Reccopolis (Spanish: Recópolis) near the tiny modern village of Zorita de los Canes in the province of Guadalajara, Castile-La Mancha, Spain, is one of at least four cities founded in Hispania by the Visigoths,[1] the only new cities in Western Europe known to be founded between the fifth and eighth centuries.[2] It was founded in 578[3] by the Visigothic king Leovigild and named to honour his son Reccared I and to serve as the seat of Reccared as co-king, in the Visigothic province of Celtiberia, lying to the west of Carpetania, where the main Visigothic capital, Toledo, lay. In the eighth century the Visigoths at Reccopolis welcomed Muslim overlordship, in return for Muslim protection. The Moors conserved the city, as Madinät Raqquba, though they reused building materials to construct a fortification on a hill facing the city; the city declined and the site was burned, looted, razed and incrementally abandoned in the tenth century. Its "vast field of ruins"[4] in the Cerro de la Olíva lay forgotten until the twentieth century,[5] but as a post-Roman royal foundation, its only European rival in the sixth century was Ravenna. Its urbanistic core is centered on a palace with administrative as well as royal functions, connected with a palatine chapel, an arrangement that has Byzantine parallels.
Archeological excavations at Reccopolis have revealed traces of city walls built with towers every thirty metres, an aqueduct, commercial and residential quarters covering 30 hectares, markets and a mint. On the western wall, a single entrance gate provided access. Within, a second gate formed an entrance to an "upper city" of the palace compound and its attached chapel, while the "lower city" contained lodgings for the ordinary citizens, commercial districts and barracks.
The palace was of two stories, the lower one a single space (perhaps a granary) with the bases of columns that supported the upper one, which, to judge from remnants of its flooring, was the piano nobile. Roofs were tiled, as they had been in Roman times. The palace chapel, which was overlaid by the Romanesque hermitage of Nuestra Señora de Recatel constructed on the ruined site, is perhaps the last of the Visigothic Arian churches.[2] It was of basilica construction with a central nave separated by solid walls from the flanking naves, which exited into the transept, but did not communicate directly with the nave; its hemispherical apse was rectangular in its outer appearance. A deep narthex was entered by a single central door. In the basilica a cache of coins was discovered, which fixed the date of construction as before 580–83 and indicated the reach of cultural connections, with gold coins of the Merovingian series, Suevic coins from Galicia and some of Justinian II, as well as coins from Visigothic Hispania itself.[6] There was also an active mint at Reccopolis, coins from which have been found dating to the reign of Wittiza in the early eighth century.[7]
The city's site, only part of which has been excavated, is to be protected as the projected Parque Arqueológico Recópolis.[8] In 2007 an exhibition, "Recópolis: un paseo por la ciudad Visigoda" was mounted by the Museo Arqueológico Regional, Alcalá de Henares; an accompanying catalogue was published.