THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE VISIGOTHS
A.D. 603-711
Obscurity of Visigothic History—Sisibut and Swinthila expel the
East-Romans—A series of priest-ridden Kings—Chindaswinth restores
the royal power—His legislation—Recceswinth’s long reign—Wamba and
his wars—The rebellion of Paulus—Wamba’s weak and obscure
successors—Approach of the Saracens—Weakness of Spain—Roderic the
Last of the Goths—All Spain subdued by the Saracens.
Few periods of European history are so obscure as the last hundred years
of the Visigothic dominion in Spain. The original sources for its annals
are few and meagre, and little has been accomplished of late in the way
of making the period more comprehensible. The Moorish conquest in 711
seems to have swept away both books and writers, and it was not till
many years after that disaster that the composition of historical works
in Spain was resumed; the later Visigothic times are as dark and little
known as the beginnings of the English heptarchy, and Spain had no Bede
and no _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_ to throw gleams of light across the
obscurity. Hence it comes that many of their kings are mere names, and
that their acts and policy are often incomprehensible. The tale grows
more and more puzzling as the seventh century draws on to its close, and
by the beginning of the eighth we have only untrustworthy legends to
help us.
The house of Leovigild, after forty years of success, ended disastrously
in 603 by the assassination of the young king Leova II. His murderer was
a certain count Witterich, a turbulent noble who had joined in the Arian
rising of 590, and had been unwisely pardoned by Reccared. The accession
of Witterich marked a revulsion against the growth of the kingly power,
which had been making such strides under Leovigild and Reccared, and
probably also a protest against the ecclesiastical policy of Reccared,
who, since his conversion, had given the Catholic bishops such power and
authority in his realm. [Sidenote: Witterich, 603-10.] Witterich reigned
for seven years, with little credit to himself—it is only strange that
he guarded his ill-gotten crown so long. He had some unimportant
struggles with the Franks in Aquitaine and the Byzantine garrisons in
Andalusia, but won no credit in either quarter. The Church was against
him, his counts and dukes paid him little heed, and no one showed much
astonishment or regret when in 610 he was murdered by conspirators at a
feast, like his predecessor the tyrant Theudigisel.
The king chosen by the Goths in his place was a certain count Gundimar,
who appears to have been the head of the orthodox church party, as the
ecclesiastical chronicles are loud in the praises of his piety. Gundimar
determined to take part in the Frankish civil war when Theuderich of
Burgundy and Brunhildis attacked Theudebert of Austrasia. He naturally
sided with the distant Austrasian against his nearer Burgundian brother,
with whom the Goths of Septimania had some frontier disputes. But in the
year that the war broke out Gundimar died, only twenty-one months after
he had been crowned (612).
[Sidenote: Sisibut, 612-20.] His successor was king Sisibut (612-20), a
prince of some mark and character, who like his predecessor was a great
friend of the church party and a foe of the unruly secular nobility. He
was not only a great warrior, but what was more strange in a Gothic
prince, a learned student and even a writer of books. The modern
historian would give much to be able to recover his lost _Chronicle of
the Kings of the Goths_; but the irony of fate has decreed that of his
works only an ecclesiastical biography, _The Life and Passion of St.
Desiderius_, and some bad verses, should survive. We learn from his
admiring clerical friends that he was skilled in grammar, rhetoric, and
dialectic, and that he erected a magnificent cathedral in Toledo.
But Sisibut was no mere crowned _savant_; he took up the task, which had
been abandoned since the death of Reccared, of driving the East-Roman
garrisons out of Andalusia, and was almost completely successful. The
emperor Heraclius, then in the throes of his Persian war, could send no
help to Spain, and one after another all the harbours of south-eastern
Spain from the mouth of the Guadalquivir to the mouth of the Sucre fell
into his hands. Nothing remained to the East-Romans except their most
westerly possession, the extreme south-west angle of Portugal, with the
fortress of Lagos, and the promontory of Cape St. Vincent. After winning
the Andalusian coast it appears that Sisibut built a small fleet and
crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to wrest Ceuta and Tangier from the
exarch of Africa. In 615 Heraclius made peace with him, formally
surrendering all that Sisibut had succeeded in gaining from his
generals. Sisibut was also successful in taming the intractable Basques;
following them into their mountains he compelled them to pay tribute.
A less happy record is preserved of Sisibut in the matter of internal
government. As befitted a hot supporter of the intolerant Spanish
church, he gave himself up to the promptings of his bishops, and
commenced a fierce persecution of the Jews, the first of many
tribulations which the unhappy Hebrews were to suffer at the hands of
the later Gothic kings.
