In one of his last articles, the late Gilbert Dagron pointed out how Byzantium was purposely ‘forgotten’ in historiographical constructions of Europe stretching back to the First World War and continuing through the Annales school. The racist myth that Europe was produced by a merger between an exhausted Romanity and a young and vital Germanity was then replaced by the idea that Europe had emerged out of the mosaic of peoples in Charlemagne's empire. Significantly, in this new narrative, Charlemagne's Europe had moved to the north, away from the Mediterranean area, and Byzantium had no further role in European memory. This historiographical perspective left aside not only Mediterranean Byzantium, but also the Iberian peninsula, which had entered the European community fairly late, just as, centuries before, it stood on the margins of the Carolingian sphere of influence. It should hardly be surprising that, whereas the rest of Europe built a collective memory by deliberately forgetting Byzantium and the Mediterranean, Spain used Byzantium to work out parts of its own memory.

Still, such diverging paths do not account enough for the fact that, for several decades, many historians of the Visigothic kingdom were seemingly so fascinated by the Byzantine empire that they strove to uncover similarities between both polities, or even the imitation of the latter by the former—an obsession we will call ‘Byzantinism’.