by Tony Kevin
With the Pax Romana finally established in the peninsula, Mérida on the main north-south trade-route prospered. In the late Roman period, it became the seat of the Archbishop of Spain. Its conversion to Christianity was inspired by the martyrdom of its own local patron saint, Santa Eulalia. According to the story, Eulalia was a twelve-year-old Christian girl sentenced to burn to death by a local judge in 304 A.D. because she refused to offer a sacrifice to Roman gods, as commanded by the Emperor Diocletian. There is a similar Saint Eulalia story set in the other Roman capital, Barcelona.
Mérida continued as a functioning city in the Visigothic period, and then prospered anew for five centuries as a Muslim city, with the Vía de la Plata now at its zenith as the major north-south trade and pilgrimage route.
I went to evening Mass in the Basilica of Santa Eulalia — a lovely, really old Romanesque church that links all these periods. Archaeologists have unearthed its interesting history, digging carefully under the church. There had been a Christian cemetery here since the fourth century. It had included a mausoleum in memory of Santa Eulalia. The first Christian basilica was constructed here between the sixth and ninth centuries under Visigothic rule. In 875, when Muslims occupied the city, the Christian community of Mérida emigrated to Badajos — it isn’t clear why — abandoning their basilica, but not forgetting its memory. After the reconquest, starting in 1230, a new basilica was built on the ruins of the original one.
Mérida’s importance waned after the Christian reconquest, but revived again in modern times. A few years ago, Mérida was chosen ahead of the larger provincial cities Badajoz and Cáceres to be the capital of the new autonomous community of Extremadura, combining these two eponymous provinces. Maybe Mérida, like Washington or Canberra, was a compromise choice when larger rival cities could not concede to the other, but Mérida’s rich 2000-year-old civic history must have been a major factor in the choice.
The Museum of Roman Art houses a magnificent collection, beautifully displayed, of the finest original Roman statuary and mosaics, and of pottery and household items and coins, all locally excavated. The museum basement is itself an excavated Roman city street, with house foundations and roadways clearly visible. There is also a reconstructed section of Roman road, as it would have been when newly laid: a roughly cobbled road four metres wide, with interlocked granite cobblestones the size of melons extending neatly a metre into the ground. Immensely strong, such roads look as if they were hell to march or ride along, but at the time they would have had well-maintained, smooth clay surfaces, long since washed away.
This museum is an ancient history textbook brought to life. Here are famous emperors such as Augustus flanked by his sons Drusus and the terrible Tiberius, and Trajan; divinities like Hercules and Ceres, the goddess of fertility; a massive, sacrificial stone bull, warriors, and gladiators; and huge colourful mosaics, painstakingly restored and re-cemented onto walls for clear viewing from raised galleries opposite, containing images of the River Nile, crocodiles and tigers, scenes from Greek mythology. There are also wineglasses, dinner plates, vases, perfectly carved plaques in perfect, elegant Latin. It all brings home what a technically and culturally advanced and comfortable civilisation the Roman Empire was for so many hundreds of years — but also, it seemed to me, a civilisation with a certain coldness, a bleakness of spirit.
I think the Hollywood Biblo–Roman swords-and-sandals movies — Ben Hur, Spartacus, Decline and Fall, Gladiator, etc. — capture something of the kind of society that Rome must have been. Rome was an expansionist, ruthless, and cruel military civilisation, only gradually humanised by the spread of Greek philosophies and the three Abrahamic religions around the Mediterranean. For all its glories and comforts, I would not want to have lived under the Roman Empire.
Mérida has a permanent Visigothic museum too, much smaller, but unexpectedly quite endearing. The Visigothic era, roughly 400–750 A.D., that succeeded the fall of the Empire was clearly a time of disruption and cultural decline. The Visigoths were one of several waves of Germanic invading tribes who swept down from north of the Pyrenees, who converted to Christianity and settled down as a ruling aristocracy in the ruins of Roman Hispania. The quality of Visigoth-period carving and inscriptions falls away precipitously. Clumsy dog-Latin, ungrammatical and poorly carved, takes over from classically perfect Latin inscriptions. But yet, this was a young and fresh Christian civilisation. My eyes filled with tears as I read the words cut on a Visigothic tombstone: ‘Arestila, servant of God, she lived 27 years, she rested in peace on 26 July 559’. Who was Arestila, who died in peace 250 years after Eulalia’s martydom? What sort of a life had she led in her brief twenty-seven years as a ‘servant of God’? I felt a sharp human connection to Arestila, that I could not feel anywhere in the great Roman museum. Spanish historians call the Visigothic period a time of ‘decadence’, but that seems to me a misleading choice of word. I see it as a time of exciting transmigrations, of the dismantlement of a cruel and sterile imperial order, of new spiritual beginnings and of new life.
