Visions of Unity after the Visigoths: Early Iberian Latin Chronicles and the Mediterranean World

This study addresses the negotiation of unity and diversity in Spain's earliest narrative testimonies–Mozarabic, Asturian, Leonese, and Castilian Latin chronicles composed during an age of religious conflict and political fragmentation. As the principal source of Spanish political thought between the eighth and mid-thirteenth centuries, these texts have long been regarded from the perspective of modern-day national boundaries of a political entity called Spain.

From the post-national perspective of Mediterranean studies, which considers Iberian centers of power in cultural contact with the broader world, medieval Iberian chronicle writing is seen as a cultural practice that seeks to reconcile the imperative of unity and stability with the reality of diversity and social change. In conceptualizing the loss of Visigothic sovereignty to the Arabs in 711, and in dealing with subsequent claims to territorial unity, political sovereignty, and religious uniformity, Mozarabic, Asturian, and Leonese-Castilian chroniclers systematically adapted religious, legal, and philosophical narratives originating in and around the Iberian peninsula, as well as those from Carolingian France, the Byzantine Near East, and North Africa. The degree to which these texts anchor themselves in Mediterranean networks of knowledge and culture, while simultaneously rejecting notions of diversity, coexistence, and heterogeneity, challenges contemporary notions of inclusion and exclusion alike.