Before
Romanization, the mountainous area that was to become Baetica was occupied by several settled Iberian tribal groups.
Celtic influence was not as strong as it was in the
Celtiberian north. According to the geographer
Claudius Ptolemy, the indigenes were the powerful
Turdetani, in the valley of the
Guadalquivir in the west, bordering on
Lusitania, and the partly
Hellenized Turduli with their city
Baelo, in the hinterland behind the coastal Phoenician trading colonies, whose
Punic inhabitants Ptolemy termed the "
Bastuli". Phoenician Gadir (
Cádiz) was on an island against the coast of Hispania Baetica. Other important Iberians were the
Bastetani, who occupied the
Almería and mountainous
Granada regions. Towards the southeast, Punic influence spread from the
Carthaginian cities on the coast: New Carthage (Roman
Carthago Nova, modern
Cartagena),
Abdera and Malaca (
Málaga). Some of the Iberian cities retained their pre-
Indo-European names in Baetica throughout the Roman era.
Granada was called
Eliberri,
Illiberis and
Illiber by the Romans; in
Basque,
"iri-berri" or
"ili-berri", still signifies "new town". The south of the Iberian peninsula was agriculturally rich, providing for export of
wine,
olive oil and the fermented fish sauce called
garum that were staples of the Mediterranean diet, and its products formed part of the western Mediterranean trade economy even before it submitted to Rome in 206 BC. After the defeat of
Carthage in the
Second Punic War, which found its
casus belli on the coast of Baetica at
Saguntum, Hispania was significantly Romanized in the course of the 2nd century BC, following the uprising initiated by the
Turdetani in 197. The central and north-eastern
Celtiberians soon followed suit. It took
Cato the Elder, who became consul in 195 BC and was given the command of the whole peninsula to put down the rebellion in the northeast and the lower
Ebro valley. He then marched southwards and put down a revolt by the Turdetani. Cato returned to Rome in 194, leaving two
praetors in charge of the two Iberian provinces. In the late
Roman Republic, Hispania remained divided like
Gaul into a "Nearer" and a "Farther" province, as experienced marching overland from Gaul:
Hispania Citerior (the Ebro region), and
Ulterior (the Guadalquivir region). The battles in Hispania during the 1st century BC were largely confined to the north. In the reorganization of the Empire in 14 BC, Baetica was made a senatorial province, which means it was governed by a
proconsul who had formerly been a
praetor appointed by the Senate. Its capital was Colonia Patricia Corduba (modern day
Córdoba), founded in 169 BC. Fortune smiled on rich Baetica, which was
Baetica Felix, and a dynamic, upwardly-mobile social and economic middling stratum developed there, which absorbed
freed slaves and far outnumbered the rich
elite. The Senatorial province of Baetica became so secure that no
Roman legion was required to be permanently stationed there, whereas
Legio VII Gemina was permanently stationed to the north, in
Hispania Tarraconensis, in a camp which later became the city of
León. found in
Essaouira, 1–2nd century AD Baetica was divided into four
conventūs, which were territorial divisions like judicial circuits, where the chief men met together at major centers, at fixed times of year, under the eye of the proconsul, to oversee the administration of justice: the
conventus Gaditanus (of Gades, or
Cádiz),
Cordubensis (of
Cordoba),
Astigitanus (of Astigi, or
Écija), and
Hispalensis (of Hispalis, or
Seville). As the towns became the permanent seats of standing courts during the later Empire, the
conventūs were superseded (
Justinian's Code, i.40.6) and the term
conventus is lastly applied to certain bodies of Roman citizens living in a province, forming a sort of enfranchised corporation, and representing the Roman people in their district as a kind of
gentry; and it was from among these that proconsuls generally took their assistants. So in spite of some social upsets, as when
Septimius Severus put to death a number of leading Baetians— including women — the elite in Baetica remained a stable class for centuries.
Columella, who wrote a twelve volume treatise on all aspects of Roman farming and knew
viticulture, came from Gades (Cádiz). The vast
olive plantations of Baetica shipped olive oil from the coastal ports by sea to supply Roman legions in
Germania and general demand elsewhere in the empire.
Amphoras from Baetica have been found everywhere in the
Western Roman Empire. It was to keep Roman legions supplied by sea routes that the Empire needed to control the distant coasts of Lusitania and the northern
Atlantic coast of Hispania. Baetica was rich and strongly Romanized, attracting colonists and merchants from Italy. Since the 1st century BC it produced outstanding figures like the aforementioned Columella, the rhetorician
Seneca the Elder, his son the stoic philosopher
Seneca the Younger, and
Lucan, author of the epic poem
Pharsalia on
Caesar's civil war against
Pompey the Great. The last three were members of the Annaea family, a prominent Roman gens settled in Córdoba. Facts that the Emperor
Vespasian was rewarding when he granted the
Ius latii that extended the rights pertaining to Roman citizenship (
latinitas) to the inhabitants of Hispania, an honor that secured the loyalty of the Baetian elite and its middle class. Baetica also gave Rome two emperors.
Trajan, the first emperor since Claudius to be of provincial birth, though of Italic stock, was born in
Itálica (Baetica), a colony established in 206 BC by
Scipio Africanus for Roman veterans of the
Second Punic War. Trajan's kinsman and successor
Hadrian also came from Itálica.
Marcus Aurelius, though born in Rome, had ancestors born in the town of Ucubi (modern day
Espejo), a Roman colony not far from Córdoba. Baetica enjoyed
Pax Romana for most of imperial history, though it faced a permanent threat stemming from Africa from the 2nd century AD. On 171 groups of
mauri (natives of
Mauretania Tingitana, roughly modern day
Morocco) crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and looted rural towns for months until they were expelled. A century later, in 296–297, Emperor
Maximian built a massive palace nearby Córdoba from where to command the campaign against piracy in the Strait and Berber incursions in Mauritania. Baetica was Roman until the brief invasion of the
Vandals and
Alans passed through in the 5th century, followed by the more permanent kingdom of the
Visigoths. The province formed part of the
Exarchate of Africa and was joined to
Mauretania Tingitana after
Belisarius' reconquest of Africa. The
Catholic bishops of Baetica, solidly backed by their local population, were able to convert the
Arian Visigoth king
Reccared and his nobles. As an administrative unit, Baetica ceased to exist after the Islamic invasion in 711. == Proconsuls ==