Something for Peter Linehan

The day I write this is, by various accidents, turning into a day for the dead, in which what I have before me is mainly writing stuff for the sake of people no longer with us. This happens sometimes, I suppose it can only happen more over time and eventually perhaps I will be the person being written for, so it behoves me to do my best. For a start, therefore, I only found out the other day that Neil Faulkner had died. I never met him but I saw a really good program he did with my then-colleague Roger White about the archæology of Romano-British Wroxeter, in which they just wandered around the site amiably but fiercely arguing about its interpretation; it was one of the best showcases of the academic endeavour and how we advance knowledge in its current Occidental paradigm that I’ve ever seen, and ever after that I thought of him as a good thing. The Guardian has an obituary for him that suggests at least one other person, and probably lots more, did too. But this post is not about him, but about someone whom I did meet and who was, in a way I don’t suppose he ever knew, part of my own academic story.

Peter Linehan’s website portrait

I won’t try and do a full run-down of Peter Linehan’s career, not least because there were plenty of write-ups of it when he died in 2020 – though somehow, I only just found that out when looking him up for something I’ve been writing elsewhere, on which more in due course. If you’ve never heard of the man, however, a few details might not go amiss. He studied medieval Iberian history, and the core of his work was on the Church politics of León and Castile in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which is why I rarely have the pleasure of citing him here. In the 1980s he became one of the few Anglophone scholars in the field whom Spaniards would cite on the back of that, but he did range more widely.¹ He was a particularly good source of archive war-stories, half of which he seemed to have poached from the late great Richard Fletcher, with whom he was a close contemporary, but with plenty of his own too; this made my experiences with the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, when I had them, less frustrating for having some sense that this kind of thing was part of a researcher’s formation, a kind of rite de passage through which we all went. But he was at his best, probably, in print, where he combined widespread erudition with a delicious but needle-sharp wit that could leave foolish conjectures or bad scholarship in general punctured on every side. It’s not that Linehan necessarily solved every historiographical problem he encountered, but he was really good at showing weaknesses in previous solutions, and did so with great enjoyment and enjoyability. What he wasn’t good at was doing this briefly, which is why his masterwork, a critical review of eight or nine particular areas of debate in the interpretation of historical sources for the Iberian Peninsula’s Middle Ages, entitled History and the Historians of Medieval Spain, weighs in at 748 pages, a big number even in this day of huge books and more so when it came out in 1993.² I assume that he was somehow involved with Oxford University Press at that point and managed to push it through whatever objections they may have had to it in that form, but I am glad he did, because every few pages there’s something that makes one pause and close one’s eyes in academic glee. I don’t have a copy to quote, alas, because it was expensive new and is probably more so now, but you can find this sort of thing in all his work.

The cover of the selfsame book

However, I don’t usually give space to obituaries these days unless the unfortunate deceased is someone whom I feel touches my own story in some way, and Peter Linehan, though as I say he possibly never knew, is indeed one of the people without whom I would not now be doing what I do. My first – and actually almost my only – encounter with him came during my M. Phil. at Cambridge, when I was trying to come up with a topic for my Short Essay and Professor Rosamond McKitterick was determinedly trying to steer me away from the Insular history which had up till that time more or less consumed my interest. Even then I was expressing an interest in frontier spaces and also charters, and so she pointed me at Catalonia, as a frontier space of the empire she herself knows best but one where, as she then said, “there’re thousands of charters that no-one’s using”. Trouble was, she didn’t know the area and its scholarship at all well, so she couldn’t approve my suggested topic; instead, she sent me to Peter Linehan.

