Crafting the image of Pelayo: identity and state-building in early medieval Asturian chronicles

Authors

Erica Buchberger, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-25-2023

Abstract

In the late ninth century, a series of chronicles from the Christian kingdom of Asturias staked a claim on Visigothic identity, and thus ancestral legitimacy to rule in Iberia, for Asturias and its kings. Connecting Pelayo, the first king of the Asturian kingdom, to the last Visigothic kings and crafting his image as an ideal Goth and Christian was essential to this process. Informed by scholarship on “borderlands” and boundary-making, this article demonstrates how the chroniclers renegotiated the parameters of Gothic identity to impose the idea of a strict border between legitimate and illegitimate, good Catholic and heretic, and loyalty and disloyalty. In doing so, they provided Pelayo with a layered and flexible Gothic-Christian-Asturian identity.

Comments

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies on July 25, 2023, available at https://doi.org/10.1080/17546559.2023.2236598

View published version freely: https://www.tandfonline.com/share/4NUIPWTDYNMZ8WBM9V8M?target=10.1080/17546559.2023.2236598

Recommended Citation

Erica Buchberger (2023) Crafting the image of Pelayo: identity and state-building in early medieval Asturian chronicles, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 15:3, 405-426, https://doi.org/10.1080/17546559.2023.2236598

Publication Title

Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies

DOI

10.1080/17546559.2023.2236598