THE Visigothic kingdom of Spain preceded and outlasted the two other Germanic kingdoms of the Mediterranean basin, the Ostrogothic and the Vandal; it lasted from 466 to 711. It started when a Germanic chieftain aspired to be something less than an emperor of the west, but to rule, at any rate, the praetorian prefecture of the Gauls, in which the Pyrenees had been no limes, nor any barrier to the coast road carrying the Roman trade from Marseilles to Narbonne and on to Tarragona. In days when both Gaul and Spain looked towards the Mediterranean, this road was a more important means of communication than that running from the Cantabrian hills and the Asturias, round the western end of the Pyrenees, to the Garonne; but such a road there was as well. Only Alaric’s death had saved Italy from a Visigothic settlement: but it seemed to the victorious Visigoths, intending not to destroy the empire but to revive it, that they might well rule the Gauls. Even after their defeat at the ‘campus Vogladensis’ and restriction to Septimania, the Mediterranean coastal province, Visigothic kings, it seems, did not forget their earlier claims.
The cause of their failure to reassert themselves after 507, to push back again, at least to the Loire, is probably their being cut off from any further accession of Germanic population: other barbarian races had pressed in behind them, blocking the way. The strength of their enemies the Franks lay in Austrasia, where the Germanic population was thickest, and where such population could increase by infiltration from central Germany; there was no such possibility for the Visigoths.
Yet though the Visigoths lost Aquitania, which they held only for some forty-five years, it was they and not the Franks who stamped the character of their barbarian art upon this region; there is a change in Merovingian barbarian ornament, as between the north and the south of Gaul, that corresponds to the boundaries between Franks and Goths before 507. It is true that this region was richer in Roman buildings than the north, and also had more access to Byzantine inspiration and trade in the sixth and seventh centuries; but the rarity of Germanic animal ornament south of the Loire, like the distinction in medieval France between the langue d’oui and the langue d’oc, points to some survival of Visigothic population in Aquitaine after 511. The Visigoths in Septimania and Spain were the weaker because they had lost the headquarters of their original settlement.
Visigothic society falls in with Ostrogothic, Lombard and Vandal society, as against that of the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons, as belonging to a Mediterranean world. Visigothic Spain was a land of Roman temples, villas and basilicas, not all destroyed, and it drew its inspiration in government and art from East Rome. In the sixth and seventh centuries Byzantium was to the Mediterranean world the arbiter of taste and the lamp of learning, and though Italy and Spain slipped again from the political government of the eastern empire after Justinian, Byzantium was still the centre of civilization. The crowns that the late Visigothic kings hung in votive offerings before the altars are decorated with Germanic cloisonné, but their inspiration goes back to the mosaics of the crowned emperors and the crowns held ready for offering, in such mosaics as that of the procession of martyrs in St Apollinare-within-the-walls at Ravenna. The great Visigothic treasure found at Guarrazar near Toledo was probably the precious ornaments and vessels of some church, hastily buried before the Muslim invasion: it included two gold votive crowns hung by chains from a point, offered by king Swinthila (621–631) and king Recesvinth (649–672): and also a pendant gold cross, inset with precious stone and enriched with pendant pearls, and ornament in the Lombard manner; all very Byzantine in conception and detail.
The structure, too, of the radiate brooches of the Visigothic ladies, with the pins projecting beyond the semi-circular head-plate of the safety-pin brooch of south Russia, is Germanic; but the number and elaboration of the radiating pin heads, the fineness of the metal work, the naturalistic ornament—all these look to Byzantium. A well-dressed Visigothic lady had brooches and rings as good as any in Byzantium, and very similar; a well-dressed Frankish lady from Paris would have had ornaments that seemed to her Greek sister interesting but a little outlandish.
Two other points of comparison between the Visigothic and other Germanic kingdoms call for mention. With regard to the succession problem, the passing on of authority without a break for civil war, that same problem which the later Roman empire had found so intractable but which East Rome managed with conspicuous success: the Germanic kingdoms treated the matter with some variety. All had behind them the tradition of a semi-divine royal house, and also of elective monarchy, where a council of nobles passed over heirs who were children or incapable. Among the Franks, the need to satisfy sons who already in their father’s lifetime had some share of regional government, often led to partition, but the primitive reverence for the royal house of the Merovings prevented any noble outside it from seizing the throne for 250 years. The ambitions and rivalries of the nobles fought themselves out in the following up of royal blood feuds, and, at length, in the struggle for success as mayors of the palace. Among the Vandals, the succession law was unwontedly strong, under Byzantine influence. Among the Visigoths, the royal house of the Baits became extinct with Amalaric; nobles outside it were elected, and in the final collapse before the Moors, the struggle of rival candidates for the throne played a fatal part.
The other point of comparison concerns subject populations. The Franks in Gaul had a Celtic, Gallo-Roman population to deal with, and one, except in Brittany, well Romanized; but in Brittany, the Celtic population remained only restively subservient to the king of Paris and the archbishop of Tours. Not much force of arms was, however, needed to preserve the Frankish supremacy in the Merovingian period. Among the Ostrogoths of north Italy, there was no large, separate population group to be disaffected. The Vandals were planted among Moorish tribes and surrounded by them; the Arab conquest was in one sense a reconquest by the desert.
The Visigoths, however, had particular population difficulties; they brought with them the Sueves, settled them in Galicia (Portugal) and claimed overlordship over them; but the Sueves had a king of their own, and were frequently at war with the Goths. The autochthonous Wascones or Basques, speaking a dialect possibly not even Indo-European and certainly not Celtic, inhabited the north-eastern corner of Spain and spread down the valley of the Ebro, and the upper waters of the Douro and the Tagus; they were a compact and alien population, little Romanized; much Visigothic effort was expended in pushing them back to the north, and finally driving them back beyond the Pyrenees. Again, the perpetual difficulties of Visigothic kings with the Jews of the southern ports, and their policy of alternate tolerance and, latterly, persecution, probably reflects difficulties other than religious. The Visigoths had ports, access to the Mediterranean and, between the Vandal and Arab dominance of Mediterranean trade, apparently a chance to develop a class of sea-traders, always a source of royal revenue. The worst period of persecution of the Jews came when the Visigothic kings seem to have desired to get trading riches into their own hands and those of their nobles.
To turn to the political history of the Visigoths between the reigns of Eufic and Roderick (466 to 711). The Visigoths had reached Gaul under Athaulf and made Toulouse their capital by 412; but the Romans still held north Gaul, and, when Euric murdered his brother, Theoderic II, and became king in 466, Syagrius still maintained an isolated Roman rule at Soissons. Euric’s policy differed from his murdered brother’s, in that he was the leader of the Visigothic party who stood for an independent Visigothic state and no subservience to Roman tradition and alliance. In 469 he launched an attack clearly meant to give him the rule both of Gaul and Spain: but the central plateau of France, the plateau of the Auvergne with Clermont as its chief city, held out firmly against him. He defeated a Roman fleet under Basiliscus; he succeeded in 470 in taking Bourges, to the north of the Auvergne; but it took him years to get the Auvergne itself. Ecdicius and the bishop of Clermont, Sidonius Apollinaris, defended the city against him in a series of sieges. Auvergne was only ceded to him, in 475, by Julius Nepos, emperor of the west, when a section of the Ostrogoths threatened to invade north Italy, and Nepos needed Visigothic support. To save Italy, he ceded the Gauls: for by this treaty Euric was left in possession of his conquest in Spain and southern Gaul up to the Rhone, and of central Gaul up to the Loire.
In 476 Euric even led his Visigoths into north Italy against Odovacar. Though he could not dispute Odovacar’s claim to replace Romulus Augustulus, he had enough success to make the emperor Zeno yield him by treaty, at Odovacar’s expense, the territory between the Rhone and the Alps, south of the Durance.
Euric won no more victories, though the military renown of the Visigoths was such, that provincials from Gothic Italy, and envoys from various Germanic tribes and even from the Persians, came to Toulouse to ask his alliance and military help. He published a code of Roman law for the provincials; he allowed the old Roman provinces of the Gauls to remain, though the title of the old proconsular governors was soon changed to dux; he retained the civitas as the old administrative centre under its comes; and he retained the old Roman assessment to taxation, and the Roman fisc as his treasury. One of his laws refers to the earlier ‘thirding’ of the land by the Visigoths by which, apparently, a third of the produce could be claimed by the new possessor from the former owner and the cultivators; it shows that boundary disputes had been caused between the provincials and those hospitati upon them. Those who removed boundaries were subjected to penalties, and it was ordered that these sortes Gothicae and tertiae Romanorum which had not been revoked for fifty years might not be called in question. Other Eurician laws dealt with theft, slaves and marriage, and laid down that arms supplied to the saiones for service should not be reclaimed.
Like all the Germanic kings (except Clovis, and the Anglo-Saxon kings) Euric was an Arian, identifying Arianism with Germanic independence, and Catholicism with the international universalism of the Roman empire. It was not theology alone that divided Goth and provincial in Spain or Africa: it was the issue of German sovereignty. The emperor at Byzantium was ‘sanctus’ and his palatium ‘sacrum’: he protected, but also dominated, the Christian church; to accept his version of the Christian religion was to lack full Germanic sovereignty. Euric and his early successors were not violent persecutors of the Catholics, though Euric banished Sidonius Apollinaris from Clermont, and one or two other bishops; but their Arianism alienated the Catholic clergy.
Euric died at Arles in 484, and was succeeded by his son Alaric II, no warrior and no match for his rival Clovis in energy. When Syagrius fled to him for refuge after the battle of Soissons in 486, Alaric gave him up, thus allowing Clovis to become the heir to the Roman kingdom of Soissons. But more dangerous to Alaric than this loss was Clovis’s conversion to Catholicism, which took him out of the ring of friendly Germanic kings, and made his rule acceptable to the Gallic provincials. Alaric’s attitude to his Catholic bishops became more tolerant, and he allowed them to meet in council at Agde in 506, before which he had published from Toulouse the famous Breviarium Alarici for the benefit of the Roman provincials. This short code, composed of certain imperial edicts and the verdicts of jurists, obtained a wide popularity in the west: but it left unchanged the Roman law forbidding intermarriage between Goth and provincial.
In 507 Clovis launched his attack against the Visigoths, an attack prepared for by negotiation with the emperor Anastasius. The Burgundians, his allies, invaded the Auvergne, and he himself crossed the Loire at Amboise and followed the Roman road to Poitiers. The Auvergnats fought for the Visigoths, but the Visigothic king Alaric lost the battle of the ‘campus Vogladensis’, and his own life. Franks and Burgundians joined forces, and took and burned the capital city of Toulouse: the famous Visigothic treasure, including that taken by Alaric I from Rome in 410, passed to the Franks. Clovis took Angoulême, Saintes, Bordeaux, and, finally, Tours, and his eldest son, Theoderic, ravaged the Visigothic countryside.
Alaric’s five-year-old son, Amalaric, was saved from the battle, and, after a short interval when Alaric’s bastard but full-grown son Gesalech was king, Amalaric reigned under the protection of Theoderic’s Ostrogothic defender, count Theudis. The possibility of an Ostrogothic regency had rested on the chance of defending Aries, strategic for communications: but Theoderic’s generals defeated the Frankish prince Theoderic at the battle of Arles in 511 and cleared the corridor to Narbonne, now the Visigothic capital. After the great Theoderic’s death in 526, Amalaric’s reign was unfortunate: he married Clovis’s daughter, named, like her mother, Chlotilde, and then desired her to become an Arian; she refused and he maltreated her. In 531, her brother, king Childebert of Paris, raided Septimania, the Gallic province remaining to the Visigoths, took Narbonne and a Visigothic treasure and delivered his sister; Amalaric fled by sea to Barcelona, and was there killed by his own followers.
In 531 count Theudis became king, since the royal race of the Baits was extinct, and ruled for twenty years, which is in itself evidence of the kinship still felt by the two branches of the Gothic race: for he could look for no support from Ostrogothic Italy, now in eclipse. His reign marks the transfer of the centre of Visigothic power to Spain; he had earlier ruled from Narbonne, but his capital was now moved to Barcelona. The Frankish kings Childebert and Lothar in 541 pursued him even into Spain: but though they besieged Saragossa, they could not take it. For his part, Theudis in 543 seized the castle of Septa (Ceuta) from the empire; but he could not keep it. He died at Seville in 548 and had a short-lived successor, Theudegesil, who was assassinated.
The next king, Agila (548–554), made a notable change in Visigothic policy, by giving up the old conception of Visigothic rule of ‘the Gauls’ and concentrating on Spain. So far, the kings had resided at Toulouse, Narbonne or Barcelona, leaving the provincials of Spain under only nominal rule; Agila now moved his capital to Merida on the Guadiana and set about subduing the provincials of the old province of Baetica (Andalusia). But a Catholic revolt followed: he was defeated at Cordova and his son killed.
Agila’s persecution of the Catholics as well as attempt to subjugate the semi-independent Andalusian nobles, inspired a rival, the Visigothic noble Athanagild, to seek military help from Justinian. The Gothic wars in Italy were not going well for the Byzantines: but in 550 Justinian was able to spare a fleet and a very small army, and send them from Sicily to Spain under the patrician Liberius, a very indifferent commander. But the help seems to have been enough: Athanagild defeated Agila at Seville in 554, and when Agila died at Merida that year, Athanagild became king (554–567).
Though Athanagild was the strongest Visigothic king of the sixth century, his reign saw the setting up of a Byzantine province in Spain, the price of Justinian’s help. The province of Baetica, and part of Cartaginiensis, together with the ports of Malaga and Cartagena and the cities of Cordoba and Seville, returned to Roman rule; a magister militum Spaniae was appointed to defend them for the Greeks. Athanagild, pushed out from the south, moved his capital to Toledo, at the heart of central Spain, and this choice of a capital made possible the real penetration of the peninsula by the Visigoths. He may have accepted in some way the suzerainty of the emperor himself, for his coins bear the imperial image; but he maintained a brilliant court at Toledo, fought the Basques with success, pushing them northwards into Navarre, and prevented the Franks from making further gains in Septimania. It was Athanagild’s daughters, Brunhilde and Galswintha, whom the Frankish kings Sigebert of Austrasia and Chilperic of Paris sought in marriage, and who were to involve the Franks in the blood feud between Brunhilde and Fredegund. The future lay with the Frankish kings: but, at the time, the Frankish conquerors and new-comers found honour in these marriage alliances with the senior conquerors of Gaul and with the more cultivated court of Toledo.
The struggle between a pro-Byzantine and a pro-Gothic party among the Visigoths was, however, to continue, finding expression in almost alternate reigns. The pro-Byzantine Athanagild was succeeded in 568 by his two brothers Leova and Leovigild (Liuvigild), both of whom favoured Gothic self-sufficiency and independence. Leova died in 572: and Leovigild’s reign may be reckoned from 568 to 586.
Leovigild desired to rule the whole peninsula, and rule it with Byzantine prestige. He increased the splendour and ceremonial of his court, and struck gold coins in his own name. He had four practical tasks: to push out the Greeks from south Spain; to push the Basques back into the north; to assert his authority over the Sueves of Galicia, and to strengthen his own authority in central Spain over the provincials, to which the opposition of the Catholic bishops was an obstacle. He was not as yet in a position to deal with the Greeks, though they were gradually limited more and more to the coast itself and the ports: in 571 and 572, he took Medina Sidonia (then Assidonia) and Cordoba from the Greeks.
For the next five years he was occupied in dealing with risings of the subject races, and of his own nobles: he fought campaigns over the whole Spanish peninsula. The Sueves of Galicia, under their king Mir (Theodomir), allied with the Cantabrians of the hill country south of the Bay of Biscay: in 569 Leovigild had taken Leon and Zamora from them, but border warfare continued. There were revolts in Cordoba and Toledo assisted by his own nobles, and danger from the Franks in Septimania. In 573 Leovigild gave one of his sons Septimania to rule, and gave another the ‘duchy’ of Toledo. The rebellious Gothic nobles met with very harsh treatment, and their confiscated estates enriched the fisc.
Leovigild’s policy was essentially warlike, and aimed at subjecting the whole peninsula to his rule; but it was complicated by the religious difficulty, and that in his own family, as well as among his subjects. No strong Germanic king had as yet renounced his royal Arianism to accept the emperor’s Catholicism; but in Africa and Italy the old religion of the conquerors had lost the day. Leovigild’s policy to the Catholics was therefore not consistent; he persecuted dangerous Catholic bishops, but later in his reign was driven to find some accommodation with the Catholics.
His two sons, Hermenegild and Recared, had been born of his own marriage with a Byzantine lady, and he married the eldest, Hermenegild, to Ingundis, the daughter of the Spanish princess Brunhilde and king Sigebert. There was again trouble over this lady’s religion, when Athanagild’s widow urged Ingundis to become Arian, and she refused. To avoid domestic disputes, which he was apparently unwilling to settle by royal decree, Leovigild sent off Hermenegild and his wife to live in Seville. But there Hermenegild came under the influence of the most striking Catholic figure in Spain, bishop Leander of Seville, a cultivated ecclesiastic and a notable musician. Hermenegild decided to become Catholic (579) and the population of Andalusia heard the news with joy; but Leovigild was still set on uniting his subjects under the Arian form of Christianity, and wrote forbidding him to take such a step. The king of the Sueves had, meanwhile, taken just this step: and Hermenegild entered into negotiations both with him and the emperor. It looked as if Leovigild would have against him his eldest son, the Sueves, the emperor, the Basques and the Roman provincials.
Arianism and the old king, however, made a last fighting effort to avoid surrender. He desired to make it possible for the Catholic bishops to accept Arianism; he therefore summoned them to a plenary council at Toledo (580). He offered them his grace and favour if they would accept his faith by a laying-on of hands, without a second baptism, which had been exacted before: they might thus turn from what he called the ‘Roman religion’ to the Catholic faith, by which he meant, Arianism. It was a formula of compromise, and some bishops accepted the way out; but most refused, and on them the king launched a fierce persecution. Some bishops and nobles were even put to death, and the Catholic clergy lost their status and privileges.
Leovigild then led successful campaigns against the Sueves and the Basques, winning victories over both, and founding the city of Vitoria to hold down the Basques. Between 581 and 583 he won victories over both the Sueves and the Greeks, and forced Hermenegild to withdraw his forces to the line of the Guadalquivir and Seville. After a two years’ siege, Seville was taken by Leovigild, and Hermenegild was sent from the city that favoured him to Tarragona; there he was repeatedly commanded to abjure, and, on his refusal, slain (585). That year, too, Leovigild made yet another expedition against the Sueves, whose king, Mir, had died in 583; he took Porto and Braga and annexed the kingdom of the Sueves to the Visigothic state. Only against the Franks was he less successful: for they were not willing to accept his vigorous and violent Gothic policy without protest. Hermenegild, they claimed, had died a martyr; the princess Ingundis had died a refugee in Byzantine Africa: Childebert II, Ingundis’ brother, and king Guntram of Burgundy planned revenge. They sent a Frankish fleet to encourage the Sueves to revolt, and the Burgundians invaded Septimania. But the fleet was captured, and the Burgundians driven out by Recared, the king’s second son, though without disaster. Leovigild died in May, 586: he had made an outstanding effort at uniting his subjects by military victory, some show of compromise to get the Arian faith accepted, and personal violence to all who opposed him. His son Recared, who had fought in his campaigns and in whose name he had founded a new city (Recopolis) in Alcaria, was to take the other road to union.
The chief event of Recared’s reign (586–601) was the conversion of the Visigothic nation to Catholicism. Bishop Leander, of noble Roman family from Cartagena, had been involved in royal displeasure over the conversion of Hermenegild, and sailed for refuge to Constantinople; there he had met the apocrysarius, or envoy, Gregory, afterwards to be Gregory I. Both were Latin speakers in a Greek world and both were monks; the two became and remained friends. Leander remained at Constantinople from 579 to 586; the news of Recared’s accession made him return at once to Spain. Bishop Masona of Merida also returned from exile.
Ten months after Recared’s accession the cathedral at Toledo was consecrated with the Catholic rite, on Sunday, 13 April 587. Persecution of the Catholics was remitted, many Arian bishops were converted, and Recared had himself consecrated king with the holy oils by the katholikos of Toledo, a Byzantine proceeding in which, perhaps, Leander’s influence can be traced.
The formal profession of the Catholic faith by the king and the Visigothic nation followed at the III council of Toledo, 589. This assembly of sixty-two bishops and five metropolitans was presided over by the king and attended by the queen and many nobles. After formal debate, the council explicitly renounced Arius and his teaching, the names of the Arian bishops who accepted Catholicism being explicitly recorded, and accepted the definitions of the councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon; indeed, in their anxiety to safeguard the dignity of the Son, they inserted into the creed a novel formula (filioque) concerning his relation to the Holy Ghost; an action the consequences of which were centuries later to prove destructive of the unity of Christendom. The king proposed that the Greek custom should be adopted, by which the whole congregation recited the creed aloud at mass, and this was accepted. The strong Byzantine influence under which this council was held was further shown by the fusion of secular and religious personnel at the council, the secular and religious subjects dealt with, and the royal presidency. The council of Toledo, thus constituted of bishops, royalty, and lay nobles, became the most characteristic part of the Visigothic constitution, and was summoned on many occasions; the canons of the council of Toledo became the civil law of the state.
The fifteen years of Recared’s reign are recorded by Gregory of Tours and Isidore of Seville, Leander’s brother, as fortunate for the kingdom: the military exploits of his father had procured peace, and the subject population were now content; though the pro-Arian, Gothic party were not reconciled. Four years after his conversion, Recared wrote to pope Gregory, informing him that he had embraced the Catholic faith, and sending him a gold chalice adorned with gems; apparently he also requested him to negotiate with the emperor Maurice about the old treaties concerning the Greek cities in Spain. Gregory, for his part, wrote congratulating Recared on having brought so many souls with him to the faith, and sent him a ‘small key’ which had lain upon the body of St Peter, made from fragments of the chains of his imprisonment. He also wrote on the matter of the negotiations with Maurice: some time ago Recared has sent him a message, by means of a young man going to Naples, asking him to request the emperor to have search made in his chancery (cartophylacium), for the pacta made between the prince Justinian (of pious memory) and lawful authority in Spain; and asking that the emperor would have collected from these pacta the points which Recared ought to observe. This, Gregory says, he has not done, for two good reasons: one, because the chancery of Justinian has been injured by fire, so that of the papyri of those times almost nothing remains; and the second, because it would be better to seek evidence about these points in his own records, and send it to Gregory to set forth to the emperor. In any case, the letter of Gregory shows that the remnant of Byzantine power still lingered in Spain.
Recared died in 601, but he was unhappy in his heirs. Leova II, his son, who continued his Catholic policy, lived only till 603, and was dethroned and killed in a rising of the pro-Gothic party led by count Witteric. The latter was elected king in 603, tried to restore Arianism, and was assassinated after a seven years’ attempt to try to reverse his predecessor’s policy. A noble, Gundemar, was in 610 elected king by the Catholics and reigned two years; he fought the Basques, and broke with the Greeks. In 612 he was succeeded by another Catholic noble, Sisebut, according to Isidore of Seville a lettered prince, but as good a general as Leovigild. He fought the Basques, now pushed north of the Pyrenees but anxious to return, and he fought a Byzantine general so successfully that the emperor Heraclius sued for peace; in the treaty that followed, the Byzantines gave up the Mediterranean coast, and were left with only a diminished province in the west, between Gibraltar and the Algarves.
Sisebut’s Catholic policy, or his desire to control the seaports lost by the Byzantines and the merchants who used them, led him to a fierce persecution of the Jews; such Mediterranean trade as existed appears to have been in the hands of Jews, Syrians and Byzantines, and the term ‘Jew’ is often used in contemporary writing as equivalent to ‘merchant’. Since imperial times they had lived in Spain in some numbers. By the Roman law of Alaric II’s Breviarium the Jews could not marry Christians, hold Christian slaves, or fill public office; but they were free to practise their religion and observe the Jewish law; they had their own law courts. Their numbers had increased, for in practice mixed marriages were made, and wealthy Jews both held office and had Christian slaves. The III council of Toledo began a policy of greater severity against them, ordering the children of mixed marriages to be baptized, and Sisebut went further: he ordered all Jews to be baptized, under pain of banishment and the confiscation of their goods. Most of the Jews complied; but the fisc was enriched by the wealth of some thousands who preferred to flee to Gaul.
Sisebut died in 621, and was succeeded by his son, Recared II, who reigned only a few months. The throne was seized from him by duke Swinthila, one of Sisebut’s successful generals; he renewed the policy of military expeditions against the king’s more reluctant subjects, took the remaining district of the Algarves from the Greeks, and firmly drove back the Basques beyond the Pyrenees. All Spain was now ruled in his name; and to secure the rule of his family, he associated with him in the government his wife Theodora, his son Ricimer, and his brother, in the Byzantine manner. This, however, roused the opposition of the nobles, who desired to keep the monarchy elective in their own interest; Sisenand, the governor of Septimania, was able in 631 to ally with the Franks, drive Swinthila from the throne, and make himself king. The IV council of Toledo, c. 631, condemned Swinthila to lose the crown, debarred his family from the succession, and formally proclaimed the monarchy elective at the hands of the nobles and the bishops; it also repeated the canons against the Jews and ordered their children to be taken from them and brought up in the Catholic faith. As the nominee and agent of the council of Toledo, Sisenand ruled in peace till 636. The same policy was pursued by the kings next elected by the council, Chintila and his son Tulga; but opposition was gathering. There was now no question of returning to a vigorous pro-Arian, anti-Byzantine policy as of old, for Arianism had died out and the Greeks had gone; but the lay nobles of the council of Toledo now objected to clerical preponderance and desired a more nationalist policy.
In 642 the lay nobles of the council were strong enough to declare Chindaswinth elected king, and to drive Tulga off to the cloister. Chindaswinth only maintained himself by a vigorous and violent policy that looked back to Leovigild: he and his son Receswinth killed or banished or reduced to slavery some 500 of the nobles who opposed his régime; their families fled, as did certain of the clergy. When Chindaswinth summoned the VII council of Toledo in 646, it was sufficiently overawed to pass a canon excommunicating and confiscating the property of rebels and emigrants, including churchmen who had fled the country. But after this violent beginning, Chindaswinth had a peaceful reign, marked by expeditions against the Basques but by no rebellions; he gave great gifts to churches, and his son succeeded him in 653.
The reign of Receswinth (653–672) was less pitiless, though still harsh, to the Jews, of whom, in spite of all previous repressive measures, there still seems to have been a large number in Spain. The VIII council of Toledo, held in 653, shows that many still observed the rites of their own religion in Spain: when the council refused to take further measures against the unconverted, the king himself, by edict, ordered all apostates from the Christian faith to be stoned or burned alive, or at least, to be liable to this penalty. This measure no doubt had fiscal implications; but the long series of laws against the Jews suggests that the ports of Spain had a population similar to those of the east Mediterranean, and that when this population was no longer protected by Byzantine sovereignty, the Visigoths wished to displace it.
One important step towards the unification of the Visigothic and Roman population was taken by Receswinth in 654, in the issuing of a new legal code, the Liber Judiciorum or Forum Judicum. Whereas the law of Alaric II had forbidden intermarriage, the new code removed the interdict, which had apparently in practice been disregarded from the time of Leovigild. The Forum Judicum was a real legal digest, divided according to subjects into 12 books, 54 titles and 595 articles; it incorporated the judgments of Visigothic kings for two centuries and was meant to be a systematic code, covering all branches of law. Following the precedent of Justinian’s legal reform, supplementary Novels were also issued in the years following 654. The work shows clerical inspiration, but was the first Germanic code to attempt a real fusion of Roman and Germanic law; Latin was made the sole language for the court. This code, and some supplementary laws of Receswinth, deal with conditions in a warm countryside, and also with offences in a land with some trade and some money circulating. Various forms of damage to fruit trees are dealt with, boundary questions, and disputes involving streams, as well as penalties for dangerous dogs and wandering pigs. This code maintained its authority for hundreds of years, and, as the Fuero juezgo, was quoted as a moral authority even by the Musulmans later.
The next king, Wamba, was elected by the nobles at Valladolid, where Receswinth had died, in September 672. He fought the Basques successfully, then heard that duke Paul in Septimania had betrayed him and called in the Franks to help him to secure the crown. Wamba, however, fought his way from Barcelona to Narbonne, Agde and Nîmes, where Paul was holding him. He held a triumphal procession at Toledo in 673, the defeated Paul walking in it, his head shaved.
Meanwhile, however, when the problem of internal unity, apart from succession disputes, seemed in the way of being solved, the Arab danger was beginning to show over the horizon. The Arabs had taken Tangier, and an Arab fleet even appeared to raid the Spanish coast, though it was defeated by a Visigothic squadron. The Visigoths, however, were now long settled and less willing to regard fighting as a normal occupation; Wamba attempted to recruit his army by disallowing certain exemptions of the clergy from military service, and even requiring landowners to arm a tenth of their serfs. Such measures proved unpopular and ineffective, and his attempt to pull up the standard of clerical discipline and abolish strange, semi-pagan corruptions of church rites (e.g. the use of milk instead of wine at the mass) added to his unpopularity. In 680, when he was ill and believed to be dying, his son Erwig tricked his attendants into clothing him in the penitent’s habit for death, and when he recovered, was strong enough to get the council of Toledo to declare this a valid act of abdication and take an oath to him, Flavius Ervigius, as king.
For the next thirty years the growing Arab danger remained unrealized and unshielded. In 687 Erwig was succeeded by a relation of Wamba, Egica, who persecuted the family of his predecessor, and the Jews. The plots of the nobles, and of the archbishop of Toledo, disturbed the reign: in 694, at the XVII council of Toledo, it was complained that the Jews were inviting ‘people from overseas’ into Spain to protect them: the reference may have been to Greeks or, more probably, Arabs. Egica’s son, Witiza, reigned from 700 to 709 or 710, but the records of his reign are lost. Again there was a disputed succession; the ‘senate’, i.e. the council of nobles and bishops, chose Roderick, duke of Baetica; but Roderick’s opponents, Achilla, the son of Witiza, and his followers summoned to their help the Muslims from Africa: two considerable minorities in Spain now looked to foreign deliverance from Visigothic rule.
In 711, the final catastrophe came with a suddenness surprising to the attackers and the attacked. No order to conquer Spain was given by the caliph, and even though Tarik, the leader of the Muslims, was the lieutenant of Musa, the governor of Mauretania, it is very doubtful if Musa regarded the expedition as more than a raid. The fact that the invaders were summoned seems evidenced by the fact that the partisans of Achilla fought with the Muslims, and it would seem that the Visigoths themselves and king Roderick at first regarded the war as a party struggle. Tarik had brought a fairly large force of Muslim troops, and he took Gibraltar and the neighbouring cities with no great difficulty; Roderick was away in the north, fighting the Franks and the Basques. On hearing the news of Tarik’s success, he collected a large army and marched to meet him, and on 19 July 711, the two armies met on the shores of lake Janda, between Medina Sidonia and the town of Jerez de la Frontera, in the province of Cadiz. Part of the Visigothic army, unrecognized partisans of Achilla, deserted to the Muslims; bishop Oppas was among them, and Sisebert, a relation of Witiza. Alternate rule by different families of nobles seems to have destroyed the Visigothic state, and as yet there was no popular resistance to the Muslims. They took Seville, Cordoba, and finally Toledo: the Visigothic capital city was to become their own. The campaign was not yet fought out, however: king Roderick rallied his army and advanced to threaten Tarik in Toledo. The governor Musa was asked to bring reinforcements, and he brought a large army and took Merida and other strongholds, in 712; the Jews in the town welcomed the Arab victors.
So far, the Muslims appear to have been regarded as the allies of Achilla’s party; now, however, with Arab conquest possible, Musa began to act as the vicegerent of the caliph, conquering the country for Islam. He now had to deal with a popular, though not well armed or well led, resistance: and he needed to deal with Roderick, now holding out in the wild, mountainous country on the borders of Galicia. There he pursued him, and at Segoyuela, in the province of Salamanca, in September 713, he fought Roderick and defeated him; in all probability, Roderick was killed in battle. Musa marched to Toledo, proclaimed the caliph (of Damascus) as sovereign, restored his estates and residence at Toledo to Achilla, and gave the archbishopric of Toledo to Oppas. Intermarriage of some of Achilla’s supporters with the Muslims followed, and helped to establish the Muslim régime in Cordoba.
In assessing the causes of the Visigothic collapse the relatively small numbers of the Germanic ruling caste must have counted, as in all the new kingdoms except that of the Franks; but a more important cause was the failure to make Germanic kingship prevail over the nobles. The church, standing for peace and order on the Byzantine model, was usually ready to support a king who wished to secure the succession to his sons; but the nobles wished to keep the monarchy elective in their own interest. The council of Toledo usually made the decision in particular cases.
This characteristic feature of the Visigothic constitution, the council of Toledo, needs to be understood in a Byzantine context, rather than as an Anglo-Saxon witan (which did include such bishops as the king summoned as well as the nobles), or as a normal church synod in the Latin west. The king alone summoned the council of Toledo and he alone appointed and could dispossess the bishops who attended it; the lay element consisted of the palace officials, all men of ‘magnificent and noble rank’. On ecclesiastical matters, the bishops (with, later, the vicars and abbots who attended) alone debated and passed canonical decrees; on secular matters, it would seem, the lay lords exercised their function of giving counsel to the king; but all decrees of the council were equally binding.
It is notable that when the Visigoths accepted Catholicism at the third council of Toledo in 589, under the influence of Leander, the archbishop of Toledo (as also the archbishop of Merida) was termed katholikos. In Persia, outside the Roman empire, the church of Seleukia-Ctesiphon was a great missionary church, a patriarchate in all but name, and in 410 the bishop of Seleukia-Ctesiphon had formally adopted this title of katholikos. The term was used to imply autocephalous primacy, the metropolitan in question having, among other privileges, the right of consecrating all bishops dependent upon him, whatever their rank. The term was sometimes used much later of certain patriarchs and metropolitans in the Greek east; wherever it was used, in addition to its canonical implications, it carried the connotation of primacy within a national church, of the ecclesiastical leadership in a society with a highly developed consciousness of the intimate inter-relation between ‘church’ and ‘state’. To the sixth- and seventh-century Visigoth, thinking of kingship and the church in Byzantine terms, there was nothing strange in the fusion of secular and sacred legislation and jurisdiction in the council of Toledo.
There is no Visigothic historian of the same stature as Cassiodorus and Gregory of Tours; although Gregory, and Cassiodorus’ epitomist, Jordanes, refer to Visigothic history, it is not, to them, the subject of primary interest. The figure who dominates the history of learning in Visigothic Spain is Isidore of Seville, and here again, though interested in the early history of his country as in everything else, it is with this limitation: Isidore was not primarily a historian. The family of Isidore of Seville, flourishing at the time of Recared’s conversion to Catholicism, and the figure of Martin of Braga, the canonist of the Sueves, stand out in the late sixth century as agents of the transmission of the Roman and Christian heritage.
Leander, Isidore, Fulgentius and Florentina were the children of Severianus, a noble of Roman birth in the province of Carthage; Severianus however died and the family moved to Seville. The three sons all became bishops, Leander of Seville from 579 to c. 600, Isidore from c. 600 to 636, and Fulgentius of Astigi, in the province of Seville, from c. 600 to c. 633. The sister Florentina became an abbess, and Leander wrote for her a rule, De Institutione Virginum. Leander, in addition to his intervention in politics in the reigns of Leovigild and Recared, appears to have cherished ecclesiastical learning in his household school at Seville, and particularly the study of Greek music. His brother Isidore wrote of him in his De Viris Illustribus, that he ‘was by profession a monk, and as monk made bishop of the province of Baetica in the Spanish church. He was of eloquent speech and an industrious preacher and writer against the Arians, and laboured at the ecclesiastical offices; he wrote prayers for the whole psalter … and in the sacrifice (the mass) also, with lauds and psalms he composed much that was sweet sounding (multa dulci sono).’
So little is known of Isidore’s career, beyond his attendance at, or presiding over certain church councils, that it may be inferred that he intervened little in politics. He devoted himself to learning and won a great reputation even in his own day. His pupil Braulio, bishop of Saragossa, wrote of him that:
God raised him up in recent times after the many reverses of Spain (I suppose to revive the works of the ancients that we might not grow continually duller from boorish rusticity), and set him as a kind of support. And with good right do we apply to him the words of the philosopher (Cicero): While we were strangers in our own city and, so to speak, strangers who had lost our way, your books brought us home, as it were, so that we could at last recognize who and where we were. You have discussed the antiquity of our fatherland, the orderly arrangement of chronology, the laws of sacrifices and of priests, the discipline of the home and the state, the situation of regions and places, the names, kinds, functions and causes of all things human and divine.
Braulio, in his introduction to the works of Isidore, proceeds to give a list of these works, with comments, and they included a Proœmia, a De Ortu et Obitu Patrum, a book on the Officia (addressed to his brother Fulgentius), a Synonyma, the De Natura Rerum, the De numeris (not on arithmetic but the mystical properties of numbers), the De Nominibus Legis et Evangeliorum, the De Haeresibus, the Sententiae (a treatise on Christian doctrine and morals owing much to the Moralia of Gregory the Great), the Chronica, the Contra Judaeos, the De Viribus Illustribus, the De Origine Gothorum et Regno Suevorum et etiam Vandalorum Historia, the Quaestiones, and the Etymologies, ‘a vast book’, says Braulio, ‘which he left unfinished, and which I have divided into twenty books, since he wrote it at my request. There is an exceeding elegance in his treatment of the different arts in this work, in which he has gathered well nigh everything that ought to be known.’
Turning to Isidoras’ historical work first: Isidore lived when dating by the years of the consuls had necessarily dropped out of use in the west, and when general knowledge of Dionysius Exiguus’ dating by the era of the Incarnation was still long ahead; he had therefore to depend on such chronological apparatus as the comparative tables of Eusebius, latinized by Jerome, and the like. He apparently made for himself his own tables of this kind, commonly known as Chronica, making his short tractate run, in a single book, from the creation of the world to the times of the emperor Heraclius and king Sisebut (c. 616). His Chronica thus is a piece of apparatus rather than a history. His history of the Goths and Vandals begins unfortunately by stating that the Goths, a people of undoubted antiquity, ‘are suspected of deriving their origin from Magog, son of Japhet, from the similarity of the last syllable’, though some scholars call them Geticae. Towards the end of the history, however, having apparently read another source, he connects the origin of the Goths more reasonably with the Scythians. The book is short, though valuable when it deals with Isidore’s own day; it reaches Alaric’s sack of Rome very swiftly, deals briefly with each Visigothic king till Leovigild, of whom he has more to say. Leovigild was a very fierce Arian, forcing even bishops to apostatize by accepting re-baptism; he filled the fisc with his confiscations and had to build a special aerarium for the spoils of the persecuted nobles; whereas all Gothic kings before him had worn a common dress with their nobles and sat among them in council as one of themselves, he for the first time wore the (Byzantine) ceremonial robes and sat upon a throne. He has similarly much to say of the mildness, liberality and kindness of Recared.
Isidore’s influence on the learning of medieval Europe was exerted through his twenty books of Etymologies, and that, apparently, for two reasons. Though it is a far less learned work than those of Cassiodorus and Boethius, it covers a much wider field, and it is systematically arranged by subjects, with a very brief exposition of each subject, amounting sometimes only to a single line (e.g. under De Habitaculis: Habitatio ab habendo voc ta, ut habitare casas; Cella dicta, quod nos occultet et celet, etc.). In days when books had no indexes, or tables of contents, it was easy to consult a treatise which dealt thus with subjects and categories of objects; if you wished to look up aratrum, you would expect to find it in book XX, under the heading De instrumentis domesticis et rusticis. You would learn very little about aratrum when found, except that it had a share, a vomer, so called because it made the earth to vomit, and that the dentale was the front part of the aratrum, in which the share ended as in a dens.
Isidore in his Etymologies follows the method and subject matter of a succession of Roman encyclopedists, Varro, Verrius Flaccus, the elder Pliny, Suetonius, Pompeius Festus, Nonius Marcellus, and others. Whereas Cassiodorus and Boethius had limited themselves to the exposition of the liberal arts, Isidore, though he treats of the liberal arts, goes much farther afield. He used, apparently, only Latin authorities, but his Latin authors had dealt with subjects of natural history, medicine, biology, etc., first studied with a Greek curiosity and desire of knowledge for its own sake, and not for its use in the formation of character, even of free men. The great merit of Isidore’s work for the transmission of the classical heritage to the middle ages was that he took it for granted men wanted to know, not only the whole field of knowledge necessary for bishops and clerics, not only about abstract subjects like the various branches of mathematics, but about medicine and buildings and animals, worms and fishes and dragons, rocks and precious metals, weights and measures and the proper names of trees, cucumbers and why they are sometimes bitter, and the whole business of how, in Isidore’s day, things got done. It is true that the information was in snippets, epitomes of what earlier writers had said, and it is true that the information was often at fault and frequently so grotesque as to be absurd: Isidore used no critical faculty on his miscellaneous sources and he frequently guessed and guessed wrong: but he kept alive interest in a wider field of knowledge than the liberal arts. This can be seen from the contents of his twenty books, covering grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, medicine, law, chronology, theology, human anatomy and physiology, zoology, cosmography and physical geography, architecture and surveying, mineralogy, agriculture and military science.
The one leading principle in the Etymologies, which contributed not a little to its fund of errors, and yet was vital to the arrangement and succinctness that made the work so usable, was Isidore’s belief that the road to knowledge lay through the origins of words. By supplying their etymology he hoped to explain the thing they stood for; he did not, for instance, write a treatise on architecture, but devoted a chapter to buildings, and in it explained the origins of different parts of buildings. He frequently got his etymologies wrong: Fanum, for instance, is not derived from the fauns for whom men built temples, as he says; but that was incidental to Isidore’s almost complete ignorance of philology, at that day no hindrance to his popularity.
Isidore’s work sprang from Visigothic Andalusia: that of Martin of Braga, his slightly earlier contemporary, from the remote kingdom of the Sueves. Here, while it was still part of the Roman province, and while Christianity was still very young, the Priscillianist heresy had disputed the day with orthodoxy. The Priscillianists held the ‘heresy of ascesis’ a reverence for east Mediterranean monastic practice that belittled the apostolic work of priests, combined with the claim to add certain apocryphal sentences and interpretations to the text of scripture. On this church of Galicia and the Cantabrian hills, the focus of Priscillianist teaching long after its official condemnation, the Sueves imposed their Arianism, and the three religious forms, the old Priscillianist still active in the north-east of the kingdom, orthodoxy, and the Arianism of the court, struggled with the old gods and goddesses of the countryside.