The way to see Dr Linehan; the main gate of St John’s College, Cambridge, image byDicklyon – own work, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wkimedia Commons

I remember that meeting as an archetypal Oxbridge experience. Having made my appointment – or, given the basket case I then was, quite possibly having had my appointment made for me by Rosamond, I don’t know any more – I turned up at Dr Linehan’s rooms in St John’s College and was offered a seat on a sofa at one end of them, while he sat at the other end of the room on a window seat, pretty much as far away from me as he could be, wreathed in sunlight. I remember it as a huge room, though we could hear each other perfectly well so my junior memory must have stretched it, and I could barely see him in the glare. Anyway, with some trepidation I explained what I thought my questions were and how I thought I might go about it – on the basis of almost no reading, I should say, because then there were really only two short pieces about early medieval Catalonia in English – and asked him, at the end, “So, I suppose my question is, do you think it’s viable?” And he said, “Yes, I think it should be, as long as you can read Catalan. Can you?” And I, with remarkable self-confidence for the tremorous but stroppy boy I then was, said, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out,” and went away with a reading list mainly consisting of Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals.³ And the way I usually tell this story is that I worked through most of two books by d’Abadal and found that with good Latin and good French, and sometimes with Joan Gili’s idiosyncratic grammar, I could mostly puzzle it out.⁴ When I finally put together the essay bibliography I realised that some of what I’d read had actually been Castilian, but by then it was too late…

But long before that, I’d sent a mail back to Dr Linehan saying, more or less, I’ve got through the first few things and I think it will be OK, and he mailed back his approval for the project which I proudly took to Rosamond, and the rest became history, because it was meeting this evidence and scholarship that gave me my eventual PhD project, and from there the whole rest of my career. There might have been other ways it could have gone, but the way it did briefly hung on that brief mail of approval from Peter Linehan. I guess I always expected to run into him at least one more time to say thanks; but the two times I did, he was taken up with people who knew him well and on whom I didn’t feel able to intrude. So I never did say that thanks, and now I find I missed my last chance some time ago. Therefore, this will have to do. I don’t really envisage a readership for this blog among the dead, but if he were able to look in still somehow, I hope it would give him cheer. Thanks, Dr Linehan, and my students still enjoy reading your stuff when I make them…

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1. His first book was Peter Linehan, The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth Century, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 3rd Series 4 (Cambridge 1971); his last, of which I had not heard either, was idem, At the Edge of Reformation: Iberia before the Black Death (Oxford 2019). Between the two he penned, as well as, like, eight other books not counting his two Variorum volumes of reprinted papers, both from remarkably early in his career, idem, “León, ciudad regia, y sus obispos en los siglos X-XIII”, transl. F.-J. Hernández in José María Fernández Caton (ed.), El Reino de León en la alta Edad Media VI (León 1994), pp. 409–57, which I mention not because it set my world alight especially but because it was almost the first case I’d seen of one of ‘us’ being published in Spain, in Spanish by the Spanish, presumably because they thought the work was important. I thought then that that would be one sort of measure of making it, and wanted to do likewise, and I suppose I sort of have, except, of course, not in Spanish…

2. Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford 1993), review (favourably of course) by none other than Richard Fletcher in English Historical Review Vol. 109 (Oxford 1994), pp. 660-662, on JSTOR here.

3. Those works would have been Ramon de Abadal i de Vinyals, Els primers comtes catalans, Biografies catalans: sèrie històrica 1, 2nd edn (Barcelona 1965), and idem, Dels Visigots als Catalans, ed. Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó, 2 vols, Estudis i Documents 13-14, 1st edn (Barcelona 1969). The English pieces were basically R. J. H. Collins, "Charles the Bald and Wifred the Hairy" in Margaret T. Gibson and Janet L. Nelson (edd.), Charles the Bald: court and kingdom, 2nd edn. (Aldershot 1990), pp 169–188 and a couple of papers also by Collins about law and dispute settlement which included Catalonia alongside León that I’ve referenced many times before. I suppose there was also then, very new, Julia M. H. Smith, "’Fines Imperii’: the marches" in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History volume II: c. 700-c. 900 (Cambridge 1995), pp. 169–189, DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521362924.009, which covers Catalonia in amongst the other Carolingian frontiers, and does pretty well at it. But I’m not sure I knew that piece this early.

