Spain: A Unique History (8 page)

It has been a rare and enjoyable privilege to labor in the field of the history of Spain for most of the past fifty years. The history of Spain is one of the greatest and most remarkable histories, exactly as Juan Negrín wrote in 1938, and it never ceases to impress or amaze. One of the most extraordinary things about working in the history of Spain is the generally positive reception of the Spanish themselves. Visitors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries found them markedly xenophobic. However that may have been, this was not the case in the twentieth century, with the possible exception of the first years of the Franco regime, long past by the time that I arrived in Spain. With rare exceptions, I have found the Spanish courteous and surprisingly welcoming and hospitable. Only a few months ago a journalist asked me to respond to a questionnaire concerning Spanish affairs and my experience in the country. Among the questions was one along the lines of "What has been your most disagreeable experience in Spain?" This required some thought on my part: for more than half a century I have had a certain number of disagreeable experiences, but they have all seemed so insignificant compared with the very many positive experiences that I had trouble responding to the question.

It has been observed that by the twentieth century the Spanish had to a large extent internalized the Black Legend — another Spanish "first," Spain being merely the first of the modern Western countries to undergo a ubiquitous process of massive self-criticism — and had developed a kind of national inferiority complex that often made them overly deferential to the opinions of foreigners. There is some accuracy in this observation, and the tendency developed in Spain long before the rise of political correctness and multicultural deconstruction late in the twentieth century.

The other side of the coin is what may be called the syndrome of the "hysterical Hispanist." Some of the foreign scholars who fall into this category may be characterized as strongly anti-Spanish and others as unreasonably pro-Spanish. Among the former one may find the distinguished American historian Prescott and the less well-known American literature professor John A. Crow. I myself have occasionally been criticized as being overly sympathetic to the Spanish.

As I explained at the outset, one of my principal goals when I first came to Spain in 1958 was to attempt to form an objective evaluation of Spanish society and history, avoiding the extremes of unfair criticism — so common among foreigners — or of romantic patronizing or superficial endorsement, which have also been very common. I leave it to my readers, who for the most part have been quite generous, to judge to what extent I have achieved this goal.

The Hispanic Peninsula in 800

The Iberian Peninsula entered recorded history with the Roman conquest, after which it became an integral part of the empire. Language, culture, and economic structure all stemmed from Rome, as well as the name "Hispania," a geographic term for the entire peninsula (which became a distinct "diocese" of the empire after the Diocletian reforms of the fourth century).
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Its society passed through each of the major phases and vicissitudes of the later Roman system, though some of the northern districts were less thoroughly Romanized than the south and east.

Spain emerged as a kingdom, if not exactly a state, under the Visigoths in the sixth century, though the Visigothic monarchy was slow to establish general control over the entire peninsula — and even then somewhat uncertainly in part of the north. Later generations would look back to the Visigoths as the first leaders of an independent "Spain," but in the twentieth century historians would challenge so simple and straightforward an interpretation. By that time the Visigothic kingdom was increasingly interpreted in negative terms of decline, disunity, and general weakness, an interpretative deconstruction that began historiographically well before the deconstruction of Spain in general became fashionable.

During the late twentieth century the Anglo-American historian Peter Brown introduced the concept of "Late Antiquity" as a relatively distinct period of historical transition from the ancient world to the Middle Ages. This term has been increasingly accepted as a way to periodize history between the fourth and seventh centuries. Somewhat similarly, it became fashionable during the second half of the twentieth century to reject the classic understanding of the "fall of Rome," replacing this with a new perspective that saw the Germanic kingdoms as evolutionary successor states, which formed a kind of functional symbiosis with the remains of the Roman world, not overthrowing it so much as reincorporating it in a new quasi-synthesis.
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There is no question that in most of the new kingdoms, Germanic rulers tried to cloak themselves in Roman authority and to maintain much of the existing structures, but there is also no doubt that a real break occurred during the fifth century.
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The break was most complete in Roman Britain, where the old civilization almost totally disappeared, but much less extensive in the peninsulas of Spain and Italy, where at first more of the old order survived.

The "Grand Narrative" of Spanish history, as it took full form in the nineteenth century, defined a national identity and a kind of historical purpose and mission, the origins of which were purportedly laid by the Visigoths and developed more extensively by the kingdom of Asturias. Major aspects of this interpretation have varied, most notably between liberal nationalists and Catholic traditionalists during the nineteenth century, but for some time it constituted a meta-interpretation of the Spanish past. The Grand Narrative first began to be questioned in the mood of pessimism that gripped a part of the thinking of late nineteenth-century Spain, even before 1898. Thoroughly rehabilitated and restored by Franco, its last great avatar, it began to be yet more decisively rejected in the era of democratization and autonomies that followed the dictatorship. The political and ideological deconstruction of the Spanish nation that ensued provoked an intense debate that has only accelerated in recent years — the most intense ongoing debate in any Western country, equaled or exceeded only by that of Russia in the 1990s (the chief product of which in Russia has been the neo-authoritarian nationalism of Vladimir Putin).