Sisibut reigned only eight years; he had taken the precaution to have
his son Reccared II. elected king by the national council during his own
lifetime, and on his death the youth succeeded to the throne without
molestation. But less than a year after Sisibut’s death Reccared
followed him to the grave, and the crown once more passed into a new
house.
[Sidenote: Swinthila, 620-31.] Count Swinthila, whom the Goths now chose
as king, was a general who had distinguished himself in the war with the
Basques, and had a great military reputation, but, unlike Sisibut, was
not a favourer of the Church party, and had to face its intrigues all
through the ten years of his reign. He was equally disliked by the great
nobles, whose powers he sought to curb by asserting the rights of the
smaller Gothic freeholders, who had for long been lapsing more and more
into feudal dependence on their greater neighbours. His care for their
interests won for him the title of the ‘Father of the Poor,’ and their
loyalty is no doubt the explanation of the fact that he was able to hold
the crown so long when both Church and nobles were against him. Nor was
his reign entirely without military successes. He took Lagos and the
fort on Cape St. Vincent, the two last Byzantine strongholds in Spain,
so that the whole peninsula was at last drawn under a single ruler. He
was equally successful against a rebellion of the Basques, and,
overrunning their mountain valleys in Navarre and Biscay, built the
fortress of Olite, beyond the Ebro and near Pampeluna, to hold them
down.
But Swinthila had too many enemies to be allowed to keep his crown. A
certain count Sisinand, a governor in Septimania, rose against him, and
called in to his aid Dagobert, the king of the Franks. Gaul was now once
more united under a single monarch, and the long civil wars of the
descendants of Brunhildis and Fredegundis were over, so that the Franks
were, after a long interval, able to indulge in foreign invasion. Backed
by troops lent him by Dagobert, Sisinand crossed the Pyrenees, and
advanced against Saragossa, where the king had marched forward to meet
him. No battle took place, for the matter was settled by treachery.
[Sidenote: Rebellion of Sisinand, 631.] The great nobles and bishops,
who had obeyed Swinthila’s summons to war, seized him in his own camp,
threw him into chains, and handed him over to Sisinand. The usurper,
more merciful than many Gothic rebels, contented himself with casting
Swinthila into a monastery, and did not put him to death. Sisinand had
promised his Frankish friend to surrender to him in return for his help
the most splendid treasure in the Gothic royal hoard, a great golden
bowl of Roman workmanship, weighing five hundred pounds, a trophy of the
old wars of the fifth century. He gave up the vessel to Dagobert’s
ambassadors, but, when it was seen departing from Spain, the Gothic
counts swore that such an ancient heirloom of their kings must never
leave the land, and took it back by force. In its lieu Sisinand sent to
Dagobert a sum of 200,000 gold solidi (£140,000).
Sisinand was a weak ruler, the tool and instrument of his bishops. Under
his impotent hands all the power and authority of the royal name melted
away, and the work of Sisibut and Swinthila was undone. The Church and
not he ruled Spain. When synods met, the king was seen on bended knee,
and with streaming eyes, lamenting his sins, and begging the counsel of
the holy fathers. [Sidenote: Priest-ridden kings, 631-41.] He reigned
only for five years (631-36), and was succeeded by Chinthila, another
chosen instrument of the hierarchy, of whom we know little more than
that ‘he held many synods with his bishops, and strengthened himself by
the help of the true faith.’ He reigned only three years, but was
allowed by his clerical partisans to have his son Tulga crowned as his
successor before he died. Tulga, another obedient son of the Church, had
only reigned two years when he was dethroned by a conspiracy of the
great lay nobles, to whom the domination of the clergy in the State
became more and more odious under the twelve years’ rule of three
priest-ridden kings. Tulga was sent to pursue the congenial path of
piety in a monastery, while the National Assembly, convened by the
conspirators, elected as king count Chindaswinth, whose virtues were
recognised by all, while his great age—he was no less than
seventy-nine—promised a free hand to his turbulent subjects (641).