4. Joan Gili, Introductory Catalan Grammar, with a brief outline of the language and literature, a selection from Catalan writers, and a vocabulary, 2nd edn (Oxford 1952), which is a good place to start but really really needs an update. Someone actually gave me this, though, and I wish I could remember who. I suspect they too are beyond thanking, now… Eventually I also gave in and paid the then-considerable money for the bulky and unsigned Catalan Dictionary: English-Catalan/Catalan-English (London 1994; originally printed Barcelona 1993), which is as far as I know still the only one you can get and is OK.

Pictish Pandemic Road Trip, Part V

This gallery contains 26 photos.

We return with this post to my increasingly epic road-trip of August 2020, when I set out to see as many Pictish stones as I could feasibly reach in the first easing of lockdown. If you’re enjoying these posts, the … Continue reading →

A possible revision of the history of the Islamic conquest of Iberia

I’m afraid that at the moment on A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe your choices are more or less Pictish sculpture or analysis of the earliest chronicle record of the Islamic conquest of Iberia. If the latter is more your thing than the former, today is a good day for you! This post goes back to the so-called Chronicle of 754 to pick up another thing I’m not sure anyone’s noticed and weave it into a slightly larger argument, which might make the basis of an article some day. If you get there before I do you have to cite this post as original inspiration!

Opening of the Chronicle of 754 in its oldest surving copy, Madrid, Biblioteca Universidad Complutense, Fondo histórico, MS 134 fo. 59v, image licensed under CC BY SA 4.0, source linked through

But before we can get going on the text criticism it’s probably necessary to give the background. For a pretty obvious and consequential event remarkably little is agreed about the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. You’d think we could at least start from “some Muslims invaded the Iberian Peninsula” but for some people even that’s not guaranteed, either because the mostly-Berber armies involved couldn’t yet have been believing Muslims given how recently their own lands had been conquered—which, to be honest, is most simply resolved just by assuming that the army was largely recruited from areas of North Africa which had been conquered longer ago—or because the whole thing never happened, that, in the words of an infamous and ridiculous but influential work of the 1970s, “The Arabs Never Invaded Spain”.¹ I’m going to take it as axiomatic that an army of some kind under Muslim command did spearhead a takeover of the bulk of the Iberian Peninsula, because I think that is the most obvious way to understand everything which the sources say and subsequent events, and that this happened in 711 CE, though that too has been disputed.² But after that, we’re into more even contention.

There are, more or less, two sides to the story as usually told. They are broadly a Christian Latin one and a Muslim Arabic one, and they’re not wholly incompatible, though the stories may have met some time in the 850s and exchanged parts, which complicates that kind of judgement.³ Setting that aside for now, the Christian story is roughly this:

1. After decades of contention between different ruling-class families, the year before the conquest the death of King Witiza (r. 703-710 CE) was followed by the contested election of one Roderic (r. 710-711 CE).
2. Attempting to secure his rule, Roderic was fighting someone in the north when news reached him that an army (of Arabs, “Ishmaelites”, “Chaldaeans” or any of the other racialised Biblical terms the Christian sources of the era tend to use for Muslims) from North Africa had invaded in the south, so he halted his immediate campaign and raced south rallying all the troops which would come to his call.
3. Battle was joined with the invaders, probably on the River Guadiana, and part of Roderic’s army, led by those who were less keen on his rule, perhaps sons of a recent king, deserted; Roderic was therefore defeated and (probably) killed on the field.⁴
4. The invaders then raced up the peninsula securing surrenders left right and centre and before long were in full command of the kingdom.

The Arabic story, which we first have only from the 870s CE or thereabouts, long long after it was all over, does not differ hugely from this, but fixes the narrative on particular personalities in some fairly obvious ways.⁵ In this version Roderic is an immoral and misguided king, who breaks several long-running taboos, most significantly by either seducing or raping the daughter of a Count Ilyān (Julian?), who is usually placed at Ceuta, the Visigoths’ (and indeed modern Spain’s) bridgehead on the North African coast. I don’t think it’s actually clearly attested that that’s where he ruled but it fits with what is supposed to have happened next, which is that Ilyān, enraged, reached out to the nearby Muslim governor Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr and offered to ferry his troops into the peninsula. Mūsā, proceeding with some caution, sent his freedman Tāriq ibn Ziyad with an expeditionary force to take up this offer, and it was Tāriq who met Roderic in battle and, somewhat unexpectedly, laid the peninsula open to conquest by defeating him. Anxious to catch up, Mūsā therefore brought his own army over tout de suite and the conquest then proceeded in parallel and mostly unopposed.

