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.