Gallia Aquitania

Split off by Augustus in 27 BCE to cover the region between the Loire and the Pyrenees, home to the Aquitani -- a people Julius Caesar described as ethnically distinct from the Celtic Gauls to their north. In 418 CE Rome settled the Visigoths here as federated allies (foederati), and Aquitania became the core of the independent Visigothic Kingdom of Toulouse once imperial authority in Gaul finally gave way. The province's fertile lowlands and Atlantic and Garonne river trade made it one of Gaul's most productive wine-growing regions, and its capital Burdigala (Bordeaux) became a major port shipping Aquitanian wine throughout the western empire. The poet and tutor Ausonius, a native of Burdigala, became one of the last great voices of classical Latin literature in the West, serving as tutor to a future emperor before retiring to write verse celebrating his native province's rivers and vineyards. Aquitania avoided most of the 3rd-century military crises that battered Gaul's northern and eastern provinces, giving it a reputation as a relatively peaceful, prosperous backwater even as the empire's frontiers elsewhere buckled. The Visigothic settlement of 418 was framed as a treaty granting land to allied troops rather than an outright loss of territory, but it effectively transferred sovereignty, and within decades Toulouse-based Visigothic kings ruled the province in all but name.

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