A bad man in trouble? As seen in Bernardo Blanco y Pérez, “El rey Don Rodrigo arengando a sus tropas en la batalla de Guadalete”, oil on canvas, 1871, Madrid, Museo del Prado, P003331, image public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The Arabic stories of this are perhaps most interested, however, in what happened next, which was according to them a sequence of reprisals: firstly Mūsā against Tāriq, for exceeding his instructions and (presumably) placing the situation of North Africa and Mūsā’s own command there in jeopardy; then the caliph (stories vary on which one, but either al-Walīd ibn ʿAbd al-Malik, r. 705-715 CE, or his brother and successor Sulaymān, r. 715-717 CE) against Mūsā, for more or less the same things (and this is also in the Chronicle of 754); and then Tāriq against Mūsā for false accusation, supported by the caliph.⁶ In most versions Mūsā winds up destitute, his sons wind up either dead (`Abd al-Azīz, left in charge of the peninsula and supposed to have married Roderic’s widow and started acting like the new king, so murdered by his men) or dispossessed (the others), and Tāriq disappears from the story forever immediately after the caliph’s judgement.

Romantic modern depiction of Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr whipping Tāriq ibn Ziyad for disobedience; this is on both Alamy and Bridgeman, so I’m pretty sure neither own it, but I can’t find where it’s originally from; my source linked, but not necessarily endorsed

So, as has been wisely pointed out by Denise Filios, the Arabic stories as we have them are not actually about the conquest per se, but are bases for legal judgements about proper responsibility of officers and division of spoils from conquest and so on, as well as what parties exactly were involved in those divisions, which were presumably relevant for later claims (such as those of the tenth-century jurist Ibn al-Qūtīya, who claimed to be descended from Witiza himself).⁷ To be fair, the Christian ones aren’t actually about the conquest so much as who was to blame for them: either the sons of Witiza (unlikely, as said in notes already), Roderic’s rivals, Roderic himself or either Egica or Witiza for bringing down God’s disfavour on the kingdom for forcing clerics to marry or whatever. But given that commonality, it’s possible to knit a story out of these skeins that goes, more or less: not everyone liked Roderic and so when the local Muslims came a-calling in an exploratory, plunder-seeking fashion, the disaffected got in touch and everything spiralled out of control, and the kingdom was so centralised that with its head removed it was unable to respond to the crisis; result, conquest. The bit with Count Julian is usually dismissed as romantic fiction, as is the idea of previous collusion between Muslims and renegade factions of the Visigoths; the factionalism itself is considered enough to explain the kingdom’s apparent fragility, though there is still a certain amount of Spanish heart-searching about what on earth had happened to the soul of this obviously strong, because proto-nationalistically peninsula-unifying, kingdom.⁸ But basically, we blame the Goths, as the sources do, for not being together enough to resist the Muslim onslaught. There has been a small amount of attention to notes in the Christian chronicles which suggest that North Africans had already been raiding the peninsula for a few years before the conquest, something one of the Arabic sources also suggests by having Mūsā send out a reconnaissance raid first, but nothing that changes the overall picture much.⁹ And so this is the story that, by and large, the current historiography tells, and is therefore the one I’m proposing to modify.

