THE VISIGOTHS IN SPAIN
531-603
Weakness of the Visigothic kingdom—Civil wars and murders of Kings—The
Romans invade Andalusia, 554—Reign of Leovigild—He restores the
power of the Visigoths—His conquests—Rebellion and death of his son
Hermenegild—Reign of Reccared—He converts the Goths to
Catholicism—Consequences of this conversion.
We have already, while dealing with the fortunes of Chlodovech the Frank
and Theodoric the Great, related the story of the expulsion of the
Visigoths from Aquitaine, and of the extinction of their royal house—the
heaven-born Balts—by the deaths of Alaric II. and Amalric, both slain by
the sword of the Franks.
In 531 the Visigoths, deprived of all their dominions north of the
Pyrenees, and followed into the Iberian peninsula by the victorious
Franks, found themselves without any prince of the old royal line who
could be raised to the throne, and deliver them from their enemies.
[Sidenote: Election of Theudis, 531.] The host proceeded, according to
Teutonic custom, to elect a king, and chose the old count Theudis, the
Ostrogothic noble who had acted as regent for Amalric during the long
years of his minority. The veteran justified their choice by recovering
part of the lost lands beyond the Pyrenees—the rich province of
Septimania, with its cities of Narbonne, Nismes, and Carcassonne. Ten
years later Theudis had to face another Frankish invasion, and again
succeeded in repelling his adversaries, after a bloody battle in front
of Saragossa (542).[18]
Footnote 18:
See p. 133.
Preserved from the danger of Frankish conquest, the Visigothic nation
had to face the problem of reorganising its constitution under the new
conditions of its existence. It had previously looked on Gaul rather
than on Spain as its home. Toulouse had been the favourite abode of its
kings, not Barcelona or Toledo. Gaul was now lost, save one province,
and it was in Spain alone that the Visigothic name was to survive. But
even worse than the loss of its ancient home was the loss of its ancient
royal house. Nothing could be more ruinous to a Teutonic tribe in those
days than the extinction of the line of its old heaven-descended kings.
When it had become necessary to choose a ruler from among the ranks of
the nobility, every ambitious count and duke could aspire to the throne.
Each election was bitterly contested, and the candidates who had failed
to win the favour of the host retired to plot and intrigue against their
more fortunate rival. When no one had any prescriptive hereditary right
to the succession on the reigning king’s death, the temptation to make
away with him by violence, and endeavour to seize his heritage, was
irresistible. Hence it came to pass that of the twenty-three Visigothic
kings of Spain—from Theudis to Roderic—no less than nine were deposed,
and of these seven were murdered by their successors. The average length
of their reigns was less than eight years, and only in eight instances
did a son succeed a father on the throne. There was but one single case
of grandfather, father, and son following each other in undisputed
succession.
[Sidenote: Weakness of the Visigoths.] In relating the history of the
Franks in Gaul, we have had occasion to point out the comparative ease
with which the Frank and the Roman provincial coalesced to form a new
nation. We have seen how from the first the Gaulish bishops were
employed as ministers and confidants by the Merovings, and how, in a
short time, Gallo-Roman counts and dukes were preferred to high places
in the Frankish palace and army. In Spain no such easy union between the
Teutonic conquerors and the provincials was possible, because the great
bar of religion lay between them. Unlike the Franks, the Visigoths were
Arians, having preserved the heretical form of Christianity which their
forefathers had learnt beyond the Danube in the fourth century. The
Spanish provincials, on the other hand, were almost to a man fanatically
orthodox. The Goths formed a religious community of their own, quite
apart from the Spaniards, with Arian bishops and priests to minister to
them; and their kings could not acknowledge or utilise the native
bishops as the Merovings had done in Gaul. The provincials hated their
rulers as heretics as well as barbarians, and never acquiesced willingly
in their domination. They were not indisposed to favour the advance of
the orthodox Frank, and welcomed the coming of the troops of the
East-Roman emperors to their shores in the sixth century. While the
Visigoths remained Arian they raised no Spaniard to power or office; it
was not till they became Catholic, in the very end of the sixth century,
that the first Roman names are found among the servants of the king.[19]
For the first seventy years of their rule in Spain the Visigoths were
completely estranged from their subjects (511-587).
