The Annoyance of Two Empires: Connections between Archaeology and Nationalism in Spain

Introduction

Javier Fesser’s El milagro de P. Tinto (1998) offers a surreal reflection on Spanish familial and national imaginaries through absurdist humor and ideological distortion. Two key dialogues reveal the overlap of scientific discourse and political mythology—an intersection central to this study. In one emblematic scene, Mr. Tinto solemnly addresses Pancho, a foreigner he mistakes for a lost African child:

Panchito, hijo, hay algo que tarde o temprano debías saber, y quiero ser yo quien te lo diga. Panchito, hijo, tú eres negro. Pero no debes avergonzarte. Negros eran los hombres de Cromagnon, los egipcios, los indios, los pueblos de Arabia, negros los cántabros de tez morena que tanto lucharon por su independencia; negros de pelo crespo los asirios, los persas, Antonio Machín, los vikingos del norte, y los zares de Rusia (00:10:15).

Marked by deliberate historical inaccuracies and anachronisms, the passage satirizes essentialist racial narratives and their role in shaping Spanish identity. By absurdly merging civilizations and figures from prehistoric humans to modern singers, Fesser mocks the pseudo-scientific bases of nationalist ideologies, exposing the absurdity behind nostalgic or mythologized histories.

Crucially, the term black in the monologue goes beyond skin color or fixed ethnic identity. It functions as a satirical device exposing the arbitrariness of racial classification. As Víctor Fernández Martínez notes, race lacks empirical definition since morphological traits vary across contexts (171). Here, black serves not as a descriptor but as a parody that undermines claims to biological or cultural superiority, revealing the pseudo-scientific roots of nationalist mythologies.

A second key moment in El milagro de P. Tinto shows Pancho listening to another of Mr. Tinto’s monologues, delivered as Usillos—an eccentric builder devoted to Spanish-made goods—digs in a nearby room. Adopting a pseudo-historical tone, Tinto invokes familiar ideas of national heritage and classical antiquity, declaring:

Habrás oído decir muchas veces que los romanos inventaron el pan, que los romanos trajeron el agua, que si los romanos esto, que si los romanos lo otro, que vivan los romanos. Pues bien, para que te hagas una idea, los romanos… una mierda al lado de los etruscos (00:18:25).

This grandiose yet absurd statement captures the film’s critique of dominant historical narratives. By reversing the usual reverence for Rome—a cornerstone of Spanish and Western historiography—Tinto’s praise of the Etruscans exposes the arbitrariness of civilizational hierarchies. Like the earlier speech on race, the scene uses exaggeration and parody to challenge claims to historical authority, critiquing not just the narratives themselves but the institutions that sustain them.

Here, the film reworks a familiar ideological pattern in which the local and autonomous are exalted against imperial uniformity. Rome, symbol of authority and standardization, becomes the oppressor in Tinto’s speech, while the Etruscans emerge as authentic precursors. This inversion recasts Rome not as civilizer but as usurper—a force of absorption and erasure. The same Rome opposes the dark-skinned Cantabrians mentioned earlier, linking both scenes through the tension between domination and resistance. Through absurd humor, the film mirrors postcolonial critiques of historical violence and imperial ideology.

The two guiding ideas of this study—the myth of a combative race and of timeless national independence—form its core framework. Though seemingly marginal, fictionalized archaeology and cultural uses of antiquity are central to nationalist discourse. Archaeological novels and similar narratives turn the distant past into an ideological tool, naturalizing and spreading nationalist ideas. In Spain, archaeologists helped construct national identity by using historical science to legitimize political and cultural claims. Examining these cultural artifacts reveals the epistemological and aesthetic bases of nationalism.

The Rejection of the Roman Empire

The nineteenth-century depiction of Rome as a negative reference point is key to understanding how nationalism imagined the nation. Liberal thinkers treated Rome’s legacy as a burden, preferring stories of resistance to submission. While the Middle Ages, as a concept, were central to nation-building, they were often linked to a pre-Roman, indigenous past to deepen historical roots. In France, for example, Napoleon’s 1796 Italian campaign inspired a shift: as Annie Jourdan notes, the Gauls’ sack of Rome was reinterpreted as a patriotic triumph (196–201), turning Rome’s defeat into the foundation of national sovereignty rather than civilizational decline.

The revival of pre-Roman or Celtic heritage as a counter to Rome’s authority reflects a kind of postcolonial resistance within modern nationalism. In Spain, as elsewhere in Europe, this reimagined past locates national origins before Roman rule, framing the empire’s fall not as rupture but as a step toward national fulfillment—a transformation of imperial collapse into historical redemption.

In Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson identifies three paradoxes of nationalism: it is modern yet portrayed as ancient, universal yet particular, and powerful despite weak philosophical roots (5). To these we may add a fourth—the tension between the homogeneity nationalism demands and its celebration of hybrid, syncretic heritage. National identity thus appears singular and continuous while drawing legitimacy from a mix of diverse and often conflicting historical traditions.

French nationalism illustrates this pattern. Under the Directory, neoclassicism remained dominant, but the invented Celtic bard Ossian—popularized by James Macpherson—helped artists move beyond classical limits. By Napoleon’s time, Ossian stood beside Clovis I and Charlemagne in the national pantheon (Jourdan 196–201). This triad—Celtic past, first Christian king, and restorer of empire—creates a lineage that bypasses and reclaims Rome, turning it from origin into rupture, an imperial legacy to resist or symbolically appropriate.