This modification involves taking note of two parts of the Chronicle of 754, which I introduced in the last-but-one post, together. In Wolf’s translation they go like this, with my emphasis and loaded words also given in the Latin of the MGH edition in square brackets.¹⁰

52. “In Justinian [II]’s time, in the era 749 [711 CE], in his fourth year as emperor and the ninety-second of the Arabs [Arabum], with Walid retaining the sceptre of the kingdom for the fifth year, Roderic rebelliously seized the kingdom of the Goths at the instigation of the senate [ortato senatu]. He ruled for only one year. Mustering his forces, he directed armies against the Arabs and the Moors sent by Musa, that is against Tariq ibn Ziyad and the others, who had long been raiding the province consigned to them [sibi provinciam creditam incursantibus] and simultaneously devastating many cities. In the fifth year of Justinian’s rule, the ninety-third of the Arabs, and the sixth of Walid, in the era 750 [712 CE], Roderic headed for the Transductine mountains to fight them and in that battle the entire army of the Goths, which had come with him fraudulently and in rivalry out of ambition for the kingship, fled and he was killed.”

And then…

64. “In Spain al-Hurr [the governor of al-Andalus] retained his rule over the patrician city of Cordoba, deploying garrisons of Saracens [Sarracenorum]. He restored to the Christians the small estates that had originally been confiscated for the sake of peace so as to bring in revenue to the public treasury. He punished the Moors, who had long been dwelling in Spain [Mauris dudum Spanias commeantibus], on account of the treasure they had hidden. He imprisoned them in sack cloth, infested with worms and lice, and weighed them down with chains. He tortured them as he interrogated them.”

As far as I can see, anyone who has considered the last passage has taken it to be a measure, however unpleasant, taken against members of the invading army who had held onto booty which they should have pooled for common division as was early Islamic custom.¹¹ But this seems odd to me just because of that “long time” for which these Berbers had apparently been living in “the Spains”. Firstly, this was somewhere between 718 and 720, so the invaders had been there a maximum of 9 years. More to the point, any Arabs present would have arrived at the same time, so what was the point in marking a difference? But when this is paired with the previous extract, it makes more sense if what both these two passages are actually referring to is Berbers already settled in the peninsula when the invasion came.

“Now,” as George Molyneaux used to say in his Oxford lectures, “if I’m right about this…,” then how would we explain that? I can think of two scenarios. The one of these that means messing least with the existing story is that the conquest had already begun earlier, and maybe that Tāriq’s initial expedition was some years before, achieved some limited success and that it was only when Roderic got things together to drive him out that battle royal ensued and Mūsā had to get involved. The Arabic sources would later have simplified the narrative by having it happen all at once. OK, but then why doesn’t 754, which clearly knows about this situation, mention the original invasion?

I’m laying such emphasis on this word dudum (“for a long time”) that I might as well demonstrate it’s there; here is Madrid, Biblioteca Universidad Complutense, Fondo histórico, MS 134 again, at fo. 64r, and the lines in question are the fourth and fifth of the left-hand column; image licensed under CC BY SA 4.0, source linked through

So, an easier solution logically if more difficult to mesh with the standard narrative, is that the Berbers were there by permission. This is, after all, the apparent sense of the first of these extracts: a province had been assigned to them. It was not their presence, but their predatory behaviour within that province, that brought Roderic down upon them, whereupon maybe their leaders, of whom Tāriq was apparently only one, called on Mūsā for help and (perhaps) he later punished the one who had been his client, Tāriq, for taking another lord. I would see this in the same terms as the settlement of some part of England by the Saxons in Gildas’s On the Ruin of Britain or, a century later, the Scandinavian Roric’s emplacement in Carolingian Frisia or indeed Rollo the Ganger in Normandy, in all cases something like setting a thief to catch a thief, because of existing raiding by the same groups as were now being recruited as defenders.¹² But still basically that, an enlistment of foreign troops as defence against a new coastal threat whose deeper affiliations proved more durable. Whether that leaves Roderic, or indeed Witiza or even Egica, his predecessor—after all, these Berbers had apparently been settled a long time in 720—as the Vortigern of this story, the king who recruited the foreigners whom he could not subsequently restrain, I wouldn’t like to guess, though if we’re to retain the idea of a client relationship between Mūsā and Tāriq then it is probably most easily Egica, since Mūsā was made governor of Qayrawān in 707 CE and I would find it easier to imagine his clients breaking away before he’d made good like that than after.¹³ Or, there could be something in the idea of an African agent as well and the hiring of troops actually brokered with Mūsā by Witiza or indeed Roderic, but that doesn’t leave very “long” for Tāriq and his men to settle. So, my basic proposal that makes sense of this chronicle record would be that Tāriq and some others were recruited, probably late in the reign of King Egica, as defence of the southern coast against raiding from North Africa (perhaps a factor since at least 680 CE, as we’ve seen), and, perhaps coming under pressure from Mūsā’s new régime in North Africa, took advantage of the civil war to run riot until King Roderic, badly in need of credibility, took it upon himself to bring them into line and, for whatever internal reasons, found himself fatally unable to.

