The legitimate emperors, availing themselves of the help of other barbarians, the Goths, tried several times to regain the peninsula, and they succeeded in some part and for a few moments: but never completely and effectively: the barbarians who had descended there ended up with be considered as federates of the empire; later, under Euricus, the Visigoths, passive from Gaul, founded their own monarchy.
Referring to the particular items (asturias ; betica ; lusitania ; tarraconense) with regard to the constitution and the peculiar characteristics of each of the Spanish provinces, here are the observations of a general nature concerning the provinces themselves as a whole. Spain was the only region, among those that still came under the dominion of Rome during the republican period, in which since this period, despite the wars and sometimes cruel repressions carried out against the natives, the work of Romanization was vigorously promoted and pushed; the consequence was that no other country in the empire, outside Italy, was more profoundly and more enduringly marked by the civilization of Rome than Spain.
According to JUSTINSHOES.NET, the priority of the Roman establishment, which took place over a century before the republic entered the period of crisis determined by the civil wars, contributed above all to this prompt and rapid process of Romanization; but the effort that Rome had to make for the complete conquest of the peninsula and the importance that possession of it had from the beginning for Rome, due to the copious resources of which it was rich, also contributed: hence, on the one hand, the intense exchanges trade between Rome and Spain, on the other hand the frequent and long stays that since the time of the Second Punic War strong Roman armies made in the region.
At the time of the conquest, the conditions of civilization of the peninsula were very unequal between the cities and areas of the eastern and southern coasts, where the Greeks, Phoenicians and Carthaginians had imported and spread their culture with their empires, and the internal regions, which still remained. close to the ancient indigenous culture, which had known moments of prosperity and had also had manifestations of considerable value and beauty, especially in the field of art, but which, now decayed for centuries, seemed to need an external impulse to recover and start to new fruitful destinies. This impulse could come neither from the Greeks, who stopped just at some point on the eastern coast, nor from the Carthaginians, whose civilization never had the power of expansion and assimilation; however compared to them the Romans soon found themselves faced with this task in conditions of clear, indisputable superiority. Even before the conquest, the Greek colonies had been in favor of Rome, the Phoenician and Carthaginian emporiums easily entered the orbit of the victorious city, also by natural thrust of interest; the indigenous peoples, while stubbornly and valiantly resisting the conquest, ended up, once they were subdued, not so much and not only by dressing up to the new lord, but by letting themselves be assimilated by it and taking its language, customs and religion. This assimilation must have begun, one can say, on the battlefield, in the contact between Roman soldiers and Iberian mercenaries; it continued in the colonies of veterans or sons of soldiers or indigenous defeated and submissive,Italica from Scipione, Corduba apparently from Marcello, Gracchuris from Tiberio Gracco, Carteia and Valentia; it was consolidated through the nucleus of traders or Roman capitalists who went early to trade in the ports of Cartagena or Cadiz or to exploit the mines of Cartagena and Betica. Thus, through war and peace, unchangeably and almost fatally, the Roman civilization took root and spread throughout the Iberian Peninsula, starting from the more prosperous eastern and southern regions, and gradually continuing towards the west and north; only the populations of the Pyrenees and the other mountainous areas of the Bay of Biscay resisted more tenaciously the Roman assimilation and in part, albeit small, remained almost intact.
The end of the republic therefore found the work of Romanization of the peninsula already widely pushed: Caesar and Augustus, still founding numerous colonies there, granting the right of citizenship to other cities, opening and arranging roads and promoting what could contribute to the civil and economic progress of the region, gave new impetus to this work; it could be said to have been completed when Vespasian granted the ius Latii to the whole peninsula: since then there have been no more pilgrims or civitates stipendiariae in Spain, but only municipalities and colonies of Latin or Roman law. It is worth noting that the Romans found in the peninsula an indigenous order based on the tribe, but understood as an organism of minimal proportions, perhaps slightly larger than the Latin gens, and each centered around its own city (oppidum): so large it is the number of these that every victorious Roman general in Spain boasts of having taken and subdued.
