Gallaecia

Gallaecia, originally known as Callaecia, was the name of a Roman province in the northwest of Hispania, approximately present-day Galicia, northern Portugal, Asturias and León, and the later Suevic and medieval kingdom of Gallaecia. The Roman cities included Auria (Ourense), the port of Cale (Porto), and the governing centers Lucus Augusti (Lugo), Bracara Augusta (Braga), and Asturica Augusta (Astorga), together with their administrative areas: Conventus Lucensis, Conventus Bracarensis, and Conventus Asturicensis, respectively.

Description

The Romans named the northwest part of Hispania or the Iberian Peninsula Callaecia after the Celtic tribes of the area, the Callaeci or Callaecians.

The Gallaic make their entry into written history in the first-century epic Punica of Silius Italicus on the First Punic War:

Fibrarum et pennae divinarumque sagacem

flammarum misit dives Callaecia pubem,

barbara nunc patriis ululantem carmina linguis,

nunc pedis alterno percussa verbere terra,

ad numerum resonas gaudentem plaudere caetras. (Book III pp. 344–347)

"Rich Callaecia sent its youths, wise in the knowledge of divination by the entrails of beasts, by feathers and flames—who, now crying out the barbarian song of their native tongue, now alternately stamping the ground in their rhythmic dances until the ground rang, and accompanying the playing with sonorous caetrae" (a caetra was a small type of shield used in the region).

Callaecia, as a region, was thus marked for the Romans as much for the Callaeci's castros, a system of hillforts, as it was for the lure of its gold mines. This culture extended over present-day Galicia, the north of Portugal, the western part of Asturias, the Bierzo, and Sanabria and was distinct from the neighbouring Lusitanian culture to the south according to the classical authors Pomponius Mela and Pliny the Elder.

History

Pre-Roman Callaecia

Strabo in his Geography lists the people of the northwestern Atlantic coast of Iberia as follows:

... then the Vettonians and the Vaccaeans, through whose territory the Durius [Douro] River flows, which affords a crossing at Acutia, a city of the Vaccaeans; and last, the Callaicans, [Gallaicans] who occupy a very considerable part of the mountainous country.