Much of nineteenth-century European nationalism uses paired genealogies—Gauls and Franks, Britons and Saxons, Iberians and Visigoths—to craft founding myths. These narratives suggest historical continuity while treating Rome as a short interruption, not a true origin. In this way, nationalism presents sovereignty as both ancient and modern, grounded in a mythic past yet fulfilled through contemporary imperial or monarchical power.

As Margarita Díaz-Andreu notes, nineteenth-century nationalism often traced origins to the Middle Ages—a distant yet culturally accessible era. Rome’s supranational character made it unsuitable as a national foundation (“Islamic Archaeology” 68–69). As states consolidated, historians added prehistoric and protohistoric groups—Celts, Iberians, even Paleolithic peoples—to extend temporal depth and highlight cultural uniqueness. The national past thus became a composite of overlapping and conflicting layers used to legitimize claims of continuity, territory, and distinction.

Rome often functions as a negative model in anti-imperialist discourse, its moral and economic decay compared to modern hegemonic powers. National narratives across Europe celebrate figures who resisted Roman rule—Arminius, Vercingetorix, Boudicca—as proto-national heroes. Cultural depictions of antiquity likewise portray Rome as oppressive, opposed to noble ancestors of modern nations. After World War II, this contrast intensified, with films like Spartacus, Ben-Hur, and Quo Vadis? equating Rome with totalitarian regimes—Nero’s Hitler-like salute making the link explicit.

During the Cold War, portrayals of ancient Rome took on new ideological meaning. Its legions, rigid and draped in imperial symbols, became allegories of fascist militarism. American audiences were led to side with the oppressed—played by Americans—against decadent Roman elites, often portrayed by British actors, reinforcing a moral contrast (Mills 337). Later films subtly reintroduced Spain into this schema: Gladiator (2000) features a Roman general of Hispano-Roman origin from Trujillo, linking regional Spanish identity to a global cinematic narrative.

In the Spanish version of Gladiator, Trujillo becomes Mérida, revealing a strategic localization of memory. The change reflects Spain’s preference for associating national identity with prestigious Roman sites rather than obscure provincial ones. Mérida’s status as a premier classical landmark shows how even global cinema adapts to local hierarchies of historical prestige and recognition. On the other hand, the preference of the word Trujillo could be seen as a total disregard, from the film production point of view, of any sign of historical accuracy. Instead, the choice of Trujillo reflects a modern, map-based convenience on the part of the filmmakers, prioritizing contemporary geography over historical fidelity.

Nineteenth-century culture often combined medieval and ancient themes—frequently sidelining Rome—to craft narratives of national legitimacy. This layering allowed nationalist discourse to claim continuity while avoiding imperial dependence. A scene in Estanislao de Kotska Vayo’s La conquista de Valencia por el Cid, influenced by Walter Scott, describes Sagunto’s ruins and Edetani tombs revived by El Cid’s arrival (Olmos, “Blasco Ibáñez” 366). The episode links ancient Iberian resistance with Christian heroism, portraying Spain as a continuous, autonomous nation whose origins precede conquest and empire.

If Rome served as an uneasy model for Spanish and European nationalisms—its empire too vast and hegemonic for rooted origin myths—the question arose: which civilization could replace it? The Phoenicians and Hellenistic Greeks, who settled Iberia between the ninth and sixth centuries BCE, occupy an ambivalent place in Spanish thought. Though foreign, they are often portrayed as benign and culturally enriching, their sophistication contrasted with Rome’s domination and framed as transmitters of culture rather than conquerors.

Carlos Wagner, writing in the 1980s, argued that Phoenician contact with Iberia was based on exchange rather than domination. Unlike colonial conquests, the Phoenician presence—typical of Semitic trade networks—lacked territorial control or imposed models. This non-coercive interaction, he claimed, strengthened indigenous cultural autonomy and adaptability. Sparse documentation further complicates tracing how assimilation and resistance unfolded (28).

From this view, pre-Roman Iberia appears not as a series of invasions but as a period of balanced cultural exchange. True colonial domination begins only with Rome. This interpretation allows nationalist discourse to include the Phoenicians and Greeks within an indigenous-centered genealogy—as external yet non-imperial contributors to Iberia’s distinct cultural evolution.

The Gothic presence in Spain, viewed as heirs to Rome, became central to nationalist ideology. In the early twentieth century, the Visigothic period emerged as a distinct field of study, part of efforts to trace national origins to a post-Roman, pre-Islamic past. Two conservative schools dominated: one, influenced by German thought and led by Julio Martínez Santa-Olalla, emphasized Iberia’s Germanization; the other, based at the University of Valladolid, followed French models and stressed Rome’s Mediterranean legacy (Díaz-Andreu, “Islamic Archaeology” 79–80).

Despite their differences—one stressing Germanic roots, the other Mediterranean continuity—both schools made the Visigoths a cornerstone of Spanish national identity. In this narrative, Gothic culture bridged the gap between Rome and Islam, symbolizing a sovereign Iberian kingdom briefly overshadowed by empire. The Visigoths thus provided an alternative origin myth—Christian, post-classical, and pre-Islamic—that bypassed Rome while reconciling imperial nostalgia with native autonomy.

The career of José Ramón Mélida, a major early twentieth-century archaeologist, reveals Rome’s ambivalent role in Spanish cultural thought. Mélida alternated between emphasizing Egyptian and Hellenistic influences on early Iberian identity. In his 1906 inaugural address to the Real Academia de la Historia, he praised Egyptian grandeur, Assyrian narrative clarity, Greek intellect, and the Christian Middle Ages’ spirituality (Mélida, “Discurso” 7–8).

