VARIA HISPANO-GETICA. TRACING THE POSSIBLE GETIC ORIGIN OF THE ARROWS EMBLEM ON THE COAT OF ARMS OF THE CATHOLIC MONARCHS AND THE FALANGE IN SPAIN Juan Ramón Carbó García1 When the coat of arms of the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, was created in the 15th century, it was necessary to include different elements on it. To begin with, there was the eagle with the halo of holiness, the symbol of St. John the Evangelist, holding the shield up with its claws. This represents Christian religious unity in the territories governed by Ferdinand and Isabella, as well as divine protection through the mediation of the Evangelist saint – Jesus' favourite – and, of course, the divine right of the monarchy. The great shield held up by the eagle is crowned, of course, as befits a royal coat of arms. The emblems of the different kingdoms governed by the monarchs are grouped under a single crown: there are the emblems of Castile and Leon (the tower and the silhouette of a lion), and those of Aragon and Sicily (four red stripes on a gold background, for Aragon, and the space divided into four triangles for Sicily, two with the same emblem as Aragon and the other two with the old emblem of Sicily, a black eagle crowned in gold, with a red beak and claws on a silver background. Likewise, after the conquest of the Nazari Kingdom of Granada in 1492, the pomegranate, its symbol, was added. And next to the shield borne by the eagle there appear the emblems of the yoke and arrows, the personal standards of the Catholic Monarchs2. The yoke and arrows appeared at that time as a new element in Hispanic heraldry, and had not appeared before on any of the coats of arms of the monarchs of Castile and Leon or Aragon. As personal standards of the monarchs, they were expected to symbolize their nobility and right to sovereignty, and undoubtedly Ferdinand and Isabella, who were to govern the powerful group of territories of their kingdoms, had every motive for resorting to greater symbols that would represent as clearly as possible their origins and virtues. But the need to resort to certain symbols did not mean that they could just invent or adopt them. Heraldry, in its highest form, for royalty, does not admit inventions, but rather is always linked to tradition. We can thus affirm with all certainty that the heraldists of the Catholic Monarchs did not invent anything, and that the two emblems, the yoke and the arrows, have their origins based on more or less historical traditions and there are also explanations as to why they were included next to the shield of the Monarchs and why they were used in general as their 1 Researcher in training within the framework of the Training of Research Personnel Grant, financed by the Spanish Ministry for Education and Science with DGCYT Project BHA2003-01936. 2 On heraldry in the time of the Catholic Monarchs, see: RIQUER 1986; PARDO DE GUEVARA 1987; DOMINGUEZ CASAS 1993; LIÑÁN Y EGUIZÁBAL 1994; MENÉNDEZ PIDAL 1999; GONZÁLEZ/ MARTÍNEZ 2002. EPHEMERIS NAPOCENSIS, XVI–XVII, 2006–2007, p. 255–272 256 Juan Ramón Carbó García 2 personal emblems. Our intention was to try to look into their origins and give what we believe is the most plausible hypothesis, which we will defend in the following pages of this study: that the arrows of Queen Isabella originally came from the Getae. This hypothesis is based on the logical supposition – which we shall explain below – that a symbol was chosen for the Queen that would have some relationship with the traditions prevailing in her kingdom, 15th century Castile, i.e., the Gothic tradition. And this Gothic tradition was based – owing to a complex problem of confusion and identification between peoples and their histories that we shall also have to explain – on nothing less that the history of the Getae and the Dacians. Expressed in this simple way, the hypothesis may seem like a fantasy. It is thus necessary to pose and explain the suppositions and problems mentioned. To begin with, we shall refer to the question of the confusion and identification of the Goths with the Getae, in order to understand how part of the history of the Getae and the Dacians came to be included in the legendary past of the Goths. Furthermore, in this same section we shall allude to the rise of Neo-Gothic ideals in Castile and the Gothic traditions that prevailed in the 15th century. Afterwards, we shall approach the topic of the choice of the yoke and arrows symbols by the Catholic Monarchs and their inclusion next to the royal shield. Finally, we shall take a look at the adoption of the yoke and arrows by the Spanish Falange during Spain's Second Republic in the years before the Spanish Civil War in the 20th century and analyse that group's peculiar view of the origin of these symbols, which have been present in heraldry and Spanish symbology for more than five centuries and which seem to have a much older origin. 