But the nobles had erred greatly in their estimate of Chindaswinth, as
grievously as did the misled cardinals, who, in a later age, elected the
apparently moribund Sixtus V. to the Papacy. The touch of the crown on
his brow seemed to give back his youth and vigour to the old man, and
the Goths found that a king of the type of Leovigild and Swinthila, a
stern repressor of lawlessness and feudal anarchy, was reigning over
them. [Sidenote: Chindaswinth, 641-52.] Chindaswinth set himself at once
to revindicate the royal prerogative, both against the great nobles and
against the ecclesiastical synods. His hand fell heavily upon the
traitors who, twelve years before, had betrayed Swinthila; he began to
seek them out, and to execute them. At once the majority of the nobles
of Spain burst into revolt. Some fled to Africa, and borrowed aid from
the Byzantine exarch, others to the kings of the Franks. But
Chindaswinth beat down all their risings, and quenched the flame of
insurrection in the blood of two hundred nobles, and five hundred men of
lesser rank, whom he handed over to the headsman. ‘He tamed the Goths so
that they dared attempt nothing more against him, as they had so often
done with their kings, for the Goths are a hard-necked folk, and need a
heavy yoke for their shoulders.’ When the revolt was crushed,
Chindaswinth compelled the bishops assembled in synod at Toledo to
pronounce a solemn curse on all rebellious nobles—‘_tyranni_,’ he called
them—and to decree the penalty of deprivation of orders and
excommunication on all members of the clergy who should be found
consenting to the plots of the ‘tyrants’ (646).
Chindaswinth’s heavy hand won Spain seven years of peace in the latter
end of his reign, and he was able to associate with himself on the
throne his son Recceswinth, without any of the Goths daring to murmur.
The father and son reigned together for three years, Recceswinth
discharging the functions of king, while Chindaswinth gave himself up to
works of piety. Their joint rule is marked by one very important
incident, showing the completion of the process of unification, which
had begun by the conversion of Reccared to Catholicism in 589.
[Sidenote: Laws of Chindaswinth.] Goth and Spaniard were now so much
assimilated to each other that the kings thought that they might for the
future be ruled by a single code of laws. The races were beginning to be
completely intermixed. Spanish counts and dukes are as numerous in the
end of the period as Gothic bishops and abbots. The one race had no
longer the monopoly of secular power, nor the other that of
ecclesiastical promotion. Chindaswinth resolved to suspend the use of
the old Roman law in his dominion, and to make all his subjects use
Gothic law, though he introduced into the latter a considerable Roman
element. The advantage of the new code of Chindaswinth was that the
counts and _vicarii_, the king’s immediate representatives, had for the
future full jurisdiction over the whole native Spanish element,
including the clergy; for the Spaniards were deprived of their Roman
law-book, the _Breviarium Alarici_, and of their own courts and judges,
and were subjected for legal, no less than for administrative or
military matters, to the Gothic count. At the same time the prohibition
against marriage between Goths and Provincials, which still nominally
existed, though it was frequently broken since the time of Leovigild,
was removed, and all the king’s subjects became equal in the eye of the
law.
Chindaswinth died in 652, at the great age of ninety, unparalleled among
Teutonic kings of his day. [Sidenote: Recceswinth, 652-72.] His son and
colleague, Recceswinth, already well advanced down the vale of years,
survived for twenty years more. He had the longest, quietest, and, in a
way, the most prosperous reign of any of the Visigothic kings. Unlike
his father, he was a devoted supporter of the Church, and, by the aid of
the bishops, maintained his rule until the day of his death. But he was
gradually letting slip once more all the royal powers which his father
had with such trouble regained and restored. As he grew older the entire
rule of the State dropped once more into the hands of bishops and
synods. Recceswinth was busy all his days in building churches, and
making great offerings to the saints. Chance has preserved to us one
huge gold crown, with a dedicatory inscription, which he presented to
the Virgin; it now forms the pride of the Cluny Museum at Paris, and is
the best monument of the rude Teutonic art of the time, except, perhaps,
the golden offerings of Agilulf and Theodelinda at Monza.[36] Tradition
speaks much of the spiritual blessings that were vouchsafed him. He and
Archbishop Hildefuns were privileged to behold with their own eyes a
miraculous vision of St. Leocadia, in the cathedral of Toledo. But
meanwhile the kingly authority was once more vanishing away, and
Recceswinth, provided that he at least enjoyed peace and pious leisure,
seems to have cared little for the fate of his successors; he had
himself no son to whom he could bequeath the throne. Personally he was
popular—‘so mild and unpretending that he could hardly be told from one
of his own subjects’—and he did not reap the fruit of the seeds of
weakness that he was sowing. One insignificant rebellion alone
interrupted the twenty peaceful years of his reign. But meanwhile the
elements of dissolution were growing in strength. The nobles were once
more reasserting their old claims to feudal independence, and the clergy
were growing more and more domineering.
Footnote 36:
See p. 196.
