The purported aim of this essay collection is to examine the significant role some cities had in the history of the Iberian Peninsula from Roman times to the early modern period. However, it would be more accurate to say that this book is about the transformations (or lack thereof) that some Spanish cities experienced in their topography over the course of more than a thousand years. Most of the chapters adopt an archaeological approach, except for the last two chapters, dedicated to the early modern period. The book is divided into four sections of two chapters each. The first section examines the transformations experienced by cities in late antiquity. The chapters in the second section discuss urban change in Islamic Córdoba and Toledo. The third section analyzes urban continuities and changes in Toledo, Seville, and Valladolid after the Christian conquest. The last section discusses the characteristics of Castilian cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as the conditions that led the cities of Lisbon, Seville, and Cádiz to become “ports to New Worlds” (322) in the sixteenth century (the eighteenth century in the case of Cádiz).
The chapters dealing with late antiquity and the medieval period revise the traditional view according to which the Roman cities of the Peninsula, after reaching their peak in the times of the emperors of Hispanic origin—Trajan and Hadrian—experienced a rapid decline as a consequence of the so-called crisis of the third century. These cities would have ended up being destroyed by the invasions of the Vandals, Suevi, and Visigoths in the fifth century. Taking advantage of the latest archaeological findings, several chapters show that cities in this period were not devastated, but transformed, as the goal of the invaders had by no means been the destruction of the cities. The same can be said regarding the Muslim conquest of the Peninsula after 711. Now the general consensus is one of continuity and slow change rather than collapse and destruction.
In the first chapter, Gisela Ripoll discusses the ways in which conversion to Christianity created a new topography in the Iberian cities. Cities would be marked by the cults of martyrs and their relics as well as by the establishment of a new “neuralgic center” dominated by the episcopal complex (52), which included a cathedral, a baptistery, an episcopal palace, and a parish church. In the second chapter, Javier Arce examines how Toledo, which was not an important city in Roman times, became an urbs regia and the capital of the Visigothic kingdom. For their part, Isabel Toral-Niehoff and Alberto León Muñoz contend that the Islamic conquest of Córdoba initially did not bring a radical change in the topography of the late antique city. A similar conclusion is reached by Fernando Valdés Fernández regarding Toledo, as recent archaeological excavations show the absence of generalized levels of destruction between the years 711 and 714. It is a remarkable aspect of the history of medieval Spain that something very similar happened to the Islamic cities of Toledo and Seville after they were conquered by the Peninsula's northern Christians in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, respectively. As Matthias Maser notes, when the Christian troops entered Toledo, the city was remarkably undamaged by war, and its urban topography was kept virtually unaltered from 1085 until well into the fourteenth century. Likewise, late medieval Sevillians did not seem to feel an urgent need to eliminate the architectural traces of the city's Islamic past. Things would change in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As argued by Antonio Irigoyen, Toledo would be transformed into an ecclesiastical city, its cathedral dominating the urban space and its cathedral chapter becoming closely identified with the city (unlike bishops, cathedral chapters were permanent institutions).
As is often the case with edited volumes, there is a certain imbalance in the structure of this book. The chapters on the late antique and medieval periods are more methodologically coherent, as they combine historical and archaeological approaches to demonstrate change (or the lack thereof) over time in the urban structure of several prominent Iberian cities. In any case, the volume will be useful as an overview of the urban development of Spanish cities in premodern times for readers without a strong knowledge of the subject.
