Chronicon mundi (ca. 1238), Lucas de Tuy refers to the «almighty freedom» (omnimoda libertas) of Hispania in an attempt to emphasise the unitary personality of a territory that was alien to any foreign interference. But it was above all the Toledan archbishop Jiménez de Rada who, in his Historia Gotica, definitively bolstered a discourse of integration that the dominant Castilian monarchy would thereafter make its own; he was a man of broad intellectual horizons and liked to stress that it was by the very diverse peoples and cultures —including the Arabs— that the reality of Hispania had been forged. But his legitimising discourse was clear and unequivocal: it is the Gothic people, heirs of the early peoples of Hispania and a reference point for the hegemonic legitimacy of their successors the Leonese and Castilians, who played the historical role of shaping the political reality of Hispania at its inception; it is therefore up to those successors, and in particular the Castilians, to consummate the process.
The Alphonsine scriptorium would be the great recipient of these ideas, and would be capable of definitively turning them into a political programme. The Estoria de Espanna (History of Spain), written in this scriptorium, was its great historiographical legitimisation. A series of «lordships» succeeded one another in control of the peninsula, contributing to the creation of Spain. This succession, especially striking when Hispan, Hercules’ nephew, became lord of Spain, reached a decisive turning point with the arrival of the Goths. From then on, they would be the legitimate recipients of a lordship that would be inherited by the Astur-Leonese and Castilians. The latter therefore had effective control over the whole of Spain.
To put these ideas into practice, Alfonso X revived the idea of empire by associating it with an ambitious bid for the German throne. This was nothing more than a strategy to gain recognition in the Peninsula for the authority that could be expected of a candidate for the Romano-Germanic Empire. But this recognition was not forthcoming. James I of Aragon officially protested against it in 1259, the same year in which Alfonso X had decided to appoint himself «king of Spain» in the prologue to the so-called Book of the Crosses. He would do so on several more occasions, but his imperial project, as with that of his predecessors, ended in failure.
Yet Alfonso’s model of monarchy did not fail when he did, and the word empire continued to be used as a synonym for power projected over the whole of Spain. A century later, a Catalan chronicle put the following significant words into the mouth of the Master of Santiago addressed to his lord, King Peter I of Castile: Seredes rey de Castiella e d’Aragón, e, si pleases a Dios, aprés, emperador d’Espanya (You will be king of Castile and Aragon, and, if it pleases God, afterwards, emperor of Spain). This empire no longer reflected a claim to a specific crown; it was a way of expressing effective dominion over the whole of the Peninsula under the legitimising cover of the Gothic inheritance. The Catholic Monarchs would later base their political propaganda on the same argument.
It is clear, then, that the dominant perception of Hispania during the Middle Ages was generally in line with the political discourse of the power capable of imposing itself on the rest of the peninsular kingdoms. But did these kingdoms accept it peacefully, and is it possible to speak of an alternative explanation outside the contrived vision of a unified —or yet to be unified— Hispania, which in the mid-13th century represented a scheme that was already solely Castilian?
From the sphere of the Crown of Aragon, when in the 13th century the Llibre dels Feyts stated that Catalonia is the best kingdom of Spain, the most honoured and the most noble, putting these words into the mouth of James I himself, it is obvious that he was not referring to a unitary political project but to a comparative framework that extended beyond geographical boundaries; in the same speech, the king appeals for support for Castile, threatened by the uprising led by Andalusi Muslims in 1264, and to the need to save Spain. It is obvious that Spain in this case is not merely a geographical framework, but a conceptual space occupied by a specific Christian community that is under threat and with whom the king feels solidarity. Nor does this solidarity express the hegemonic project of a king; on the contrary, it reflects the interests of a community that is culturally defined and politically structured across a group of individual kingdoms.
It is true that the last centuries of the Middle Ages were lived throughout the peninsula under the historiographical influence of the Jiménez de Rada-Alfonso X axis. But this influence tended to be processed in terms that could be assumed by the kingdoms of the peninsular «periphery», which emphasised the old scheme of the divided inheritance, fleeing from the exclusive protagonism of Castile. We see this in Portugal and Navarre, but the Crown of Aragon was undoubtedly the most characteristic area in this respect. Thus, at the end of the 14th century, the Chronicle of Pere el Ceremoniós tended to identify Hispania with Aragon, and in the 15th century, the Catalan Pere Tomic —who was familiar with the work of the Toledan, and did not hesitate to lament the loss of Gothic Spain by exalting the memory of Pelayo— when it came to explain the foundations of Catalan idiosyncrasy, turned to a figure of ultra-Pyrenean origin, Otger Cataló, governor of Aquitaine, who would be responsible for the initial reconquest of Catalonia and also for its own name.
What conclusion can we draw? Hispania in the Middle Ages is far from being a mere geographical reference point. It is a reality which, on the basis of defined cultural profiles and developed feelings of identity, has had an obvious political content from an early date. However, this content oscillates between two opposing positions: an idealised claim to unity and a constitutively plural reality. Unity was basically upheld by Castile with particular intensity from the 13th century onwards, while the peninsular reality was felt to be plural, fundamentally by the non-Castilian-Leonese political formations; these were the «peoples of Spain» referred to in the well-known Book of Alexandre in the mid-13th century, in a display of plural expression of the reality of Hispania.
Further reading:
- Fernández-Ordóñez, Inés, «La denotación de «España» en la Edad Media. Perspectiva historiográfica (siglos VII-XIV)», in J.M. García Martín (dir.), Actas del IX Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española (Cádiz, 2012), vol 1, Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2015: 51-52.
- Ayala Martínez, Carlos de, «Realidad y percepción de Hispania en la Edad Media«, eHumanista, 37 (2017), pp. 206-231.