Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  Once Visigothic rule was established, the kingdom expanded dramati-cally. Acquisitions were made in almost every decade of the fifth century. The conquest of Narbo Martius (Narbonne) in 436 provided direct access to the Mediterranean. The whole of Septimania followed later by gift of the imperial authorities. In the aftermath of the mid-century irruption of the Huns, the Visigoths roamed far to the north, well beyond the Loire, and in 470 they surged into central Gaul, incorporating both Civitas Turonum (Tours) and Arvernis (Clermont). After that, they took possession of Arelate (Arles) and Massilia (Marseille), and, during a systematic campaign of conquest in Iberia, reached the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar). From 474, a Roman in the Visigothic service, Vincentius, ruled as the king’s deputy in Iberia with the title of dux hispaniarum. By the turn of the century, they controlled the largest of all the states in the post-Roman West, and looked set to become the principal winner among the Empire’s barbarian predators.

  Theodoric I, or Theodorid (r. 419–51), was blessed with numerous sons and daughters, and used them to found an elaborate network of dynastic alliances. But he is best remembered both by contemporary chroniclers and by later historians for his valiant part in the repulse of Attila’s Huns. He perished as a faithful ally of the imperial general, Flavius Aetius, leading his warriors in June 451 into the bloody fray of the Catalaunian Fields* which preserved Gaul from the most terrible horsemen of the steppes.13 He was succeeded in turn by three of his sons.

  According to Gibbon, Thorismund (r. 451–3) had played the key role in the victory where his father perished, holding his forces in reserve on the nearby heights until he swept down and drove the Huns from the field. The victory brought him little reward. He was murdered by his brother Theodoric before his power could be consolidated, reputedly for threatening to break with the Roman alliance.

  Theodoric II (r. 453–66), has enlivened the historical record partly through the colourful name of his wife, Queen Pedauco – meaning ‘Goose Foot’ – and partly through a rare eyewitness description of him by the Latin writer Sidonius Apollinaris. Sidonius (432–88) was bishop of Arvernis, and hence a subject of the Visigoths. One of his surviving letters answered a request from a friend to describe the king in detail:

  Well, he is a man worth knowing… He is well set up, in height above the average man, but below the giant. His head is round, with curled hair retreating… His nervous neck is free from disfiguring knots. The eyebrows are bushy and arched; when the lids droop, the lashes reach almost half-way down the cheeks. The upper ears are buried under overlying locks, after the fashion of his race. The nose is finely aquiline; the lips are thin and not [unduly] enlarged… Every day the hair springing from his nostrils is cut back;… and his barber is assiduous in eradicating the rich growth on the lower part of the face. Chin, throat, and neck are full, but not fat, and all of fair complexion… they often flush, but from modesty, and not from anger. His shoulders are smooth, the upper- and forearms strong and hard; hands broad, breast prominent; waist receding. The spine dividing the broad expanse of back does not project, and you can see the spring of the ribs; the sides swell with salient muscle, the well-girt flanks are full of vigour. His thighs are like hard horn; the knee-joints firm and masculine; the knees themselves the comeliest and least wrinkled in the world. A full ankle supports the leg, and the foot is small to bear such mighty limbs.

  … Before daybreak he goes with a very small suite to attend the service of his priests. He prays with assiduity, but… one may suspect more of habit than conviction in his piety. Administrative duties… take up the rest of the morning. Armed nobles stand about the royal seat; the mass of guards in their garb of skins are… kept at the threshold… [F]oreign envoys are introduced. The king hears them out, and says little;… but accelerates matters ripe for dispatch. The second hour arrives; he rises from the throne to inspect his treasure-chamber or stable.

  The bishop, clearly an admirer, warms to the task:

  If the chase is the order of the day, he joins it, but never carries his bow at his side, considering this derogatory to royal state. When a bird or beast is marked for him… he puts his hand behind his back and takes the bow from a page with the string all hanging loose… He will ask you beforehand what you would like him to transfix; you choose, and he hits. If there is a miss… your vision will mostly be at fault, and not the archer’s skill.