What stands out in Mélida’s hierarchy is his deliberate exclusion of Rome as a civilizational model. He elevates Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Christians for their spiritual or aesthetic achievements, while reducing Rome to a mere transmitter of others’ cultures—its art realistic but devoid of idealism. This reflects a broader nationalist trend: strategically marginalizing Rome to highlight Spain’s cultural autonomy and deeper historical roots.

These interpretive patterns defined Mélida’s career and resurfaced in his major textbooks on Spanish and classical archaeology. In Arqueología clásica (1933), he surveys ancient civilizations and reserves the final chapter for Rome, depicting it not as an originator but as a transmitter of earlier cultures. Rome’s main achievements, he argues, were institutional—law and governance—while its religion was derivative and its art hybrid and lacking originality.

Mélida notes that Roman art, though shaped by Hellenistic models, retained Etruscan realism, especially in figurative work. He credits Roman architecture for adapting forms to practical and social needs, reflecting an industrial sensibility. Etruscan influence, he argues, dominated the monarchy and early Republic, while a distinct Roman style appeared only under Augustus. Even then, Greek influence remained pervasive—through Magna Graecia, Etruscan mediation, and Greece’s second-century BCE conquest, which brought Greek artists to Italy (Arqueología clásica 327).

In sum, Mélida depicts Rome as an inheritor, not an innovator. Its culture and art are secondary, its main role limited to spreading earlier legacies through empire. This view, consistent with Mélida’s preferences, reinforces the idea that true civilization originated with Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Christians—while Rome functioned merely as their conduit.

Even after Rome’s conquest of Numantia, Mélida highlights the persistence of Celtiberian culture, subtly challenging early diffusionist archaeology. In Arqueología española, he notes that Numantian houses stayed modest and distinct from Roman ones, preserving Arevaci traits (214). For Mélida, this continuity reflects cultural resilience—local traditions enduring imperial rule, with habit stronger than conquest.

This interpretation reveals a tension in Mélida’s thought. Though he usually supports a diffusionist model favoring dominant cultures, here he affirms the autonomy of the conquered. This view echoes a core myth of Spanish nationalism—that a pre-Roman identity survived successive conquests. Thus, Mélida’s Numantia becomes not a site of Romanization but a symbol of resistance, its humble architecture embodying Celtiberian endurance.

In the symbolic economy of Roman figures, Mélida employs the negative stereotype of Nero. In his short novel A orillas del Guadarza (1887), the town’s mayor is compared to the emperor (39), invoking Nero’s cruelty to criticize local abuses of power. This echoes broader discourses of caciquismo—local bossism—in late nineteenth-century Spain. By invoking Nero, Mélida joins a tradition of using Roman history as coded criticism of modern authoritarianism, especially in rural contexts.

By contrast, Mélida views Roman emperors of Hispanic origin favorably, echoing a broader nationalist trend. Trajan and Hadrian are portrayed as proof of Spain’s role in Rome’s imperial greatness. Mélida credits them with advances in marble production and technical skill (Arqueología española 230–31). Though Hadrian’s birthplace was disputed, such details mattered little to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers, who saw both as evidence of Spain’s enduring capacity for imperial leadership.

This positive view of Hispano-Roman emperors let authors like Mélida reclaim Rome’s legacy while avoiding its negative aspects. In this version, Rome becomes a stage for Spanish greatness, not a foreign oppressor. These figures provided nationalism with a bridge between antiquity and modernity, affirming that leadership and culture were not imported to Iberia but arose from it.

Late in his career, Mélida increasingly emphasized excursionismo as key to Spanish archaeology. In nationalist discourse, conservation and education were intertwined and expressed through direct engagement with the landscape. As Olmos notes, Bécquer’s Historia de los templos de España already modeled this aestheticized travel, where nature and ruins evoked Spain’s grandeur (Olmos, “Lecturas” 177–78). The 1892 Fourth Centenary of the Discovery of America revived interest in Spain’s heritage, leading to the creation of the Sociedad Española de Excursiones, inspired by Catalan and Sevillian precedents (Díaz-Andreu, “Mélida” liv).

Mélida’s main contribution to this movement was Excursión a Numancia pasando por Soria y revista de la historia y antigüedades de Numancia (1922), which highlights the site’s Celtiberian origins and post-Roman legacy over its Roman phase. Walking the landscape becomes an act of interpretation, centering local, pre-imperial history and regional identity. The archaeological excursion thus functions not only as science or leisure but as a nationalist ritual, reclaiming a history rooted in the land and distanced from Rome’s imperial narrative.

In Mélida’s itinerary, the journey from Soria to Numantia follows a temporal logic: moving through space mirrors a passage back in time. This reflects early twentieth-century archaeology’s view that historical meaning is shaped by culturally embedded ideas of time and place. As Mark Leone notes, archaeology gains significance through these dimensions (25). Soria, marked by medieval and modern history, contrasts with Numantia’s association with ancient resistance. Together they form a nationalist landscape, where travel itself enacts a historiography rooted in movement and terrain.

Mélida’s Excursión a Numancia also demonstrates spatial-temporal layering, using architecture to navigate history. He notes the Duero bridge as late medieval (91) and identifies Visigothic elements in Garray, the village above Numantia’s ruins (97). Each stop descends further into the past—from medieval Soria to post-Roman Garray, then to the pre-Roman Celtiberian world. The climb to Numantia becomes both literal and symbolic, a passage through layered national antiquity. Mélida turns the journey into a didactic narrative enacting the recovery of an indigenous past untainted by Rome.

