Visigothic Kingdom

The Gothic state that sacked Rome, then settled down and wrote law books. The Visigoths crossed the Danube in 376 fleeing the Huns, destroyed a Roman army and killed the emperor Valens at Adrianople in 378, and under Alaric took Rome itself in 410 - the first capture of the city in eight hundred years, and a shock that prompted Augustine to write the City of God. They were then settled in Aquitaine as Roman allies and built a kingdom in southern Gaul until Clovis and the Franks broke it at Vouille in 507, pushing them into Spain, where they ruled from Toledo for two centuries. The kingdom's central problem was religious: the Goths were Arian Christians governing a Nicene Roman population, a division resolved only when Reccared converted in 589. Its distinctive achievement was legal. The Liber Iudiciorum, promulgated in 654, abolished the separate laws for Goths and Romans and applied one code to everyone, an unusual step for the period, and it remained in use in Christian Spain for centuries afterwards. Its councils at Toledo also legislated harshly against Jews. Disputed successions were chronic, and a civil war left the kingdom fatally divided when Muslim forces crossed from Africa in 711. Roderic died at the Guadalete and the kingdom collapsed within a few years. Toledo remained the ecclesiastical primatial see of Spain afterwards. Their votive crowns from the Guarrazar treasure are in Madrid and Paris. Isidore of Seville, writing under their rule, compiled the Etymologiae, the most copied reference work of the middle ages. Gothic ancestry was later claimed by Spanish nobility as proof of pure descent.

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