Visigoths

• 1. Introduction

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  The Visigoths crossed the Danube into the Roman Empire in 376, refugees fleeing the Huns, and within two years they had killed a Roman emperor at the Battle of Adrianople. Within three decades they had sacked the city of Rome itself. And yet, the story that follows is not simply one of conquest. It is a story of transformation: how a Gothic people, labeled barbarians by those they would outlast, spent three centuries becoming the architects of medieval Spain. Who were they before they entered the Roman world? How did a kingdom built on battlefield ruthlessness come to produce some of the most sophisticated legal codes in early medieval Europe? And what finally brought them down, after more than two hundred years ruling a peninsula they had made their own?

• 2. Origins and a Borrowed Name

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  Cassiodorus, a Roman official serving the Ostrogoths, invented the word "Visigoths" around 507 to describe the Goths who had lost the Franco-Gothic War to Clovis I. Before that moment, the people we call Visigoths simply called themselves Goths. The name Cassiodorus chose borrowed the older tribal label "Vesi," which appears in the work of the fifth-century poet Sidonius Apollinaris and, before him, in the Notitia Dignitatum, a late fourth- or early fifth-century list of Roman military forces.

  The underlying tribal identity is tangled. Scholars such as Herwig Wolfram have argued that the Vesi and the Thervingi were the same group, while others, including Peter Heather, have contested this, pointing out that the Notitia Dignitatum places the two names in different sections of its lists. Heather has written that Wolfram's position is "entirely arguable, but so is the opposite." Whatever the tribal arithmetic, Gothic group identity as something distinct from other barbarian confederacies appears to have crystallized only after these people entered the Roman Empire, when Thervingi, Greuthungi, and others fused into multi-ethnic federate armies under a single warlord.

  The name itself carries meaning. "Vesi" or "Wesi" is Gothic for "good," implying "the good or worthy people," and is related to the Indo-European root that gives Welsh gwiw, Greek eus, and Sanskrit vasu their sense of excellence. In 469, the Visigoths were called the "Alaric Goths" in another source, while Landolfus Sagax, writing in the tenth or eleventh century, called them the Hypogothi. Jordanes, writing later, framed it geographically: "Visigoths were the Goths of the western country." The name was eventually adopted by the Visigoths themselves in their communications with the Byzantine Empire and was still in use in the seventh century.

• 3. Blood at Adrianople

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  Fritigern, one of the Gothic leaders, appealed to the Eastern Roman Emperor Valens in 376 to be allowed to settle with his people on the south bank of the Danube. Valens agreed, seeing in the Gothic refugees what he described as "a splendid recruiting ground for his army." What followed was a catastrophe of Roman making. A famine broke out, Rome refused to supply the food and land it had promised, and Roman officials began forcing the now-starving Goths to trade away their children to avoid starvation.

  Open revolt produced six years of plundering throughout the Balkans. The decisive moment came at the Battle of Adrianople in 378, where the Roman forces were slaughtered and Valens himself was killed. Precisely how the emperor fell remains uncertain, but Gothic legend claimed he was taken to a farmhouse that was then set ablaze above his head. Fourth-century Roman soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus considered the battle so definitive that he ended his entire chronology of Roman history at that point.

  For Rome the consequences were severe. Many leading officers and elite soldiers died, striking what the source describes as a major blow to Roman prestige and military capability. Yet for the Visigoths, Adrianople was not the windfall it appeared. Still confined to a small and impoverished province, they faced a reassembled Roman army for upwards of three more years. Approach routes across the Danube provinces were sealed off. The war ended not in Gothic triumph but in the treaty of 382, the first foedus on imperial Roman soil, which required the semi-autonomous Germanic tribes to furnish troops to the Roman army in exchange for land and exemption from Roman law.

• 4. Alaric and the Sack of Rome

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  Alaric I made his bid for power in 395, the year the emperor Theodosius I died. Over the next fifteen years, he maneuvered between the eastern and western halves of a fracturing empire, fighting and allying with Rome in alternating turns. In 397, the eastern emperor Arcadius named him military commander of the eastern Illyrian prefecture. He remained a force neither side could ignore and neither could fully absorb.

  The breaking point came in 408, when the western general Stilicho was executed on the orders of the emperor Honorius. Roman legions then massacred the families of thousands of barbarian soldiers who had been trying to assimilate into the empire. Alaric resolved to march on Rome. Two sieges followed, the second ending in a negotiated pay-off, before a Roman faction cheated Alaric of what had been promised. He moved to cut the city off by seizing its port.

  On the 24th of August, 410, Alaric's troops entered Rome through the Salarian Gate and sacked the city. The blow was more symbolic than strategically decisive: Rome had not been the de facto seat of western imperial government since the court moved to Ravenna in 402. Still, the fall shook confidence throughout the empire. Loaded with plunder, Alaric led his forces south through Basilicata with the intention of crossing to northern Africa. He died before the crossing could be made and was buried, according to tradition, near the ruins of Croton. His successor was his wife's brother.

• 5. A Kingdom Takes Shape

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  In 418, the emperor Honorius granted the Visigoths land in Gallia Aquitania as a reward for military service against the Suebi, Asding and Siling Vandals, and the Alans, who had crossed the Rhine near Mogontiacum (modern Mainz) on the last day of 406. That settlement became the nucleus of the Visigothic kingdom, with its capital at Toulouse. From there the Visigoths expanded steadily across the Pyrenees into Hispania.

  The kingdom's high point came under Euric, its second great king. Between 471 and 476, Euric captured most of southern Gaul. In 475, after subjugating the province of Hispania, he concluded a peace treaty with the emperor Julius Nepos in which the emperor was addressed as a friend, amicus, while Euric's people addressed the emperor as lord, dominus. The historian J. B. Bury judged Euric probably "the greatest of the Visigothic kings" for securing territorial gains denied to his predecessors and winning access to the Mediterranean Sea. By the time of his death, the Visigoths were the most powerful of the successor states to the Western Roman Empire.