  On ordinary days, his table resembles that of a private person. The board does not groan beneath a mass of dull and unpolished silver set on by panting servitors; the weight lies rather in the conversation than in the plate; there is either sensible talk or none. The hangings and draperies… are sometimes of purple silk, sometimes only of linen; art, not costliness, commends the fare… Toasts are few… In short, you will find the elegance of Greece, the good cheer of Gaul, Italian nimbleness… and everywhere the discipline of a king’s house… The siesta after dinner is… sometimes intermitted. When inclined for the board-game, he is quick to gather up the dice, examines them with care, shakes the box with expert hand, throws rapidly, humorously apostrophizes them, and patiently waits the issue. Silent at a good throw, he makes merry over a bad [one]… always the philosopher… Sometimes, though this is rare, supper is enlivened by sallies of mimes, but no guest is ever exposed to the wound of a biting tongue. Withal there is no noise of hydraulic organ, or choir with its conductor intoning a set piece; you will hear no players of lyre or flute, no master of the music, no girls with cithara or tabor; the king cares for no strains but those which no less charm the mind with virtue than the ear with melody. When he rises to withdraw, the treasury watch begins its vigil; armed sentries stand on guard during the first hours of slumber… I must stay my pen; you asked for nothing more than one or two facts… and my own aim was to write a letter, not a history. Farewell.14

  Theodoric II’s reign came to grief through the vagaries of imperial politics. In 455, the newly appointed Roman commander in Gaul, Eparchius Avitus, visited Tolosa. News arrived during his visit that Rome had been sacked for a second time, by the Vandals; and Theodoric seized the opportunity to proclaim Avitus emperor. He then conducted the first of the Visigoths’ incursions into Iberia, justifying his conquests as the recovery of imperial land. His claims did not convince the next emperor, Majorian, described by Gibbon as ‘a great and heroic character’, who briefly reasserted imperial authority in Gaul with energy.

  Theodoric’s younger brother, Euric (or Evaric or Erwig, r. 466–84), seized power in the midst of military conflicts involving not only Visigoths and imperial forces but also a number of Visigothic factions. He killed his brother, defeated a rampaging Celtic warlord, Riothamus, recrossed the Pyrenees and settled a body of Ostrogothic mercenaries from Roman service in his lands. Lawgiver as well as warrior chief, he turned out to be the most rounded personality of his House. Though familiar with Latin, he usually spoke to foreign envoys in Gothic through an interpreter. The Arian services of his royal chapel were also conducted in Gothic. He extended his realms right across Iberia. The Codex Euricianus of 471 was the first attempt in the post-Roman world to commit a summary of customary Germanic laws to writing.15 It was a sign of political maturity. In 476, Euric persuaded the penultimate emperor of the West, Julius Nepos, to relinquish even nominal Roman suzerainty over the Visigoths’ lands. Before he died, the Roman Empire in the West had collapsed completely. The Kingdom of Tolosa was left orphaned and sovereign.

  Meticulous scholarship has tracked the progression of Visigothic kingship in the fifth century. In the first stage, the tendency was to emulate all forms of Roman legal practice and Latin titles. In the middle stage, the Reges Gothorum saw themselves as something better than mere foederati. In the last stage, as successors to the Empire, they thought themselves as good as any emperor. Over the same decades, the upper stratum of Visigothic society, the optimates, gradually lost their influence. Germanic tradition had stressed the equality of all warriors. Post-Roman monarchy stressed hierarchy and regal dignity.16


  Thanks to the Frankish chronicler Gregory of Tours (534–94), Euric has been stained with the label of a persecutor of Catholics. The insinuation is unjust. A few dissaffected clerics like Bishop Quinctianus of Civitas Rutenorum (Rodez) were driven into exile. But nothing occurred to match the savage persecutions perpetrated by the Arian Vandals in North Africa.17

  Shortly after the deaths both of Euric and of Romulus Augustulus, the last of the Western emperors, Flavius Teodoricus, alias Theodoric the Ostrogoth, accepted Byzantine instructions to march on Italy and to restore imperial fortunes. He crossed the Alps with a huge army in 488, scattered the defenders of the post-Roman order, and killed its leader, Odoacer, with his own bare hands, after a three-year siege of Ravenna. Calling on the aid of his Visigoth cousins, he overran the Italian peninsula from end to end and assumed the title of ‘vice-emperor’. Bolstered by the military and cultural power of Byzantium, and by great maritime potential, his Ostrogothic kingdom based at Ravenna soon threatened to overshadow its neighbours and rivals. In addition to the Visigothic Kingdom of Tolosa, it bordered the (second) Kingdom of the Burgundians recently established in the valley of the Rhône (see pp. 94–5).18