Footnote 19:
The earliest notable case is duke Claudius, the general of king
Reccared I., the first orthodox ruler of Spain. He commanded
victoriously against the Franks of Guntram of Burgundy in 589.
The masters of Spain, then, were a not very numerous tribe, scattered
thinly among masses of an oppressed subject population. They were
masters by the power of the sword alone, but their military force was
crippled by the weakness of their elective kings, who were too much
occupied in maintaining their precarious authority over the discontented
chiefs to allow of their making their arms felt abroad. Nearly all the
wars of the Visigoths were either civil broils between rival kings, or
defensive campaigns against the intrusive Frank from beyond the
Pyrenees.
There is yet one more point to add to this picture of the distracted
realm of the Visigoths; they were not even masters of the whole of the
Iberian peninsula, but had to contend with fierce and watchful enemies
within its limits. In the western Pyrenees, and on the shores of the
Gulf of Biscay, the Basques preserved a precarious independence, and
descended from their fastnesses to plunder the valley of the Ebro,
whenever the Goths were engaged in civil discords. Farther to the west
there still subsisted in the ancient Galicia and Lusitania the kingdom
of the Suevi—the original Teutonic conquerors of Spain. The early
Visigothic kings had driven them into the mountains of the West, but had
never followed them into their last retreats, to compel them to make
complete submission. Suevic kings reigned at Braga over the country
north of the Tagus and west of the Esla and Tormes till the last years
of the sixth century. Whenever a favourable opportunity occurred, they
took part in the civil wars of the Visigoths, and harried the valley of
the upper Douro and the lower Tagus.
The inner organisation of the Visigothic realm presents a very different
picture from the centralised despotism, with everything depending on the
king, which we have described as existing among the early Franks in
Gaul. Like the Franks the Visigoths had divided their conquest into
districts, governed by counts or dukes, generally using as the unit of
division the old Roman boundaries of provinces and _civitates_. But the
Visigothic governors were far less under the control of their elective
kings than were the Frankish counts under the hand of the despotic
Merovingians. Each of them kept a body-guard of personal dependants
called—as among the Ostrogoths—_saiones_, or sometimes _bucellarii_,
whom he could trust to follow him even against the king. [Sidenote: The
Saiones.] It was the possession of this armed following among a
helpless, weaponless mass of provincials which enabled any count or duke
who was popular and ambitious to dare an attempt at rebellion, whenever
his master was weak or unfortunate. There seems to have been a
comparatively small body of lesser freeholders—_ceorls_ as they would
have been called in England—among the Visigoths. There is little trace
of any intermediate class between the nobles—whether official nobles,
_palatini_, or nobles of birth—and their sworn followers the _saiones_.
In fact, the kingdom might fairly be called feudal in its organisation,
consisting as it did of a servile population of Hispano-Roman blood,
held down by a sprinkling of Gothic men-at-arms, each bound by oath to
follow some great noble, who considered himself the equal of his king,
and vouchsafed him only the barest homage. As yet the king had no
opportunity of supporting himself by calling in to his aid either the
Church or the subject Roman population; his Arianism prevented him from
having recourse to any such expedient.
The difference between Roman and Goth was indeed accentuated in every
way. There were different codes of law for subject and master, the
former using a local adaptation of the Theodosian code known as the
_Breviarium Alarici_, while the latter was judged by old Gothic
customary law not yet reduced into written form.[20] Even marriage
between the two races was illegal, till about 570 king Leovigild broke
the prohibition by taking to wife Theodosia, the daughter of Severianus.
Spain sadly needed some ruler like Theodoric the Great, to act as a
mediator and redresser of wrongs between the two nations who dwelt
within its borders.
Footnote 20:
The Gothic law was probably written down about 587 by Reccared.
