Iberian Iron Age & Mediterranean Exchange

Pre-Roman tribal Europe — Celts, Illyrians, Thracians, hillfort and chiefdom cultures.

1 chapter

-138 - 711

The Roman Empire integrated the eastern Iberian coast into the province of Tarraconensis, founding Valentia Edetanorum as a veteran colony and transforming Saguntum into a monumental city with a forum and 1st-century AD theatre. Roman law, urban planning, and the Christian religion entered together — by the 4th century, Valencia had a bishop. Descend into La Almoina excavations beneath Valencia's Plaça de la Mare de Déu and you walk on Roman paving past an early Christian baptistery: the physical overlap of imperial and liturgical layers under the later cathedral is literal. The Roman agricultural calendar — planting, harvest, seasonal feasts — may be the oldest substrate of the Valencian festival year, though no specific fire-ritual evidence survives from this period. At Sagunto, sit in the restored Roman theatre where performances still happen each summer: two thousand years of continuous public spectacle on the same stone.

711 - 1238

Islamic civilization transformed Valencia into Balansiya, a thriving Taifa kingdom whose engineering, agriculture, and urbanism still shape the region's physical landscape. The Caliphate of Córdoba laid out the Palmeral of Elche with elaborate irrigation in the 10th century; the same groves still produce white palms for Palm Sunday processions today — a rare case where Islamic-era landscape infrastructure feeds directly into Christian liturgical practice. Abd-ar-Rahman III founded the Tribunal de les Aigües around 960 CE to govern the acequia irrigation network; every Thursday at noon, that same tribunal still convenes at the Cathedral's Puerta de los Apóstoles, adjudicating in Valencian using Arabic-origin terminology (acequia, síndic). Climb to Santa Bárbara Castle above Alicante and the 9th-century Islamic walls are still visible beneath later Christian additions. The Islamic-era agricultural calendar — organized around water allocation and seasonal planting — may be the deepest temporal rhythm underlying Valencian festival timing, though this continuity must be read cautiously: the Morisco community that maintained these practices was expelled in 1609, and the surviving terminology is a landscape fossil of an absent community, not evidence of living Islamic ritual tradition.

1238 - 1707

The Crown of Aragon conquered the Islamic kingdom of Balansiya in 1238, establishing the Kingdom of Valencia as a separate political entity with its own Furs (laws promulgated by James I in 1261), its own Generalitat, and its own Corts Valencianes — institutions distinct from those of Aragon and Catalonia. This foral self-governance is the institutional memory that makes Valencian identity politically distinct. Stand before the Torres de Serranos, the 14th-century gates where the city's liberties were symbolically guarded, and you face the physical boundary of a self-governing medieval kingdom. The Conquest also created the cultural conditions for two of Valencia's defining festival traditions: the Misteri d'Elx, a mystery play performed in Valencian in the Basilica de Santa Maria since the mid-15th century (Consueta manuscripts survive from 1625), and the Moros i Cristians of Alcoy, documented since the 16th century, commemorating a 1276 battle against Muslim raiders. Both traditions are complex: the Misteri is a liturgical drama in Valencian that may have survived the Council of Trent's prohibition through a papal exemption (widely claimed but not verified), and Moros i Cristians re-enacts an imagined Islam through Orientalist costume while the actual Islamic-descended community was being systematically expelled. In 1609, Philip III ordered the expulsion of all Moriscos from Valencia; within three months, approximately 116,000 people — 33% of the population — were removed. Over 200 villages disappeared. The interior mountain regions where Moriscos had cultivated the land became deserted. Arabic place names (Beni-, -ena) survived as landscape fossils, and the acequia irrigation system continued under Christian management, but the community that created these was gone. This rupture — the single largest in Valencian cultural continuity — means any claim of unbroken Islamic-era tradition must account for this gap. Walk the medieval streets of Morella in Castellón's interior and you pass through a landscape emptied by that expulsion and slowly repopulated by settlers from elsewhere.

1707 - 1808

The Bourbon victory in the War of Spanish Succession brought the Nueva Planta decrees of 29 June 1707, signed by Philip V — a foundational trauma in Valencian collective memory. The decrees completely abolished the Furs of Valencia, the Corts Valencianes, and the Generalitat, incorporating the Kingdom of Valencia into the Crown of Castile under Castilian law. Stand before the Palau de la Generalitat in Valencia: after 1707, the building that housed Valencian self-governance was repurposed as the seat of the new Bourbon Audiencia, a visible symbol of institutional erasure. Xàtiva, which had resisted the Bourbons, was burned and its name officially changed to 'San Felipe' — the birthplace of the Borgia popes was literally erased from the map as punishment. Climb to Xàtiva Castle and the scars of that destruction are part of the site's story. The Nueva Planta was not merely administrative modernization: it was a rupture of institutional continuity that directly shapes how Valencian identity relates to the Spanish state to this day. Do not romanticize the pre-1707 Kingdom — the Furs served an elite, and the Morisco population had already been expelled — but do not erase the specificity of what was lost: named, functioning institutions of self-governance that had existed for over four centuries.