Visigoths

The Visigoths were a Gothic people formed in the Balkans in the late fourth century, out of Goths who crossed into the Roman Empire fleeing the Huns. Under Alaric I they sacked Rome in 410, and they went on to found a kingdom first in south-western Gaul and then in Hispania, which lasted until 711. In Spain they gradually merged with the Hispano-Roman population, and their nobility is often traced into the Christian kingdoms of medieval Iberia.

The Goths of the third century lived north of the lower Danube and the Black Sea, where by the mid-third century they were the strongest military power beyond the Roman frontier. Gothic tradition placed their earlier home in Scandinavia, but archaeology does not confirm the story of a mass migration, and their real origins are obscure. The name "Visigoths" itself is late: the Roman writer Cassiodorus apparently coined it when describing their defeat by the Franks around 507, building on an older tribal name, Vesi, that some link with the word for "good". Whether the Vesi were the same people as the Tervingi of fourth-century sources is debated; historians such as Peter Heather and Roger Collins argue that a distinct Visigothic identity formed only inside the empire, from mixed Gothic and other bands.

In 376 the Gothic leader Fritigern asked the emperor Valens for permission to settle south of the Danube, beyond the reach of the Huns. Promised food and land failed to arrive, famine followed, and the Goths, reportedly forced to sell their children to survive, rose in revolt. At the Battle of Adrianople in 378 they destroyed a Roman army and killed Valens. After years of fighting, a treaty in 382 settled them on Roman soil as federates who supplied troops in return for land.

The death of Theodosius I in 395 opened a period of rivalry between the eastern and western courts, and the Gothic commander Alaric I bargained with both, receiving a military command in Illyricum in 397. After the western general Stilicho was executed in 408 and Roman troops massacred the families of barbarian soldiers, Alaric invaded Italy. Talks and a negotiated ransom failed, and on 24 August 410 his army entered Rome through the Salarian Gate, carrying out the sack of Rome. Rome was still the official capital, although the western court had moved to Ravenna in 402.

In 418 the emperor Honorius rewarded the Goths, who had fought the Vandals and Alans in Spain on his behalf, with land in Aquitaine. From this base around Toulouse they built the Visigothic Kingdom, whose kings fought beside Aetius against Attila and later expanded across the Pyrenees. Defeat by the Franks under Clovis I in 507 pushed their centre south into Hispania.

Like the Ostrogoths and Vandals, the Visigoths had become Christians before entering the empire, but in the Arian form that most Romans considered heretical. That divide with their Catholic subjects lasted until King Reccared I converted at the Third Council of Toledo in 589. Their kings built on Roman law rather than replacing it, and the code of 654 put Goths and Romans under the same law.

The Umayyad victory at Guadalete in 711, where King Roderic was killed, ended Visigothic rule. By then Goths and Hispano-Romans increasingly saw themselves as one people, and the Gothic language left few traces in Spanish. A genetic study of a sixth-century Visigothic cemetery in north-eastern Spain found mostly local Iberian ancestry with about a quarter from central or northern Europe. Nobles of Gothic descent helped found the Kingdom of Asturias, while others fled to Frankish lands.

Our maps draw the Visigoths in 400 and 500, approximate outlines for a people that moved a long way in that century; in 500 they sit beside the Ostrogoths in Italy, and the later maps show the kingdom itself.