3. Waiting for the Godos

SOME OF THE NAMES OF early kings of Spain sound strangely incongruous, as if they were pulled straight from the medieval folklore of Germany, rather than Spain: Reccared, Roderic, Athanagild, Leovigild, Seisebut, Chindasuinth, Recceswinth, and Wamba.

Yet given Spain’s history, there’s nothing strange about these names. In 507, a Germanic tribe, the Visigoths, took control of the Iberian Peninsula and ruled it for two centuries. Many common first names in Spanish today have Gothic origins, including Álvaro, Elvira, Fernando, Rodrigo, Gonzalo, Alfonso, and Ramiro. Gonzalo comes from Gundisalvus, whose root is gunthis (fight). Fernando is a combination of frithu (peace) and nanth (audacity).

The Visigoths were the last of the so-called barbarian tribes that moved into Western Europe when the Roman Empire collapsed at the end of the fifth century. In Latin, barbarus means “foreign.” But most barbarians weren’t invaders, at least not at first. They had been living in the Roman Empire, or were neighbors, since the first century, and most were partly or totally Romanized by the time they took power.

As a result of this intermixing, a number of Germanicisms entered Vulgar Latin before the barbarians even got to Hispania. The Germanic suppa (soup) became sopa in Spanish and soupe in French. Bank (bench) became banco in Spanish and banc in French. German was the source of Spanish words like jabón (soap), guerra (war), guardia (policeman), yelmo (helmet), and embajada (embassy). Other common terms include rico and fresco (rich and fresh). Bandido (bandit) came from the German ban (prohibition). Compañero and compañía (companion and company, respectively) are Latinizations of a Germanic concept, galhaiba (he who shares the bread).

At the end of the fourth century, the Roman Empire split between east and west. The Eastern Roman Empire, based in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), was by far more solid than the Western. Predominantly Greek speaking, vigorously Christian, and prosperous, the East would continue operations as the Byzantine Empire for another ten centuries.

In the Western Empire, Germanic tribes flowed in to fill the power vacuum, either as refugees, marauders, or mercenaries for the Romans themselves. Although some of these tribes went north to Britannia and Gaul, many gravitated toward Hispania, the sun belt of the empire, which had lots of sparsely populated land up for grabs and where the weather was definitely fairer than in Britannia.

The Vandals, the Alans, and the Sueves started arriving in Hispania in AD 409. They moved in and divvied up the peninsula because there wasn’t much stopping them. Hispania’s Roman legions had blended into civilian life over the centuries and were long gone by this time. By 411, the Sueves and Vandals had settled in Galicia (the northwest), the Alans in Lusitania (the west), and the Vandals in Baetica (the south).

But the Romans weren’t quite ready to give up. In a last-ditch effort to regain control over Spain, Rome hired the Visigoths, who had established their kingdom in Tolosa (Toulouse, France) to rout out the other German tribes. The Visigoth mercenaries did the job, virtually exterminating the Alans and chasing the Vandals across the Mediterranean into North Africa. Then they headed back to Gaul.

For nearly a century, Roman Hispania was divided between the Visigoths, who exerted some authority in the north, east, and south, and the Alans and Seuves, who controlled the northeast. In 507, the Franks routed the Visigoths from France, and the Visigoths moved south and set up their capital in Toledo; then, over the next 150 years, they pushed the other Germanic tribes out or conquered them.

There is very little evidence of the Visigoth presence in Toledo. Most of what remains—fragments of buildings and the odd engraving in Gothic characters—can be seen only behind glass display cabinets in museums. There are about a dozen churches throughout Spain that have characteristic Gothic horseshoe-style arches. Otherwise, almost everything the Visigoths built was destroyed by the empires that followed them.

Yet the Visigoths’ intangible legacy was far more important: they left behind a powerful myth of a Golden Age of Christian rule that ended when most of Spain became part of the Muslim world. This myth would shape the destiny of Spain and the Spanish language.

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During their actual reign, which only lasted two centuries, the Visigoths had very little impact on the language spoken there. For the most part, they let the “Roman” inhabitants of Hispania keep speaking Vulgar Latin. There simply weren’t enough Visigoths—between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand took refuge in Spain among four million Hispanians—to impose their German language. In addition, by the time they conquered Hispania, the Visigoths had been already doing business with the Romans for at least a century, so they spoke Latin. As a result, during the two centuries of Visigoth rule over Hispania, Latin remained the language of the administration, and all official documents were produced in Latin.

By the seventh century, the Gothic tongue was virtually extinct in Hispania. This was a marked contrast to the situation in France: the Frankish kings kept speaking Germanic until the end of the tenth century. Frankish heavily influenced French grammar, with the result that 10 percent of common French vocabulary is of Frankish origin.

