chapter 2 The Suevi in An Introduction

Michael Kulikowski

Most general treatments of medieval Spain, , or begin with, or include, a chapter on the Suevi, although these often reflect rather dated views of their history. In recent years, the gap between general accounts and advances in specialist scholarship has widened, for a number of reasons. First and fore- most, the whole of Iberian history before the Arab conquests is nowadays firmly attached to ancient, rather than medieval, history. This change is exem- plified by the fact that, instead of stopping with the first Christian inscriptions, the new edition of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum includes every inscrip- tion from before 711, as does Epigraphica a recent, and indispensable, addition to Iberian scholarship.1 In general terms, the Visigothic and Suevic kingdoms now tend to be seen as the final stages of the peninsula’s ancient, Roman history, and not as a prelude to the Middle Ages. Although there is much to recommend this approach—both the Gothic and Suevic kingdoms were sub-Roman states, operating reduced and restricted versions of a Roman governmental system wherever they could do so—it has made it difficult for medieval historians to keep up with changing interpretations of the peninsu- la’s late antique history.2 The present short article is aimed squarely at medie- valists and offers a guide to recent developments in the history of the Suevi and their kingdom in the Spanish Northwest. As a glance at a very useful recent bibliography will show, dozens of articles are published annually on Gallaecia and the Suevi.3 Much of this scholarship is highly repetitive, for a very simple reason: the literary sources for Suevic

1 See Edmondson (1999) on the new cil, vol. 2 (Inscriptiones Hispaniae Latinae), and the prog- ress of Spanish epigraphy more generally. Bowes and Kulikowski (2005), 13–19, survey impor- tant developments in the editing and publication of primary sources for Iberian in general. Hispania Epigraphica has now reached its 18th volume, published in 2013 and covering inscriptions discovered or republished in 2009. 2 My own history of the period, Kulikowski (2004), attempts to show how closely tied the Gothic and Suevic kingdoms were to their Roman progenitors. Collins (2004) reflects a lin- gering medievalist approach to the period. 3 Ferreiro (2006), 555–604; this supplements Ferreiro (1988). Additional supplements have appeared in 2008 and 2011.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004288607_004 132 Kulikowski history in the peninsula are very few and have been worked over by scholars for centuries. They consist, in the fifth century, of a couple of lines in and substantial sections of the chronicle of , the bishop of (modern Chaves), who wrote around 470.4 For the sixth century, there are Martin of , author of pastoral and theological tracts, and John of Biclar, who continued the African chronicle of Victor Vitensis into the very late 500s, with an Iberian focus and brief references to Gallaecia.5 In the seventh century, Isidore of Seville had as little to work with as we do, and merely reworked Hydatius for his Historiae.6 Apart from that, the literary sources are silent, and the prospects of new discoveries are slender in the extreme: reports of newly discovered texts about the Spanish Suevi should be mistrusted, as none has yet proved to be what its discoverers claim (see, for instance, the purported inscription of a hitherto unknown Suevic king Veremundus which actually commemorates one of the tenth-century Asturian rulers, King Vermudo II).7 That is not to say that, in time, new ways of reading old evidence might not open up as yet unsuspected insights into the Gallaecian kingdom of the Suevi, but at present scholarship is clearly at something of an impasse and much that is published merely rehearses yet again what we already know—often what was already said in the classic accounts of Reinhart and Torres.8 As several contributions to the present volume will demonstrate, archaeol- ogy offers more hope of substantial progress. Even if nothing in Galicia has

4 The standard edition of Orosius’s Historiae adversum paganos remains that of Zangemeister in the csel; A.T. Fear published an English translation in 2010. Book 7 deals briefly with the invasion of Spain. Burgess’s edition of Hydatius (cited as Hyd.) supersedes in every respect that of Mommsen in vol. 2 of the Chronica minora (mgh, aa, vol. 11, pp. 1–36), and I follow Burgess’s numbering of the text throughout. To place Hydatius in the full context of the ancient and medieval chronicle tradition, one should consult Burgess and Kulikowski (2013), the first of four volumes on the topic. A full commentary on Hydatius will appear in volume 3. 5 Martin of Braga should still be consulted in the edition of Barlow (1950); John of Biclar (cited as Ioh. Bicl.) is now available in an excellent Corpus Christianorum edition by Cardelle de Hartmann (2001), 59–83. 6 The Rodríguez Alonso (1975) edition of Isidore’s Historiae prints the short and long recen- sions (the first of which might actually be the work of another author, Maximus of Zaragoza— see, persuasively, Collins [1994]) side by side. 7 Ferreiro (1997), correctly dismissed by Collins (2004), 32, which is otherwise an unreliable guide to the fifth and earlier sixth centuries. 8 Reinhart (1952); Torres (1977). Díaz (2011) is the latest overview, with a useful introduction on modern ideas about the Sueves. The introduction to Bowes and Kulikowski (2005), 15–18, illustrates by way of example some approaches towards reassessing the evidence of the fifth- and sixth-century chronicles.