In Mélida’s account, the Roman presence at Garray Hill—ancient Numantia—is minimized to preserve the site’s symbolic purity as a patriotic monument. He focuses instead on Celtiberian resistance, describing it as epic (99) and Numantia as the supreme example of Spain’s love of independence (100). The 1905 monument serves not only as commemoration but as a spatial anchor of national memory, sacralizing the landscape through sacrifice. Mélida writes that it stands in solitude where cries for freedom once echoed (103–04), giving the site both historical and emotional power.

Mélida’s idealization of pre-Roman heroism does not suggest isolationism. He distinguishes Rome’s imperialism from the more benign contacts of Phoenicians and Greeks, portraying Rome as a violent rupture in an otherwise pluralistic world where local agency coexisted with exchange. Numantia thus becomes both a foundational myth of Spanish resistance and a nationalist lieu de mémoire—defined as much by excluding Rome as by what it commemorates.

Mélida depicts Numantia as a stronghold of Celtiberian identity—independent yet connected to the Mediterranean world. Its people, he writes, defended their freedom while engaging with Hellenistic culture, Phoenician trade, and peaceful Carthaginian contact (119). By emphasizing these exchanges, Mélida portrays Celtiberian society as both autonomous and cosmopolitan: resistant to Roman rule but active in a wider cultural and commercial network.

Mélida supports this view with classical sources like Strabo, who observed that Celtiberian marriages followed Greek customs (120). Such evidence underscores the sophistication of pre-Roman Iberia and challenges diffusionist claims that Rome civilized the peninsula. Instead, Roman conquest appears as a coercive break in an already dynamic cultural landscape. Highlighting Iberia’s plural heritage thus serves to downplay Rome’s legacy and promote a nationalist historiography grounded in indigenous agency and continuity.

As a guide, Mélida consistently minimizes the Roman presence, emphasizing the site’s indigenous and pre-Roman character. At Numantia, he notes that visitors may question whether the streets are Celtiberian or Roman but concludes the pavement is “mostly Celtiberian, and rarely Roman” (180). He even attributes the stones to Carthaginian influence (182–83). This approach extends to his description of the Numantino Museum, where he contrasts the rich Iberian collections with the small, modest Roman section confined to Room III (293).

These choices reflect a broader ideological pattern: the greater the patriotic value of a site, the more Rome’s presence is minimized. Mélida’s Numantia epitomizes this logic. Its power as a symbol of resistance and authenticity depends on portraying Rome as an intruder, not a civilizer. Roman traces are noted but subordinated to a story of Celtiberian endurance. In this way, Mélida constructs an archaeology of national sentiment that exalts a heroic, autonomous past over imperial legacy.

Islamic Power and the Two Spains

Within the framework of Spanish historiography, the intersection of archaeology and nationalism confronted a singular challenge: the reconciliation of two exogenous political domination or imperial legacies—the Roman and the Islamic. While the Roman heritage was the first to be strategically marginalized to emphasize indigenous resistance, the Islamic period, initiated by the Umayyad conquest of 711, represented a more complex rupture. Nationalist discourse fluctuated between framing the Islamic presence as a regenerative force and depicting it as a fundamental threat to the peninsula’s cultural integrity, exposing a profound anxiety over the definition of a pre-Islamic national essence. Crucially, the dominant providentialist narrative among most historians framed the 711 invasions not merely as a conquest, but as a punishment from heaven. This teleological view posits that the Islamic incursion served as a necessary catalyst to rouse the Visigoths—conceptualized in this tradition as the proto-Spanish nation—from a state of moral and political decadence.

The second half of this study specifically interrogates the nuances of liberal Spanish historiography. The distinct perceptions within this tradition were shaped not merely by geographical or cultural proximity to North Africa but were fundamentally driven by Spain’s strategic colonial interests in the region. As a colonial enterprise, the Spanish presence in Africa was intrinsically linked to the maturation of the domestic bourgeoisie. Scholars have noted the conspicuous fact that most nineteenth-century Spanish explorers in Africa hailed from Catalonia and the Basque Country, the primary engines of the nation’s bourgeois revolution (Fernández Martínez 177). From this perspective, the advancement of Spanish archaeology, nationalism, and colonialism was contingent upon the socioeconomic success of industrial capitalism. However, this created a structural tension: while the economic impetus for expansion originated in these industrial peripheries, institutional authority over archaeology remained largely concentrated in the hands of the landed aristocracy, as exemplified by the influential role of Enrique de Aguilera y Gamboa, the Marquis of Cerralbo.

At first glance, Spain’s dual imperial legacy might appear to challenge nationalism along religious lines. Yet the key issue was sovereignty, not faith: both Roman and Islamic presences signified cultural and political dependence. The Islamic legacy, however, was more adaptable for historians. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers often compared Iberians and Arabs—not to claim continuity, but to stress perceived African or Eastern traits that could be integrated into a broader Mediterranean context.

