Roderic

Roderic was the last king of the Visigoths and reigned for about a year before losing his kingdom, his army and his life to an invasion he had a few weeks' warning of. He was Duke of Baetica and came to the throne in 710 by election or by coup depending on the source, against the sons of his predecessor Wittiza, who never accepted it. Visigothic Spain was an elective monarchy in principle and a contested one in practice, and it had spent the seventh century in civil wars between noble factions and in increasingly severe persecution of its Jewish population, both of which left it without much willingness to fight for any particular king. He was campaigning against the Basques in the north when word came that a force had landed at Gibraltar. He marched the length of the peninsula and met Tariq ibn Ziyad near the Guadalete in July 711 with an army probably larger than the one opposite. It disintegrated. The wings, commanded by Wittiza's relatives, are generally said to have withdrawn or gone over, calculating that a raid would leave and Roderic would not. They were wrong about the raid. Roderic vanished in the rout and no body was identified, which produced centuries of legend in which he survives as a penitent hermit. Within four years almost the whole peninsula was under Muslim rule. The Christian legend that he provoked the invasion by seducing the daughter of Count Julian, the man who supplied the ships, is later and unverifiable, and served the useful purpose of explaining a catastrophe by a sin.

• Lived: 680 CE – 711 CE
• Nationality: Visigothic
• Roles: monarch, military_leader