Visigothic Spain and Byzantium : The Story of a Special (Historiographical) Relationship

Abstract

Most late twentieth-century studies dealing with the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo mentioned its alleged imitation of Byzantium as its hallmark, singling it out from the rest of barbarian Europe. This was not a general imitatio imperii, but an imitation of the only Roman empire contemporary to the Gothic polity: eastern, Greek-speaking, exotic Byzantium. This chapter discusses the origins of Byzantinism in Visigothic historiography, its occasionally scant grounding in the evidence, and the ideological functions it fulfilled for historians. In the twentieth century, the Byzantinist paradigm produced well-arranged yet often contradictory narratives of one of the longest-lived post-Roman kingdoms in the West. Only lately has political and scientific globalization dispelled both the illusion of the uniqueness of Spanish features and the necessity for grounding it in Byzantinism.