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Hunh? Spain has been a "geographic term" for a gazillion years. Not only that, it even had a unified non-Christian government in the days when it was allied with Carthage. It is believed that Biblical "Tarshish" is, in fact, a kingdom on the SW Coast on the Atlantic.

Spain, to say the least, has been around a very long time ~ Trajan, the Roman Emperor, was a Spaniard.

Now, what was it you were saying about "The Dark Ages"? I'd suggest you go find out how many books were published in Western Europe from 538 AD to about 1066 AD ~ get back to us when you find some eh!

Spain, to say the least, has been around a very long time ~ Trajan, the Roman Emperor, was a Spaniard.

Trajan was a Roman citizen, son of a Roman Senator, in a conquered Roman provence. The Iberian Peninsula existed in 727 AD, but as a collection of kingdoms and counties, such as Aragon, Catalonia, Grenada, Andalusia, Toledo, Asturias, etc. This was no different than the rest of Europe. The Visigoths fell to Islamic invaders in 711, the Franks didn't in 727.

Now, what was it you were saying about "The Dark Ages"? I'd suggest you go find out how many books were published in Western Europe from 538 AD to about 1066 AD ~ get back to us when you find some eh!

If you mean by published "printed and distributed", that would be difficult pre Gutenberg. If you mean authored, there were plenty. Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum by Bede, Beowulf, Anglo-Saxon chronicles, Irish chronicles, etc. There are over 3000 extant texts in just Old English. From here:

"The DOE is based on a computerized Corpus comprising at least one copy of each text surviving in Old English. The total size is about six times the collected works of Shakespeare. The body of surviving Old English texts encompasses a rich diversity of records written on parchment, carved in stone and inscribed in jewelry. These texts fall into several categories: prose, poetry, glosses to Latin texts and inscriptions. In the prose in particular, there is a wide range of texts: saints' lives, sermons, biblical translations, penitential writings, laws, charters and wills, records (of manumissions, land grants, land sales, land surveys), chronicles, a set of tables for computing the moveable feasts of the Church calendar and for astrological calculations, medical texts, prognostics (the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the horoscope), charms (such as those for a toothache or for an easy labour), and even cryptograms."

There was also a continuous history in art, achitecture, poetry, social development, trade, and many other aspects of civilization. See here for a compendium of links to medieval European and Byzantine history.

"Spain, to say the least, has been around a very long time ~ Trajan, the Roman Emperor, was a Spaniard."

By 800 B.C., the Phoenicians were founding colonies on the Iberian Peninsula such as Gadir (today's Cadiz) and Almuñécar. Though they called the region "i-shaphan-im", these individual city/colonies, were no more in "Spain" than Athens was in "Greece".

When Rome destroyed Carthage, it took the land and called it Hispania. It was a province, and Trajan would have considered himself a Roman, albiet from the province Hispania. But there still was no country called Spain. The Visigoths, Vandals and Alans fought over the place next, with various kingdoms occupying various parts of the peninsula from about 400 to 718 when the Moors drove the Visigoths to the north. Then the land was split into kingdoms like Asturias and Galacia, and the Omayyad Emirate of Cordova. Later, there were the Kingdoms of Navarre, Castile, Aragon and Grenada.

Not until 1492 did Spain was we know it today come into being. Even then, it was called The Crown of Aragon or Aragonese Empire. By 1512, most of the kingdoms of present-day Spain were politically unified. The region was known as "Spain" (España). It was a geographic term that was more or less synonymous with Iberia, not the present-day state called Spain. There was no "King of Spain" until 1837.