The ruins of Suso Monastery in San Millán de la Cogolla look eerily beautiful in this image, evocative of a distant past whose details are lost to us now. Situated in northern Spain, they are some of the last surviving remains of the Visigothic Kingdom that ruled the Iberian peninsula from the late fifth century to 711, when it was destroyed by an ambitious warrior from Islamic north Africa who successfully conquered it with a force of only 7,000 men. Why this powerful kingdom collapsed so quickly has been debated by historians. Now, in a recent paper in _Nature Communications_, a team of scholars analyzing pollen records is arguing that drought conditions may well have been a key factor in the Visigoths’ demise.
During the 400s, the Western half of the Roman Empire was in great duress, with many Roman and Germanic aristocrats breaking off into separate states and competing for the spoils of Empire. The Visigoths were a relatively “Romanized” group of Barbarians — although their language and laws were distinct from Romans, they had absorbed much of the culture that they overtook in Spain in the late fifth century. The Suso Monastery shown here, dating to the mid 6th century, illustrates the way the Visigoths blended Roman architecture with their own style.
The Visigoths ruled in the Iberian peninsula for hundreds of years, and although their leaders did get into civil wars and factionalism from time to time, theirs was a relatively prosperous kingdom, with agricultural production a mainstay of the economy.
But this type of economy was especially subject to the relative abundance of rainfall, and between 695-725, there was a significant drought. Tree cover declined, and widespread fires erupted. Whole populations seem to have moved into mountainous regions in southern Iberia. Elsewhere, new crops such as rye were cultivated in areas of higher elevation, while terrace land cultivation was taken up — all of this suggests a people who were adapting their living conditions to the water-starved land.
And this, argue Jon Camuera and the authors of this paper, created a sort of fragility that made the takeover of the Visigoth Kingdom so easy to accomplish.
Sources: “Drought as a possible contributor to the Visigothic Kingdom crisis and Islamic expansion in the Iberian Peninsula,” Jon Camuera et al, _Nature Communications_ Sept 15, 2023. Image wikipedia