An evil end fell upon all the first three Visigothic kings who ruled in
Spain. The aged Theudis enjoyed seventeen years of power, and, as we
have already related, was successful in beating off three successive
attacks of the Franks on the peninsula. But the end of his reign was
clouded by disaster; frightened by the rapidity with which the armies of
Justinian had crushed Vandal and Goth, he resolved to create a diversion
in favour of his own Italian kinsmen, by attacking the newly-created
imperial province of Africa. But his army was almost annihilated in
front of the fortress of Septa (Ceuta), the westernmost bulwark of the
African province, and he himself returned to Spain with his military
reputation wrecked in his extreme old age. Four years later he was
murdered at Seville by an unknown assassin, who either was, or feigned
to be, insane (548).
The Visigothic chiefs then elected as their king, Theudigisel, the
general who had beaten the Franks at Saragossa in 542, and had ever
since been reckoned the best warrior of their race. But the new king was
brutal and debauched; his excesses provoked the anger of the nobles, and
only seventeen months after his accession he was murdered. ‘While he sat
at supper with his friends, and waxed merry over the wine, the lamps
were extinguished, and he was slain on his couch by the sword of his
enemies.’
The majority of the Visigoths then chose Agila as their ruler, but,
though he was acknowledged as king at Toledo and Barcelona, the counts
of the South refused to recognise him. When he invaded Andalusia he
suffered a fearful defeat in front of Cordova, and saw his son and heir
slain before his eyes. But he still held all Spain north of the Sierra
Morena, and seemed so strong that the chief of the rebels, count
Athanagild, resolved to call in to his aid the arms of the East-Romans.
Justinian embraced with joy this opportunity of getting a footing in
Spain, and by his orders Liberius, governor of Africa, crossed the
Straits, and landed at Cadiz. Many towns at once opened their gates to
the Roman troops, for the oppressed provincials thought that Liberius
would deliver them for ever from the Goths, and restore the imperial
authority in the whole peninsula. [Sidenote: The Romans land in Spain.]
Roused to desperation, Agila summoned up all his forces, crossed the
Sierra Morena for a second time, and engaged the armies of Athanagild
and Liberius in front of Seville. Again he suffered a disastrous defeat,
and was constrained to fly to Merida. Then his soldiery, seeing that the
Gothic race was ruining itself by fratricidal strife, while the Romans
were occupying town after town, suddenly ended the civil war by
murdering their chief, and saluting the rebel Athanagild as king of the
Visigoths. For, as a Frankish chronicler observed, ‘the Goths have long
had the evil custom of slaying with the sword any king who does not
please them, and of choosing in his stead some one who better suits
their inclination.’ The Franks, on the other hand, boasted of their
unshaken fidelity to the house of Chlodovech, outside whose limits they
never looked when a king had to be chosen.
Athanagild was now king of Spain, but he soon found that by calling in
the Romans he had raised up a demon whom he was not strong enough to
control. The generals of Justinian utterly refused to evacuate the towns
they had seized during the civil war. They were in possession of the
majority of the harbours of the south coast of the peninsula, on both
sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, from the promontory of St. Vincent on
the Atlantic to the mouth of the Sucre on the Mediterranean. And not
only were Cadiz, Malaga, and Carthagena in their hands, but also many of
the inland towns of Andalusia, including the great city of Cordova.
Athanagild never succeeded in evicting them from these conquests; for
thirty years the Constantinopolitan Caesars were acknowledged as rulers
at Cordova and Granada, and it was fully sixty years before the
sea-coast towns were all won back by the Goths. Although defeated in the
open field by Athanagild, the generals of Justinian clung successfully
to their walled towns, till at last the Gothic king was forced to make a
truce with them, and leave them unsubdued.
[Sidenote: Athanagild, 555-568.] Although Athanagild maintained himself
on the throne for thirteen years, and died a natural death—unlike his
five predecessors on the Visigothic throne—he does not seem to have been
a very powerful or successful monarch. The scanty annals of the century
preserve few facts about him, and he is best remembered as the father of
the two unhappy sisters, Brunhildis and Galswintha, ‘the pearls of
Spain,’ whom he gave in marriage to the Frankish kings, Sigibert and
Chilperich. These alliances were founded on political needs; the
marriage of Brunhildis—the first wed of the two princesses—was destined
to secure the aid of the king of Austrasia against any attempts of his
brothers of Paris, Soissons, and Burgundy against Spain. The fame of the
beauty and wealth of Brunhildis then led the wicked Chilperich of
Soissons to ask and obtain her sister’s hand, which Athanagild granted
in order to secure another ally. Luckily for himself the old Gothic king
died soon after, before he had time to hear of Galswintha’s troubled
wedlock and miserable end (568).
