Noise and the vandal menace

 Another day and across the motorway and on to the Restaurante Venta Quemada. It has 14648 reviews - better than many a cathedral.   http://www.restauranteventaquemada.es/  The top words are ember, embutido, autovia. Peak hours, fly, agneau, personal foul and rabbit meat.  


55 minutes ago chiqui gave four stars, said they had lunch with no wait and they experienced ‘moderate noise.’  The devil is in the detail.  Are we talking British moderate noise or Spanish moderate noise.  Maybe Cristy will qualify this.  Five hours ago Cristy gave five stars and said ‘The food was excellent. The atmosphere was a bit noisy, but that's normal. The service was very fast.’





Well here we go.  Nothing else reviewed to look at so its time we talked about…. the origins of the name Andalusia.  Well, why not.



You will not be surprised that the origin of the name is somewhat debated - come on, you know academics, of course it is.  It appears it was once thought it came from the Vandals, we are going to have to talk about the Vandals at some time, and a bit more about the Visigoths. Since the 1980s this has been challenged.  Some have said it is derived from the a Gothic term, ‘landahlauts’ and others that it is born out of a Roman term. Back to the form of Andalucia. This seems to have entered Castilian in the 13th century as el Andalucia - referring to those realms under Islamic rule.



The trouble with History is it always has a bit of ‘they were only doing it to become us one day’ unconscious bias.  Take the Reconquest. It assumes great amounts of assuming the people who battled into Granada in 1492 and the close relations of a bunch of barely controlled Asturians from the early eight century. It.  The Visigoths barely get a decent mention and understanding in Spanish history and the Vandals are struggling for a footnote.



The Vandals were a Germanic people who were having trouble with the Huns and got pushed across the Rhine in 406.  Obviously Gaul wasn’t to everyone’s taste and the Vandals moved into Iberia where the Hasdingi and Silingi headed up for Galicia and Andalucia.  It all got a bit messy when the Visigoths were sent to ‘have a word’.  In 417 AD King Athaulf and his Goths invaded Iberia on the orders of the Roman Emperor Honorius, almost crushed the Silingi Vandals in Andalucia.



The remainder of the Alans - don’t even ask - and the remnants of the Silingi merged under the Vandal King Gunderic.  Gunderic then decisively defeated a Roman-Suebi-Gothic coalition led by the Roman Castinus at Tarragona. For the next five years, according to writings of Bishop Hydatius, Gunderic created widespread havoc in the western Mediterranean.



In 425AD the Vandals took Hispalis ( Seville) and Carthago Spartaria (Cartagena).  This gave them ships to go forth and get nautical on nearby peoples.

Gunderic seems to have lost Hispalisso had to take it again in 428AD but died while laying siege to the city's church. He was succeeded by his half-brother Genseric.  It seems to game was up and the following year the Vandals departed Spain for North Africa, which returned almost totally in Roman hands.

And so we are done for the day.






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