Visigothic Spain

Introduction

The Visigothic kingdom of Toledo ruled the greater part of the Iberian peninsula for nearly two centuries, from the early sixth century to the Arab conquest of 711. It was one of the most distinctive political experiments of post-Roman Europe: an Arian Germanic dynasty ruling a heavily Romanized Catholic population, gradually fusing the two communities into a single Christian kingdom while producing, in law, liturgy, and conciliar government, a set of institutions whose influence would long outlast the kingdom itself.

The Gothic Settlement in Gaul and Spain

The Visigoths had a long history before they settled in Spain. Originally a Gothic people on the lower Danube, they had been converted to Arian Christianity in the fourth century, had sacked Rome in 410 under Alaric, and had established a kingdom in southern Gaul under Roman federal treaty in 418. For most of the fifth century, the Visigothic kings — Wallia, Theodoric I, Theodoric II, Euric, and Alaric II — had ruled a substantial kingdom that included most of southern Gaul and a significant part of Spain. Euric (r. 466–484) had issued the Codex Euricianus, the first Germanic law code to be written in Latin rather than in the vernacular, and his son Alaric II had produced the famous Breviarium Alaricianum of 506, a digest of Roman law for the use of the Roman population of the kingdom.

The Frankish victory at Vouillé in 507, in which Clovis killed the Gothic king Alaric II, was a catastrophe. The Visigoths lost most of their Gallic territories and withdrew across the Pyrenees into Hispania. The Breviarium was published the year after the defeat, perhaps in a desperate attempt to win the loyalty of the Roman population; it survived the kingdom’s loss of Gaul and would, like the Lex Romana Visigothorum that descended from it, exercise a profound influence on the law of medieval Spain and Portugal.

The Kingdom of Toledo

The political center of the Visigothic kingdom shifted, in the sixth century, from Toulouse to Toledo, and the kings of the later sixth and seventh centuries — Leovigild (r. 568–586), Reccared (r. 586–601), Sisebut (r. 612–621), Reccaswinth (r. 653–672), Erwig (r. 680–687), and Egica (r. 687–702) — turned the city of Toledo into the symbolic capital of a unified Spanish monarchy. Leovigild’s reign was decisive: he completed the conquest of the remaining Suevic and Byzantine territories in the peninsula, made Toledo his capital, and reorganized the kingdom’s coinage and fiscal administration. He was an Arian who was the father of the Catholic Reccared and who, in a famous exchange, told the Catholic bishop Masona of Merida that he “could not love” the Catholic clergy of the kingdom. He was followed, however, by his son Reccared, who in 587, at the Third Council of Toledo, publicly renounced Arianism and was received into the Catholic church with the bishops of the kingdom.

The Conversion to Catholic Christianity

The conversion of Reccared was the most important political event in the history of the Visigothic kingdom. Arianism, which had been the religion of the ruling Gothic minority for nearly two centuries, was not a deep-rooted theological tradition; it was, in practice, a marker of Gothic identity and a barrier between the new Germanic ruling class and the Catholic Hispano-Roman population. Reccared’s conversion closed the barrier. The Council of Toledo III (589) received the Arian bishops into the Catholic church and laid down that the public profession of Arian Christianity was thenceforward a criminal offense. The subsequent conciliar legislation of the kingdom, embodied in the canons of seventeen councils of Toledo held between 589 and 702, treated the Arian heresy as a closed chapter.

The closing of the religious gap did not at once close the ethnic gap. The Visigothic Codex Revisus of 654 (the Liber Iudicum of Reccaswinth, eventually issued in revised form by Erwig in 681) maintained, in theory, two separate bodies of law: one for the Gothi, descendants of the original settlers, and one for the Romani, the Hispano-Roman population. In practice, the distinction was rapidly eroding: a Gothic nobleman might have a Roman wife, a Roman bishop might serve a Gothic king, and the great aristocratic families of the seventh century were increasingly mixed. The last Gothic kings of the seventh century legislated for “all the people” of the kingdom, and the Liber Iudicum of Reccaswinth, while it maintained the formal distinction, was in fact a single body of law applied to both groups.

Government, Law, and the Toledan Councils

The Visigothic state was a curious hybrid. The king was elected by a small assembly of bishops and lay nobles at a council held, in many cases, in or near the metropolitan city. The new king swore an oath to rule according to the laws, to protect the church, and to preserve the unity of the kingdom; the bishops swore obedience to him. The system worked better in theory than in practice: the seventh century saw a series of depositions, usurpations, and assassinations that were symptoms of an unstable political system unable to govern a peninsula of four million people with the limited fiscal and military resources of the early Middle Ages.

