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12 - The Agents and Mechanics of Connectivity: The Mediterranean World and the Cities of the Guadiana Valley in the Sixth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2024

Damián Fernández
Affiliation:
Northern Illinois University
Molly Lester
Affiliation:
United States Naval Academy, Maryland
Jamie Wood
Affiliation:
University of Lincoln
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Summary

Abstract

This chapter explores connections between the upper Guadiana valley, especially the cities of Mérida and Mertola, and the Byzantine world in the sixth century. By analysing archaeological evidence in conjunction with written sources, it identifies continued linkages to North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean in this period. Although the ceramic assemblages indicate that the scale of such connectivity was considerably reduced compared to previous centuries, hagiography and epigraphy both point towards the presence of well-established ‘Greek’ ecclesiastical elites at both cities in the middle decades of the sixth century who, alongside other local leaders, played a pivotal role in managing connections to outsiders, including traders who brought goods from beyond Hispania to the Guadiana basin.

Keywords: bishops; ceramics; economic relations; Greeks; Guadiana valley; local elites; Lusitania; material culture; Mérida; Mértola; trade; Lives of the Fathers of Mérida

Introduction

Studies that examine Byzantine influence or presence in Hispania tend to focus on two locations: the nascent Visigothic court at Toledo that developed from the mid-sixth century onwards, and the province that was established under Justinian on the southern coast of Hispania in the mid-sixth century, the capital of which lay at Cartagena. Historical and art historical scholarship has tended to focus geographically on the imperial presence in the south-east of the Iberian peninsula, on elite-level religious and political interactions, and on the ‘influence’ that Byzantine culture and theology exerted on the Visigothic kingdom. Archaeologists, meanwhile, have tended to address economic issues. The roles of what are assumed to be peripheral regions and the people that inhabited them have, in general, been overlooked in favour of examples of imperial-royal interactivity.

This approach to relations between the Byzantine world and post-Roman Hispania is at odds with much recent work on the Iberian peninsula, which has adopted a regional perspective. Many scholars, often drawing more directly on material evidence, have sought to move beyond centralizing sources and the Toledo-focused narratives that they propagated. This chapter focuses on connectivity (evidence for linkages to the eastern Mediterranean and the north of Africa) and interactivity (cases in which we can see active engagement and/or reciprocal exchange with such regions) on a micro-regional level.

Type
Chapter
Information
Rome and Byzantium in the Visigothic Kingdom
Beyond Imitatio Imperii
, pp. 317 - 344
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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