Imperial Spain.—Under Augustus (or possibly Tiberius) there was a reorganization. Henceforward there were three prov inces : (a) the north and north-west, the central tableland and the east coast as far south as New Carthage, that is, all the thinly-populated and unquiet hill country, formed the province of Tarraconensis with a capital at Tarraco (Tarragona) under a legatus Augusti pro praetore with a legion (VII. Gemina) at Leon and some other troops at his disposal; (b) the fertile and peace ful west formed the province of Lusitania, very roughly the modern Portugal, also under a legatus Augusti pro praetore, but with very few troops; (c) the fertile and peaceful south formed the province of Baetica, under a pro-consul nominated by the senate, with no troops. These divisions (it will be observed) exactly coincide with the geographical features of the Peninsula. Substantially, they remained till the end of the empire, though Tarraconensis was broken up at different dates into smaller and more manageable areas. Augustus also accelerated the Romaniza tion of the land by planting in it many municipalities (coloniae) of time-expired veterans (e-meriti) such as Augusta Emerita (mod. Merida), which still possesses extensive Roman ruins. About this time imperial finance agents (procuratores) were ap pointed to control the revenues and look after the mines, which became Imperial property, while a special praefectus administered the Balearic Islands. The iron and also the copper, silver and lead of Spain were well known : it was also (according to the elder Pliny) the chief source whence the Roman world obtained its tin. Its olive-oil was superior to that of Italy. But commercial prosperity characterized many districts of the empire during the first two centuries of our era. Spain can boast that she supplied Rome with almost her whole literature in the silver age. The Augustan writers had been Italians. Their successors were Spaniards—the younger Seneca, Lucan, Martial, Quintilian, be sides a host of lesser lights. By-and-by the impulse of the open ing empire died away and with the 2nd century the great Roman Spanish literature ceased. Of statesmen the Peninsula was less prolific. Though the emperor Trajan and his relative and succes sor Hadrian, were born in Spain, both were of Roman stock and Roman training. The 3rd and 4th centuries saw a decline in prosperity. The confiscations of Septimius Severus and the rav ages of barbarians in the middle of the 3rd century have been adduced as causes. But, though we need not doubt that the decline occurred, we can hardly determine either its date or its intensity without careful examination of the Roman remains of Spain. While many of the best Roman ruins—such as the aque duct of Segovia or the bridge of Alcantara—are older than 200 A.D. others are probably later, and indicate that prosperity con tinued here, as it did on the other side of the Pyrenees, till the later days of the 4th century—perhaps indeed till the fatal winter's night in 406-7 when the barbarians burst the Rhine frontier and flooded Gaul and even Spain with a deluge from which there was no recovery. (F. J. H. ; G. M.) The Barbarian Invasion.—With the irruption of the Vandals, the Suevi and the Alans, the history of Spain enters on a long period of division and confusion which did not end even with the union of the chief kingdoms by the marriage of Isabella and Ferdi nand at the close of the 15th century. The function of the bar barians everywhere was to cut the communications of commerce, and the nerves of the imperial administration.
This function was effectually discharged in Spain by the Van dals and their associates, who plundered far and wide, and then by the Visigoths, who appeared as the foederati, or duly commis sioned defenders of the Romans. The first-comers were not nu merous enough to establish a rule of their own. When in 428 Gaiseric, king of the Vandals (q.v.), accepted the invitation of
Bonifacius, the count of Africa, and passed out of Spain to found the Vandal kingdom of Carthage, his whole horde numbered only 8o,000 persons, including old men, women and children, and run away slaves who had joined him. There is probably some truth in the assertion of Salvian that many of the subjects of the em pire preferred poverty among the barbarians to the tyranny of the imperial tax collectors. This would be pre-eminently the case with the smaller landowners who formed the curiales, and who were in reality serfs of the fisc, for on them fell the main weight of taxation, and they were confined to their position by oppressive laws. The great landowners who formed the ordo senatorius had almost as much to fear from the agrarian insurgents known as bagaudae, who are indeed found acting with the Suevi, as from the barbarians. In the north the Asturians and Basques, the least Romanized part of the population, appear from the beginning of the age of barbarization as acting for themselves. In the mountain country of Cuenca, Albacete, and the Sierra Nevada the natives known as the Orospedans were entirely independent in the middle of the 6th century. But if there lay in this revival of energy and character the germs of a vigorous national life, for the time being Spain was thrown back into the state of division from which it had been drawn by the Romans—with the vital difference that the race now possessed the tradition of the Roman law, the munic ipalities, and one great organization in the Christian Church.
No help was to be expected from the empire. Unable to aid itself it had recourse to the Visigoths (see GOTHS). Ataulphus (q.v.) the successor of Alaric, and husband of Placidia, daughter of the emperor Theodosius, whom he had married against the wish of her brother Honorius, entered Spain in 412, as the ally of the empire. He was murdered in 415, but after the speedily ensu ing murder of his murderer and successor Sigeric, Wallia (415 419), who was elected to the kingdom, continued his work. He destroyed the Alans, and drove the Vandals and Suevi into the north-west. Then he handed Spain back to the imperial officials, that is to say, to weakness and corruption, and marched with all his people into the Second Aquitaine, the south-west of modern France, which had been assigned to them by Honorius as a home and a reward. From this date till the very end of the reign of Amalaric (511-531), the seat of the Visigothic kings was at Bor deaux, or Toulouse or Narbonne, and their main interests were in Gaul. Southern Spain was overrun and plundered by the Vandals before their departure for Africa. In 456 Theodoric II. entered Spain as ally of Avitus, whom he had himself raised to the empire in Gaul. He defeated the Roman senators of the Tar raconensis and the Suevi, putting their king to death, and ad vanced as far as Merida. Majorian (457-461), the last capable emperor of the West, proposed to make Spain the basis of his attack on the Vandals at Carthage till his fleet was destroyed by them in the harbour of Carthagena. The fratricidal murderer and successor of Theodoric, Euric (466-485), followed his brother's policy in Spain. With the extinction of the Western empire or 479) the kings of the Visigoths became more and more the representatives of authority, which they exercised on Roman lines, and with an implied or formal deference to the dis tant emperor at Constantinople. After the defeat and death of Alaric II. (485-507) at Vouille the shattered Visigoth power was preserved from destruction at the hands of the Frankish king Clovis (q.v.) by Theodoric, the Gothic king of Italy. But on his death the advance of the Franks began again. Amalaric (507-53i) fled from Narbonne, to meet the usual violent end of a Visigothic king at Barcelona.