Modern Spanish has almost no traces of Germanic languages. Spanish has only a few early Visigothic loans, including espía (spy), ropa (clothing), sitio (site). Later borrowings include ataviar (to adorn), escanciar (to pour wine), ganso (goose), and tapa (lid), probably the origin of the name for the Spanish dish tapas. There are many theories about how tapas came to refer to food. Some believe early tapas were slices of bread or cheese placed on top of drinks. The meaning of the word evolved from there. The other remnant of the Visigothic language is the Spanish suffix -engo, as in abandengo and realengo (belonging to the abbey or to the crown). It comes from the Germanic suffix -ing, in the sense of “belonging to.” And, of course, Spanish kept many Visigothic names.

Beyond their small numbers, there was another reason the Visigoths had so little impact on the culture and language of Hispania: they were never popular rulers. The Goths forbade intermarriage and lived apart from the Romans. Visigothic kings were ruthless and constantly embroiled in rivalries. Every one of the thirty-three legitimate kings who ruled Visigothic between 507 and 711 was toppled by a usurper.

The Visigoths had another flaw, which adds a curious twist to the Christian Golden Age associated with their rule: although Christian, the Goths were actually heretics. Most of the inhabitants of the peninsula were Catholic by this point, but the Visigoths belonged to the Arian sect of Christianity, characterized by a belief, originating in Egypt, that Christ is subordinate to God. This rejection of the Trinity of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit made the Visigoths heretics in the eyes of their own Christian subjects.

Curiously, the Spanish term for the Visigoths, godos, would go on to have reactionary associations in Hispanic culture. In Colombia and Paraguay, it is a nickname for the Conservative Party. In Chile, it refers to someone from Spain. (Renaissance architects in Europe dubbed the architecture of the twelfth to fifteenth century “Gothic,” a pejorative name for a style they looked down upon in favor of classical models.)

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Despite their scant numbers, heretical faith, and the general bad opinion in which they were held, the Visigoths turned out to be important figures in the story of Spanish. They made their mark in two ways. First, they laid the groundwork for the incredible growth of Spanish by creating the myth of a unified, Christian Hispania. Then, they actually contributed to unifying Spain by establishing a law code that would apply to the whole Iberian Peninsula.

Everywhere else in Western Europe, the former Roman provinces were fracturing; cities, ports, and roads were falling into disuse and communication lines were collapsing. This process of decay was considerably slower under the Visigoths, skilled warriors who progressively extended their domain over the peninsula.

Despite their unpopularity, the Visigoth rulers benefited from a peculiar advantage: they, and the local “Romans,” were united against a common enemy, the Byzantine Empire, formerly the Eastern Roman Empire. The Byzantines were determined to reclaim control over the land Rome had lost 141 years earlier. They landed in Cartagena in 552 and carved themselves out a banana-shaped territory along the southern coast of the Iberian Peninsula. Nothing is left of this short-lived province today except the name, Spania. Such are the twists of history that the name of Spain turns out to be a Hellenism of a Latinism (Hispania) of the Phoenician name I-shepan-ha.

The threat of the Byzantine Empire motivated the Roman patricians of Hispania, and much of the population, to rally around the Visigothic Crown, heresies and all. This was mostly thanks to work of the two most famous personalities of Visigothic Hispania: Leander, and his younger brother Isidore, both of whom were appointed bishop of Seville. Both were also canonized—like a number of their siblings, including their brother Fulgentius and their sister Florentine.

Well-spoken and a brilliant writer, Leander was a true statesman as well as a deeply religious man. He understood that the Visigoths’ heretical Arian faith was a political handicap, since it reduced the legitimacy of the Visigothic kings in the eyes of their Christian subjects. After being named bishop of Seville in 579, Leander converted the king’s successor, Prince Hermenegild, to Catholicism. The king himself was not happy about Leander’s initiative. He declared war on his son and exiled Leander to Byzantium. But Leander had the last word: he returned to Hispania three years later and converted the next prince in line to the throne, Reccared.

When Reccared inherited the Visigothic throne in 589, he made Catholicism the official religion of his kingdom. This new legitimacy allowed him to rally his Roman subjects to fight the Byzantines. It took thirty-five more years and six more kings to finally chase the last Byzantine soldier out of Hispania, but by 624, the peninsula was nominally united for the first time in two centuries.

When Leander died in 601, his brother Isidore, twenty-six years younger, succeeded him as bishop of Seville. Isidore of Seville is considered one of the greatest writers of the period, along with the Venerable Bede of England and Gregory of Tours of France. Among them, Isidore left the most substantial volume of writings. He wrote extensively on history, law, and theology, but also on language and culture. His most significant work, an encyclopedia called Etymologiae, was a massive work of 448 chapters in 20 volumes in which Isidore attempted to “account for all that was known.” This work prompted the Vatican in 2005 to declare Isidore the patron saint of the Internet!

