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Portugal Germanic Invasions
In 406 the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by Germanic
peoples
consisting of Vandals, Swabians, and Alans, a non-Germanic
people
of Iranian stock who had attached themselves to the
Vandals.
Within two years, the invaders had spread to the west
coast. The
Swabians were primarily herders and were drawn to Galicia
because
the climate was similar to what they had left behind. The
Vandals
settled to the north of Galicia but soon left with the
remnants
of the Alans for the east. After the departure of the
Vandals,
the Swabians moved southward and settled among the
Luso-Romans,
who put up no resistance and assimilated them easily. The
urban
life of the citânias gave way to the Swabian custom
of
dispersed houses and smallholdings, a pattern that is
reflected
today in the land tenure pattern of northern Portugal.
Roman
administration disappeared. The capital of Swabian
hegemony was
present-day Braga, but some Swabian kings lived in the
Roman city
of Cale (present-day Porto) at the mouth of the Douro
River. The
city was a customs post between Galicia and Lusitania.
Gradually,
the city came to be called Portucale, a compound of
portus
(port) and Cale. This name also referred to the vast
territory to
the immediate north and south of the banks of the river
upstream
from the city.
With large parts of the peninsula now outside their
control,
the Romans commissioned the Visigoths, the most highly
Romanized
of the Germanic peoples, to restore Rome's hegemony in
415. The
Visigoths forced the Vandals to sail for North Africa and
defeated the Swabians. The Swabian kings and their
Visigothic
overlords held commissions to govern in the name of the
emperor;
their kingdoms were thus part of the Roman Empire. Latin
remained
the language of government and commerce. The Visigoths,
who had
been converted to Christianity in the fifth century,
decided to
organize themselves into an independent kingdom with their
capital at Toledo. The kingdom was based on the principle
of
absolute monarchy, each sovereign being elected by an
assembly of
nobles. Visigothic kings convoked great councils made up
of
bishops and nobles to assist in deciding ecclesiastical
and civil
matters. Visigoths gradually fused with the Swabians and
Hispano-Romans into a single politico-religious entity
that
lasted until the eighth century, when the Iberian
Peninsula fell
under Muslim domination.
Data as of January 1993
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