From the Scipiones at Emporion and the storming of New Carthage through Viriathus and Numantia, Sertorius and Caesar at Munda, Augustus's Cantabrian wars and the founding of Emerita Augusta, the Hispano-Roman emperors Trajan and Hadrian, Seneca and Martial, the Council of Elvira and the execution of Priscillian, to the crossing of the Vandals and Alans, the rise of the Visigothic kingdom, and the end of Roman rule in the peninsula. Slide across the centuries to read the major events that made Hispania Roman.
While Hannibal marches north through Gaul towards the Alps, the consul's brother Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio disembarks at the Greek colony of Emporion and opens the Iberian front of the Second Punic War.
From the Scipiones at Emporion and the storming of New Carthage through Viriathus and Numantia, Sertorius and Caesar at Munda, Augustus's Cantabrian wars and the founding of Emerita Augusta, the Hispano-Roman emperors Trajan and Hadrian, Seneca and Martial, the Council of Elvira and the execution of Priscillian, to the crossing of the Vandals and Alans, the rise of the Visigothic kingdom, and the end of Roman rule in the peninsula. Slide across the centuries to read the major events that made Hispania Roman.
While Hannibal marches north through Gaul towards the Alps, the consul's brother Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio disembarks at the Greek colony of Emporion and opens the Iberian front of the Second Punic War.
The 25-year-old Publius Cornelius Scipio takes the Barcid capital Qart Hadasht in a single day, wading his men through the lagoon at low tide while a feint engages the seaward walls.
At Ilipa on the Guadalquivir, Scipio outmanoeuvres Hasdrubal Gisco and Mago Barca and shatters the last great Carthaginian army in Iberia, ending three centuries of Punic presence in the peninsula.
Rome divides the conquered ground into Hispania Citerior on the eastern seaboard and Hispania Ulterior in the south, each governed by a praetor — the first Roman provinces outside Italy and Sicily.
After eight years of guerrilla war that had humbled successive Roman armies in the western sierras, the Lusitanian leader Viriathus is murdered in his sleep by three of his own envoys, bribed by the proconsul Servilius Caepio.
After a fifteen-month blockade by Scipio Aemilianus, the Celtiberian hill-town of Numantia falls. Most of its defenders have killed themselves or one another rather than surrender; the survivors are sold into slavery and the city is razed.
After almost a decade as the de facto ruler of an independent Roman state in Hispania, Quintus Sertorius is murdered at a banquet by his own lieutenant Marcus Perperna, who is in turn quickly crushed by Pompey.
On the plain of Munda in Hispania Ulterior, Caesar destroys the last Pompeian army under Pompey's sons Gnaeus and Sextus in a battle so close that he afterwards said he had at last fought not for victory but for his life.
Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa breaks the resistance of the Cantabri and Astures of the northern coast, ending a generation of campaigning that had brought Augustus himself to Tarraco. For the first time the entire peninsula lies under Roman rule.
On the death of Nerva, Marcus Ulpius Traianus, born at Italica in Baetica, ascends the throne — the first Roman emperor from outside Italy, and the beginning of a Hispano-Roman age that will give Rome its widest borders and some of its finest writers.
By the edict of Caracalla, every free inhabitant of the empire — including the towns and tribes of the three Hispanic provinces — becomes a Roman citizen, completing in law a Romanisation that municipal life had largely accomplished in practice.
Around eighty-one canons agreed by nineteen bishops at Elvira near Granada give the earliest detailed picture of organised Christianity in the Latin West — a Hispanic Church already mature, austere, and confronting a still-pagan civic world.
Priscillian, ascetic bishop of Ávila, is beheaded at Trier by the usurper Magnus Maximus — the first Christian executed for heresy by a Christian state, and a scandal that would haunt the conscience of the Latin Church.
Three years after their crossing of the frozen Rhine, the Vandals, Alans, and Suebi force the passes of the Pyrenees and pour into Hispania. Within months the diocese is partitioned by lot among the invaders.
On the river Órbigo near Astorga, the Visigothic king Theodoric II, acting as Roman federate, annihilates the army of the Suevic king Rechiarius. The Suevic kingdom collapses to a rump in Gallaecia and the Visigoths inherit the western Mediterranean settlement.
With the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in Ravenna, the imperial title in the West lapses. In Hispania, only the rump province of Tarraconensis remains in titular Roman hands; everywhere else the Visigothic king is the only effective authority.