The death of Athanagild was followed by five months of anarchy; the
Visigothic nobles could not agree to choose any king; each took arms,
assaulted his neighbours, and did all that was right in his own eyes,
for the ‘king’s peace’ died with the king. At last the governors of
Septimania agreed to elect Leova, duke of Narbonne, as their ruler; but
the counts who dwelt south of the Pyrenees refused to accept the nominee
of the Gallic province. After some fighting, however, Leova proposed to
them to take as his colleague his brother Leovigild, who was well known
and popular in the south, and the majority of the nobles of Spain agreed
to accept him. Leova retained his kingly title and his own Septimanian
realm, while Leovigild reigned in the peninsula as king of Spain. The
division of the kingdom, however, only lasted four years, as Leova died
without issue in 572, and his brother then united Septimania to Spain.
Leovigild was the first man of mark who had reigned over the Visigoths
for a hundred years; he may be styled the second founder of the
Visigothic kingdom, for he dragged it out of the depths of anarchy and
weakness, gave it a new organisation, and smote down its enemies to east
and west. Without his strong hand it seems possible that the realm would
have gone to pieces, and become the prey of the Franks and the
East-Romans.
For the first eight years of his reign Leovigild was forced to fight
hard with enemies on all sides, before he could win a moment for repose.
His first blows were struck against the Imperialists, who had gone forth
from Cordova and Cadiz and conquered the whole of Andalusia. [Sidenote:
Wars of Leovigild, 570-80.] After winning several battles in the open
field, and storming Baza and Assidonia, he drove the Romans within the
walls of Cordova. This great city, defended by a strong garrison and a
fanatically Catholic population, kept the king at bay for a whole year;
but in 571 it was betrayed to him by its Gothic inhabitants and fell,
after having been more than twenty years in the hands of the
Imperialists. The East-Roman power now shrank back behind the Sierra
Nevada, and comprised nothing more than the coast-strip from Lagos to
Carthagena.
Leovigild then turned against the Suevi, who had seized the valley of
the middle Douro, and were pushing into the very heart of the peninsula.
They had lately been converted to Catholicism, and were welcomed by the
provincials of central Spain, who hoped to gain an orthodox instead of
an Arian master. But Leovigild beat the Suevic king Theodemir in the
field, stormed his fortress of Senabria, and compelled him to do homage.
For two years more Leovigild was occupied in putting down sporadic
rebellions of the Roman provincials in all the more remote and
mountainous corners of Spain—especially in Cantabria, on the shores of
the Gulf of Biscay, and among the Murcian mountains in the South. He
captured and put to death Aspidius and Abundantius, the chief leaders of
these revolts, and punished their followers by wholesale executions. At
last, after eight years of war, the whole of the ancient Visigothic
dominions, save the towns on the Andalusian coast, were once more
subdued and under control (576).
The hand of Leovigild was no less hard upon the factious nobility of his
own nation than upon the foreign enemies of Spain. He sought out and
executed, one after another, all the more unruly of the Visigothic
chiefs—‘all the race of men who had been wont to slay their kings,’ as a
Frankish chronicler styled them. In their stead he appointed counts and
dukes from among his own _comitatus_, whom he thought that he could
trust. At last the king’s mandate was obeyed through all the realm, from
Nismes to Seville, as it had never been obeyed before, and it seemed
likely that a strong autocratic royalty would prevail among the
Visigoths as it did among the Franks. Leovigild now fixed his court
permanently at Toledo, and assumed all the splendour and state of the
ancient Roman Caesars—the diadem, the sceptre, the purple robe, and
golden throne. Before him the kings of the Visigoths had been
indistinguishable in manners and apparel from their own nobles; they
only differed from them by bearing the royal name, and keeping up a
larger body of oath-bound _saiones_. At the same time that he fixed his
seat at Toledo, Leovigild took another opportunity of asserting his
power and independence. The coinage of the Visigoths had hitherto been a
mere barbarous imitation of the imperial currency of Rome and
Constantinople, but from henceforth the name of the Gothic king was
placed upon all the gold _tremisses_ of Spain. For a few years Leovigild
added the name of Justin II. to his own, but he soon cast away the last
sign of the old dependence on the empire, and the inscription,
LIVIGILDVS INCLITVS REX, was the sign of the disavowal of the last
nominal connection of Spain with the heirs of Constantine.
