Everything about The Visigoths totally explained
The
Visigoths were one of two main branches of the
Goths, an
East Germanic tribe, the
Ostrogoths being the other. Together these tribes were among the
Germanic peoples who disturbed the late
Roman Empire during the
Migration Period, following a Visigothic force led by
Alaric I's
sacking of Rome in 410.
After the
collapse of the western Roman Empire, the Visigoths played a major role in western
European affairs for another two and a half centuries.
Division of the Goths: Tervingi and Vesi
The division of the Goths is first attested in 291. The
Tervingi are first attested around that date, the
Greuthungi, Ostrogothi, and Vesi are all attested no earlier than 388.) and traditionally ascribed to
Claudius Mamertinus, which says that the "Tervingi, another division of the Goths" (
Tervingi pars alia Gothorum) joined with the
Taifali to attack the
Vandals and
Gepidae. The term "Vandals" may have been erroneous for "
Victohali" because around 360 the historian
Eutropius reports that
Dacia was currently (
nunc) inhabited by Taifali, Victohali, and Tervingi.
According to Wolfram, in the
Notitia Dignitatum the Vesi are equated with the Tervingi in a reference to the years 388–391; According to
Herwig Wolfram, the primary sources either use the terminology of Tervingi/Greuthungi or Vesi/Ostrogothi and never mix the pairs. That the Tervingi were the Vesi/Visigothi and the Greuthungi the Ostrogothi is also supported by
Jordanes. He identified the Visigothic kings from
Alaric I to
Alaric II as the heirs of the fourth-century Tervingian king
Athanaric and the Ostrogothic kings from
Theodoric the Great to
Theodahad as the heirs of the Greuthungian king
Ermanaric. This interpretation, however, though very common among scholars today, isn't universal.
Herwig Wolfram concludes that the terms Tervingi and Greuthungi were geographical identifiers used by each tribe to describe the other. Wolfram concludes that this people was the Tervingi who had remained behind after the Hunnic conquest. Roger Collins believes the Visigoths were a creation of the
Gothic War of 376-382 and began as a collection of
foederati (Wolfram's "federate armies") under Alaric I in the eastern
Balkans, composed of largely Tervingi with Greuthungian and other barbarian contingents. They were thus multiethnic and can't lay claim to an exclusively Tervingian heritage. Collins points out that no contemporaries directly link the Tervingi and Vesi. Furthermore, Cassiodorus used the term "Goths" to refer only to the Ostrogoths, whom he served, and reserved the geographical term "Visigoths" for the Gallo-Spanish Goths. This usage, however, was adopted by the Visigoths themselves in their communications with the
Byzantine Empire and was in use in the seventh century. That the name "Tervingi" has pre-Pontic, possibly Scandinavian, origins still has support today. The words are
Gothic ones meaning "the good or noble people", However, a
famine broke out and Rome was unwilling to supply them with the food they were promised nor the land; open revolt ensued leading to 6 years of plundering and destruction throughout the Balkans, the death of a Roman Emperor and the destruction of an entire Roman army.
The
Battle of Adrianople in 378 was the decisive moment of the war. The Roman forces were slaughtered and the Emperor
Valens was killed during the fighting. Adrianople shocked the Roman world and eventually forced the Romans to negotiate with and settle the barbarians within the empire's boundaries, a development with far reaching consequences for the eventual
fall of Rome.
Reign of Alaric I
The new emperor,
Theodosius I, made peace with the rebels, and this peace held essentially unbroken until Theodosius died in
395. In that year, the Visigoths' most famous king,
Alaric I, took the throne, while Theodosius was succeeded by his incapable sons:
Arcadius in the east and
Honorius in the west.
