The Meaning of Hispania in Mediaeval Majorca

Introduction

The concept “Hispania” did not have an unequivocal meaning in the Middle Ages.¹¹ As we know, the term originated in the classical era. The Greeks called the Peninsula “Iberia”, a name that appears to be connected with the river “Iber”, which most scholars identify as the Ebro. Other times, they called it “Hesperia”, a name associated with the god Hesperus, personification of the planet Venus. Under the Romans, the name became “Hispania”, which, according to García Bellido (1985), stems from the Phoenician expression “i-sephan-in”, meaning “rabbit coast” or, as presently thought, western coast or smelters’ coast. Yet despite this, behind the origin of the name lies a controversy which dates back to mediaeval times, with several different theories.

When the Romans first arrived on the Iberian Peninsula, there was no ethic homogeneity or common name for the whole of the peninsular territory. In fact, it was the Roman Empire that homogenised it and established a common geographical name, in accordance with the administrative reality.

Henceforth, Roman Hispania –a geographical concept, let us reiterate, not a political one– has continuously been associated with modern Spain by some of the more nationalist Spanish historiographers. In one of the most classic works on the subject, J. A. Maravall (1981) argued that the word “Spain” was linked to the idea of the Reconquista from the very onset of the struggle between the Christian kingdoms and al-Andalus, and that, “in our Middle Ages, Spain defined both the area of the Reconquista and the purpose and prime cause thereof” (p.249). This appraisal, which links the name “Spain” to a religious/Christian factor, is incorrect, except with regards to the Church, which, throughout the Middle Ages, purported a unified vision of the Iberian Peninsula. Foremost, it overlooks the very thing that is systematically ignored by those who identify Spain with Hispania: it fails to take into account what would later become Portugal, which, in Roman times, was also part of Hispania. The correlation Hispania = Spain is therefore flawed from the outset. In contrast, this affirmation may be more or less true in relation to Castile, although the idea of the Reconquista as we understand it today is a 19^th-century historiographic fabrication endorsed by Spanish nationalists and later sublimated by the Franco regime (García Fitz, 2010; Ríos, 2011 & 2013). To associate it with the Middle Ages is therefore grossly anachronistic. In Catalonia and the Kingdom of Majorca, on the other hand, the concept of Hispania, as we shall later see, was different altogether.

The first thing we must bear in mind is that the notion behind the choronym “Hispania” differs depending on the mediaeval political entity being analyzed. In the Castilian world, we see that the Crown of Castile-León habitually identified with “Hispania/Spain” (Alomar, 2006), while in the Crown of Aragon, “Hispania” had both geographical (the Peninsula) and political connotations (in the final years) or, most importantly, in mediaeval times, was synonymous with al-Andalus. The meanings varied depending on period and context. In mediaeval Majorca, the term was most commonly taken to mean the latter, and it is this we would like to address. When people from mediaeval Majorca spoke about “Hispania” or “Spain”, they were essentially speaking about Muslim territory on the Peninsula. This runs opposite to the claims of Maravall (1981), who links Spain to the dream of Christian reconquest, or his belief that this “reduction of the name ‘Spain’” (p.222) to the Muslim part of the Peninsula occurs only in “exceptional and purely fanciful cases” (p. 235), in texts that compare Hispania to the Christian kingdoms. Well, they do not.

The identification of Spain with al-Andalus is a concept that surfaced in early mediaeval Catalonia. As a result, we shall briefly discuss the meaning ascribed to the word “Hispania” in relation to Catalan territory (Cingolani, 2015), although it is important to note that the meaning of the term was inverted over time. After the Carolingian conquest (785-801), Frankish –and therefore foreign– texts referred to Catalonia as “Hispania”. This name, which did distinguish the Catalan counties from the rest of the Peninsula under Muslim rule, should come as no surprise, because, in the absence of a clear-cut name for the Catalan counties (which did not appear in records until the 12^th century), this region was, geographically speaking, also part of the Peninsula. In the same way as Muslim texts referred to what would later become Catalonia as ““franja” (land of the Francs), because, politically speaking, it was (Lapiedra, 1997).