The troubles of Leovigild, however, had not yet come to an end. His
worst enemies were to be those of his own house. Before his accession to
the throne he had married, contrary to Gothic custom, a noble Roman lady
named Theodosia, daughter of Severianus, sometime governor of
Carthagena. By her he had two sons, Hermenegild and Reccared. When she
died he endeavoured to strengthen his position by marrying Godiswintha,
the widow of his predecessor Athanagild; and some years later, when his
son Hermenegild reached manhood, he determined to seek for him another
bride from the family of Athanagild. Accordingly he asked for, and
obtained the hand of his wife’s granddaughter, Ingunthis, the daughter
of Sigibert of Austrasia and Brunhildis. At the age of thirteen she was
wedded to Hermenegild. This marriage was destined to have the most
unhappy results. The daughter of Brunhildis was fated to be as much the
cause of woe to Spain as her mother had been to Gaul. She had been
reared in Austrasia as a Catholic, and, in spite of her tender age,
refused to conform to the Arian creed of the Visigoths. If the Frankish
chronicles are to be believed, she was subjected to the most violent
treatment by her grandmother Godiswintha, to force her to abandon the
orthodox faith. But though beaten, starved, and flung into a fish-pond,
she still refused to renounce the faith of her childhood. At last
Leovigild, tired of the perpetual disputes between his wife and his
daughter-in-law, which made his palace unbearable, sent off Hermenegild
to Seville to govern part of Andalusia.
This step proved most unfortunate. The young prince fell entirely under
the influence of his wife and of his mother’s brother, Leander bishop of
Seville. Won over by their pleadings, he declared himself a Catholic,
and was rebaptized, and received into the orthodox church. [Sidenote:
Rebellion of Hermenegild, 580.] He knew that his conversion would bring
on him his father’s wrath, and the loss of his prospect of succeeding to
the Visigothic crown, but he was unwilling to suffer degradation meekly,
and promptly proclaimed himself king, allied himself with the Suevi and
the East-Romans, and called the orthodox to arms all over Spain.
Leovigild had never had to face a more dangerous crisis. The rebellion
of his son had called out against him all the elements of disorder in
the peninsula. The Suevi swarmed down the Douro; the Imperialists
reoccupied Cordova; Merida, Seville, and Evora hailed Hermenegild as
king; and the discontented provincials, headed by their bishops, began
to stir all over the country. It is the greatest testimonial to
Leovigild’s abilities that he knew how to deal with all these dangers.
First, he turned against the incipient rebellion in the north, and put
it down by banishing or imprisoning some dozen bishops, and by defeating
in battle the Basques, who had come down from their hills to join in the
struggle. After beating them, he founded on their border the town of
Vittoria as a memorial of his success—a town destined to be better
remembered for the great English victory of 1813 than for this ancient
triumph.
Hermenegild was nearly two years in possession of the valley of the
Guadalquivir, but in 582 his father suddenly descended upon him, and
drove him within the walls of Seville. The Suevi came up to raise the
siege, but Leovigild routed their king Miro, and returned to resume his
leaguer. After many months of blockade he stormed the town, but
Hermenegild and his wife escaped to the Romans. The rebel prince took
refuge in the castle of Osset, whither the king followed him, and, by
the huge bribe of 30,000 solidi, induced the Imperialist Government to
sell the town. Hermenegild was dragged from sanctuary, and brought
before his father, who pardoned his rebellion, but stripped him of his
princely insignia, and sent him to live in honourable confinement at
Valencia as a private person.
Leovigild then turned against the Suevi, overran their whole country,
and captured their last king, Andica, whom he interned in a monastery.