Over the next 15 years, years of uneasy peace were broken by occasional conflicts between Alaric and the powerful German generals who commanded the Roman armies in the east and west, wielding the real power of the empire. Finally, after the western general
Stilicho was executed by Honorius in
408 and the Roman legions massacred the families of 30,000 barbarian soldiers serving in the Roman army, Alaric declared war. After two defeats in Northern Italy and a siege of Rome ended by a negotiated pay-off, Alaric was cheated by another Roman faction. He resolved to cut the city off by capturing its port. On
August 24,
410, however, Alaric's troops entered Rome through the
Salarian Gate, to plunder its riches in the
sack of Rome. While Rome was no longer the official capital of the Western Roman Empire (it had been moved to
Ravenna for strategic reasons), its fall severely shook the empire's foundations.
Visigothic kingdom
The Visigothic Kingdom was a Western European power in the 5th to 7th centuries, created in Gaul by the German people of the Visigoths when the Romans lost their control of their empire. From
407 to
409 the
Vandals, with the allied
Alans and Germanic tribes like the
Suevi, swept into the
Iberian peninsula. In response to this invasion of
Roman Hispania,
Honorius, the emperor in the West, enlisted the aid of the Visigoths to regain control of the territory. In
418, Honorius rewarded his Visigothic
federates by giving them land in
Gallia Aquitania on which to settle. This was probably done under
hospitalitas, the rules for billeting army soldiers (Heather 1996, Sivan 1987). The settlement formed the nucleus of the future Visigothic kingdom that would eventually expand across the
Pyrenees and onto the Iberian peninsula.
The Visigoths' second great king,
Euric, unified the various quarreling factions among the Visigoths and, in
475, forced the Roman government to grant them full independence. At his death, the Visigoths were the most powerful of the successor states to the Western Roman Empire.
The Visigoths also became the dominant power in the
Iberian Peninsula, quickly crushing the
Alans and forcing the
Vandals into
north Africa. By
500, the Visigothic Kingdom, centred at
Toulouse, controlled Aquitania and
Gallia Narbonensis and most of Hispania with the exception of the
Suevic kingdom in the northwest and small areas controlled by the
Basques. However, in 507, the Franks under Clovis I defeated the Visigoths in the
Vouillé and wrested control of Aquitaine. King
Alaric II was killed in battle.
After Alaric's death, Visigothic nobles spirited his heir, the child-king
Amalaric, first to
Narbonne, which was the last Gothic outpost in Gaul, and further across the Pyrenees into Hispania. The center of Visigothic rule shifted first to
Barcelona, then inland and south to
Toledo. From
511 to
526, the Visigoths were ruled by
Theodoric the Great of the Ostrogoths as
de jure regent for the young Amalaric.
In
554, Granada and southernmost
Hispania Baetica were lost to representatives of the
Byzantine Empire (to form the province of
Spania) who had been invited in to help settle a Visigothic dynastic struggle, but who stayed on, as a hoped-for spearhead to a "Reconquest" of the far west envisaged by emperor
Justinian I.
The last Arian Visigothic king,
Liuvigild, conquered the Suevic kingdom in
585 and most of the northern regions (Cantabria) in
574 and regained part of the southern areas lost to the
Byzantines, which King
Suintila reconquered completely in
624. The kingdom survived until
711, when King
Roderic (Rodrigo) was killed while opposing an invasion from the south by the
Umayyad Muslims in the
Battle of Guadalete on
July 19. This marked the beginning of the
Muslim conquest of Hispania in which most of peninsula came under
Islamic rule by
718.
A Visigothic nobleman,
Pelayo, is credited with beginning the Christian
Reconquista of Iberia in
718, when he defeated the
Umayyads in
battle and established the
Kingdom of Asturias in the northern part of the peninsula. Other Visigoths, refusing to adopt the Muslim faith or live under their rule, fled north to the kingdom of the
Franks, and Visigoths played key roles in the empire of
Charlemagne a few generations later.
During their long reign in Spain, the Visigoths were responsible for the
only new cities founded in Western Europe between the fifth and eighth centuries. It is certain (through contemporary Spanish accounts) that they founded four:
Reccopolis, Victoriacum, Luceo, and Olite. There is also a possible fifth city ascribed to them by a later Arabic source:
Baiyara (perhaps modern
Montoro). All of these cities were founded for military purposes and three of them in celebration of victory.
