Identity and Interaction: the Suevi and the Hispano-Romans
- ️https://ucla.academia.edu/JorgeArias
Related papers
From the Rhine to Carthage: The Ethnogenesis of the Suevi and Vandals, 101 BC – AD 585
Swansea University MA Dissertation in Ancient History, 2020
“The first fifty and the last thirty years of the Suevic kingdom are quite well documented, whereas the years in between are hopelessly obscure”. This is how Purificación Ubric describes the kingdom of the Suevi in her chapter of James D’Emilio’s edited volume on Medieval Galicia. The same can be similarly said of the Vandals who, before the Marcomannic Wars, were scarcely recorded by history to have achieved anything greater than that of ethnographic mentions in geographical works from the likes of Tacitus. Neither people achieved the historical importance of those such as the Visigoths or the Franks and, as such, have been relegated to the periphery in the study of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. This being the case, scholarship on their period of rule within both Spain and North Africa has been somewhat lacking. Even discussion of early textual mentions in the geographies of the Classical and Republic era have become bogged down in questions of authenticity, rather than discussion of the records themselves. Despite this depressing view of past scholarship, the introduction of new interpretations of texts such as Hydatius’ Chronicle by Richard Burgess have reopened avenues of research long thought closed by many scholars. Many works ‘reconsidering’ the history of the Suevi and the Vandals have appeared, reflecting new interpretations such as these. Nevertheless, both peoples are still considered relatively unimportant in the study of Late Antiquity.
Galicia and its Barbarians: A Suevic Identity?
15th Celtic Conference in Classics, Cardiff University, 2024
Northwestern Spain has always had a distinct identity that has differentiated itself from the rest of the peninsula. Many locals today would most likely talk about their ‘Celtic’ past with nods to the region’s pre-Roman inhabitants. However, in reality, a significant role was played by the Suevi, a gens originating across the Rhine, who in 416 founded the first barbarian kingdom here within the collapsing Roman Empire’s borders. Their kingdom extended from the borders of Gallaecia to much of Lusitania, and at one point the fifth century chronicler Hydatius records they controlled almost three quarters of the peninsula. Fifth century records show a development of local powers in Spain that both resisted and colluded with their minority Suevic rulers. But by the sixth century, a stable Catholic kingdom emerged that weaved Hispano-Roman and Suevic cultures together, while positioned as an alternative power to the Arian Visigoths in Spain. Nevertheless, the influence of this lesser-known people was strong enough that it can still be seen today. This paper aims to highlight how the Suevi succeeded in developing a new ‘Gallaecian’ culture, resulting in a distinct identity that lasted well after the kingdom’s demise.
The Suevic Kingdom. Why Gallaecia?
The Sueves, perhaps the weakest of the barbarians who had entered Hispania, decided to abandon their alliance with the Vandals in 418–19 and realign themselves with the Visigoths in what proved to be a forward-looking move. In 420, they received a kingdom in the northwest corner of Hispania, with the blessing of Honorius and the support of the Visigothic kingdom of Toulouse, as a reward for their help against the Vandals. In return, their mission was to maintain a degree of order in the western part of Hispania. Far from being merely the seizure of a peripheral province by a group of barbarians beyond imperial control, the Suevic occupation of Gallaecia and the establishment and expansion of their kingdom in Hispania has to be understood as the assumption of legitimate authority within a strictly Roman constitutional framework. Gallaecia can be then considered as a region of economic, military, and maritime significance within the important Atlantic territories of the empire and the commercial networks that linked the Atlantic and the Mediterranean through the rich province of Baetica.
THE TROJAN ORIGIN OF THE FRANKS AND THE ALLIANCE WITH THE SUEVI
Paris, 2024
What if, finally, one of the founders of the Frank confederation were of Trojan origin? What if we were wrong to have abandoned the millennia literary tradition sustaining the Trojan ancestry because of a lack of understanding of ancient sources? This paper’s aim is not commenting an old literary debate about a hypothetic Roman-Greek influence on the Medieval French literature. It rather provides new elements leading to the hypothesis according to which a single individual in the Franks’ ethnogenesis was either the vector of the Pergamon ideology or inspired the Medieval authors who associated him with their knowledge of Hellenism. Thanks to a multidisciplinary approach, a reconstitution stages a certain Attalus, a Roman noble of probable Pergamon origin married to a Marcomanni princess in the 1st half of the 3rd century CE, appointed vassal king of the Marcomanni after the invasion of 254 CE. A kind of foedus treaty was concluded with the emperor Gallienus reinforced by a marriage with his daughter Pipa. For the first time, a Marcomanni army was asked to instal in Pannonia to defend the border from the inside, but the foedus ended with the reign of Aurelianus (270 CE) who chased them away. Attalus died during a clash with the Romans and his descendance went up the Danube to install on Main River, in the Suevi territory. Both groups remained ethnically distinct but intertwined. In Greggory of Tours, the two Frank leaders of the Late 4th century CE, Marcomer and Sunno, are recognized to be descendants of the group originated from Pannonia. In the later Fredegar Chronicle (660 CE) and the Liber Historiae Francorum (727 CE), they became associated to the Pergamon ideology based on the Homeric tradition highly probably diffused or inspired by the name of leader Attalus, now called “Priam”. Unexpectedly, elements presented in this paper show that the Suevi and Franks crossed the rhine in 406 CE to finally instal together in Gallaecia. If the installation of the Suevi has been mentioned in ancient sources, the Franks yet largely in majority, remained invisible. Nevertheless, this new perspective highlights the rise of Flavius Ricimer.
