Origins

The history of Galicia is in many respects quite unlike that of the Liébana, and it is to the north-western corner of the Iberian Peninsula that we now turn in order to see how and why this was so. At the heart of this matter lies the supposed distinctiveness of Galician history and culture, a longstanding motif in Spanish historical and folkloric literature. The notion that there exists a distinctive Galician path to modernity has been advocated since at least the nineteenth century, when nationalists began to debate the putative Celtic culture of the ancient and early medieval inhabitants of the region. Whatever the motivations of their proponents, all arguments concerning the ethnic or cultural attributes of Galicians and their history share one feature: they attempt to set Galicia at one remove from the rest of Spain. But divorcing Galician history from wider peninsular developments is hazardous, for it risks marginalising important contextual factors.

One such factor concerns the legacy of Rome, for while Ibero-Celtic and Suevic influences remain hard to detect, Roman-native cultural syncretism of the sort seen in many parts of the Roman world is abundantly evidenced in Galicia, leaving a recognisably Roman-influenced inheritance in its wake. This point was not lost on Sánchez-Albornoz, who thought it unwise to imagine Galicia ‘cloaked with the mystique of Celtic antiquity’, and chose instead to stress the weight of the Roman legacy. Noting that Romanitas was surprisingly resistant in this corner of the peninsula, Sánchez-Albornoz penned a series of articles that focussed on a Roman legacy that has, since he wrote, become increasingly well attested in the archaeological record. Romanisation in Galicia, as elsewhere in most of Western Europe, was a matter of degree; its reality is without question. This chapter will take this reality as its starting point, and examine Galicia in the three centuries after the Roman state collapsed in the West. Subsequent chapters will take the story further, looking at village society from 800 to 1031, and the elite families whose power shaped society and politics in this region.

A relic of antiquity?

‘In Galicia, at the edge of the entire world’

The fifth-century chronicler Hydatius, bishop of Chaves, is principally known for his learned lament on the destruction of the Roman Church and empire in the north-western corner of the Iberian Peninsula, an account more or less contemporary with the events it describes.