Recceswinth died in 672, leaving no heir, and there was much disputing
among the nobles as to the election of his successor. Their choice fell
at last upon Wamba, a man of mature age and high reputation, but he
refused to take up the burden, in spite of the acclamations with which
his name was received. At last, we are told, a certain duke drew his
sword, and threatened to slay him, as a traitor to his nation and his
duty, if he hesitated any longer to obey the will of the assembly. Wamba
bowed to this form of persuasion, and accepted the crown.
[Sidenote: Wamba, 672-680.] We have more knowledge of Wamba’s reign than
of those of his predecessors and successors, as his biography, written
by bishop Julian of Toledo, has chanced to survive. We learn that he was
a stern and hard master to the Goths, modelling himself upon the example
of Chindaswinth, and that his reign was spent in a not unsuccessful
attempt to recover the powers of the crown, which the pious Recceswinth
had let slip. Rebellions were naturally rife when the king began to make
his strong hand felt. The untameable Basques took to arms, and, while
Wamba was busy in their mountains, a more dangerous rising took place in
Septimania, where a certain count Hilderic raised the standard of
revolt. [Sidenote: Rebellion of Paulus, 673.] The king sent against them
a large army, under duke Paulus, a trusted officer of Roman blood. But,
instead of attacking the rebels, the treacherous Paulus opened
negotiations with them, debauched the chiefs of his own army, and
suddenly proclaimed himself king. The challenge which he is said to have
sent to Wamba deserves, perhaps, to be recorded for its strange and
high-flown style. ‘In the name of God,’ wrote the usurper, ‘Flavius
Paulus, the mighty king of the East, greets Wamba, the king of the West.
If thou hast traversed the rough, unpeopled waste of the mountains; if
thou hast burst through woods and thickets like some strong lion; if
thou hast tamed the swiftness of the wild goat, and the bounding stag,
and the ravening boar and bear; if thou hast cast out the poison of
snake and adder,—then make thyself known to me, thou man of arms, lord
of the woods, and lover of the rocks, and hasten to meet me, that we may
strive against each other in song, like nightingales. Wherefore, great
king, stir up thy heart to strength, come down to the passes of the
Pyrenees, and there shalt thou find an athlete with whom thou mayest
worthily contend.’
Paulus was taken at his word, the ‘lord of the woods’ flew down in haste
from the Basque mountains, and had thrown himself upon the rebel army
before a single week was out. He forced the passes of the Pyrenees,
driving the troops of Paulus before him, and then threw himself upon
Narbonne, the capital of Septimania. The town was stormed by main force,
after a siege of only three days, and, when it had fallen, Wamba
recovered most of the other towns between the mountains and the Rhone.
Paulus took refuge in the strong town of Nismes, and sent to ask help of
the Franks. But the king was too quick for him. The Goths had grown
skilled in the art of poliorcetics during their long struggle to expel
the Byzantines from Andalusia, and, by means of his siege-machines,
Wamba took Nismes on the second day of its leaguer. Paulus and his
chiefs then shut themselves up in the great Roman amphitheatre, which
they had turned into a citadel. In a few days they were reduced by
famine to throw themselves on the king’s mercy. Wamba swore to spare
their lives, and Paulus, with six-and-twenty counts and chiefs, gave
themselves up to his mercy. The king had their beards and hair plucked
out by the roots, and led them in triumph to Toledo, where they were
marched through the town in chains and barefoot, clothed in shirts of
sackcloth, with Paulus in front, wearing a leather crown, fastened on to
his bare scalp by a pitch-plaster. The names of the six-and-twenty have
survived. They included one bishop (a Goth), one priest of Roman blood,
and twenty-four counts and chiefs, of whom seventeen have Gothic and
seven Roman names.
This blow to the unruly Gothic nobles secured Wamba a quiet reign. He
sat on the throne for seven years more (673-680), in peace and
prosperity, endeavouring to palliate as best he could the diseases of
the Visigothic state. [Sidenote: Laws of Wamba.] Some of his laws show
clearly enough the dangers of the times. So far had the class of small
freeholders, who should have composed the bulk of the royal host, now
disappeared that Wamba ordains that for the future slaves, as well as
freemen, are to obey the royal summons to war. He even ordered that the
bishops were to head their serfs in the field, a command which was
deeply resented by the clergy, though a few generations later we find
the practice common enough both in England, Gaul, and Germany.
Wamba lost his throne by a curious chance or, perhaps, by a still more
curious plot. He fell ill in 680, was given over by the physicians, and
fell into a long stupor. His attendants, in accordance with a frequent
practice of the day, clad him in monkish robes and shore his hair to the
tonsure, that he might die ‘in religion.’ [Sidenote: Erwig, 680-87.]