Jorge López Quiroga (Coord.): IN TEMPORE SUEBORUM. El tiempo de los Suevos en la Gallaecia (411-585). El primer reino medieval de Occidente.Volumen de Estudios (Servicio de Publicaciones de la Diputación Provincial de Ourense), Ourense., 2018
This volume of studies includes a series of works carried out on the occasion of the 'In Tempore Sueborum' exhibition, held in Ourense (Galicia, Spain) between December 15, 2017 and May 7, 2018, sponsored and funded by the Provincial Council of Ourense and the Regional Government of Galicia (Xunta de Galicia). This work completes the catalog of the exhibition, already published in 2017, and offers a complete and updated overview of the historical-archaeological research about those Barbarians groups known through the textual sources as 'Suebi' and the processes known as 'barbarian migrations' in the post-Roman West (chapters I and II). At the same time we presented an overview of the period in which the 'Suebi' formed an independent kingdom in 411 AD (the first Kingdom of the West) in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula (in the former Roman province of 'Gallaecia') through a set of studies that present the current state of our knowledge about the 5th and 6th centuries in that region based on political, religious, monetary history, population structures (urban and rural), the Christianization process, the funeral world and Christian religious architecture (Chapter III). It is, to date, the most complete and interdisciplinary study on this period (from the 5th to the 7th century) and for this region (the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula), bringing together the best current specialists on this period.
Visigothic Symposia, 2017
Despite being a topic with an extensive historiographical tradition, the end of the Roman Empire and the consolidation of the first barbarian kingdoms in Western Europe continue to lead to different interpretations, leaving many questions unresolved. The lack of a continuous and exhaustive repertoire of documents regarding the disappearance of the Roman state has contributed to the perpetuation of a complex historiographical debate, which has been remarkably enriched in the last decades with the introduction of new and varied perspectives. Tarraco, capital city of the northeastern territories of the Iberian Peninsula, that is, Hispania Tarraconensis, is no exception to this trend. The Visigothic conquest of the city of Tarraco by the armies of King Euric (r. AD 466-484), in the last third of the fifth century (472), allowed him to exert control over the entire Roman province (Hispania Tarraconensis), so the chroniclers tell us. Traditional historiography interprets these events as representing a real break for Tarraco, as well as the beginning of an irreversible period of decline that resulted in an almost complete loss of its former competencies – civilian and ecclesiastical – as capital city of Roman Tarraconensis. According to the conventional view, the city would have become something similar to a military colony, at the mercy of the representatives of Visigothic public power, whose main aim would have been to satisfy the ruling kings, themselves controlling a unified kingdom from distant royal sees in Toulouse, first, and in Toledo, afterwards. Uncovering details about the inclusion of the provincial capital of Roman Tarraconensis into the dominions of the Visigothic kingdom, as well as the impact on the immediate history of the city, is a hard task due to the scarce information available. The current debate on the dynamics of ethnicity and ethnogenesis has contributed to clarifying the ‘barbaric’ features of the first European ‘Germanic’ kingdoms, in accordance with the diversity of situations derived from their encounter with romanitas, while forcing scholars to call attention to the perpetuation of the many realities which were common before the disintegration of the Roman state in these territories. In addition, the growing interest in the historiography of the late antique city and a sounder knowledge of the archaeological materials of the period together offer new approaches to analyzing the processes of urban transformation characteristic of these centuries.
Visigothic Symposia 3, 2018
The essay presents some parallelisms on the concept of "border" and the relations among Vandals, Byzantines and Sardinians on the one hand, and among Byzantines, Goths and Hispano-Romans, on the other, in the former Roman provinces of Sardinia and Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula) during the early Middle Ages. To do so, I analyze the modern identitarian and nationalistic uses of that historical period within the context of its historiography. In parts of both Sardinian and Iberian historiography there is the tendency to highlight the imagined 'originative' role of indigenous peoples, complemented by the relatively small influence, in some areas of northern Iberia and the mountainous center of Sardinia, of Roman colonization. In these areas, the role of Barbaricini (the inhabitants of the Civitates Barbariae of the interior of Sardinia mentioned by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian [r. 527-565]), Hispano-Romans, proud opponents of the Empire, and "true" Sardinians and Iberians have been exalted. Employing Maurice Halbwachs's theoretical rubric, I show how these specific stereotypes, historical and historiographical myths, confirmed memory and identity and were the result of continuous choices-conscious or not-of what people wanted to remember, wanted to be, and wanted to be represented as, and what that means for historical reconstruction.