Visigothic Spain and Byzantium. The story of a special (historiographical) relationship
Résumé
Most late-twentieth-century studies dealing with the Visigothic kingdom
of Toledo mentioned its alleged imitation of Byzantium as its hallmark,
singling it out from the rest of barbarian Europe. This was not a general
imitatio imperii, but an imitation of the only Roman empire contemporary
to the Gothic polity: eastern, Greek-speaking, exotic Byzantium. This
chapter discusses the origins of Byzantinism in Visigothic historiography, its
occasionally scant grounding in the evidence, and the ideological functions
it fulfijilled for historians. In the twentieth century, the Byzantinist paradigm
produced well-arranged yet often contradictory narratives of one of the
longest-lived post-Roman kingdoms in the West. Only lately has political
and scientifijic globalization dispelled both the illusion of the uniqueness
of Spanish features and the necessity for grounding it in Byzantinism.