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camp, but one defined and outlined by thick masonry brick and cement walls. But small and rather ad hoc though Barcino (as it was named) might be, it still signified Rome, the greatest power on Earth, and consequently the cult of the Roman emperor and the Roman gods. Hence its temple dedicated to the Emperor Augustus, of which a few remains survive in the form of three Corinthian columns in the basement of a house at No. 10, Carrer del Paradis, just off Plaça Sant Jaume. They don’t look like much. But on the other hand, none of the Roman relics of Barcelona do, except perhaps for a few parts of the old city wall, massive and obdurate and much built into by later construction. The lower levels of Barcelona are not a Pompeii. If you expected the interest of this ancient city to reside in its most ancient parts, you would be sorely disappointed.
    No sooner had Roman Barcelona begun to attain a respectable size than the decay and contraction of the Spanish part of the Roman Empire itself began to work against it, pulling it back to inconsequence and provinciality. In a series of maneuvers and takeovers too complicated to recite here, a series of barbarian invasions from Germany came down across the Pyrenees, starting around A.D. 409: Vandals, Suevians, Alani, and finally a force of (perhaps) 250,000 Visigoths, commanded by their king, Ataulf. The Visigoths have had an unjust press, denounced as destroyers and brutes. But quite a lot had rubbed off on them in the few years since they devastated Greece and sacked Rome. In fact, they had become enthusiastic churchbuilders and in the late sixth century one of their kings, Reccared, imposed Catholicism over Arianism as the official state religion in northern Spain. (So much for a famously silly claim by one American neo-con writer in the 1980s, that the universities and higher institutions of learning in his country were being taken over by “Visigoths in tweed.” If only, one can hear more informed neo-cons groaning.)
    Only fragments—and fragments of fragments, at that—survive to mark the Visigoths’ Christian presence in Barcelona. The sculptures of evangelists, a lion (Mark), an angel (Matthew), an eagle (John), and the hand of God, which are built into the facade of tiny Sant Pau del Camp, the oldest church in the city, were salvaged and recycled from what was probably a Visigothic chapel on the site. But apart from that, virtually nothing of Visigothic Barcelona remains. What is even more surprising is that no buildings survive that were erected by the great unifier of the Catalan Dark Ages in the middle of the ninth century, and who was mythologized by Catalans for a thousand years after his death as the founder of Catalunya’s national independence. This man was known as Guifré el Pelos—Wilfred the Hairy.
    Wilfred established his rule of Catalunya by defeating a Frankish overlord, while presiding over the expulsion from Barcelona of the Saracens, who had managed to conquer the city—the next-to-last time any Arabs would get into Barcelona. Despite the nearly intact Roman walls of the little city, the sarrains— who had become a big inconvenience to trade, a wasp’s nest of Moorish freebooters—were thrown out, or so the story goes, by an alliance between Wilfred the Hairy and Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, in 801. (Their respective dates, as we have already seen, make this impossible, but never mind. In terms of heraldry, politics, and myth, the idea of Catalan independence begins with him.)
    Wilfred the Hairy, having consolidated his hold on northern Catalunya, became an enthusiastic supporter of monasteries and churches, thereby getting the priestly scribes on his side and ensuring himself an excellent press. He endowed almost all the earliest church foundations of Catalunya: Santa Maria de Formiguera (873), Santa Maria de la Grassa (878), Santa Maria de Ripoll(888), and Sant Pere de Ripoll (890) among them.