Thus the rebellion of Hermenegild had not only failed to ruin the Gothic
state, but had actually led to the subjection of the troublesome
neighbour-kingdom in the north-west, which had hitherto escaped the
Visigothic sword.
Hermenegild’s fate was destined to be a sad one. His father promised to
restore him to his former place if he would abandon the orthodox faith,
but he steadfastly refused, and was presently cast into prison. But
chains had no more effect on his constancy than prayers and promises.
His father grew angry, and bade him expect the worst if he persisted in
his obstinacy. On Easter Day 585, he sent an Arian bishop to administer
the sacrament to the prisoner. Hermenegild drove the heretical prelate
from his cell with cries and imprecations. [Sidenote: Execution of
Hermenegild, 585.] The news was brought to his father, who, in a moment
of ungovernable rage, like that which induced our own Henry II. to order
the death of Becket, bade his guards seize and behead his inflexible
son. So perished Hermenegild, whom after generations, forgetting his
undutiful rebellion, and remembering only his constancy in the orthodox
faith, saluted as a saint. His wife and infant son were sent to
Constantinople by the Roman governor of Malaga. Ingunthis died on the
voyage, but the boy, Athanagild, lived and died obscurely at the court
of the emperor Maurice.
Leovigild had now to face the wrath of the Franks. Guntram, the uncle,
and Theudebert, the brother of Ingunthis, took arms to avenge her
husband’s execution. They sent a fleet to land a force in Galicia, and
raise the newly-conquered Suevi, while a Burgundian army entered
Septimania, and attacked Nismes and Carcassonne. But Leovigild’s
military skill and constant good fortune in war did not fail him. While
he himself cut to pieces the army which had landed in Galicia, his son,
Reccared, drove the Burgundians out of Septimania, with the loss of
their general and half their army. Father and son met in triumph at
Toledo, but the hardships of a winter campaign had been too much for
Leovigild, who died soon after his return to his capital, on the 13th of
April 586, a year to the very day from the date of his eldest son’s
execution, a coincidence which the orthodox did not fail to point out as
marking the wrath of heaven.
Leovigild, some time before his death, had induced the Visigoths to
elect his second son, Reccared, as his colleague, and to salute him as
king. There was, therefore, no tumultuous election or civil war when the
old king died, and his heir quietly took his place. Reccared was
destined to set his mark on the history of the Visigothic kingdom no
less firmly than his father had done. If Leovigild saved the state from
anarchy by his strong arm, Reccared set it on a new and altered course
of existence, and introduced a new element into its political and
religious life by the great change which is connected with his name—the
conversion of the Visigoths to the orthodox faith. [Sidenote: Reccared,
586-601.] Reccared was the son of a Roman mother, but, unlike his
brother Hermenegild, he never showed any discontent with Arianism in his
father’s lifetime. No sooner, however, was the old man dead than his
successor began to take steps which threw the Arians into a state of
excitement and apprehension. He summoned Catholic and Arian bishops
before him, and many times bade them dispute in his presence on the
mysteries of the Trinity. This he did more to prepare the people for the
coming change than because he was himself in any doubt as to his future
conduct.
Reccared thoroughly grasped the fact that the Visigothic state would
never be established on a really firm basis as long as the governing
caste were separated from the bulk of their subjects by the fatal
barrier of religion. The Goths were too few to amalgamate the
provincials with themselves, and had shown no signs of wishing to do so.
But if no such amalgamation took place, the Gothic monarchy was doomed
to disappear some day in a political convulsion, when the moment should
come that found no strong and capable ruler on the throne. Leovigild had
only staved off such a crisis by prodigies of activity and courage. Now
Reccared had made up his mind that the Arianism of the Goths was more a
matter of conservative adherence to ancestral prejudices and of
race-pride, than of real conviction or fanatical faith. He thought that
if the king led the way, and if mild and cautious changes were made,
without any sudden blow or attempt at enforced conformity, his
countrymen might insensibly be led within the pale of the Catholic
church. The course of events proved that he was entirely right; and the
conversion of the nation was managed all the more surely because it was
carried out by a cautious and unemotional statesman, and not by an
enthusiastic saint.