I probably don’t teach this this year – though I might, as there’s almost no better way to find out whether an idea works than to try it out with suitably critical students – but I think I might already think it. I wonder how it strikes any of the interested parties reading, though?

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1. The former contention I originally got from the paper by Richard Hitchcock at the link given; he seems to have dialled back on it in Richard Hitchcock, Muslim Spain Reconsidered (Edinburgh 2014), pp. 18-19. The latter is better-known and better-contested: it begins with Ignacio Olagüe, Les Arabes n’ont jamais envahi l’Espagne (Paris 1969), to which cf. most famously Pierre Guichard, “Les Arabes ont bien envahi l’Espagne : les structures sociales de l’Espagne musulmane” in Annales : Économies, sociétés, civilisations Vol. 29 (Paris 1974), pp. 1483–1513, DOI: 10.3406/ahess.1974.293575, but now also, because of a renewal of the debate, Alejandro García Sanjuán, La conquista islámica de la península ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado: del catastrofismo al negacionismo (Madrid 2013), reviewed favourably by Eduardo Manzano, “De cómo los árabes realmente invadieron Hispania” in al-Qanṭara Vol. 35 (Madrid 2014), pp. 311–319, with those views put into popular form in Eduardo Manzano Moreno, “¿Realmente invadieron los árabes Hispania?” in El País (13 de febrero de 2014), online here as of 10th February 2021, but less favourably in Kenneth Baxter Wolf, “La conquista islámica: Negacionar el negacionismo” in Revista de Libros, 2a época (9th June 2014) online here as of 10th February 2021, translated as Wolf, “Negating Negationism” (2014), online here. García-Sanjuán replied to that in “La tergiversación del pasado y la función social del conocimiento histórico: Una réplica a Kenneth B. Wolf” in Revista de Libros (9th July 2014), online here. The main new enemy in these sallies, however, is Emilio González Ferrín, Historia general de Al Ándalus (Córdoba 2006), and the controversy has gone another round since then, with González Ferrín renewing his version in Cuando fuimos árabes (Córdoba 2017) and García-Sanjuán replying, including in English, to both him and Wolf in García Sanjuán, “La creciente difusión de un fraude historiográfico: la negación de la conquista musulmana de la península ibérica” in Vínculos de Historia Vol. 7 (Ciudad Real 2018), pp. 173–193, DOI: 10.18239/vdh_2018.07.10, and García-Sanjuán, “Denying the Islamic conquest of Iberia: A historiographical fraud”, edd. Hussein Fancy and García-Sanjuán in Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies Vol. 11 (Abingdon 2019), pp. 306–322, DOI: 10.1080/17546559.2019.1601753.

2. The dispute comes not least from the fact that the Chronicle of 754, our earliest source and very well-informed, nonetheless says it happened in 712; on this and the real chronology see Roger Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain (Oxford 1989), pp. 28-31. The fact that so early a source thought that invasion by a foreign force was what had happened is, of course, a major plank in the case against Olgaüe et al..

3. Although this theory probably didn’t originate there, I know it from Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, “La crónica del moro Rasis y la Continuatio Hispana” in Anales de la Universidad de Madrid Vol. 3 (Madrid 1934), pp. 229–266, reprinted in Sánchez-Albornoz, Investigaciones sobre historiografía hispana medieval (siglos VIII al XII) (Buenos Aires 1967), pp. 267–302. Of course, it’s possible that there was some kind of shared peninsular understanding of what had happened which was reported on both sides of the border; but Sánchez-Albornoz thought the textual links were stronger than that.

