In 1898, the last speaker of the little-known Dalmatian language died in a railroad accident, the final act in the language’s millennium-long decline. Although it had clung onto life for so long, the Dalmatian language had been caught between two much larger rivals, the prestige language of the Adriatic, Italian, […]
As I discussed in the last post, the Umayyad consolidation of power in Iberia ran into problems following the debacle outside Toulouse. When the governor of Anbasa raised taxes, he had to respect treaties that had been made with conquered Visigothic nobles in 711, limiting his ability to tax them […]
The Iberian countries of Spain and Portugal are today overwhelmingly Catholic. For part of the Middle Ages though, much of their current territory fell within various Muslims states that medieval sources collectively referred to as al-Andalus. At one point, virtually all of the peninsula fell under the rule of the […]