The completion of Reccared’s scheme occupied the years 586-88. When he
declared himself a Catholic, and accepted the solemn blessing of his
uncle, the Metropolitan of Seville, the greater part of his _comitatus_
followed his example. In quick succession many Gothic counts, and a
large portion of the Arian episcopate conformed to orthodoxy. [Sidenote:
The Goths turn Catholic, 587.]
The Church on its side made the change easy, by not insisting on any new
baptism of the converts. It was enough if they attended a Catholic place
of worship, and received the blessing of an orthodox priest.
It was not to be expected, however, that so momentous a change would
pass over the country without provoking trouble. There were many Goths,
both clergy and laymen, who viewed Arianism as the sacred religion of
their ancestors, and the badge of their conquering race. Three
rebellions broke out in quick succession, in regions as far apart as
Septimania and Lusitania, while the king’s stepmother Godiswintha and
bishop Athaloc, the chief of the Arian clergy, placed themselves at the
head of the rising. But the greater part of the Visigoths looked on in
apathy, and allowed a small body of fanatics to fight out the question
of religion with the king. The Arians were put down, and gave no further
trouble. The whole sect seems to have melted away in a few years, and
ere long the Visigoths were as proud of their Catholicism as they had
once been of their heterodoxy.
While Reccared was busy with the suppression of the Arian rebels, the
Frankish king Guntram of Burgundy thought that a good opportunity had
arisen for conquering Septimania. He sent a great army down the Rhone,
but near Narbonne it was completely defeated by Reccared’s general, duke
Claudius, the first man of Roman blood who had ever been promoted to
high rank by a Visigothic king. This was the last time that a Frankish
conquest of Septimania was ever seriously attempted (589).
Reccared reigned for twelve years more, with great good fortune both at
home and abroad. He subdued the Basques, kept the Imperialists penned in
to their line of harbours along the south coast, and repressed several
minor tumults raised by discontented Gothic nobles. In every crisis he
found the Catholic bishops his best support, and must have constantly
congratulated himself on having turned his most dangerous enemies into
the strongest bulwark of his throne. But by placing himself in their
hands he had begun to expose Gothic royalty to a new danger, that of too
great dependence on the Church. The National Council—the _Witan_ as it
would have been called in England—was completely swamped by the
churchmen. There were more than sixty bishops in Spain, while the number
of dukes and counts who were usually summoned to the Assembly was
considerably less. The bishops—men more clever, more wise, and better
organised than their lay colleagues—soon came to exercise a dominating
influence in the council. The spiritual pressure which they could bring
to bear on the king was too great to be disregarded. Hence it came to
pass that ere the end of his reign Reccared, though peaceful and
tolerant himself, was urged into acts of persecution, not only against
his old co-religionists, the Arians, but against the Jews—a race who had
hitherto prospered in Spain, and who had gathered in a very considerable
portion of its wealth and commerce. Formerly the Visigothic kings, like
the great Theodoric in Italy, had been very tolerant, and had not seldom
employed Jews as collectors of revenue and in minor official posts. All
this came to an end with the conversion of Reccared, though in his day
the discouragement alike of Arian and Jew went no further than making
them incapable of holding any office, and prohibiting the public
exercise of their worship.
After a reign of fifteen years, king Reccared died in 601, leaving the
throne to his son, Leova II., the only instance in Gothic Spain of a
succession of three generations of the same house on the throne. The new
monarch was just twenty. He was a devoted admirer and follower of the
Catholic bishops, and, by all accounts, showed more piety than capacity.
The accession of a weak and inexperienced youth was the opportunity for
which the unruly Visigothic nobles, crushed for thirty years under the
strong hands of Leovigild and Reccared, had been long waiting. In the
second year of his reign Leova was surprised and murdered by
conspirators under the guidance of a certain count Witterich, who had
headed an Arian rising in 588, but had been spared on conforming to
Catholicism. He now repaid Reccared’s clemency by murdering his son
(603).
After thirty-three years of strong government, Spain once more fell back
into the state of civil strife from which it had been rescued by
Leovigild. But the character of the struggle was now changed; for the
future it was a contest between the Catholic hierarchy and the
Visigothic nobles, as to which should appoint and control the king.
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