4. The 9th-century chronicles of Asturias, which I get at through Yves Bonnaz (ed.), Chroniques asturiennes (fin IX^e siècle), avec édition critique, traduction et commentaire (Paris 1987), unite in blaming the sons of King Witiza and accusing Witiza himself of bringing down God’s judgement on the Visigoths by forcing clergy to marry so as to legitimise his own loose sexual morals (Bonnaz, Chroniques, Chronique d’Alphonse III cc. 2-4; English in “The Chronicle of Alfonso III”, transl. Kenneth Baxter Wolf in Wolf (ed.), Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain, Translated Texts for Historians 9, 2nd edn (Liverpool 2011), pp. 161-177, cap. 5). As Collins points out, however, given that Witiza was only born in the early 680s, in 711 his own children can scarcely have been political actors yet (Collins, Arab Conquest, pp. 144-145). On the other hand, early Asturias was concerned about clerical marriage, which was apparently banned by King Fruela in 718-19 (Bonnaz, Chroniques, Chronique d’Alphonse III cap. 9; “Chronicle of Alfonso III”, c. 16), and the Asturian traditions uniformly blame Witiza for expelling the kingdom’s founder-figure Pelayo from the Visigothic capital (Bonnaz, Chroniques, Chronique d’Albelda cap. 36 – there is no English translation of this published – and Chronique d’Alphonse III cap. 6.1, “Chronicle of Alfonso III” c. 8, with commentary at Collins, Arab Conquest, pp. 142-144. So, it’s possible there was a family animus at work here pinning all bad things on their rivals. By contrast, the Chronicle of 754 accuses one of the sons of King Egica of collaboration with the invaders (‘The Chronicle of 754’, trans. Kenneth Baxter Wolf, in Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers, pp. 111–160 at cap. 54, and thinks Witiza was a ray of sunshine who put everything right that his corrupt father Egica had done wrong (ibid. cap. 44), whereas the Chronicle of Alfonso III thinks Egica was the good one and Witiza the villain (Bonnaz, Chroniques, Chronique d’Alphonse III capp.  3-4; “Chronicle of Alfonso III”, cc. 4-5), so we seem to have a source from each side of the faction fighting but a century and a new border apart. I should note at this point – just in case things weren’t confused enough – that there are two variant versions of the Chronicle of Alfonso III, which Wolf’s translation unhelpfully synthesizes and which all four of the differing editions of reference capitulate differently… As for the doubt over Roderic’s death, the Chronicle of Alfonso III records that his grave was found in Viseu, in what’s now Portugal, in the writer’s own times (Bonnaz, Chroniques, Chronique d’Alphonse III, cap. 5.2; “Chronicle of Alfonso III”, c. 7. This looks likely to be an attempt at appropriation of a technical-sense pathetic legacy, however, as no other source ever picked up the claim.

5. This story is drawn largely from the respective works of Abū Marwān `Abd al-Malik ibn Ḥabīb al-Sulami (d. 853 CE in the Peninsula), Abu’l-Qāsim `Abd al-Raḥman ibn `Abdullah Ibn `Abd al-Ḥakam (d. 871 CE in Cairo) and the much later `Alī ʿIzz al-Dīn Ibn al-Athīr al-Jazarī (d. 1233 CE in Mosul). We know the work of Ibn Habib primarily though its citation by the other two, which I access through John Harris Jones (transl.), Ibn Abd-el-Hakem’s History of the Conquest of Spain, translated from the Arabic with a Historical Introduction (Göttingen 1858), online here as of 12th August 2023, and Ibn el-Athir, Annales du Maghreb et de l’Espagne, transl. Edmond Fagnan (Alger 1901) online here as of 23rd July 2016, respectively. Collins, Arab Conquest, summarises over pp. 25-26 & 31-35.