  Euric’s son, Alaric II, who succeeded as a boy in 484, was the eighth of the royal line. He spent much energy mollifying neighbours and subjects alike. His greatest achievement lay in the preparation of the famous Breviarum Alarici, a highly refined compilation of Roman law. This work, which interpreted laws as well as summarizing them, was approved by a committee of nobles and clerics before being promulgated in 506. It would become a standard text throughout post-Roman Gaul until the eleventh century.19 Furthermore, Alaric courted the Ostrogoths. He married Theodoric’s daughter, and with her produced an infant son, bringing the prospect of a vast and combined pan-Gothic federation into view.

  Alaric’s nemesis, however, arrived in the shape of Clovis, king of the Germanic Franks, who from the 480s had begun to extend his realm into Gaul from the Rhineland and who was already busy undermining the Burgundians. Clovis was a neophyte Catholic with limitless ambitions, and the ruler most likely to feel threatened by a union of the Goths.20 In 497 he had joined with the Bretons to mount an attack along the western coast of Aquitaine, where the port of Burdigala (Bordeaux) was briefly occupied. Sometime after that, he won a crushing victory over his eastern neighbours, the Alemanni, and felt free to pay more attention to the south. Alaric’s instinct was to avoid confrontation. He had once handed back a Frankish fugitive, Syagrius, who had dared to challenge Clovis. Gregory of Tours reports how the Visigoth insisted on going to Ambaciensis (Amboise), where he engaged Clovis in face-to-face conversation on an island of the River Loire:

  Igitur Alaricus rex Gothorum cum viderit, Chlodovechum regem gentes assiduae debellare, legatus ad eum dirigit, dicens: ‘Si frater meus vellit, insederat animo, ut nos Deo propitio pariter videremus.’…

  When Alaric King of the Goths saw the constant conquests which Clovis was making, he sent delegates to him, saying: ‘If my brother so agrees, I propose that we hold a conversation together, under God’s auspices.’ And when Clovis did not reply, Alaric went to meet him regardless, and they talked and ate and drank, and left each other in peace.21

  As it turned out, Clovis could not be assuaged so easily. Recently allied both to the Burgundians, by marriage, and to the Byzantine emperor, who granted him the title of imperial consul, he aimed to steal a march on his rivals. A joint campaign against the Visigothic realm was agreed. The Byzantines were to patrol the southern coast. The Franks were to march from the north. An offer of parley from Theodoric the Ostrogoth was spurned. It was the spring of 507, and a ‘flaming meteor’ was lighting up the night sky:

  Igitur Chlodovechus rex ait suis: ‘Valde molestum fero, quod hi Arriani partem teneant Galliarum…

  King Clovis, therefore, addressed his warriors: ‘It pains me that these Arians are holding such a large part of the Gauls. Let us march with God’s aid, and reduce them to our power…’ So the army moved off [from Tours] in the direction of Poitiers… Reaching the River Vigenna [Vienne], which was swollen by rain, the Franks did not know how to cross until a huge hind appeared and showed them how the river could be forded… Pitching his tent on a hill near Poitiers, the king saw smoke rising from the Church of St Hilaire, and took it as a sign that he was to triumph over the heretics.

  The scene for the fateful battle was set:

  So Clovis came to grips with Alaric, King of the Goths, in the plain of Vouillé [in campo Vogladense], three leagues from the city. As was their custom, the Goths feigned flight. But Clovis killed Alaric with his own hand, himself escaping [an ambush] thanks to the strength of his breastplate and the speed of his horse.22

  The outcome, therefore, was undisputable (and the Vouglaisiens have proof positive of their name’s derivation). The power of the Visigoths in Gaul was broken in a few hours. And the Franks pressed on. Some of them rode over the central mountains to garner lands as far as the Burgundian frontier. Clovis made for Burdigala, where he wintered before sacking Tolosa the following spring. A remnant of Alaric’s forces made a stand at Narbonne, but most of them withdrew to the line of the Pyrenees. The Gallic heartland of their kingdom was abandoned. Henceforth, the Visigoths would rule in Iberia alone, preserving their ascendancy there until the arrival of the Moors two centuries later.