The Toledan councils, seventeen in number and held at intervals from 589 to 702, were the most distinctive institution of the Visigothic kingdom. Each council was attended by the metropolitan bishops of the kingdom, by the king’s officiales palatii, and often by Visigothic nobles; it issued canons on doctrinal, liturgical, and disciplinary questions, and it produced political legislation, the tomus regius, in which the king, with the council’s approval, addressed the kingdom. The acts of these councils form the largest single body of administrative and ecclesiastical documentation of any early medieval European kingdom. They also preserve the texts of official laudes, formal acclamations of the king by the assembled bishops, that show how the political theory of the kingdom combined the Roman and Christian traditions into a distinctive Visigothic synthesis.

The Spanish Church and the Cult of the Saints

The church in Visigothic Spain was unusually wealthy and unusually well-organized. Bishops, who often came from the great landowning aristocratic families, served as both ecclesiastical and civil officials in their dioceses; some, like Leander of Seville and his brother Isidore (succeeding him as archbishop), were also significant literary and intellectual figures. The conversion of the Visigoths to Catholic Christianity produced an extraordinary flowering of theological and historical writing in the seventh century. Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) was, after Augustine, the most influential Latin theologian of the early Middle Ages; his Etymologiae were a kind of encyclopedia that preserved classical learning for centuries. The De Viris Illustribus of Ildefonsus of Toledo and the De Natura Rerum and the historical works of Isidore provided the literary models for centuries of subsequent Spanish writing. The hagiographic literature of the period is also extensive: the Vitae of Saints Aemilianus, Fructuosus of Braga, Desiderius of Vienne, and the Martyrologium of Wamba are among the most important in the early medieval west.

Visigothic Society and Material Culture

The material culture of the Visigothic kingdom was, on the surface, an extension of late Roman provincial culture. The Visigothic kings struck gold tremisses in the late Roman pattern; the major cities — Toledo, Merida, Cordoba, Seville, Saragossa, Tarragona, Barcelona, and Narbonne — remained the seats of bishops and the centers of artisan and commercial life; the great estate agriculture of the late Roman period continued, with bishops, lay aristocrats, and the royal fisc holding the bulk of the cultivable land. What had changed was the political settlement: where late Roman Spain had been a Christian Roman province governed from afar, Visigothic Spain was a Christian kingdom governed by a small but powerful Germanic dynasty. The fusion of the two populations was a slow process, but by the late seventh century a single Spanish Christian aristocracy, both Gothic and Roman in ancestry, occupied the great offices of the kingdom and the great episcopal sees.

The seventh century saw an impressive flowering of Visigothic visual and material culture. The crown votive offerings of the kings — most famously the votive crown of Reccaswinth, given to the church of San Salvador at Toledo and preserved in the treasury of Guarrazar — show a sophisticated combination of classical, late antique, and Germanic ornamental traditions. The metalwork of the period, especially the votive crosses, the encrusted brooches, and the chalices made for the liturgy of the new Christian kingdom, are among the most accomplished of the early Middle Ages. The construction of new churches, especially in the cities of the south, and the rebuilding of older ones in a distinctive Visigothic style, kept the architectural traditions of late Roman Spain alive and provided a model for the churches of the Asturian kingdom that emerged after 711.

The Arab Conquest of 711

The political weakness of the Visigothic kingdom in the late seventh century is hard to exaggerate. The usurpation of Roderic in 710 was the latest in a long line of depositions, and the kingdom was already showing signs of internal collapse when, in 711, a force of Berber and Arab soldiers under Tariq ibn Ziyad and Musa ibn Nusayr crossed the strait of Gibraltar and defeated Roderic on the river Guadalete. The battle is one of the most consequential in the history of Europe. Within five years, the Visigothic state had been reduced to a rump kingdom in the Asturias under Pelayo, and the Christian principalities of the north would spend the next seven centuries slowly reconquering the peninsula. The fate of the surviving Visigothic population and of its political legacy is discussed separately in the What happened to the Visigoths.

The Visigothic Legacy

The Visigothic kingdom was, in many ways, a failure. Politically, it could not defend itself against an external enemy, and internally it was the most unstable of the post-Roman states. Yet in law, in the church, and in the preservation of classical learning, the Visigothic contribution to medieval Europe was substantial. The Liber Iudicum remained in force in Christian Spain until the thirteenth century, and through it Visigothic law influenced the legal traditions of Latin America. The intellectual tradition of Isidore, Braulio, Julian of Toledo, and the rest of the seventh-century Spanish church shaped medieval learning throughout Latin Christendom. The political idea of a unified Christian Spain, centered on Toledo and ruled by a king whose authority was conferred by a church council, would be invoked, with varying degrees of historical justification, by Spanish rulers for the rest of the Middle Ages.