Hispania Citerior

The nearer of the two provinces Rome carved out of Carthage's Spanish empire, and the one that took two centuries to actually control. Rome went to Spain in 218 BC to cut Hannibal off from the silver and manpower that were funding him, not to acquire territory, and the province that resulted was an accident of that war. Citerior meant nearer Rome: the Ebro valley and the Mediterranean coast up to the Pyrenees, administered from Tarraco. It was formally organised in 197 BC alongside Hispania Ulterior, and both provinces immediately rebelled. What followed was not a conquest but a grinding frontier war lasting until 19 BC, longer than Rome spent subduing anywhere else in the west. The Celtiberian wars produced the siege of Numantia, where the defenders held out for months and then burned the town rather than surrender - an episode Spanish nationalism has cited ever since. Roman commanders in Spain acquired a reputation for treachery that damaged them at home, and one, Sulpicius Galba, was prosecuted in Rome for massacring Lusitanians who had surrendered. The province supplied silver from Carthago Nova and the northwest, iron from Bilbilis, and eventually soldiers in large numbers. Its garrison made it a prize in Roman civil wars: Sertorius held it against Sulla's government for eight years, and Caesar fought Pompey's sons at Munda. Augustus dissolved it in the reorganisation of 27 BC, replacing it with the far larger Tarraconensis. Latin took hold along the coast first and in the interior only slowly. The road network laid down here still underlies parts of the modern Spanish system. The province was governed by a praetor with an army from 197 BC. Its capital Tarraco is now Tarragona.

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