Visigoths

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The Visigoths (Latin: Visigothi, Wisigothi, Vesi, Visi, Wesi, or Wisi) 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. A Visigothic force led by Alaric I sacked 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.

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A votive crown belonging to Reccesuinth (653–672)

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Division of the Goths: Tervingi and Vesi

The division of the Goths is first attested in 291.[1] The Tervingi are first attested around that date, the Greuthungi, Ostrogothi, and Vesi are all attested no earlier than 388.[1] The first mention of the Tervingi occurs in a eulogy of the emperor Maximian (285–305), delivered in or shortly after 291 (or perhaps delivered at Trier on 20 April 292[2]) and traditionally ascribed to Claudius Mamertinus,[3] 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.[4]

In the Notitia Dignitatum the Vesi are equated with the Tervingi in a reference to the years 388–391.[1] The Greuthungi are first named by Ammianus Marcellinus, writing no earlier than 392 and perhaps later than 395, and basing his account of the words of a Tervingian chieftain who is attested as early as 376.[1] The Ostrogoths are first named in a document dated September 392 from Milan.[1] Claudian mentions that they together with the Gruthungi inhabit Phrygia.[5] According to Herwig Wolfram, the primary sources either use the terminology of Tervingi/Greuthungi or Vesi/Ostrogothi and never mix the pairs.[1] All four names were used together, but the pairing was always preserved, as in Gruthungi, Austrogothi, Tervingi, Visi.[6] That the Tervingi were the Vesi/Visigothi and the Greuthungi the Ostrogothi is also supported by Jordanes.[7] 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, is not universal.

Herwig Wolfram concludes that the terms Tervingi and Greuthungi were geographical identifiers used by each tribe to describe the other.[6] This terminology therefore dropped out of use after the Goths were displaced by the Hunnic invasions. In support of this, Wolfram cites Zosimus as referring to a group of "Scythians" north of the Danube who were called "Greutungi" by the barbarians north of the Ister.[8] Wolfram concludes that this people was the Tervingi who had remained behind after the Hunnic conquest.[8] He further believes that the terms "Vesi" and "Ostrogothi" were used by the peoples to boastfully describe themselves.[6]

The nomenclature of Greuthungi and Tervingi fell out of use shortly after 400.[1] In general, the terminology of a divided Gothic people disappeared gradually after they entered the Roman Empire.[6] The last indication that the Goths whose king reigned at Toulouse considered themselves Vesi is found in a panegyric on Avitus by Sidonius Apollinaris dated 1 January 456.[6] The term "Visigoth", however, was an invention of the sixth century. Most recent scholars (notably Peter Heather) argue that Visigothic group identity emerged only within the Roman Empire.[9] 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 Geruthungian and other barbarian contingents.[10] They were thus multiethnic and cannot lay claim to an exclusively Tervingian heritage. Collins points out that no contemporaries directly link the Tervingi and Vesi.[10]

Cassiodorus, a Roman in the service of Theodoric the Great, invented the term "Visigothi" to match that of "Ostrogothi", which terms he thought of as "western Goths" and "eastern Goths" respectively.[6] The western-eastern division was a simplification and a literary device of sixth-century historians where political realities were more complex.[11] 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.[11]

Other names for the Goths abounded. A "Germanic" Byzantine or Italian author referred to one of the two peoples as the Valagothi, meaning "Roman Goths" and in 469 the Visigoths were called the "Alaric Goths".[11]

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Etymology of Tervingi and Vesi/Visigothi

The name "Tervingi" may mean "forest people".[6] This is supported by evidence that geographic descriptors were commonly used to distinguish people living north of the Black Sea both before and after Gothic settlement there, by evidence of forest-related names among the Tervingi, and by the lack of evidence for an earlier date for the name pair Tervingi-Greuthungi than the late third century.[12] That the name "Tervingi" has pre-Pontic, possibly Scandinavian, origins still has support today.[12]

The Visigoths are called Wesi or Wisi by Trebellius Pollio, Claudian, and Sidonius Apollinaris.[13] The words are Gothic ones meaning "the good or noble people",[6] similar to Gothic iusiza, "better". W. H. Stevenson remarks that the term seems to be the Germanic representative of Indo-European *wesu-s ("good"), comparing Sanskrit vásu-ş and Gaulish vesu-. While Jordanes refers to a river which gave its name to the Vesi, this is probably just legend, like his similar story about the Greuthung name.[12] The name "Visigothi" is an invention of Cassiodorus, who combined "Visi" and "Gothi" and intended to mean "west Goths".