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After Mérida, I did not want to be a tourist in Spain any more. It was time now to get on to the real business of my journey — walking the camino, to experience what it means to be a Christian pilgrim travelling to Santiago. With joy and expectation in my heart, I left my Mérida pensión just before dawn on Sunday, meeting a crowd of well-dressed young revellers drifting out of a nightclub. I recognised them: they had all been guests at a wedding the evening before in the Basilica of Santa Eulalia, which had started just after my evening Mass there. They must have been partying all night, but all of them looked surprisingly fresh still — and seemingly still sober, the young men in elegant suits and the young women in crisp party dresses and impeccable make-up. Most Spanish people I met hold their drink well — it is considered boorish and uncivilised to be seen to be drunk or disorderly. We exchanged good wishes, and I walked out of Mérida as the sky began to lighten behind the arches of the great Roman aqueduct that towered over my pathway out of the city.
Two hours later, I was standing on the stone wall of the old Roman reservoir in the mountains, the Embalse de Proserpina. A few more hours, and I was in the village of Aljucén, getting the keys from the local bar proprietor to my first pilgrim albergue. I walked up the hill to find it. It was a little former workmen’s cottage, freshly painted, with four small rooms with bunks, a bathroom and kitchen with hot water, and cold-water washing tubs in the sunny backyard, backing onto fields. I read the albergue guest book, filled with the thank-you messages of preceding pilgrims. It was a perfect moment, though I was still physically alone, because at last I felt the presence of other pilgrims. I was the first to arrive that day, but I knew there would be others. And throughout the afternoon, other pilgrims came in. I had at last, twenty days after arriving in Spain, joined the community of pilgrims walking the Vía de la Plata. For 240 kilometres behind me, back as far as Seville, and for 760 kilometres ahead of me to Santiago, I knew that pilgrims were walking and cycling and riding on this same trail as me. I didn’t feel alone any more.
chapter seven
Spanish Politics
At this moment in the story, I want to digress from the narrative to say a little about the complex and unusual contemporary politics of Spain. Those uninterested in politics might like to skip this chapter. During a long and rewarding career as an Australian diplomat, I developed skills in understanding and reporting on the differing agendas and styles of governance of various nations I was posted to. When I went to Spain on pilgrimage, I was naturally curious, probably more so than most pilgrims might be, to learn as much as I could about Spanish government and politics, about what makes this remarkable country what it is.
Deliberately, I did not do any preliminary reading. By entering the country pretty much as a blank page, I would be more open to new ideas and not bound by preconceptions. So I went with little knowledge, apart from vague recol
lections from books read long ago on Spanish history up to the Civil War, and a few snippets of more contemporary information from newspapers.
I knew that after Franco had died in 1975, a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy had somehow been restored, and that Spain had joined the European Union. I knew — because it was world news — that in a national election held three days after Islamic terrorists had bombed Madrid train station on 11 March 2004, killing 191 people and wounding over 1700, the Spanish people had voted out a conservative government closely aligned to the United States, led by José María Aznar, in favour of a new socialist government led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Two million people in Madrid alone — and 28 per cent of the Spanish population nationally — had gone out on the streets to demonstrate against terrorism of any kind. The Aznar government initially tried falsely to blame the train attack on Basque terrorists, fearing the electoral reaction if it became known — as it immediately did through the leaking of early police findings — that the train bombing had been an act of Islamist terrorism motivated by the already controversial Spanish military presence in Iraq. By lying to its citizens on such a serious matter and being exposed so soon in the lie, the Aznar government sealed its fate. The new PSOE government shortly thereafter fulfilled its campaign promise to withdraw the Spanish contingent from the US-led coalition force occupying Iraq, despite strong pressure from Washington and its NATO coalition allies, and accusations that Spain was in a cowardly fashion cutting and running from its NATO obligations.
This Spanish response to a terrible act of Islamist terrorism interested me. Unlike the US, Britain, and Australia, which have responded to every terrorist threat or attack with ever more machismo and expressions of determination to confront Al Qaeda and Islamic resistance elements in Iraq with military force, Spain seemed to have chosen instead to back off from ‘the war on terror’, at least in its Iraqi dimension. There are still Spanish troops in Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led operation there.
I thought that it must have taken a particular kind of Spanish bravery and political maturity to respond to a traumatic terrorist act and intense pressure afterwards from major allies in such an independent way, and one that was hurtfully mocked by critics. I doubted that my country, Australia, would be capable of such political maturity, and wondered where the Spanish people had found their courage and wisdom.
I was also assuming, as I recall now, that the harsh Civil War and Franco years would have left strong psychological residues in Spain: perhaps I expected to find a country that was still quite nationalist, conservative, Catholic, authoritarian-tending, illiberal, centralist, viscerally anti-Muslim. I was wrong on all these counts.
It was all the more interesting because it took a while for me to absorb contemporary Spanish political realities. All I knew came from the Spanish newspapers I was reading daily, initially with painstaking dictionary-aided efforts to get the main gist of news stories and opinion pieces and editorials, later with increasing detail and fluency as my Spanish political vocabulary expanded; and from watching the main news and current affairs television program every evening. You can learn a great deal about a country from the way in which it selects, prioritises, and presents its national news to itself. Finally, there were valuable hints and pointers to Spanish politics picked up in many conversations, and from watching how people reacted to television news stories — for example, watching the body language of viewers in bars when Prime Minister Zapatero or Leader of the Opposition Rajoy were speaking on the screen. With the former, I saw relaxation and familiarity, a sense of ‘there is our friend again’; in the case of the latter, impatience and boredom with ‘what is this man ranting on about now?’