6. Jones, Ibn Abd-el-Hakem’s History, pp. 24-26 (though pp. 22-24 are also about misappropriation of treasure); Ibn el-Athir, Annales, pp. 48-50. The best guide on all of this is Denise Keyes Filios, “A good story well told: memory, identity, and the conquest of Iberia” in Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies Vol. 6 (Abingdon 2014), pp. 127–147, DOI: 10.1080/17546559.2014.932422.

7. Filios’s work ibid. and Denise Filios, “Legends of the Fall: Conde Julián in Medieval Arabic and Hispano-Latin Historiography” in Medieval Encounters Vol. 15 (Wien 2009), pp. 375–390, DOI: 10.1163/157006709X458918. Ibn al-Qūtīya can be read in Muḥammad ibn `Umar Ibn al-Qūṭīyah, Early Islamic Spain: the history of Ibn al-Qutiya, transl. David James (London 2011), online here; on him see Ann Christys, Christians in al-Andalus (711 – 1000), Culture and Civilization in the Middle East (Richmond 2002), pp. 158-183, Christys, “How the Royal House of Witiza Survived the Islamic Conquest of Spain” in Walter Pohl and Maximilian Diesenberger (edd.), Integration und Herrschaft: ethnische Identitäten und soziale Organisation im Frühmittelalter, Denkschriften der Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Klasse 301 (Wien 2002), pp. 233–246 and Denise K. Filios, “Playing the Goth Card in Tenth-Century Córdoba: Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s Family Traditions” in La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Vol. 43 (Dallas TX 2015), pp. 57–84, DOI: 10.1353/cor.2015.0011.

8. For Count Julian see Filios, “Legends of the Fall”; for the nationalistic agonising see Pablo C. Díaz & María del R. Valverde, “The Theoretical Strength and Practical Weakness of the Visigothic Monarchy of Toledo” in Frans Theuws & Janet L. Nelson (edd.), Rituals of Power: From Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, The Transformation of the Roman World 8 (Leiden 2000), pp. 59‒93, and Javier Arce, “The Visigoths in Spain: old and new historical problems” in Walter Pohl and Veronika Wieser (edd.), Der frühmittelalterliche Staat – europäische Perspektiven, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 16 (Wien 2009), pp. 31–40 at pp. 31-34.

9. Bonnaz, Chroniques, Chronique d’Alphonse III cap. 1.3 (170 ships in the reign of Wamba (r. 672-680 CE)); “Chronicle of Alfonso III” c. 2 (270 ships). If the Chronicler of 754 knew about this, they gathered it in under “various misfortunes” during the reign (“Chronicle of 754” cap. 36. The Arabic source which mentions a test raid is Ibn el-Athīr, Annales, p. 42; the fact that this only turns up in such a late account doesn’t inspire confidence, especially since the detail is used to explain a place-name.

10. “Chronicle of 754” capp. 52 (pp. 131-132) & 64 (p. 137); Theodor Mommsen (ed.), Chronica Minora saec. IV. V. VI. VII 2, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Auctores Antiquissimi) 11 (Berlin 1894), online here, pp. 323-369 at pp. 352 & 356.

11. For example, Collins, Arab Conquest, pp. 46-48.

12. Gildas, The Ruin of Britain, and other documents, ed. Michael Winterbottom, Arthurian Period Sources 7 (London 1978), De Excidio c. 23; Simon Coupland, “From Poachers to Gamekeepers: Scandinavian warlords and Carolingian kings” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 7 (Oxford 1998), pp. 85–114, DOI: 10.1111/1468-0254.00019; Pierre Bauduin, “Chefs normandes et élites franques, fin IX^e-début X^e siècle” in idem (ed.), Les fondations scandinaves en Occident et les débuts du duché de Normandie (Caen 2005), pp. 181–194.

13. The date is from Ibn el-Athir, Annales, p. 33.

Pictish Pandemic Road Trip, Part IV

This gallery contains 29 photos.

Having floated my unexpected finding of last week before you, it’s now back to the world of Pictish stones as of August 2020, by what I could loosely call popular demand (one person has demanded it). You may recall that … Continue reading →