What Happened to the Visigoths?

Short answer

The Visigothic kingdom, which had ruled most of the Iberian peninsula for nearly two centuries, collapsed in 711 under the Arab-Berber invasion of Tariq ibn Ziyad and Musa ibn Nusayr. The last Visigothic king, Roderic, was defeated and killed at the Battle of Guadalete, and within five years the Visigothic state had been reduced to a small rump kingdom in the Asturias under Pelayo, a Visigothic noble who had refused to submit to the Muslims. The surviving Visigothic population was gradually absorbed into the Christian principalities of the north and, more slowly, into the Christian population of the reconquered lands in the central and southern parts of the peninsula. The Visigothic legal tradition, embodied in the Liber Iudicum, continued to be applied in Christian Spain until the thirteenth century.

The Arab-Berber Conquest

The Arab-Berber invasion of 711 was one of the most consequential events in European history. The Visigothic kingdom, which had been the dominant political force in the Iberian peninsula for nearly two centuries, was already in a state of internal collapse: the legitimate king, Witiza, had died in 710, and the throne had been seized by Roderic, the duke of Baetica, in what was probably an act of usurpation. The family of Witiza appealed to the Muslim governor of North Africa, Musa ibn Nusayr, for help. Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Berber general of Musa, crossed the strait of Gibraltar with a small force of Berbers and Arabs in the spring of 711.

The two armies met at the Battle of Guadalete (in modern Cadiz province) in July 711. Roderic was defeated and killed, and the Visigothic army was destroyed. The Muslim forces then advanced rapidly, taking the major cities of southern Spain: Cordoba, Granada, Seville, Merida, Toledo. By 714, Musa himself had joined the campaign, and by 716 the entire peninsula south of the Cantabrian mountains had been incorporated into the Muslim state of al-Andalus. The Visigothic church, which had been the principal institution of the Catholic kingdom, continued to exist under the new Muslim rulers, but the Visigothic state was finished.

The Survival of the Visigothic Population

The Arab-Berber conquest of 711 was not, in demographic terms, a wholesale replacement of the population. The Muslim forces that conquered Spain were small: the armies of Tariq and Musa probably numbered in the low thousands, and the subsequent Berber settlement of the peninsula was a slow process, heavily concentrated in the south and east. The great majority of the population of Visigothic Spain — the Hispano-Romans, the Gothic-Spanish aristocracy, the peasants, the slaves, the Jewish communities — remained in place and was gradually absorbed into the new Muslim political order.

The Visigothic noble families of the late seventh and eighth centuries had been the dominant political and ecclesiastical class of the kingdom. After 711, many of these families submitted to the Muslim regime; others fled north to the Christian principalities of the Asturias, the Pyrenees, and Galicia. The Visigothic noble class was, accordingly, divided between the Muslim north (a small but politically significant group, especially in the early period of Muslim rule) and the Christian north (a much larger group, which would form the political and ecclesiastical class of the Asturian kingdom and the later Christian states).

The Visigothic language, the so-called Gothic, did not survive as a vernacular in Iberia. The Christian and Muslim sources of the eighth and ninth centuries do not record the use of Gothic as a spoken language, and the surviving Gothic texts — the Skeireins (a fragmentary Gothic translation of the gospel of John), the Wulfilan bible, the few Gothic glosses in Latin and Greek manuscripts — are all associated with the Visigoths of the Danube and the Balkans, not with those of Iberia. The Visigoths of the Iberian peninsula were, by the eighth century, almost completely Latinized, and the Gothic vernacular of the early medieval Spanish church was, in effect, Latin.

The Asturian Kingdom and the Foundations of the Reconquista

The first Christian polity to emerge from the Arab-Berber conquest was the kingdom of Asturias, traditionally founded by Pelayo, a Visigothic noble who, with a small group of followers, took refuge in the mountains of the Asturias and defeated a Muslim force at the Battle of Covadonga around 722. The kingdom of Asturias, which was to become the kingdom of León, was the most important of the Christian principalities of the north, and it produced, over the course of the eighth and ninth centuries, the political and ecclesiastical framework of the Christian reconquest.

The Asturian kingdom claimed, from the first, to be the legitimate successor of the Visigothic kingdom. Alfonso I (r. 739–757) and his successors used the title of imperator totius Hispaniae and the symbols of Visigothic kingship, including the crown, the cross, and the lance of victory. The Asturian chronicles of the ninth century, the Chronicon Albeldense and the Chronicon Silense, present the history of the new kingdom as a continuation of the Visigothic past, and the political ideology of the Christian reconquest was, in significant part, the ideology of the Visigothic restoration.

The Visigothic Legal Tradition

The most durable legacy of the Visigothic kingdom was the Liber Iudicum, the great law code issued by Reccaswinth in 654 and revised by Erwig in 681. The Liber Iudicum was the most sophisticated body of secular law in the early medieval West, and it was to be the foundation of legal practice in Christian Spain for nearly six centuries. The Asturian kings, the kings of León, and the kings of Castile used the Liber Iudicum as the principal law of the realm; the Siete Partidas of Alfonso X of Castile, the great thirteenth-century codification, drew extensively on Visigothic legal material.

The Visigothic legal tradition was, in turn, drawn on by the legal traditions of the rest of medieval Europe. The Lex Romana Visigothorum, the Breviarium of Alaric II, was the most important surviving body of Roman law in the early Middle Ages, and it was used as the basis of legal education in the Frankish and German lands. The Visigothic legal tradition, in this sense, was one of the most important factors in the survival of Roman legal knowledge in the early Middle Ages.

The End of the Visigoths

By the eleventh century, the Visigoths as a distinct people had disappeared. The Christian population of the reconquered lands of Spain was, in linguistic and cultural terms, a Latin Christian population; the Visigothic identity had been subsumed into the broader identity of Christian Spain. The Muslim population of al-Andalus was, in turn, a Berber-Arab population, with a substantial Jewish and Christian minority. The Arab-Berber conquest of 711 had transformed the peninsula, and the Visigothic state, the Visigothic people, and the Visigothic culture had been absorbed, over the course of several centuries, into the new political and cultural orders.

The Visigothic legacy survived, however, in the institutions and the ideologies of the Christian kingdoms of the north. The kings of Asturias, León, and Castile claimed the symbols and the titles of the Visigothic kings; the Liber Iudicum continued to be the basis of legal practice; the Catholic church of medieval Spain, in its organization and its liturgy, was the heir of the Visigothic church; the Mozarabic rite, the liturgy of the Christian community under Muslim rule and of the Christian population of the northern kingdoms, was the direct descendant of the Visigothic liturgy. The Visigoths, in a sense, did not disappear; they were absorbed.