  That dominance ended in 507 at the Battle of Vouillé, where the Franks under Clovis I killed King Alaric II and wrested control of Aquitaine. The Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great intervened to prevent total collapse, pushing Clovis back from Visigothic territories, though his motive was extending his own power rather than any ethnic loyalty. The young heir Amalaric was smuggled first to Narbonne, the last Gothic outpost in Gaul, then across the Pyrenees into Hispania. The capital shifted first to Barcelona, then inland to Toledo. From 511 to 526, Theodoric the Great ruled as de jure regent for the child-king, and Amalaric reigned independently only after Theodoric's death in 526. Amalaric was assassinated in 531.

• 6. Faith, Law, and Identity

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  The Visigoths entered the Roman Empire as Arian Christians, followers of a doctrine that most Romans considered heresy. For nearly two centuries, a religious gulf separated the Gothic ruling class from their Hispano-Roman Catholic subjects. King Liuvigild, who reigned from 568 to 586, attempted a doctrinal compromise to bridge this divide, but it failed. His successor, Reccared I, took a more decisive step: he convened the Third Council of Toledo in 589 and converted the kingdom from Arianism to Nicene Christianity.

  While the Visigoths held to Arianism, Jews in Hispania had been relatively well treated. The historian Jane Gerber notes that some Jews "held ranking posts in the government or the army; others were recruited and organized for garrison service; still others continued to hold senatorial rank." Non-Jewish neighbors asked rabbis to bless their fields. The Catholic conversion changed this. King Sisibut decreed forced Christian conversion upon all Jews in Spain. Throughout the seventh century, Jews faced confiscation of property, ruinous taxes, prohibitions on trade, and forced baptism. Many continued to practice Judaism privately. The decree of 613 set off a century of difficulty for Spanish Jewry that ended only with the Muslim conquest.

  The legal transformation was no less consequential. King Chindasuinth first promulgated the Visigothic Code of Law between 642 and 653, setting down in writing rules that had existed in aristocratic oral tradition. The text, also called the Liber Iudiciorum or Forum Iudicum, survives in two codices preserved at El Escorial. In 654, the code abolished the old tradition of separate law for Romans and Goths alike: all subjects of the kingdom ceased being romani or gothi and became instead hispani, subject to the same jurisdiction. One of the code's most enduring contributions was its protection of the property rights of married women, a principle that ultimately evolved into the community property system found across much of western Europe today.

• 7. Art, Stone, and Gold

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  The Treasure of Guarrazar, found at Guadamur in the Province of Toledo, represents what Spanish archaeologists describe as the high point of Visigothic goldsmithery. The hoard contains twenty-six votive crowns and gold crosses from the royal workshop in Toledo, showing clear signs of Byzantine influence. The two most important pieces are the crowns of King Recceswinth and King Suintila, both made of gold and encrusted with sapphires, pearls, and other precious stones; they are displayed at the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid.

  The crown of Suintila has its own dark chapter. The discoverer of a second lot gave pieces, including Suintila's crown, to Spanish Queen Elizabeth II. That crown was stolen in 1921 and has never been recovered. Three crowns, two crosses, and gold pendants from the treasure are held at the National Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris.

  Beyond goldsmithery, the Visigoths left churches still standing today: San Pedro de la Nave in El Campillo, Santa María de Melque in San Martín de Montalbán, Santa Lucía del Trampal in Alcuéscar, Santa Comba in Bande, and Santa María de Lara in Quintanilla de las Viñas. The Crypt of San Antolín, built during the reign of Wamba in the mid-seventh century and now inside the Palencia Cathedral, was constructed to preserve the remains of the martyr Saint Antoninus of Pamiers, a Visigothic-Gallic nobleman brought from Narbonne to Hispania by Wamba himself in 672 or 673. The Visigoths were also responsible for the only new cities founded in Western Europe between the fifth and eighth centuries, among them Reccopolis, ordered built by King Liuvigild to honor his son Reccared, located near what is now the tiny village of Zorita de los Canes in the province of Guadalajara.

• 8. The Fall and What Remained

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  In 711, a Umayyad army crossed into Hispania and met the Visigothic forces at the Battle of Guadalete. King Roderic was killed in the fighting, and the kingdom that had endured for nearly three centuries collapsed within months. Most of the Iberian Peninsula came under Islamic rule in the early eighth century.

  Not all Visigoths submitted. A nobleman named Pelayo defeated Umayyad forces at the Battle of Covadonga in 718 and established the Kingdom of Asturias in the north. The historian Joseph F. O'Callaghan has written that remnants of the Hispano-Gothic aristocracy continued to play an important role in the society of the peninsula after the conquest. Those who refused to live under Muslim rule or adopt the Muslim faith fled north to the kingdom of the Franks; Visigoths played key roles in the empire of Charlemagne a few generations later. In the early years of the Emirate of Córdoba, a group of Visigoths who remained under Muslim rule constituted the personal bodyguard of the Emir, al-Haras.

  A genetic study published in Science in March 2019 analyzed remains of eight Visigoths buried at Pla de l'Horta, dating to the sixth century, and found that 73% of their ancestry derived from northeast Iberian populations and 23% from Central or Northern European populations. The medieval Spanish nobility traces its most remote origins to the Visigothic monarchy. The muwallad clan of the Banu Qasi, active in the eighth through eleventh centuries, claimed descent from the Visigothic Count Cassius. The Visigothic Code remained influential in Iberian law until the Late Middle Ages, and the community property protections it enshrined for married women outlasted the kingdom by centuries.