Roman Hispania and the Visigoths
Aqueducts, theatres and gold crowns – when the Iberian Peninsula became part of Rome and then a Visigothic kingdom.
In 218 BC Roman troops landed at Emporion. It took Rome almost two hundred years to conquer the whole peninsula, but the result was one of the empire’s richest regions. The Romans called it Hispania. They built towns with forums, temples, theatres and baths, and they bound the land together with roads and bridges. The Aqueduct of Segovia and the theatre at Mérida still stand, and they are among the best-preserved Roman buildings in all of Europe.
Hispania also gave Rome people. The philosopher Seneca came from Córdoba, and the emperor Trajan was born at Italica near Seville. In 98 he became the first emperor born outside Italy. Wealthy provincial families had floor mosaics laid in their villas and commissioned portraits and funerary monuments in marble. Christianity reached the peninsula early, and in the 4th century a Christian imagery developed in sarcophagi, mosaics and small churches.
When the Western Roman Empire fell in the 5th century, Germanic peoples took over. The Visigoths founded a kingdom with its capital at Toledo. Their art is known mainly from a few small stone churches and from gold crowns set with precious stones, which the kings donated to the Church. The horseshoe arch, which later became a hallmark of Islamic architecture in Spain, was already used by them. The era ended in 711, when an Arab-Berber army crossed the Strait of Gibraltar.