This ambiguity was deepened by the short-lived Visigothic kingdom, which, though promoted as a native alternative to Rome, lacked the durability to anchor national identity alone. Consequently, both Visigoths and Muslims came to embody, paradoxically, authentic Spanishness. This dual legacy appears in the opposing yet complementary views of Claudio Sánchez Albornoz and Américo Castro: the former stressed Germanic roots and Visigothic primacy, while the latter emphasized convivencia—the coexistence of Arabs, Christians, and Jews—as Spain’s defining trait (Díaz-Andreu, “Islamic Archaeology” 80). Both reflect broader interwar European tensions between essentialist and pluralist historiography, although it is important to notice that, in the case of Castro and Sánchez Albornoz, the former represented a small group of liberal thinkers against a much larger group of scholars who, in addition, enjoyed the full support of the Spanish institutional, political, and educational establishment.

The famous debate between Castro and Sánchez Albornoz parallels the historiographical divide noted by Azorín in France before and after World War I. For Azorín, the issue was epistemological: is history an art shaped by the historian’s temperament or a science grounded in objectivity and evidence? He framed it as a continuum—from Jules Michelet, the inspired artist, to Theodor Mommsen, the meticulous scholar (171–72).

Seen this way, Castro and Sánchez Albornoz are less opponents than complements in shaping modern Spanish historical thought. Castro, following Michelet’s tradition, viewed Spain as born of convivencia—a synthesis of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim cultures. Sánchez Albornoz, closer to Mommsen, stressed Visigothic and northern European roots. Their divide lies not in facts but in interpretation—one favoring eastern and southern influences, the other northern, Christian, and Germanic. Together, they outline the main currents of twentieth-century Spanish historiography.

The notion of the two Spains—a concept captured in a short poem by Antonio Machado in 1912—remains one of the most persistent tropes in Spanish intellectual history. This binary highlights the need to separate myth from history—and to recognize how myths generate their own histories. As a historiographical construct, it endures despite its simplifications. As Silke Morgenroth observes (162), archaeology helps sustain such myths, anchoring abstract national narratives in the landscape and giving them an empirical authority that conceals their ideological roots. The two Spains, then, is used in this article as its historiographical interpretation, and not a historical Spain.

Archaeology is inseparable from the institutional structures of the nation-state—museums, universities, laws, and funding. These supports make the discipline possible but also bind it to national agendas. As a result, archaeology has functioned not just to uncover the past but to legitimize specific visions of identity. In Spain, this link has reinforced foundational myths like the two Spains, giving them both historical depth and tangible form.

The idea of the two Spains also supports another major trope in Spanish politics: anti-España. As José Álvarez Junco explains, it arose within a Catholicism that, by the late nineteenth century, had adapted to liberal nationalism—departing from Carlist traditionalism and its absolutist ideals. Figures like Alejandro Pidal y Mon, through the Catholic Union, advanced this shift. The Union became a mass civic organization, exemplified by its role in the 1892 commemoration of the “discovery” of America—a symbolic moment of liberal-nationalist convergence (Álvarez Junco 279).

Though often dismissed as cliché, the binary of the two Spains still holds strong ideological force. Like other national myths, it serves less as historical explanation than as a framework for negotiating political identity. Its persistence in scholarship and popular culture shows how hard it is to separate thought from myth and myth from politics. Rather than reject it, we should examine the conditions that have allowed it to endure as a powerful shaper of Spanish collective memory.

The Arab world came to embody the archetypal anti-España. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, historiography portrayed Islam as a foreign disruption of an otherwise continuous Christian identity. Juan de Mariana’s Historia general de España (1592) exemplifies this view, blaming the fall of the Visigoths on defeat by a “fierce and cruel” people. His account cast Islam in Iberia as an era of occupation and decline, shaping nineteenth-century narratives and reinforcing anti-Arab sentiment in mainstream history (Díaz-Andreu, “Islamic Archaeology” 70).

Editions of Mariana’s work—and those of other early modern chroniclers—remained staples of Spanish education into the twentieth century, shaping collective memory and historiography alike. Their depiction of the Arab world as Spain’s cultural opposite shows how historical writing actively built national identity. The idea of anti-España thus arose from the systematic erasure of Islamic contributions, reinforcing a binary vision that still informs political and cultural discourse today.

Even at the dawn of the Hispanic Monarchy in the sixteenth century, Arabic culture was not always seen as entirely foreign. In the late eighteenth century, Arabic literature and history began to be partly reclaimed as part of Spain’s shared heritage. Between 1792 and 1798, the Crown sponsored the publication of classical texts—including Arabic—supporting orientalists such as Joseph Banqueri and José Antonio Conde, and commissioning institutions like the Royal Academy of San Fernando to pursue projects such as Antigüedades árabes de España (Canto 35). In this Enlightenment setting, Arabic scholarship was reframed as a valued part of Spain’s diverse past.

With the ascendancy of nationalist archaeology in the late nineteenth century, the inclusive, text-based appreciation of Arabic heritage was increasingly supplanted by an approach centered on material culture. What had originated as a largely philological endeavor evolved into a rigorous archaeological project, wherein artifacts were interpreted through the prism of nationalist constructs such as territoriality, historical continuity, and essentialist identity. While Enlightenment-era scholars prioritized the recovery and translation of Arabic texts, this new archaeological paradigm imposed ideological hierarchies that frequently marginalized the Islamic past in favor of pre-Roman, Visigothic, and Christian narratives. These hierarchies were often manifested physically through the practice of spolia, where the strategic reuse and reinterpretation of architectural elements—and the literal superposition of new structures atop existing Islamic foundations—reified a narrative of cultural dominance and historical replacement.

