Visigothic Kingdom

For three centuries the Visigoths, a Gothic people who had once lived along the Danube, ruled one of the largest of the kingdoms that replaced Roman power in the West. Their state began in south-western Gaul in the early fifth century, came to cover almost all of the Iberian Peninsula, and ended with the Muslim conquest that began in 711. Its law code and its church councils shaped Spanish institutions long after it fell.

A few years after Alaric's Goths carried out the sack of Rome in 410, the emperor Honorius settled them in the Garonne valley of Aquitaine in 418, under King Wallia, as allied federates. From their capital at Toulouse they soon acted independently of the weakening Western Roman Empire. Theodoric I fought alongside Aetius against Attila at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451 and died there, and his son Theodoric II pushed into Hispania, defeating the Suebi in 456.

Euric, king from 466 to 484, turned this foothold into a large realm. He took Mérida, captured Tarraconensis in 472 and, by 476, held southern Gaul up to the Loire and the Rhône. In 475 the emperor Julius Nepos recognised his conquests. The Gallic part of the kingdom did not last: in 507 the Franks under Clovis I killed Alaric II at Vouillé, near Poitiers, and Toulouse was sacked. By 508 only Septimania, a coastal strip around Narbonne, remained north of the Pyrenees.

The kingdom's centre moved south, eventually to Toledo. After a civil war began in 549, the usurper Athanagild sought help from Justinian I, and the Byzantine Empire used the opening to seize a strip of the southern coast. Liuvigild, who reigned from 569 to 586, restored royal authority, annexed the Suebic kingdom in the north-west in 585 and founded new towns such as Reccopolis. The last Byzantine footholds fell to Swinthila by about 625.

The Visigoths had been Arian Christians, at odds with the Catholic majority of their subjects. Reccared I abandoned Arianism, and at the Third Council of Toledo in 589 the kingdom formally adopted the Nicene creed. Thereafter the councils of Toledo, attended by bishops and nobles, became central to government, helping to elect kings and trying to curb the frequent coups. Under Chindaswinth and Recceswinth a single law book, the Visigothic Code, was completed in 654, applying the same, largely Roman-based law to Goths and Hispano-Romans alike. Royal policy towards Jews was often harsh: Sisebut forced many to convert, and a council in 694 ordered many enslaved.

The kingdom was not the cultural backwater it was once assumed to be. Isidore of Seville compiled the Etymologies, an encyclopedia read throughout medieval Europe, and the gold votive crowns of the Guarrazar treasure show the skill of its craftsmen. Roman baths and aqueducts remained in use in cities such as Mérida, and by the seventh century Goths and Hispano-Romans had largely merged into one population.

Disputed successions left the kingdom divided when Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed from North Africa in 711. King Roderic was killed at the Guadalete, Toledo fell, and by 716 most of the peninsula was under the Umayyad Caliphate; Septimania was taken in the 720s. In the northern mountains the nobleman Pelagius led a revolt from 718, from which the Christian kingdom of Asturias grew, and later Spanish kings looked back to the Visigoths as their predecessors.

Our 600 and 700 maps show the Visigothic Kingdom across most of Iberia and Septimania, with the Frankish Kingdom to the north. Within a few years of the 700 map the kingdom fell to the Umayyads advancing from North Africa.