Gradually, a consistent picture came together. But first some recent history is needed, to fill in the gaps of what happened after Franco died in 1975, over a generation ago. Franco died peacefully, though unloved and unmourned. Like Rip Van Winkle, Spain began to wake up with relief from its long-imposed political slumber to find out how far Western Europe had left it behind. The country embarked on an exciting but risky experiment in the fast-track rebuilding of a constitutional democracy.
Franco’s careful succession planning had set in place a stable transitional political framework for after he left the scene. Two days after Franco’s death, Prince Juan Carlos, the 37-year old grandson of the last Bourbon monarch, Alfonso XIII, who had abdicated in 1931, was reinstated as King Juan Carlos I, to preside over democratic elections and the subsequent drafting of a new constitution. Within two years, under the stabilising eye of the surprisingly wise young king, Spain in 1977 held its first democratic elections since before the Civil War. In 1978, the new parliament passed a new, democratic constitution.
These were dangerous years. Had history gone another way, Spain might have again split under the same divisive forces from the extreme Right and Left that had destroyed the Republic in 1936. There were still, it was generally assumed, many die-hard fascists and communists left in Spain, and many family scores and blood feuds to settle. What would happen now, with Franco’s iron hand no longer at the helm of the ship of state, and the feared Guardia Civil (national police) de-fanged?
Fortunately, Spain by now had a large middle class with a strong interest in upholding a stable modern state. Many Spaniards would, even today, give credit to the Franco years for nurturing and building the self-confidence of this new class. It turned out that there was now a large, politically active moderate centre that was Christian Democrat in orientation, and strong enough to face down the old fascist Falange Party, which was now ideologically isolated and abandoned by history, and without effective leadership. Franco had deliberately left the Falange with no charismatic political heir, in order to steer Falangist loyalties back towards the monarch. There was not much left of the communists, either. Despite the re-launch of a destabilising Basque separatist terror campaign, which has sputtered on ever since — Spain, sadly, has had much experience of home-grown lethal political terrorism since 1975, and the Spanish people have had to live with terror bombings and hostage-taking long before Al Qaeda — the centre held in the country’s first post-Franco democratic elections. This time, things did not fall apart in Spain.
Contesting these crucial 1977 elections were three newly formed national parties, all sworn to uphold the new democracy. The UCD (Union of the Democratic Centre) was a new Christian Democrat centrist coalition, modelled on similar parties that had flourished in post-war Italy and Germany. The PSOE (the Spanish Socialist Workers Party) was the direct heir to the eponymous party that led the Centre-Left Republican coalition government at the start of the Civil War in 1936. The AP (Popular Alliance) represented post-Francoist conservative elements on the far Right — the Falange had collapsed. Finally, there were the Communists.
The election results were: UCD, 31.1 per cent; PSOE, 28.6 per cent; Communists, 9.4 per cent; and AP, 8.5 per cent. Smaller voting shares went to regional–nationalist parties, especially in the Basque and Catalonian regions, with their strong local tradition of separatism. This was a very reassuring outcome. The electorate had rejected both the extreme Left and Right (for both the AP’s and the Communists’ credentials as democratic parties were widely mistrusted). The two centrist parties, the UCD and PSOE, had won sufficient parliamentary dominance, 60 per cent between them, to cooperate in the drafting of a democratic constitution.
This constitution, passed in 1978 and the third key hurdle, established Spain as a ‘parliamentary monarchy’. This is the first of many semantic contradictions I encountered in Spanish political language. In English, the phrase makes little sense, but I think it means a parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarchy that retains strong reserve powers. Spain chose to be a kingdom once again — no longer a republic — with a strong hereditary constitutional monarch and an elected prime minister whose formal title, confusingly for Anglophones, is ‘President of the Council of Ministers�
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The preamble of the constitution sets out the aspirations of the new Spanish democracy:
The Spanish Nation, wishing to establish justice, liberty and security, and to promote the welfare of all who make part of it, in use of her sovereignty, proclaims its will to:
Guarantee democratic life within the Constitution and the laws according to a just economic and social order;
Consolidate a State ensuring the rule of law as an expression of the will of the people;
Protect all Spaniards and all the peoples of Spain in the exercise of human rights, their cultures and traditions, languages and institutions.
Promote the progress of culture and the economy to ensure a dignified quality of life for all;
Establish an advanced democratic society; and
Collaborate in the strengthening of peaceful and efficient cooperation among all the peoples of the Earth.
All the familiar democratic building blocks are here: justice, liberty, security, sovereignty, economic and social justice, rule of law, human rights, culture, quality of life, and international good citizenship. What stands out as specifically Spanish, and problematical, is this clause: ‘Protect all Spaniards and all the peoples of Spain in the exercise of human rights, their cultures and traditions, languages and institutions’. The puzzling phrase ‘all Spaniards and all the peoples of Spain’ goes to the heart of the existential Spanish question: is Spain one people, many peoples, or both at the same time? Another key article in the Constitution, Section 2, is again a brave straddle of this same semantic contradiction: