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A member of the western Goths that invaded the Roman Empire in the fourth century A.D. and settled in France and Spain, establishing a monarchy that lasted until the early eighth century.
[Late Latin Visigothī, the Visigoths.]
Visigothic Vis'i·goth'ic adj.For more information on Visigoth, visit Britannica.com.
Visigoths, i.e. west Goths, a Germanic tribe which in the late third century AD occupied Dacia, north of the Danube. They were driven across that river by the Huns in 376, and in 378 they killed the Roman emperor Valens at the great battle of Adrianople. After devastating Greece they invaded Italy in 401 under their leader Alaric and again in 403, but were driven back. In 410, however, they sacked Rome itself; it was the first occasion the city had been entered by an enemy since the Gallic invasion of 390 BC. Later they moved to Gaul and Spain. In the sixth century most of those in Gaul were driven out and retreated to Spain. There the Visigothic kingdom survived until it was overrun by the Arabs in 711. In the fourth century the Visigoths were converted to Arian Christianity, and became Catholics in the late sixth century. See FALL OF ROME.
In the Roman Empire
By the 4th cent. the Visigoths were at the borders of the East Roman Empire, raiding across the Danube River, and peacefully infiltrating the trans-Danubian provinces. Constantine I was troubled by the Visigoths, but they became a real menace only after the middle of the 4th cent. At that time groups of Visigoths had settled in Dacia as agriculturalists, and many had accepted Arian Christianity (see Arianism), partly as a result of the work of Ulfilas. About 364 a group of Visigoths devastated Thrace, and punitive measures were undertaken against them. They were also involved in the revolt (366) of Procopius.
Until 369 Emperor Valens waged war successfully against the Visigoths, who were led by Athanaric. Athanaric asserted his supremacy over Fritigern, a rival Visigothic leader who then retired into the Roman Empire and obtained Roman aid against Athanaric. However, the internal affairs of the Goths became of secondary importance to the invasion (c.375) of their lands by the Huns. Athanaric retired to Transylvania, and the majority of the Visigoths joined Fritigern and fled (376) into the empire. Subjected to oppressive measures by Roman officials, these Visigothic settlers soon rose in revolt. Opposed by Emperor Valens at Adrianople in 378, the Goths won a decisive victory. They then swept across the upper Balkan Peninsula and ravaged Thrace. Theodosius I immediately took up arms against them. In 382 peace was finally concluded, and the Goths under Athanaric were settled in Thrace. Friction, however, continued.
In 395, after the death of Theodosius I, the Visigothic troops in Roman service proclaimed Alaric I their leader; under his strong guidance they first developed the concept of kingship. Alaric led a revolt in the Balkan Peninsula but was checked by Stilicho. In 401 Alaric began his attacks on Italy; he was halted by Stilicho, but after Stilicho's death he succeeded in his invasion, and the Visigoths became masters of Italy. Negotiations between Alaric and Emperor Honorius failed, and in 410 the Visigoths sacked Rome. Alaric died soon afterward.
In Spain
Under Ataulf the Visigoths left (412) Italy and went into S Gaul and N Spain. They increased their territories in Spain (which was evacuated by the Vandals), acquired Aquitaine, and extended their influence to the Loire valley, making Toulouse their capital. The height of Visigothic power was reached under Euric (466–84), who completed the conquest of Spain. In 507, Alaric II was defeated at Vouillé by the Franks under Clovis, to whom he lost nearly all his possessions N of the Pyrenees. Toledo became the new Visigothic capital, and the history of the Visigoths became essentially that of Spain.
Weakened by warfare with the Franks and the Basques and by Byzantine penetration in S Spain, the kingdom recovered its vigor in the late 6th cent. under Leovigild and under Recared, whose conversion to Catholicism facilitated the fusion of the Visigothic and the Hispano-Roman populations of Spain. King Recceswinth imposed (c.654) a Visigothic common law on both his Gothic and his Roman subjects, who previously had lived under different codes (see Germanic laws). The church councils of Toledo became the main force in the government, and the royal power was weakened accordingly.
King Wamba, who succeeded Recceswinth, was deposed after a civil war, and thereafter the kingdom was torn by civil strife. When the last king, Roderick, seized the throne, his rivals appealed to the Muslim leader Tarik ibn Ziyad, whose victory (711) in a battle near Medina Sidonia ended the Visigothic kingdom and inaugurated the Moorish period in the history of Spain.
Bibliography
See T. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. I–III (2d ed. 1892–96, repr. 1967); E. A. Thompson, The Goths in Spain (1969); A. Barbero, The Day of the Barbarians (2007).
The Visigoths (Western Goths) were one of two main branches of the Goths, an East Germanic tribe (the Ostrogoths being the other). Together these tribes were among the loosely-termed Germanic peoples who disturbed the late Roman Empire during the Migration Period.
Most famously, 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.
Jordanes identified the early 5th to early 6th-century Visigothic kings (from Alaric I to Alaric II) as the heirs of the 4th-century Therving kings (to Athanaric), and identified the late 5th to early 6th-century Ostrogothic kings (from Theodoric the Great to Theodahad) as the heirs of the 4th-century Greuthung kings (to Ermanaric). Jordanes therefore identifies the earlier Thervings with the later Visigoths and the earlier Greuthungs with the later Ostrogoths.[1]
Some recent historians (notably Herwig Wolfram) also identify the earlier Thervings with the later Visigoths, but most recent scholars (notably Peter Heather) argue that Visigothic group identity emerged within the Roman Empire.[2]
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The factual accuracy of this section is disputed. Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page |
The naming of this people is problematic. A eulogy of Emperor Maximian (285-305), delivered some time shortly after 291 and traditionally ascribed to Claudius Mamertinus,[3] says that the "Tervingi, another division of the Goths" (Tervingi pars alia Gothorum) joined with a band called here 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] But about a hundred years later the term Vesi appears to be applied to the same people.[dubious ] Correspondingly, the other branch[dubious ] was originally called Greutungi (compare Jordanes' Evagreotingi, i.e. Island Greotingi in Scandza), but this[dubious ] was soon replaced by Ostrogothi ("gleaming goths").[citation needed] The Visigoths are called simply Wesi or Wisi by Trebellius Pollio, Claudian and Apollinaris Sidonius. [5] The term Vesi or Visi came from Gothic Wisi, Wesi "the noble people", similar to Gothic iusiza "better".[6]
By the 5th century,[citation needed] the two main branches were known as Vesi and Ostrogothi. When Cassiodorus wrote the history of the gothic peoples in the early sixth century, he interpreted Ostrogothi as "East Goths" and invented the term Visigothi to denote "West Goths." There was some logic in this invention, since, at the time, the Vesi ruled the Iberian Peninsula and the Ostrogothi parts of Italy. This usage has continued to this day, though since the 1970s, modern historians have started to use the contemporary terms instead of Cassiodorus' interpretations.
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.
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 troups 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.
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, small areas controlled by the Basques and the southern Mediterranean coast (a Byzantine province).
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 closely allied to the Ostrogoths under Theodoric the Great.
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.
The Visigothic Code of Law (forum judicum), which had been part of aristocratic oral tradition, was set in writing in the early 7th century— and survives in two separate codices preserved at the Escorial. It goes into more detail than a modern constitution commonly does and reveals a great deal about Visigothic social structure.
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.[7] 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.
These kings and leaders, with the exception of Fritigern, and the possible exception of Alavivus, were pagans.
These kings were Arians, but they tended to succeed their fathers or close relatives on the throne and thus constitute a dynasty.
The Visigothic monarchy took on a completely elective character with the fall of the Balts, but the monarchy remained Arian until Reccared converted in 587. Only a few sons succeeded fathers in this succession.
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.
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Copyrights:
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Classical Literature Companion. The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. Copyright © 1993, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ Read more |
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| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Visigoths". Read more |
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