For Herodotus, the father of historiography, human greatness was anything but enduring, a dictum that he also applied to the cities of his time (the 5th century B.C.): cities that had once been large had become small, and those he experienced as great had previously been inconsequential. He concluded that he should treat the fates of both in the same way and thereby formulated a maxim for urban research that even today qualifies as avant-garde.
The idea for this volume originated in 2014, during a stay in Córdoba in southern Spain. In the 1930s, Manuel Machado characterized this city, which leads a sleepy existence on the banks of the Gaudalquivir, as “romana y mora, Córdoba callada”—a phrase that could no better have captured the impression it made on me in the June heat of that year. The stone bridge of the Baetis reminded me of its founding by M. Claudius Marcellus in the middle of the 2nd century B.C.—designed as a propugnaculum populi Romani in the Turdetania—as did the marble pillars of the so-called Templo de la calle Claudio Marcelo that stretched into the brilliant blue sky. After having received juridical privileges under Augustus, and thanks to the plentiful natural resources in its surroundings and hinterland, Colonia Patricia Corduba had developed into a prosperous and flourishing provincial capital. The theater, too, indicated the “Roman way of life” that Italic peoples, veterans, and members of the local and regional elite had lived here: spurred on by their enthusiasm for this lifestyle, some of them had even moved to the capital of the Imperium Romanum, with Seneca, the philosopher and educator of Nero, surely serving as a famous example. But this testimony to the erstwhile glory of Rome, the patria communis and the romanitas it brought with it—which in following centuries would continue to prove viable, identity-establishing constituents that defied not only the “crisis of the 3th century” but Byzantium and the Visigoths—clearly stood in the shadow of the construction that sprawled in the immediate vicinity of the Roman bridge: the Mezquita Aljama. This squat construction from the end of the 8th century, which dates to the first Umayyad emir, impresses one on entering its patio, whose shady orange trees and burbling fountains invite one to stay, dazzling one on entering its forest of gleaming white-red pillars. Here, al-Andalus’s impressions are indicative: Qurṭuba with its mosques and gardens, its public baths and water features, its university and public library and schools, whose estimated population of half a million in the 10th century made it the most populous city in the Mediterranean region, seemed to live again for one long moment—a moment one tried to hold onto when leaving the Mezquita. This simultaneity of the non-simultaneous fascinated,
I could not stop contemplating these questions, nor could they be answered within the scope of an annual Toletum workshop that took place in the Hamburg Warburg House: In 2010 I had founded a “Network for Researching the Iberian Peninsula in Antiquity” (www.toletum-network.com) together with Markus Trunk, a classical archaeologist from the University of Trier. Since then, we have discussed constituent elements of the urban world in an interdisciplinary and epoch-spanning manner, from the perspective of ancient and medieval history, classical, provincial Roman, and Early Christian archaeology, as well as from architectural and Islamic studies. In 2013, for example, we dedicated ourselves to the sculptural features of public and private spaces; in 2014, we studied the entertainment sites of the theater, amphitheater, and circus as places of civic self-conception. Our focus always lay within the centuries between the Republic and the year 711 and thus on questions of continuity and change, of rupture and transformation. What was needed was a format that would enable us to transcend this temporal framework, to allow us to include the Arabic and Christian Middle Ages and Early Modern period. A research day seemed ideal for our purpose: in April 2015, the network thus for the first time hosted an event that extended its temporal scope into the 18th century. The participants proceeded from the current state of research on Late Antique urbanism and the image of the cities of the Iberian Peninsula to what had been fundamentally modified by urban archaeological research and a change in the paradigm; they then asked what consequences this reassessment had for the following epochs.
The majority of the authors whose contributions are featured in this volume had the opportunity to discuss these questions of the power of the cities that day in the Hamburg Warburg House. Nevertheless, these are not conference notes in the strictest sense of the term, as the authors who participated substantially reworked their essays and are joined by others whose contributions have closed thematic gaps—Alberto León Muñoz, Fernando Valdés Fernández, María Asenjo González, Klaus Weber, and Torsten dos Santos Arnold. The editor has done no more than to copyedit these texts, which reflect the variety of research questions and the different ways of approaching the problem; responsibility for their content and illustrations lie with the authors. It is obvious that this volume utilizes the perspective of classical studies, as reflected in its conception. Evidently, the time for cooperation in the field of urban
This volume does not distinguish itself in these attempts through the swiftness of its publication, but sometimes Rome really isn’t built in a day. That it has come into existence is due to the efforts of a not-insignificant number of people, whom I would like to thank for their help and support. I am indebted to Caroline Bergen (Hamburg), Florian Klein (Hamburg), and Florian Sittig (Cologne), who helped to prepare the manuscript for publication; to Dominik Kloss (Hamburg), who as usual compiled the register; to Laurent Callegarin (Madrid), who was responsible for drawing the maps; to Charlotte Tupman (Exeter) und Timothy Wardell (Hopewell, New Jersey) for additional language assistance, and to Marcella Mulder, editor at Brill, for her infinite patience—my heartfelt thanks goes out to them, as it does to the anonymous reviewers whose constructive criticisms indubitably helped to improve the individual articles as well as the volume as a whole. I would also particularly like to thank those who for years have allowed me to participate in their thoughts and research in this field through consistently lively and contentious discussions: Javier Arce (Lille), Patrice Cressier (Madrid), and Horst Pietschmann (Cologne). Last but not least, my thanks above all is due to Eduardo Manzano Moreno (Madrid) for an epoch-spanning, discipline-crossing, curiosity-driven exchange of ideas in those summer days of 2014 that opened my eyes to al-Andalus.
Sabine Panzram
Madrid, April 2019