In the 1970s, critics held that the formation of historically continuous Spanish institutions in the kingdom of Asturias during the generation immediately following the Muslim conquest involved a major paradox. The most succinct statement of this position was made by Abilio Barbero and Marcelo Vigil in the small study they published in 1974,
Sobre los orígenes sociales de la Reconquista
. This appeared on the eve of the democratization of Spain, and for that particular theme represented a climax of the deconstructive trend of interpretation, which had begun in the late nineteenth century. It posited a paradox, not to say contradiction, in the origins of the resistance nucleus of Asturias during the second quarter of the eighth century.

The paradox was supposed to be twofold. On the one hand, independent Hispano-Christian society first arose in what was heretofore the least Romanized and Christianized part of the peninsula, with the exception of the Basque region. On the other hand, the "neo-Gothic ideal," which emerged as a kind of political doctrine among the Asturian elite by the end of the ninth century, was held to have had the scantiest historical basis in Asturias itself, for the greater Asturian-Cantabrian region, as putatively one of the least Romanized districts, was said to have possessed little or no Visigothic political structure or identity. It was allegedly the home almost exclusively of semiprimitive autochthonous peoples, whose society was scarcely more than tribal in structure and who had had little to do with the Visigothic state at all, having never been effectively conquered or integrated by it.

Though some historians rejected this interpretation, or at least its most extreme version, it commanded a wide audience after the death of Franco, fitting nicely the mood of diversity and pluralism of the years of the democratization.
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During that era the Grand Narrative of Spanish history, which had found its earliest limited expression in the Asturias of Alfonso el Casto and reached its height in nineteenth-century Spanish nationalism — both liberal and rightist — and in the doctrines of the Franco regime, was rejected politically and broadly deconstructed historiographically. Moreover, this reinterpretation could not easily be challenged by new historical research, for the sources on the last years of Visigothic history are the weakest of the entire Visigothic period, while the principal documentary sources for the history of the kingdom of Asturias consist of only three chronicles.

An examination of the roots of the kingdom of Asturias should begin with the Visigothic monarchy, which preceded it. For nearly a hundred years, the latter was viewed by most commentators as a semi-incoherent failure, whose sudden downfall merely reflected its internal social and political divisions and general decadence, so that its ruin became almost inevitable. The achievements and influence of its cultural superstar, San Isidoro of Seville, were seen as a unique exception that otherwise merely proved the rule. More recently, however, historians have viewed this attitude as originating, at least in part, in the cultural pessimism of Spain at the close of the nineteenth century.

For most of the twentieth century, the Visigothic state was given credit for establishing its sovereignty over the peninsula and for eventually adopting Catholic orthodoxy, but for little else. The Grand Narrative had lauded it for building the political and religious unity of Spain, but the tendency among twentieth-century historians was to judge it a decadent failure in social, cultural, and political terms. Disparagement of the Visigothic era was not new. It had been begun as early as the eighth century by French Carolingians, the first to propagate the myth that Roman culture had been almost totally submerged by "barbarian invasions," introducing the concept, if not quite the term, of "dark ages" overtaking western Europe after the collapse of Rome.

Research on the Visigoths enjoys a venerable tradition in Spain, and for long it centered on the history of law, on the one hand, and of church history and patristics, on the other. In 1941, two years after the Civil War, the young historian Alfonso García Gallo published a major one-hundred-page article in the first new number of the
Anuario de la Historia del Derecho Español
, which challenged traditional understanding of the origins of Visigothic law. The major figures in that field, led by Eduardo de Hinojosa and later by Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, had emphasized the centrality of Germanic law, whereas García Gallo argued on the basis of considerable evidence that what was known in western Europe as "Roman vulgar law" was more nearly the basis of Visigothic law codes.
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The Visigoths had long been recognized as the most Romanized of the Germanic peoples, and — unlike the Franks, Germans, Angles, Saxons, Burgundians, or Lombards — had never replaced the Latin name of their territory with their own. García Gallo's reinterpretation, however, considerably broadened understanding of the post-Roman character of certain Visigothic institutions, and which to some degree has been substantiated by subsequent research. Moreover, coming as it did during the high triumphal phase of early Francoism, it accorded nicely with the dominant political ideology, which was pleased to alter the origins of the conventional Grand Narrative in a more directly Roman-Hispanic southwest European, less Germanic, direction. The fact that the most recent research in Germany itself had underscored the persistence of Roman vulgar law in the various Germanic kingdoms only gave this greater credibility. At that stage the regime encouraged the friendliest of relations with Nazi Germany, but preferred a less Germanized version of the national Grand Narrative.

A more positive reevaluation of the Visigothic kingdom took place in the last two decades of the century, most notably among foreign scholars. The British Hispanist Roger Collins accused previous commentators of what he termed "virtually a 'slave-mentality,' induced by a priori acceptance of the necessary inferiority of Visigothic Spain."
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A significant role has been played by the French Hispanist Jacques Fontaine, the leading living authority on San Isidoro,
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though one of its first manifestations was the international conference on "Visigothic Spain: New Approaches," held at University College, Dublin, in 1975.
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This reevaluation gives the Visigoths credit for "holding together for over a century the largest undivided political unit in seventh-century Europe," for having extended political organization rather more thoroughly across the peninsula's north than had earlier been thought, for building some degree of politico-administrative structure, and for having expelled Byzantine invaders.
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