A major factor behind renewed interest in Arab culture in nineteenth-century Spain was the decline of Church influence after the rise of the liberal regime in 1833. As Díaz-Andreu notes, this shift fueled widespread anticlericalism—seen in events like convent burnings—and let scholars distance themselves from ecclesiastical control (“Islamic Archaeology” 71–72). In this new climate, studying the Islamic past became more acceptable, even in a still Catholic state. The desacralization of history opened space to recognize Islamic contributions as intellectually valid and sometimes culturally valuable.

The rising academic interest in al-Andalus must be seen within a wider rethinking of national identity. As this study argues, modern nationalism constructs the nation as a layered product of successive cultures rather than a single inheritance. The nineteenth-century turn toward Arab culture followed this logic, selectively integrating once-marginalized traditions into a cohesive yet plural narrative. Far from weakening identity, this pluralism became a rhetorical strength—paradoxically enriched by elements once branded anti-España.

Several mid-nineteenth-century developments signaled growing openness to Spain’s Islamic past. A chair of Arabic was established in Madrid in 1843 and another in Granada in 1846, with José Moreno Nieto as professor. These posts affirmed Arabic language and culture as legitimate academic fields. In 1850, priest Joaquín Rodríguez went further, arguing that religious difference was no reason to deny justice to the Arabs. He urged Spaniards to see themselves as their heirs, crediting Arab intellectual vitality with laying the groundwork for Spain’s later global influence (Díaz-Andreu, “Islamic Archaeology” 72).

Rodríguez’s view—and those of his peers—shows the dual role given to the Arab legacy in Spanish essentialism. The Arab world appears both as a civilizing influence and as the catalyst that revived a dormant Spanish genius. This perspective treats Arabic heritage not as a rupture but as a force that renews an inherent national essence. Such ambivalence—balancing difference and assimilation—captures a key tension in nineteenth-century Spanish nationalism: defining the nation against its Others while also drawing on them to build a richer, more convincing past.

The eighteenth-century reevaluation of the Arab world reached beyond Spain’s internal debates to influence European thought. Enlightenment figures like Juan Pablo Forner viewed the Middle Ages as an age of stagnation, with Islamic Spain as Europe’s lone beacon of civilization. This challenged earlier Catholic narratives and encouraged more pluralist readings of Spain’s past. Meanwhile, foreign writers helped orientalize Spain: in the 1820s, Victor Hugo famously called it an African nation, implying both exoticism and a lack of European refinement.

By the early twentieth century, this discourse endured within racialized frameworks. In 1903, Alfred Fouillée claimed Spain contained substantial “African blood,” though he noted Celtic and Germanic traits in the north and west, especially among the aristocracy (Díaz-Andreu, “Islamic Archaeology” 70–71). His view reflected dominant racial hierarchies, mapping the myth of the two Spains onto geography and class: a southern, plebeian Spain shaped by Moorish and African influence, and a northern, aristocratic one tied to Europe through Celtic and Germanic lineage.

In both Forner’s internal reassessment and the French orientalizing gaze, the Arab past serves as a discursive tool for defining Spain’s identity—what it was, might have been, or should be. These perspectives expose the Islamic legacy’s flexibility in Spanish nationalism: alternately vilified, romanticized, or used instrumentally to suit changing ideological aims.

Mariano Fortuny’s complex work reflects Spain’s internalized orientalism and selective use of its Islamic past. As Eloy Martín Corrales observes, Fortuny helped “Moroccanize” Spanish Orientalism by distinguishing Moroccans from the wider Arab-Islamic world (49). This distinction allowed parts of Arab culture to be absorbed into the national imagination while sidestepping politically sensitive links to the East. Tellingly, Fortuny’s engagement with Spain’s Islamic heritage—especially al-Andalus—came only after his travels in North Africa. His celebrated visit to Granada to paint the Alhambra was guided less by local study than by an external perspective shaped abroad.

This trajectory underscores a key difference between Spanish and other European orientalisms. While Britain, France, and Germany pursued Oriental studies for colonial or academic purposes, Spain’s approach was largely introspective. The Oriental was not a distant Other but an internalized past, used to interpret and aestheticize Spanish identity. As Díaz-Andreu notes, in Spain the study of Africa and the Orient became a flexible tool for explaining artistic, cultural, and demographic patterns (“Islamic Archaeology” 75). In Fortuny’s work, the Oriental becomes a mirror of national identity—filtered through aesthetics and framed within nationalism, blurring the boundary between foreign and native.

Arabic influences on Spanish nationalism date back to its nineteenth-century beginnings. Antonio Gil de Zárate’s Historia de la literatura española (1844), the first Spanish literature textbook, shows how Spain’s heritage was framed through continuity and hybridity. While recognizing Latin’s spread under Rome, Gil de Zárate stressed the persistence of older dialects and the impact of Greek, Phoenician, and Carthaginian tongues. He claimed that even in the eighth century, languages such as Greek, Chaldean, Hebrew, Cantabrian, and Celtiberian coexisted with Latin, underscoring early medieval Spain’s linguistic diversity (5–13).

Gil de Zárate notably argued that Latin became a truly national language only after the Visigothic settlement, which he believed preserved rather than corrupted it. This view challenged the common claim that Rome was responsible for Hispania’s Romanization. For him, the Visigoths stabilized Latin—a continuity he said persisted, even flourished, under Arab rule. This striking idea, portraying Arabs as guardians of linguistic continuity, was later ignored by nationalist historiography, which preferred to stress a sharper divide between Christian and Islamic Spain.

