Unless they’re tourists you won’t see many Spanish goths haunting the current big BL exhibition ‘Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination’, but for centuries the Goths loomed large in the Spanish imaginary.

In the eighth century Christian Spain was weakened by the sexual shenanigans of King Roderick (perhaps you saw Oliver Tobias in this role in the musical La Cava).  He took as his mistress the daughter of Count Julian: she is known to this day by her soubriquet La Cava, Arabic for a scarlet woman (ahem) (according to Wikipedia).  

King Roderick. Image from vol. 1 of  Manuel Rodríguez, Retratos de los Reyes de España desde Atanarico hasta ... Don Cárlos III. … (Madrid, 1782) 1199.c.15

The disaffected Count opened the gates of Spain to the Moors  in 711 and they quickly overran the Peninsula, driving the Christians into the northern mountains.

Roderick, according to legend, was imprisoned in his own tomb and gnawed by a huge snake: ‘Ya me come, ya me come, en la parte do pequé’, says the ballad, ‘Now it eats me, now it eats me, in the part wherein I sinned’.

The Christians under Pelayo started fighting back in 718, and by 1492 it was all over.

Pelayo, from vol. 2 of Rodríguez, Retratos de los Reyes 

Medieval Spain never lost the memory of the Visigothic golden age but interest in the period experienced a definite surge in the 16th century.  As Sebastián de Covarrubias ironized in 1611:

de las reliquias dellos [los godos] que se recogieron en las montañas, bolvio a retoñar la nobleza, que hasta oy dia dura, y en tanta estima que para encarecer la presuncion de algun vano, le preguntamos si deciende de la casta de los godos.

[The residue of the Goths took cover in the mountains, nobility began to sprout again, and survives to this day, and in such esteem that in order to praise the presumption of a vain man, we ask him if he is descended from the caste of the Goths.]

Philip II’s royal chroniclers were at pains to emphasize the continuity of the royal blood from the Goths to the present.  In 1571 Alvar Gómez de Castro  (1515-80), churchman and professor of Rhetoric and Greek at Toledo, wrote to the king proposing an edition of the works of  St Isidore of Seville, pointing out that Philip was a relative of the saint ‘with 80 and more degrees of consanguinity’.

There was much uncertainty about the origins of the Spanish Goths: some said Scotland, some said Scandinavia (presumably because Escocia can be misread as Escandinavia, and vice versa).

As late as the Franco regime, faced with the threats of local nationalism and atheism, it was pleasant to think back on a time when Spain was a unitary state, and a Christian one.

And although they might be wreathed in mountain mist, it was important to know what these illustrious forebears looked like. Rodríguez’s Retratos de los Reyes de España desde Athanaric  (Portraits of the Kings of Spain since Atanarico), from which the images in this post are taken, uses coins as a source, topped up with a good dose of poetic licence.

Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic Studies

References

Barry Taylor, ‘Gothic Revival: The 1599 Opera of St Isidore’, in Manuscripts, Texts and Transmission from Isidore to the Enlightenment: papers from the Bristol Colloquium on Hispanic Texts and Manuscripts, ed. David Hook (Bristol, 2006), pp. 131-46. YC.2008.a.2215