Early Medieval Spain (New Studies in Medieval History)

In Spain the 1980s and 1990s have seen a dramatic revival of regional aspirations towards greater self-expression and increased political autonomy, following a period of rigid centralisation of government in Madrid and the attempted imposition of cultural uniformity. This tension between the ethnic and cultural diversity of the different regions of the Iberian peninsula and the attempts of various rulers to impose political and 'national' unity goes back to at least the time of the Roman Empire. In the period covered in this book there occurred many of the major events that shaped the subsequent history of Spain: the unification of the peninsula under Rome, the attempted imposition of a unitary Christian culture under the Visigoths, and the shattering of both of these by Arab conquest in 711. At the same time the Basque and Catalan national identities began to take shape, and the resistance to the Arab conquest by the Asturians, Galicians, Leonese and Castillians formed these and other distinctive components of the Hispanic cultural mix. In this fully corrected, revised and partly rewritten version of this authoritative study, first published in 1983, account has been taken of the