Visigothic identity of Spain

[Ingemar Nordgren]

Dear Ualarauans!

I think you have made a brilliant analysis and hence it as well seems
that the Gothic laguage could have remained if the Goths and allies
had won the war. 

Best
Iggwimer


> 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
>





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