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THE COMING DARK AGE
Newsletter
September, 2005
1. INTRODUCTION
This month's newsletter comprises some comments on the favoured barbarian route across the Gibraltar Strait. No submissions have yet been received for the test of dark age theory included in the last newsletter. Closing date is 10 October 2005. Please send in even partial attempts. You may be the only entrant, which guarantees you the prize. Send answers by email to the address on the website.
Past editions of the newsletter are on the website, although this has not been updated for a year. I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson
2. SPAIN, NORTH AFRICA AND THE BARBARIANS
The North African towns of Ceuta and Melilla have recently been in the news as African migrants have been storming them, some dying in the attempt. These are Spanish possessions although they are on the Moroccan coast. They have long been a jumping-off point for barbarians heading in one direction or the other.
For many centuries, both North Africa and Spain were part of the Roman Empire. However, in autumn 409, Spain was invaded by the Vandals, Alans and Sueves, three barbarian groups that had crossed the Rhine from Germany a couple of years earlier. Over the next couple of decades, they resisted Roman attempts to take back Spain. In the late 420s, there was civil war between the top Roman commanders of Italy and Africa. The Vandal king Gaiseric took this opportunity to move his forces across the Gibraltar Strait, a distance of a dozen miles or so, and established a bridgehead in what is now Morocco. From there, the Vandals spread along the coast, and captured Carthage in 439, thus completing their conquest of North Africa. They left Spain to the Sueves, and it largely came back under Roman control. In his "History of the Vandal Persecution", written around 488, Victor of Vita tells us of the atrocities perpetrated by the Vandals in Africa:
"Finding a province which was at peace and enjoying quiet, the whole land beautiful and flowering on all sides, they set to work on it with their wicked forces, laying it waste by devastation and bringing everything to ruin with fire and murders. They did not even spare the fruit-bearing orchards, in case people who had hidden in the caves of the mountains or steep places or any remote areas would be able to eat the foods produced by them after they had passed...They burned houses of prayer...When they found the doors of a sacred building closed they opened up a way with the blows of their hatchets...Many distinguished bishops and noble priests were put to death with different kinds of torment...so that the things which were in their keeping would be brought forth more easily under pressure of pain...Some had their mouths forced open with poles and stakes, and disgusting filth was put in their jaws...They tortured others by twisting cords around their foreheads and shins until they snapped...In their barbaric frenzy they even snatched children from their mothers' breasts...They held babies by the feet, upside down, and cut them in two from their bottoms to the tops of their heads." And so it goes on.
In 460, the emperor Majorian was in Spain to plan an invasion of North Africa and capture it back from the Vandals. The latter were now operating as a naval power, and had crossed the Mediterranean to raid Sicily and sack Rome. They heard what Majorian was up to and launched a surprise attack on his fleet in the Spanish harbour of Cartagena. This put an end to Majorian's plans. The Vandal kingdom of North Africa was, however, eventually conquered by the Roman general, Belisarius, in 533. By this time, the western Roman empire was already defunct and, since 476, only the eastern empire continued in existence, ruled from what is now Istanbul (formerly Constantinople). Nevertheless, under the emperor Justinian, Belisarius and others managed to reconquer large parts of the west, including Italy, North Africa and, returning across the straits, parts of the southern Spanish coast.
Spain at this time was in the hands of the Visigoths. They had begun to take over in the 480s, and they established themselves fully in the peninsula after being driven out of Gaul by the Franks. At some stage, the Visigoths had captured Ceuta from the Vandals, but they lost it again as Belisarius re-took North Africa. In 547, the Visigothic king Theudis sent an invasion force across the Strait to get Ceuta back again. This ended in disaster, and supposedly the entire army was wiped out. Theudis was murdered shortly afterwards. Nevertheless, the Visigoths continued to struggle against the remnants of east Roman (Byzantine) rule in this part of the world. Over the next century, they drove the Byzantines out of Spain and again crossed to Africa where they established coastal enclaves.
The next invaders to arrive were the new armies of the Muslims. In only a hundred years, they had come out of the Arabian peninsula and conquered all along the North African coast, as well as in other directions. By 710, they had reached Morocco. According to legend, a certain Count Julian, the Visigothic governor of Ceuta at this time, was disgruntled with the Visigothic king, Roderic, who had raped his daughter, Florinda. In revenge, Julian encouraged the Moors to cross the Gibraltar Strait and conquer Spain, which they did. Julian and his daughter are surely mythical figures, invented later to explain the ease of the Islamic conquest. Only slightly less legendary is the Islamic general (and slave), Tariq ibn Ziyad, who led the initial raiding into Spain in 710. Supposedly, Gibraltar was named after him as "the mountain (Arabic, jabal) of Tariq". Tariq's army disembarked at the Spanish port of Tarifa, from which the Vandals had come to North Africa three centuries earlier, and within a few years Spain was conquered. When Tariq visited the Caliph, to report his success, he was whipped and imprisoned - generals who were too successful were a threat to the ruler's authority. Belisarius had similarly been stripped of his command by Justinian, who was afraid that Belisarius might be ambitious for the imperial throne.
For the next half-millennium, Spain was peaceful and civilised under the western Islamic Empire. However, the Christian kingdoms of the north undertook a gradual reconquest, culminating in the capture of Granada in 1492 and elimination of the last vestiges of Islamic rule from Spain. The Christian Spaniards did not stop at the coast, but continued across the strait to North Africa. The Archbishop of Toledo urged King Ferdinand II of Aragon to devote himself to the conquest of Africa and the spreading of the Christian faith. Pope Alexander VI also approved and authorised a special tax to pay for this "crusade". Spain did indeed capture territory along the African coast over the next few decades, including Melilla in 1497. However, it was more interested in the New World, and with the decline of the Islamic Empire, the North African coast became the haunt of pirates, the so-called Barbary corsairs. Nevertheless, Ceuta, Melilla and a few islands off the Moroccan coast have remained Spanish to this day.
Melilla and Ceuta are now magnets for would-be immigrants not only from Morocco and Algeria, but also from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Mauritius, Cameroon, Mali and even further afield. They are surrounded by high wire fences, which are heavily patrolled, but a constant stream gets through. Some of these people have crossed the Sahara desert. They are not going to be put off by a bit of barbed wire. Furthermore, the Moroccans and Algerians can be easily expelled once they are caught, but the black Africans cannot be. They are not Moroccan citizens and Morocco will not have them back. Instead they get the chance of seeking asylum, perhaps in some other European country.
In his 1970s novel, "The Camp of the Saints", the French author Jean Raspail envisaged an invasion of France by an armada of 800,000 illegal immigrants, sailing, in this case, from the Ganges and arriving en masse on the French Riviera. His book was essentially a complaint or warning about the west's failure to stem the tide of migrants. He saw these migrants as keen to grab the material fruits of western civilisation but without any affection for its culture, or indeed intent on destroying it. Raspail's novel is generally considered inflammatory and racist. It was also written at a time when India seemed to be one of the world's more desperate regions and the source of immigration, whereas, thirty years on, the situation has changed and Africa is much more in that role. Nevertheless, the mass movement of barbarians into and out of Europe, often across the Gibraltar Strait, may be considered part of the natural flow of history, and one should not be surprised to see it happen again.