  Explanations of the Frankish victory differ widely. The victors’ version conveyed by Gregory of Tours stressed the hand of a Catholic God who had aided his Catholic warriors. Even Edward Gibbon stressed the role of religion, imaginatively casting the Gallo-Roman nobility in the role of a Catholic fifth column. His arguments are now contested.23 He is on safer ground when he writes of the fickle fortunes of war. ‘Such is the empire of Fortune (if we may still disguise our ignorance under that popular name)’, wrote Gibbon loftily, ‘that it is almost equally difficult to foresee the events of war, or to explain their various consequences.’24

  For a decade or more, Theodoric the Ostrogoth continued to pursue his pan-Gothic dreams. He was the designated guardian of his grandson, Alaric II’s young heir, Amalric, and the nominal overlord of a supposedly nascent ‘empire’ stretching from the Alps to the Atlantic. Yet the pillars of his own power were crumbling. He could not maintain order in Italy, let alone challenge the Franks in Gaul or assist the Visigoths in Spain. The moment was ripe for the Roman emperors in Constantinople to launch yet another strategic offensive. Shortly after Theodoric died in 526, the Emperor Justinian prepared to lead his legions to the West in person.25 For the rest of the sixth century, as Alaric’s descendants consolidated their hold on Iberia, imperial troops remained in Italy, while the successors of Clovis the Frank put their shoulder to the long task of transforming Gallia into Francia, and Francia into France.

  III

  Though the Visigothic Kingdom of Tolosa lasted for eighty-nine years over a wide area, the physical evidence for its existence is minimal. Archaeological excavations have yielded almost nothing.26 Although one gold solidus of Alaric II has survived, most coins from Visigothic Tolosa carry imperial inscriptions. Several hundred marble sarcophagi from the period bear no marks of identification. Almost everything that is known comes from fragmentary written sources. Even the site of the battle with Clovis is not entirely certain. One group of antiquarians equates Gregory’s campus Vogladensis with Vouillé, another group insists on locating it at the nearby village of Voulon.27 There is almost no mention of the Visigoths in the widespread ‘Heritage’ activities of Toulouse and Aquitaine.28 Only recently has a comprehensive bibliography been compiled to help scholars piece the jigsaw together.29

  The church of Nostra Domina Daurata – Notre-Dame de la Daurade – whose origins were connected with the Visigoths, was totally demolished in 1761 to make way for the construction of Toulouse’s riverside quays. It had housed the shrine of a Black Madonna. The original icon was stolen in the fifteenth century, and its first replacement was burned by revolutionaries in 1799. Prints survi
ve of an early medieval octagonal chapel lined with marble columns and golden mosaics. The present-day basilica, like the cathedral of St Saturnin, is entirely modern.30

  Fortunately, the maps and the museums are not totally bare. A cluster of place names featuring the suffix -ens, as in Douzens, Pezens and Sauzens, all in the Département de l’Aude, is judged to betray Visigothic origins. The village of Dieupentale (Tarn-et-Garonne) possesses the only name of exclusively Visigothic provenance: diup meaning ‘deep’, and dal, ‘valley’. Certain modest types of bronzes, eagle brooches and glassware are classed in the same way, thanks to similarities with finds in Rome’s former Danubian provinces. And on the road between Narbonne and Carcassonne one passes the imposing whale-back Montagne d’Alaric. Local sources explain its name by reference to fortifications dating to the reign of Ataulf, and to a persistent myth concerning the last king of Tolosa’s last resting place. The mountain shelters the ruins of a medieval priory, St Pierre d’Alaric and, on its northern slopes, a registered wine region which produces vintage wines within the scope of AOC Corbières.31

  Nowadays, some of the strongest hints of a Visigothic past in southern France emanate unexpectedly from wild legends, from historical fiction, and in particular from one small village deep in the Pyrenean foothills. Rennes-le-Château is a walled, hilltop hamlet in the Pays de Razès, containing perhaps twenty houses, a church and a medieval castle. It commands enchanting views over the Val des Couleurs, and stands beneath the ‘Holy Mountain’ of Bugarach, starting point of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Identified as the ancient city of Rhedae, it gained a reputation in the nineteenth century for having been the impregnable stronghold of the Visigoths after their expulsion from none-too-distant Tolosa. The stone pillars of the parish church were said to be of Visigothic origin, and fabulous rumours of buried treasure proliferated.32