The conversion of the king and kingdom to Catholicism was accomplished in 560 by Martin, bishop of Braga (Bracara). He was, like his namesake, St Martin, a Pannonian; he had taken the monastic habit in Palestine, and come as a missionary ad portum Galiciae; he was soon made abbot of Dumio (near Braga) and bishop of Braga. Gregory of Tours calls him one of the most learned men of his day. He converted king Mir to Catholicism in 560, and in 563 the Sueves by synod accepted the faith; in 579 Martin presided as archbishop of Braga, the capital of the Sueves.
Martin’s most important work was the small collection of canons, about bishops, clerks and laity, which he drew up for the use of his own church (see p. 72). He wrote also, for king Mir, a Formula Vitae Honestis, echoing the teaching of Seneca, and stressing the four cardinal virtues of prudence, magnanimity, temperance and justice. He translated from the Greek for his monks the Ægyptiorum patrum sententiae et verba seniorum, and he wrote for his brother bishop Polemius a long sermon De Correctione Rusticorum.
This tract is of considerable interest, not only as indicating a Suevish bishop’s difficulties with his rustic pagani, but as affording a picture of the tenacity with which the Latin cults, of the Olympic deities and of the countryside, still kept their hold of western Europe at the end of the sixth century. There is, apparently, no reference in the tractate to the Germanic gods of the invaders, or their cults; unless a charge that rustics pour on heathen altars the blood, not only of beasts, but of men, hints at some dark Germanic or Celtic rite. For the most part, the practices blamed are clearly connected with classical paganism, or eastern incantations, and involve no blood shedding. Martin begins by explaining to his ‘beloved sons’, that God created all things, including certain spiritual beings, one of whom fell and lost his glory and became ‘a dark and horrible devil’. Some of the angels followed him, and they became ‘demons’. Such demons showed themselves to men under various forms, demanding that sacrifice should be offered to them on high mountains or in leafy woods: they took the names Jove, Juno, Minerva, Venus, Mars, Mercury, Saturn and the rest. Mercury, the inventor of thefts and deceits, is worshipped by men greedy for gold, and in passing a cross road, they cast a stone in sacrifice upon the heap there raised. And ignorant rustic people worship these gods with sacrifices, and also those of the fallen spirits who preside over the sea, or rivers, or streams, or woods: in the springs, they are called nymphs, and in the woods lamiae. It is shocking that the very days of the week are named after these demons: dies Martis, dies Mercurii, etc., and yet these demons never made a day at all: God made the light and the dark and the day and the week.
Martin then attacks the superstitious practices of his ‘beloved children’. They keep the Kalends, believing falsely that it is the beginning of the year: a miserable man thinks that he will pass the whole year according to the beginning, and that therefore he must leap and rejoice on New Year’s Day; and he reckons that he will be very unlucky if he doesn’t, secretly or openly. And even more unbecoming is it to Christian men, and very stupid, to keep the festival of ‘moth and mice’ (the days when Tellus and Ceres were venerated to keep the crops and household stuff from harmful creatures). Yet Christians think that if, at this season, moth and mice are not venerated by putting outside cask or coffer or bread or cloth, they will not spare what they find within!
Martin then recalls to them the solemnities of their baptism. ‘When you were given a name at the font, perhaps John or Peter or some other name, you were, you remember, questioned by the sacerdos: “How will you be called?” Then you answered, if you could answer, or indeed, he who was your sponsor, he who lifted you up from the font said, perhaps: “He is called John.” And the sacerdos questioned you: “John! Do you renounce the devil and his angels, his worship and his idols, his thefts and deceits, his fornication and drunkenness, and all his works: do you renounce them?” And you answered: “I renounce them.”
‘You have made a pact with God, beloved, and you break it if you return to the worship of devils. For what else than the worship of devils is the cult of trees, of springs, of burning candles at a cross road? What are divinations and auguries and keeping the Vulcanalia and the Kalends and adorning tables and decking with laurels? What are taking omens from footsteps and putting fruit and wine on the hearth and bread in the spring? Women who weave call upon Minerva, and invoke Venus at weddings and when they go out on the public way: and what else is this but to worship devils? And to make incantations with herbs and utter the names of demons: what else is this but the worship of the devil?’
Finally, Martin deplores the slackness of his country parishioners in keeping Sunday, a day when the pagans so zealously worship Jove. ‘You ought to keep Sunday: and if you go out on that day, it should be for some holy purpose, to visit holy places, or visit a brother or a friend, or console the sick or those in trouble or bear help in some good cause. That is how a Christian man should keep Sunday.’
Martin’s discourse has a ring as of a Victorian vicar preaching in an English village church: but it is an authentic voice from sixth-century Visigothic Spain. In the end, the pagan Olympians were driven from the countryside to the constellations of the night sky; but the witches, the herb magic, the bee charms—it took long before they left the countryside; if they have.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
For the political history, in addition to the standard general works, see H. M. Leclercq, L’Espagne chrétienne; F. Dahn, Die könige der Germanen, tom, v, 1861–1911; A. K. Ziegler, Church and State in Visigothic Spain; R. Menendez Pidal, Historia de Espana, vol. 3, 1935; W. Reinhart,
Mission Historica de los Visigodos, Segovia, 1954. For administrative history, see P. Goubert, ‘L’administration de l’Espagne byzantine’, in Études Byzantines, tom. 3: also Études Byzantines, tom. 2 (1944). For Visigothic art and archaeology, N. Åberg, Die Franken und Westgothen in der volkerwanderungszeit, Uppsala, 1922. For Visigothic learning, W. M. Lindsay, Isidori Etymologiae, and E. Bréhaut, An Encyclopaedist of the Dark Ages: Isidore of Seville, 1912 (Columbia Univ. Studies, vol. 48), and C. P. Caspari, Martin von Bracara’s schrift: De correctione rusticorum, 1883, and for a new edition of his works, C. W. Barlow, Martini Episcopi Bracarensis opera omnia, Yale, 1950.