No other Christian thinker of the Middle Ages was as influential as Isidore. Until the invention of the printing press eight centuries later, his Etymologiae would be the second most read work, after the Bible. Historians regard him as the last philosopher of Antiquity or the last founding father of the church. And despite the fact that he was one of the most learned men of his age, numerous traces of Vulgar Latin were creeping into his writings, which he intended to be exemplary Classical Latin. Faustino Arévalo, a Jesuit who edited the Spanish version of the Etymologiae in 1763, counted no fewer than 1,640 “Spanish” terms in the Latin of Isidore of Seville, by which Arévalo meant Vulgar Latin terms that had made it into the Spanish spoken in the eighteenth century.

Since very few writings of the period survive, Isidore’s voluminous output is important to show the stages of transformation of Vulgar Latin. It is all the more precious since Isidore wrote about language, including treatises on verbs and synonyms. A sizable part of his encyclopedia is devoted to etymology. To the modern reader, accustomed to scientific etymology, Isidore’s attempts seem like pop etymology—for example, he affirms that cattus (cat) originated in the verb cattare (to see, to look). On the other hand, Isidore is right about the Spanish origin of the color amarillo (yellow).

As an erudite, Isidore was obsessed with preventing knowledge from being lost in the ruins of the Roman Empire. His encyclopedic work was an effort to protect and cultivate what was left of Rome, starting with culture and language. One of his great decisions as bishop was to call for the creation of bishopric schools that would provide formal teaching of Latin. As a result of Isidore’s efforts, Latin—whether Classical or Vulgar—was taught longer in Spain than anywhere else in the former Western Roman Empire. This is another reason modern Spanish resembles Latin a lot more than French does.

Isidore also labored to create a unified set of laws for Hispania, which was a first in Europe. Isidore was a statesman obsessed with uniting Spain by means beyond the Christian faith. At the fourth Council of Toledo in 633, he went as far as preaching a famous formula: rex, gens, patria. Literally, this means “king, people, nation,” but it carries the sense of “one king, one people, one nation.” Isidore’s point was that Romans and Visigoths had to merge into a single identity. The common link would be law. So Isidore spent his whole life compiling Roman law, a work he never finished.

Isidore did not have time to overhaul the law code before he died in 636. Less than seven years later, the next Visigothic king, Chindasuinth, created a coded legal system called the Liber Iudicorum or the Lex Visigothorum, better known by its later name, Fuero Juzgo (Charter of Justice).

Spain’s Visigothic “law of the land” was a huge departure from the rest of Europe. The Barbarian invasions in Europe had introduced Germanic law into the former Roman Empire but didn’t erase Roman law. The effect was that most of Western Europe had separate laws for “Barbarians” and for “Romans.” In short, it was legal chaos. If a Visigoth killed a Roman, he was judged according to Visigothic law; if a Roman killed a Visigoth, he was judged according to Roman law. The system was both unjust and impractical—for starters, courts had no idea which system to use for the offspring of mixed marriages (which were outlawed in the first place).

Although the Visigothic nobility never really learned to respect their own laws, the Visigothic law code achieved three things that had a profound impact on later Spanish culture. First, Hispania became the only place in “barbarian” Europe where the same laws applied to all (theoretically). The Fuero Juzgo, which predates the English Magna Carta by five and a half centuries, is often cited as the foundation of representative government in Europe. The code proceeded from principles rather than customs, interdicts, and obligations.

Second, the Fuero Juzgo set a standard for Vulgar Latin. The best minds on the Iberian Peninsula would read and reread it for the next seven centuries.

Finally, constant reference to this important document implanted a “culture of language” in the peninsula based on orderliness and principles. The way a language is conceived tends to mirror the way the law of its speakers is organized. English-speaking countries use common law, a system based on customs, canon law, parliamentary writs, and royal decree. Common law does not proceed from a code or from principles, and English itself is a disorganized tongue that follows no code.

In Hispania, the clearly defined Visigothic code no doubt inspired a desire to organize the language in which it was written. This would manifest itself not only in the Kingdom of Castile but that of Portugal as well. As we will see in the coming chapters, the Christians—who were extremely busy fighting the Arabs as well as each other—codified their language as they expanded their hold on Iberia, beginning as early as the eleventh century, four or five centuries before the French or Italians tried to do the same thing.

Yet the most significant political impact of the Visigoths on Spanish was their legacy: the myth of a unified, Christian Visigothic Spain centered on Toledo. This idea of a Visigothic Golden Age was so resilient that in the twentieth century, during Franco’s dictatorship, students were forced to memorize the names of Spain’s thirty-three Gothic kings.

Of course, the Visigothic myth was just that, a myth. The Visigoths were never popular rulers, nor had they really unified the peninsula politically. Which is why, when Muslims from North Africa landed on the Iberian Peninsula and started taking control of Hispania, the locals hardly lifted a finger to resist them.