Gil de Zárate’s synthesis reveals how early Spanish nationalism selectively absorbed multiple cultural legacies. Instead of sidelining the Arab contribution, he implicitly credited it with preserving the linguistic continuity vital to national identity. His work embodies an early form of pluralist essentialism, defining Spain not in opposition to foreign influence but through a layered history shaped by Greeks, Phoenicians, Goths, and Arabs alike.

A few years earlier, Agustín Durán presented a similarly hybrid view of Spanish identity in his 1828 speech Sobre el carácter de la antigua poesía castellana. He argued that Spain’s national character emerged from a blend of Northern and Eastern influences, reflected in a literature combining French precision with Arab richness. Durán did not reject the Arab legacy; he acknowledged that although the sons of Ishmael were expelled, the Christian victors absorbed their knowledge, customs, and luxury, adapting them to Iberian culture (54–57).

Durán saw no conflict between Castile’s political dominance and Spain’s cultural diversity. He portrayed Castile as a crossroads of traditions, noting how Catalan and Aragonese troubadours mixed their melancholic melodies with the lively imagination of Andalusian Moors at John II’s court (57). For Durán, Spain’s nationhood arose not from purity but from mixture—a fusion of northern, eastern, and regional influences that defined its distinctive cultural and political identity.

Durán and Gil de Zárate embody the fluid interaction of language, literature, and politics in early Spanish liberalism. Both viewed Spain as the outcome of cultural mestizaje, defining its national character through synthesis rather than exclusion. Their work reinforces this study’s central claim: that mixture—not homogeneity—was the key metaphor nineteenth-century European liberal nationalisms used to legitimize the modern nation-state.

From an archaeological perspective, the hypothesis of primordial contact with Africa was received with significant interest within Spain. Some scholars even proposed a prehistoric link between the Iberian Peninsula and populations situated south of the Central African rainforest. These parallels were predicated on the alleged existence of a matriarchal right and the architectural presence of hórreos, both characteristic of Northern Spain—a region where classical sources suggest women held elevated social prestige during the pre-Roman era. Furthermore, the striking stylistic affinities between Levantine rock art in Iberia and that of the Bushmen had been repeatedly highlighted by Hugo Obermaier (Fernández Martínez 173). Mirroring the French colonial experience, the Spanish intervention in Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was often framed not as an exogenous conquest, but as a homecoming for the peninsula’s original occupants.

Within this late nineteenth-century context, Manuel Antón y Ferrándiz emerged as the preeminent authority in Spanish anthropology. A disciple of Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau in Paris and the first Chair of Anthropology at the Universidad Central between 1890 and 1919, Antón y Ferrándiz identified the primordial race of the Iberian Peninsula as Libyo-Iberian to underscore its African origins. According to his thesis, this group possessed a strong and rugged nature and a frank and resolute character (Fernández Martínez 169)—physical and psychological attributes that closely mirrored the nationalist clichés associated with the Spanish essence of that era. It is worth noting that this scientific categorization served a strategic purpose: by aligning the Iberian race with these specific virtues, liberal historiography could sanitize the African connection, framing it not as a foreign intrusion but as the foundational source of a continuous and authentic Spanish identity.

The notion that Spain’s natural borders effectively extended to the Atlas Mountains in the Maghreb was championed in his youth by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo and became a cornerstone of the thought of Joaquín Costa. As a primary advocate for military intervention, Costa promoted this expansion through his combative writings and the foundation of the Sociedad Española de Africanistas y Colonialistas. Costa, who conducted archaeological research and was a steadfast proponent of Vasco-Iberianism, utilized archaeological data to provide a historical justification for annexation. It is particularly telling that Costa criticized the expedition of Víctor Abargues through the Red Sea and Ethiopia; in the Aragonese writer’s view, the enterprise had been excessively scientific and lacked practical territorial utility (Fernández Martínez 177). Indeed, Costa personifies, perhaps more than any other figure, the inextricable link between colonialism, archaeology, and the construction of national identity.

Oriental studies in Spain were fundamentally nationalist in nature; unlike the academic traditions of other nations, their analytical focus remained largely confined to the domestic sphere. The work of the painter Fortuny should be examined within this framework. Although hailing from Catalonia, his interest in the Islamic vestiges of Spain—exemplified by his journey to Granada to paint the Alhambra—only crystallized after his direct encounter with North Africa. Furthermore, Costa advocated for strengthening ties with Africa through the implementation of archaeological excavations (Díaz-Andreu, “Islamic Archaeology” 75). As evidenced here, archaeology and Orientalism converged, unified by the underlying nationalist project that sought to define the Spanish identity.

It is evident, therefore, that one of the primary mechanisms for restoring national prestige was the acquisition of regional power in North Africa. Following the Algeciras Conference of 1906, European powers reached an agreement whereby France and Spain established legal oversight over Morocco; however, it was not until 1912 that Spain formally initiated its protectorate, which would endure until 1956. The failed attempt to establish the Centro de Estudios Árabes in 1908 must be understood within this specific geopolitical framework. Inspired by the intellectual program of Julián Ribera y Tarragó, the center was intended to facilitate the study of both classical and colloquial Arabic, as well as the history of al-Andalus and Morocco. Its ultimate objective was to train a professional class equipped to serve Spain’s strategic interests in the North African territory.