Visigothic religion
There was a religious gulf between the Visigoths, who had for a long time adhered to
Arianism, and their Catholic subjects in Hispania. The Iberian Visigoths continued to be Arians until
589. For the role of Arianism in Visigothic kingship, see the entry for
Liuvigild.
There were also deep sectarian splits among the Catholic population of the peninsula. The
ascetic Priscillian of Avila was
martyred by orthodox Catholic forces in
385, before the Visigothic period, and the persecution continued in subsequent generations as "Priscillianist"
heretics were rooted out. At the very beginning of
Leo I's pontificate, in the years 444-447, Turribius, the bishop of
Astorga in
León, sent to Rome a memorandum warning that Priscillianism was by no means dead, reporting that it numbered even bishops among its supporters, and asking the aid of the
Roman See. The distance was insurmountable in the 5th century. Nevertheless Leo intervened, by forwarding a set of propositions that each bishop was required to sign: all did. But if Priscillianist bishops hesitated to be barred from their sees, a passionately concerned segment of Christian communities in Iberia were disaffected from the more orthodox hierarchy and welcomed the tolerant Arian Visigoths. The Visigoths scorned to interfere among Catholics but were interested in decorum and public order.
The Arian Visigoths were also tolerant of
Jews, a tradition that lingered in post-Visigothic
Septimania, exemplified by the career of
Ferreol, Bishop of Uzès (died 581).
In 589, King
Reccared (Recaredo) converted his people to Catholicism. With the Catholicization of the Visigothic kings, the Catholic bishops increased in power, until, at the
Fourth Council of Toledo in
633, they took upon themselves the nobles' right to select a king from among the royal family. Visigothic persecution of Jews began after the conversion to Catholicism of the Visigothic king
Reccared. In
633 the same
synod of Catholic bishops that usurped the Visigothic nobles' right to confirm the election of a king declared that all Jews must be
baptised.
Visigothic culture
Law
The
Visigothic Code of Law (
forum judicum), which had been part of
aristocratic oral tradition, was set in writing in the early 7th century— and survives in two separate codices preserved at the
Escorial. It goes into more detail than a modern constitution commonly does and reveals a great deal about Visigothic social structure.
Art and architecture
Kings of the Visigoths
Terving kings
These kings and leaders, with the exception of Fritigern, and the possible exception of Alavivus, were pagans.
These kings were Arians, but they tended to succeed their fathers or close relatives on the throne and thus constitute a dynasty.
Alaric I (395–410)
Athaulf (410–415)
Sigeric (415)
Wallia (415–419)
Theodoric I (419–451)
Thorismund (451–453)
Theodoric II (453–466)
Euric (466–484)
Alaric II (484–507)
Gesalec (507–511)
Amalaric (526–531)
Non-Balti kings
The Visigothic monarchy took on a completely elective character with the fall of the Balti, but the monarchy remained Arian until Reccared converted in 587. Only a few sons succeeded their fathers to the throne in this period.
Theudis (531–548)
Theudigisel (548–549)
Agila I (549–554)
Athanagild (554–568)
Liuva I (568–572), only ruled in Narbonensis from 569
Liuvigild (569–586), ruled only south of the Pyrenees until 572
Reccared I (580–601), son, sub-king in Narbonensis until 586, first Catholic king
Liuva II (601–603), son
Witteric (603–610)
Gundemar (610–612)
Sisebut (612–621)
Reccared II (621), son
Suintila (621–631)
Sisenand (631–636)
Chintila (636–640)
Tulga (640–641)
Chindasuinth (641–653)
Recceswinth (649–672), son, initially co-king
Wamba (672–680)
Erwig (680–687)
Ergica (687–702)
Wittiza (694–710), son, initially co-king or sub-king in Gallaecia
Roderic (710–711), only in Lusitania and Carthaginiensis
Agila II (711–714), only in Tarraconensis and Narbonensis
- Oppas (712), perhaps in opposition to Roderic and Agila II
Ardo (714–721), only in Narbonensis
A list of Visigothic kings was quoted in Spain as an egregious example of rote memorization in school during the time of Francisco Franco's dictatorship.
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