1. Goths and Getae in the Historiography of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages3 Since the end of the 4th century C.E., the Goths have been assimilated to the Getae by both poets and historians, something which was favoured by the phonetic similarity and geographical proximity of the two names: gothi and getae. They were two peoples who had nothing in common, apart from having occupied, at very different points in time, the territory bordering the left bank of the lower Danube. However, the term Getae was to be used as the poetic name for the Goths for many centuries, whereas for historians, it was considered the old name for the Goths4. This confusion is similar to that between the Getae and the Scythians in the poetic works of the High Empire, especially after Ovid. These two confusions were to give rise to another one later on, that affecting the Goths and the Scythians, as frequent among historians and poets of the Late Empire as the assimilation between Goths and Getae. The problem lies in whether it really was a matter of confusion at the origin and was only that in subsequent historical and poetic works, or whether the assimilation of Goths and Getae was somewhat intentional, if not at the beginning, then sometime later. The answers to this question and to that of what this intentionality would have been seem to be clearly related to the historiographic problematic of the historical origin of peoples, a study that is complex and difficult to synthesize5. 3 This section has already been dealt with by the author elsewhere: CARBÓ GARCÍA 2004, 179–206. On the problem of the confusion between the Getae and the Goths, see also SÖHRMAN 2004, 169–196; CANDAU /GONZÁLEZ/CRUZ 2004; HOBSBAWN 1995, 1–14; DENIZE 1986, 75–82; BUSUIOCEANU 1985; GEARY 1983, 15–26; PETOLESCU 1983, 147–149; VON SYBEL 1847, 288–296. 4 SVENNUNG 1967, 5–6. 5 GEARY 1983, 15–26. 3 Varia hispano-getica 257 Hedeager suggests that the myths concerning the origins of peoples and epic poetry seemed to have helped to create identities for the warrior elites during the Period of Migrations, taking into account that the texts and the material culture would be ideologically related to the creation and articulation of a new social and cosmological order6. Ideology, a source of social power and a nuclear element in every cultural system, controller of beliefs, values and ideas, is a prior condition for social and political legitimization. The formation of oral traditions and written production are some of the vehicles of the materialization of these ideas7. In the 5th century and the beginning of the 6th century A.D., material culture turned into a symbolic materialization of the new social and political identities. The hybrid Roman-Germanic culture transformed the Germanic oral tradition which included origin myths, tribal histories and royal genealogies, of great importance for the political legitimization of the Germanic peoples, and put it in written form, thus integrating it into the imperial classical Roman tradition8. It is these mythical stories which are of interest for our study of the assimilation of the history of the Getae into the history of the origin of the Goths, which in turn was of great importance in the historical process of integration and legitimization of the latter. The Scandinavian origin myth can be traced back to Ablabius, who write a history of the Goths that has been lost. Cassiodorus, probably following Ablabius, wrote a Historia Gothorum in which he created a royal genealogy that comprised seventeen generations between the first king and Atalaric, following the numerical scheme of the royal Roman genealogy from Aeneas to Romulus. Although it incorporates an element from classical literature, it was perhaps an adaptation from an orally transmitted Goth genealogy. Genealogies, like heroic legends, are thus presented as instruments of legitimization9. In any case, if one wished to maintain credibility, there must have been certain limits to the alteration of the oral traditions of a people or to the change of its legends and sacred stories. The effect of genealogies and origin myths in the search for legitimacy and political domination would have disappeared if the manipulation had been too obvious. Therefore, these stories would not have been invented on the spur of the moment but would have developed, been altered or constructed throughout several generations, so that the power derived from their being told again and again would be reinforced and they would turn into pure tradition10.