Visigothic identity of Spain

[ualarauans]

Hailai jus, frijonds!

I fear to bore you with another portion of long reasoning 
essentially about the same subject, yet I hope this would serve to 
incite some discussion of the really important matter of ethnic and 
religious identities in the Migration period.

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Michael Erwin <merwin at ...> wrote:
>
> Basically people might tie their religious identities with their
> other identities; however, if they believe "the enemy [Islam] of my
> enemy [Catholicism] is my friend," they and their families may
accept
> the combination of new religious identities with the older ethno-
> cultural, identities.

I guess we all agree that the correlation and occasional concurrence 
of religious and ethnic identities was a not too rare phenomenon in 
the epoch. Its probably most clear expression we may see 
in "Barbarian" henotheistic pre-Christian cults genetically 
connected with ancestry worship (e.g. Gaut as a progenitor of the 
Goths and the Amalingian dynasty in particular). Such a cult, as 
Ingemar pointed out, did not refute other deities which might exist 
in the Universe besides, nor was it able of proselytizing among 
strangers (unless perhaps through intermarriage). I think the 
bearers of this cult (actually most pre-Christian Goths) would admit 
that other ethno-cultural entities could as well have their own 
divine progenitors, and a conflict between, say, Teruingi and Suebi 
could be mythologically interpreted as a single combat between Gaut 
and Irmin.

Now, first the Visi- and later the Ostrogoths adopt the Arian 
Christianity, their older ethno-genealogic traditions being not 
abolished, but rather revaluated in the euhemeristic spirit ("Gaut 
was an ancient hero of our people, of course he was not a God, well, 
probably not, but neither a quite ordinary man... Psst, the priest 
would hear!"). But in the situation when most of the Christian world 
went Orthodox Catholic, Arianism de facto became a kind of an ethnic 
religion, a distinctive feature of the East-Germanic peoples. That a 
young Federico speaks Gothic no less fluently than Vulgar Latin and 
is able to trace his patrilineal ancestry as far back as to 
legendary mist-covered Scandza is yet not enough. To feel and be 
accepted as a true Goth he has to consent to the galeiki, not 
ibnaleiki, of the Father and the Son.

Now, what did it imply in that time to be Byzantine? The East-Roman 
Empire was a huge melting pot, where your particular ethnic 
background meant practically nothing. It was a) your religious 
loyalty towards the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, and b) 
your civic loyalty towards the Emperor sitting in the Golden Palace, 
which defined your inclusion into the super-ethnic body of 
Byzantium. The old Greek auto-ethnonym "Hellene" came to 
mean "pagan" (cf. already in the NT, Mc 7:26 hH DE GYNH HN hELLHNIS, 
SYROFOINIKISSA TW GENEI wasuþ-þan so qino haiþno, Saurini fwnikiska 
gabaurþai). Justinian ordered repressalies to be performed in 
Hellas. In its stead came the word "Romaios" as a self-name of a new 
nation which potentially could expand up to the very limits of the 
Oecumene. Centuries later, another Orthodox Empire, Russia, which 
had inherited much of the Byzantine institutions and ideology, did 
pay much more attention to the religion than to the ethnicity of its 
subjects. In your birth certificate you'd have had "Orthodox" 
or "Catholic" or "Lutheran" or "Muslim" instead 
of "Russian", "Pole", "Swede", "Tatar" respectively. This, in 
combination with pan-Orthodox claims of Russian Czars and 
universalistic theses of Russian literary authors 
(Dostoevsky: "Russian means the same as Orthodox"), creates a pretty 
close analogy.

Back to the Goths. In 53? CE Theodahadus gives audience to a 
Byzantine embassy. They speak something about the murder of 
Amalasuintha, about the Sicilian problem etc, but the rex sees 
Justinian's real, though unspoken, message, which is a 
demand: "Renounce your kingship, order your people convert to 
Orthodox Catholicism, let the brave Goths swell the ranks of the 
invincible Byzantine legions, and, maybe, then We will assign you a 
governor of the new-established Imperial province of Italy". That 
would have been not only a demotion from thiudans to kindins in the 
terms we discussed here before. Translated from the language of the 
epoch of clashing ethno-religious identities into ours, that would 
simply say: "Stop being Gothic, forget your roots, your heretical 
forefathers who are now burning in hell, become Byzantines, become 
Romaioi, members of a new family. Look at your fellow Arian Vandals, 
who declined the generous offer, and now they are dust". That was 
not a mere arrogance. For the top class, the title of a Byzantine 
patrikios and the appointed rent proved to be very attractive. And 
we know that one by one, Gothic generals surrender to Belisarius 
almost without combat. After the first defeats Theodahadus, suspect 
of his Byzantine sympathies, gets overthrown and killed in 536, his 
successor Uitiges tries to organize a resistance but soon gives up, 
accepts the terms and moves to Byzantium in 540. This event is 
celebrated by Jordanes as the end of the Ostrogothic Italy. Jordanes 
himself was not a Gothic writer as we use to think. Not Gothic in 
the sense of his political and ideological party. After his 
conversion ("post conuersionem meam", as he puts it) he is a 
Byzantine author of a Gothic descent. Just like Justinian himself 
was a Byzantine of a Thracian descent.

But the common Goths, they couldn't await much from the compelled 
Byzantinization. Instead of fighting under command of their kinsmen 
in defense of their wives and children in Italy, they would have to 
fight and die as an auxiliary force under Byzantine strategs in Asia 
Minor, against the Persians who did never hurt a single Goth, for 
the sake of the Emperor whom none of these Goths has ever seen. 
Totila arose as an answer to their expectations of a leader who 
would throw off the Byzantine yoke. And the Italian Romans, who at 
first did hail the approaching Byzantine armies as liberators from 
the God-condemned heretical rule and restitutors of the past Roman 
glory, now, with newly appointed tax-collectors, judges and police 
officers dealing with the new subjects in the Byzantine way, 
recalled the time of Theodoric as a Golden Age. Their wish had been 
to stay Catholic, not to become Byzantine. They understood why the 
Jews of Naples preferred to die in a hopeless combat rather than to 
lose themselves in conversion. Lots of Romans were joining in with 
Totila until his army became more Italian than Gothic. We can't 
explain why Catholics fought Catholics under the command of an Arian 
leader if we proceed from the theology only. After several decades 
of the Ostrogothic rule, preceded by several decades of the rule of 
other Germanic reges, and these by still more years since the 
partition of the Empire, the feel of self-identity of the native 
Italian population apparently differed from the Byzantine in so much 
that it proved hardly possible to unite them again under one roof. 
Later, the Pope called for a Frankish help against the Byzantines in 
Italy, and that ultimately resulted in the Great Schism. The Gothic 
War of the 6th century can probably be regarded as the first 
conflict between East and West of Europe.

Ualarauans




You are a member of the Gothic-L list.  To unsubscribe, send a blank email to <gothic-l-unsubscribe at egroups.com>. 
Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gothic-l/

<*> Your email settings:
    Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gothic-l/join
    (Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
    mailto:gothic-l-digest at yahoogroups.com 
    mailto:gothic-l-fullfeatured at yahoogroups.com

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    gothic-l-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/