AH-22 Spania: the Eastern Roman province in Iberia

The province emerged from imperial intervention in Visigothic political conflict. Its holdings included important ports and coastal territories whose exact boundaries changed and remain incompletely recoverable. Carthago Spartaria, the former Carthago Nova, and Malaca were significant centres within this maritime-oriented imperial foothold.

Spania’s strategic logic was Mediterranean. Shipping linked it with Africa and other imperial possessions, while ports and fortified towns offered bases that did not require control of every inland district. Local agriculture, commerce, taxation, church institutions, and regional elites supported provincial life under a government facing continued Visigothic pressure.

Its creation was a genuine restoration of direct imperial authority to part of an old Roman land, but not the reconstitution of all Baetica, Carthaginiensis, or Hispania. Civil and military command had to function in a contested frontier environment. Religious and political relationships crossed the boundary between imperial and Visigothic territories.

Visigothic kings gradually reduced the imperial holdings. By the early seventh century, the province had been largely eliminated as a mainland jurisdiction, conventionally ending by the 620s. Its history is short compared with Republican and early imperial Spain, but essential to understanding why the end of western Roman government did not mean a permanent end to all Roman provincial rule in Iberia.