Dramatic regional differences within the Iberian Peninsula were always characteristic of the religious history of ancient Spain. Although long predating the Roman conquest, these differences are accessible to the modern scholar only as a result of the Roman conquest. Roman conquest brought with it religious practices, chief among them the habit of inscription, which have left traces in the material record. The religious diversity of Iberia followed directly from the enormous cultural differences between the coasts and the interior, the river valleys, the mountain chains, and the vast plateaus of the central peninsula. This cultural diversity was never wholly erased, not even with the spread of Christianity in the fourth and later centuries.

Nonetheless, the arrival of Roman armies in the peninsula, and thereafter the slow and bloody process by which Spain was made part of the empire, caused very significant changes to the peninsula’s religious life. For many years, these changes were intermittent and highly regional, but three periods of accelerated change affected the whole peninsula. The first of these took place during and immediately after the long reign of Augustus (r.27 BCE–14 CE), who had taken a personal interest in the final conquest of the peninsula and its incorporation into the empire. The Augustan reorganization of Spain placed every corner of the peninsula within a framework of Roman government in which Roman religious practices could spread rapidly. The second period of intense religious change began under the Flavian emperors, when Vespasian (r.69–79) extended the Latin right, a subordinate form of Roman citizenship, to every municipality in Spain that had previously lacked status under Roman law. This had the effect of giving every city in Spain a stake in the Roman system; as a result, both the cult of the Roman emperors and other Roman modes of public religious practice became universalized. The final period of accelerated change came with the imperial conversion to Christianity, as the new religion of the Roman state transformed the religious life of the Spanish provinces just as it did elsewhere. A diachronic perspective on the religious diversity of ancient Spain will perhaps be more useful than a synchronic catalogue of the religions, cults, and divinities of the peninsula, particularly given the necessary superficiality of such surveys. In the first instance, however, it will be worth sketching the broad differences among the various regions of the peninsula.

As with so much of Spanish history in Late Antiquity, tracing the Justinianic Plague in Spain is a matter of guesswork and extrapolation from a very small body of evidence. The amount of evidence at our disposal has expanded dramatically in recent years because of improvements in the quality and quantity of Spanish archaeological research. Reliable archaeological data is now much more plentiful than is the evidence of more traditional historical sources. One might therefore expect the archaeological record to shed light on plague in sixth-and seventh-century Spain, and it does seem to do so. We must, however, begin from the literary sources for the plague in Spain for a simple methodological reason: Nothing in the material record unambiguously demonstrates the existence of plague in late antique Spain. The literary evidence, by contrast, states explicitly that the peninsula was struck by the plague of 541–543, and that during the next century and a half there were at least three further outbreaks. We must in consequence begin from these explicit attestations of plague and then move on to other sorts of evidence that might bear some relationship to them.

We have only a single literary source for the initial outbreak of the Justinianic Plague in Spain, an anonymous Spanish annotator whose marginal notations are traditionally referred to as the Chronicle of Zaragoza.

THE BATTLE OF ADRIANOPLE WIPED OUT TWO-THIRDS OF THE whole field army of the Roman East. It was the worst military disaster of the Roman imperial era, and one of the worst in Roman history. That it was inflicted by barbarians made it instantly controversial, as contemporaries struggled to understand the reasons for the loss. For them, little save divine displeasure could explain such a calamity, so debate centred on which god was angry and why. But from the perspective of the modern historian, the trail of events that led to Adrianople is dotted with human error at every step. The Goths who defeated the emperor Valens at Adrianople in 378 were not a horde of unstoppable invaders. They were, for the most part, the same Goths who had crossed the Danube just two years earlier, in 376, having done so with the full approval of the imperial government. The reception of barbarians into the empire was no unprecedented novelty, but a well-known procedure with centuries of success behind it. Of course, accidents can happen whenever large numbers of people move from one place to another. But the path to Adrianople was no accident. The orderly reception of the Goths broke down through mismanagement and thereafter the imperial government repeatedly exacerbated the problem in a toxic combination of venality and incompetence. And so the crisis marched inexorably onwards to the fatal 9th of August 378.

A modern narrative history is entirely at the mercy of the ancient sources that happen to survive, which condition both its depth and its detail. For the two years before Adrianople, our access to one particular stream of Gothic history grows tremendously larger. The Goths who entered the empire in 376 are better known to us than are any of their predecessors, or indeed any of their contemporaries who remained outside the empire.

JUST AS AN INCREASINGLY COHERENT ROMAN IDENTITY WAS spreading throughout the Roman provinces, so too were major social changes at work in the barbarian societies of northern and central Europe. Soon after the Antonine Constitution made all the inhabitants of the empire Roman citizens for the first time, a new word appears in our sources to describe the world outside the empire: barbaricum, the land of the barbarians, and the antithesis of the civilization that was synonymous – and coterminous – with the empire. The catalyst for social change in the barbaricum was the simple fact of the empire's existence and with it the growth of Roman provincial life. That fact is hardly surprising, particularly in light of modern studies showing how advanced and relatively complex societies exert unconscious pressures to change on less developed neighbours. The Roman empire was, by the standards of the ancient world, a very complex state. The sophistication of its economic life and its hierarchies of government impinged upon the peoples who lived in its shadow. As provincials became Romans, so they provided instructive models to neighbouring peoples outside the provincial structure, and offered a conduit by which the more portable aspects of Roman provincial life – from luxury goods to a monetized economy – were transmitted to lands that were not, or not yet, provincial.

We can conceive of Roman cultural influence as a series of concentric circles radiating out beyond the Roman frontier. In the band nearest to the frontier, it can sometimes be hard to distinguish the archaeological culture of the natives from their neighbours on the Roman side of the frontier, at least below the level of the social elite; indeed, the fact of imperial government and its regular demands for taxation may have been the only real factor distinguishing a Pannonian peasant on one side of the Danube from a Quadic peasant on the other.

GOTHIC HISTORY, AS IT APPEARS IN EVERY MODERN AC-count, is a story of migration. Traditionally, it begins in Scandinavia, moves to the southern shores of the Baltic around the mouth of the Vistula river, and then onwards to the Black Sea. Depending upon what study one reads, one can find it stated that written sources, archaeology, and linguistic evidence all demonstrate that just such a migration took place, if not out of Scandinavia then at least out of Poland. In fact, there is just a single source for this extended story of Gothic migration, the Getica of Jordanes, written in the middle of the sixth century A.D., hundreds of years after the events it purports to record. Other sources, literary and archaeological, have been brought in to corroborate, correct or supplement Jordanes' narrative, but his story of Gothic migration underpins nearly every modern treatment of the Goths, consciously or not. And yet Jordanes, as we shall see, is not merely unreliable, he is deeply misleading. To understand why his satisfyingly linear, but ultimately implausible, account is still so pervasive, we have to understand why the idea of Gothic roots stretching back into the deepest mists of prehistory has played so important a role in conceptualizing the northern European past. As we shall see, for the past 500 years the Goths have played an indispensable part in imagining a northern European history untouched by the Graeco-Roman world.

THE NORTHERN RENAISSANCE AND THE GERMANIC PAST

In 1425, the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini discovered the only known medieval manuscript of Tacitus' Germania. That discovery, and still more the first printing of the text at Venice around 1470, were watersheds in the search for a northern, non-Roman, and ultimately Gothic, past. The Germania is a short treatise on the peoples and customs of the region that the Romans called Germany – which is to say the whole vast tract of central Europe beyond the Rhine and Danube rivers which was in many ways a mystery to the Romans.