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War with Rome (376–382)

The Goths remained in Dacia until 376, when one of their leaders, Fritigern, appealed to the Roman emperor Valens to be allowed to settle with his people on the south bank of the Danube. Here, they hoped to find refuge from the Huns. Valens permitted this. 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; the Emperor Valens was killed during the fighting, shocking the Roman world and eventually forcing the Romans to negotiate with and settle the Barbarians on Roman land, a new trend with far reaching consequences for the eventual fall of the Roman Empire.

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Migrations of the main column of the Visigoths

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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.

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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 respondible 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.

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Greatest extent of the Visigothic kingdom of Toulouse, c. 500

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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.[14] 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.

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Capital from the Visigothic church of San Pedro de la Nave.

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Belt buckle. Gilt and silvered bronze and glass paste, Visigothic Aquitaine, 6th century. Found in 1868 in the Visigothic necropolis of Tressan, Provence (Musée national du Moyen Âge)

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Visigothic Code

The Visigothic Code (Latin, Forum Iudicum or Liber Judiciorum; Spanish, Libro de los Juicios) comprises a set of laws promulgated by the Visigothic king of Hispania, Chindasuinth in his second year (642/643). They were enlarged by the novel legislation of Reccesuinth (for which reason it is sometimes called the Code of Reccesuinth), Wamba, Erwig, Egica, and perhaps Wittiza. In 654 Reccesuinth promulgated the code anew after a project of editing by Braulio of Zaragoza, since Chindasuinth's original code had been quickly commissioned and enacted in rough.[1]

They are often called the Lex Visigothorum, law of the Visigoths. However, this code abolished the old tradition of having different laws for Romans and for Visigoths; all the subjects of the kingdom would stop being romani and gothi to become hispani. In this way, all the subjects of the kingdom were gathered under the same jurisdiction, eliminating social apart from juridical differences.

The laws were far-reaching and long in effect: in 10th century Galicia, monastic charters make reference to the Code (Fletcher 1984, ch. 1, note 56). The laws govern and sanction family life and by extension political life—the marrying and the giving in marriage, the transmission of property to heirs, the safeguarding of the rights of widows and orphans.

The laws combine the Catholic Church's Canon law, and have a strongly theocratic tone.

The code is known to have been preserved by the Moors, as Christians were permitted the use of their own laws, where they did not conflict with those of the conquerors, upon the regular payment of tribute; thus it may be presumed that it was the recognized legal authority of Christian magistrates while Spain remained under Muslim control. When Ferdinand III of Castile took Cordova in the thirteenth century, he ordered the code to be adopted and observed by its citizens, and caused it to be rendered, albeit inaccurately, into Castilian. The Catalan translation of this document is the oldest text found in that language.

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The cover of an edition of the Liber Judiciorum from 1600.

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Kings of the Visigoths

Terving kings

These kings and leaders, with the exception of Fritigern, and the possible exception of Alavivus, were pagans.

Athanaric (369–381)
Rothesteus, sub-king
Winguric, sub-king
Alavivus (c. 376), rebel against Valens
Fritigern (c. 376–c. 380), rebel against Athanaric and Valens

Balti dynasty

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)
Theodoric the Great (511–526), regent
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 fathers in this succession.

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
Hermenegild (580–585), sub-king in Baetica
Reccared I (580–601), son, sub-king in Narbonensis until 586, first Catholic king
Segga (586–587), rebel
Liuva II (601–603), son
Witteric (603–610)
Gundemar (610–612)
Sisebut (612–621)
Reccared II (621), son
Suintila (621–631)
Reccimer (626–631), son and associate
Sisenand (631–636)
Iudila (632–633), rebel
Chintila (636–640)
Tulga (640–641)
Chindasuinth (641–653)
Reccesuinth (649–672), son, initially co-king
Froia (653), rebel
Wamba (672–680)
Hilderic (672), rebel
Paul (672–673), rebel
Erwig (680–687)
Ergica (687–702)
Suniefred (693), rebel
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
Oppa (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.