Ribera y Tarragó was convinced that the conversion to Islam within the Iberian Peninsula had facilitated the emergence of a specific national personality, shaped by the profound influence of Islamic civilization. In his view, the Muslims of the peninsula were essentially Spanish—in terms of race, language, character, aesthetic taste, and temperament. Consequently, and in contrast to other European traditions, Spanish intellectuals did not distinguish between colonial action and their own historical past, as both were inextricably linked to the broader project of national construction (Díaz-Andreu, “Islamic Archaeology” 77). It is noteworthy that reaching this conclusion required a significant historiographical shift, as Ribera y Tarragó and other twentieth-century scholars posited that the events of 711 did not constitute an Islamic conquest in the traditional sense, but were instead a mass conversion of the indigenous population.

A secondary consideration regarding Hispanic Islam was the systematic Europeanization of its cultural legacy. For instance, the archaeological site of Medina Azahara was among the most heavily funded projects in Spain during the 1920s and 1930s. The underlying objective was to frame the Caliphate of Córdoba within a European context, presenting it as a foundational participant in the first artistic renaissance of the medieval West. This narrative soon incorporated artistic comparisons between Córdoba and the Greece of Pericles or the Rome of Augustus. In essence, there was a deliberate attempt to classicize and Europeanize the Islamic world to facilitate its assimilation into the construction of the Spanish national past. This valorization of the Hispanic-Islamic world represented a significant advancement in the phenomenon of cultural and political andalucismo. Simultaneously, it solidified a conceptual division between a Northern identity, epitomized by Numantia and Altamira, and a Southern identity, represented by Tartessos and Medina Azahara.

Conclusion

The chronological bridge between disparate epochs and cultures, exemplified by the surrealist motifs in El milagro de P. Tinto, finds a more pervasive—and ideologically potent—parallel in mid-twentieth-century Spanish popular media. As critic Julià Guillamon observed in 2016, the iconic comic protagonist El Jabato was conceptualized not as a specific tribal subject —such as an Ausetano or Ilergete—, but rather as a generalized Iberian archetype. Despite the character’s pre-Christian temporal setting and the absence of overt ecclesiastical symbols, he is coded with the moral and physical attributes of a traditionalist Christian patriarch. This underscores the semiotic flexibility of the Iberian in the Spanish national imaginary: it functions less as a precise ethno-historical category and more as a vessel for an essentialist Spanish identity—one defined by rugged antiquity, moral rectitude, and an implicit, proto-Christian ethos. In this framework, the Iberian serves as a diachronic symbol of spiritual resistance against imperial hegemony, effectively collapsing historical distance to validate a continuous national narrative.

This ambiguity takes shape in El Jabato, created by Víctor Mora, who also wrote Capitán Trueno. Set in the first century BCE, it depicts a proto-Christian hero resisting Rome. The presence of Christian morals in a pre-Christian world is a deliberate anachronism, transforming ancient Hispania into a land of virtue, faith, and anti-imperial spirit. Chronology collapses as emperors like Nero, Titus, Trajan, and a fictional Sulla coexist, and the hero fights Romans, Carthaginians, Arabs, and even extinct beasts—merging millennia into one myth of nationalist resistance.

In this light, El Jabato is more than a comic hero—he embodies the discursive patterns explored in this study. His world fuses oriental motifs with Christian values, casts Rome as the oppressive Other, and builds Spanish identity through a mythic tale of constant resistance. Whether set in pre-Roman times or the medieval crusades, the heroic Iberian—Christian, masculine, and anti-imperial—acts as a cultural vessel projecting a nationalist self-image across Spain’s historical and symbolic frontiers.

This essay has examined archaeology as a lens for understanding the links between nationalism and the scientific study of antiquity. Central to this inquiry is the nineteenth-century trope of Rome as an uneasy inheritance—an imperial legacy at odds with liberal nationalism’s quest for native origins. Rather than a founding force, Rome appears as a rupture that interrupts the organic development of peoples like the Celts and Iberians. This narrative, both modern and classicist, reimagines Spain as a land of intrinsic worth—historically rich yet continually besieged by foreign powers.

Within this framework, Spain’s origins lay not in Rome but in two genealogies: the Iberians, representing pre-Roman authenticity, and the Visigoths, post-Roman restorers of a sovereign Hispania. Together they provided a dual foundation for nationalist historiography—ancient yet local, medieval yet regenerative. Through archaeology, literature, and popular culture, a selective memory of antiquity forged a national identity that was deep in history but ideologically unified, embracing diversity while preserving the illusion of continuity. Archaeology thus not only uncovered the past but actively built the symbolic landscape of the modern nation.

Alongside Rome, Spanish nationalism confronted a second imperial legacy: the Islamic presence. Though Muslim rule might seem another obstacle to a unified national story, its historiographical role was more nuanced than Rome’s. Muslims were not portrayed merely as foreign conquerors like the Phoenicians or Greeks; perceived affinities between Iberians and Arabs—geographic or cultural rather than historical—often made Islam partly assimilable. Through African or Oriental links, the Islamic presence could be woven into, rather than excluded from, the national narrative.

A key factor in Islam’s integration into Spanish nationalism was the racialized view of Arabs. Unlike the Romans, often portrayed as coercive outsiders, Arabs were seen—positively or not—as culturally and ethnically closer to the Iberian spirit. Crucially, no strong ideological barrier excluded them from Spain’s civilizational fabric. In some narratives, Islam even revived a dormant national essence, much as the Visigoths were said to have restored an authentic Hispania after Rome. Both Muslims and Goths thus played parallel roles in nationalist thought—not as invaders, but as agents of regeneration within Spain’s historical continuity.