Then before the breath was out of his body his most trusted officer,
count Erwig, seized the royal hoard and declared himself king. Erwig was
a great-nephew of king Chindaswinth, and looked upon himself as the heir
of his cousin, Recceswinth, Wamba’s predecessor. Yet he was not of pure
Visigothic blood; his father Artavasdes was a refugee from Byzantium,
whom Chindaswinth had taken into favour and honoured with the gift of
his niece’s hand.
To the dismay of the palace the aged Wamba did not die: he recovered
from his long stupor and began to mend. But the new king and the court
clergy joined in assuring him that—even though he knew it not—he had
become a monk, and could not resume his lay attire or his royal
authority. Apparently Wamba was not above the superstitions of his day;
he resigned himself to the idea, and retired to the monastery of
Pampliega, where he lived to a great old age. It was afterwards
rumoured, whether truly or falsely, that his long trance had not been
natural, but that Erwig, seeing him on the bed of sickness, had given
him a strong sleeping-potion, and deliberately enfrocked him by fraud in
order to seize the crown.
[Sidenote: The last Gothic kings.] Wamba was the last of the Visigoths;
the four kings who followed him are mere shadows, crowned phantoms of
whom we know little or nothing, for with Wamba’s death the history of
Spain sinks into the blackest obscurity. Their names were Erwig
(680-87), Egica (687-701), Witiza (701-10), and Roderic (710-11). Of the
last two we know little more than the names, but a few facts are
ascertainable about Erwig and Egica.
The former, though he had nerve enough to seize the throne, had not
courage to defend the royal rights. He let the crown sink back into the
same state of dependence on the church into which it had fallen in the
days of Sisinand and Recceswinth. He was ruled and managed by Julian,
the bishop of Toledo, and appears to have been far less truly king of
Spain than was that prelate. At Julian’s behest he repealed the military
laws of Wamba, because they bore hardly on the church, and recommenced
the cruel persecution of the Jews, which always accompanied the
accession of a priest-ridden king to the Spanish throne.
Apparently because he was tormented by his conscience on account of his
dealings with king Wamba, Erwig chose Wamba’s nephew and heir Egica as
his successor. Having married him to his own daughter Cixilo, and made
him swear to be kind to his wife and her brothers, Erwig laid down his
crown and followed Wamba into a monastery.
Egica did not keep his vow; the moment that the Gothic assembly had
recognised him as king he made the bishops absolve him from his oath,
and then repudiated his wife and seized the property of his
brothers-in-law, the sons of Erwig. Egica’s reign was marked by the last
and fiercest persecution of the Jews, in which the Visigothic king and
clergy ever indulged. They voted at the sixteenth Council of Toledo
(695) that all adult Jews should be seized and sold as slaves, while
their children were to be separated from them and given to Christian
families to rear in the true faith. Under this wicked law many Hebrews
conformed, and still more fled over-sea to Africa. The crime which
brought down this doom upon them is said to have been a plot to betray
Spain to foreign enemies. A new power had just arrived in the
neighbourhood of the Visigothic realm; after fifty years of [Sidenote:
Approach of the Saracens.] fighting, the terrible and fanatical Saracen
had just overcome the Byzantine governors of Africa and stormed Carthage
(695), the last stronghold of the East-Romans. It was to them, it would
seem, that the Jews had sent messages, to beg them to cross the straits
and put an end to the persecuting rule of the Spanish bishops. Nothing
came of the invitation at this time; but the very fact that it was
possible implied the gravest change in the situation of the Visigoths.
For three generations they had been lying between two weak stationary
and unenterprising neighbours, the faction-ridden Franks and the exarchs
of Africa. How would the decaying realm fare when attacked by a new
power in the first bloom of its fanatical youth and vigour?
Egica, however, was not destined to see the day of trial, nor was his
son Witiza (701-710), of whom absolutely nothing is known, save that he
was ‘popular with the people but hated by the clergy.’ The details of
his evil doings are the mere imaginings of the monkish writers of the
tenth century. In his own time they were not written down, for within
two years of his death Spain had fallen under the power of the Moor, and
no native chronicler had the heart to detail the last hours of the old
Visigothic kingdom.
Witiza died young, leaving two sons who were not old enough to wear the
crown. The Goths chose, therefore, as their king a certain count
Roderic, who is a mere name to us—though the later chroniclers say, what
is likely enough, that he was a kinsman of Chindaswinth and Erwig, and
therefore hostile to the house of Wamba and Egica.
He reigned but eighteen months, for in his time came the evil day of
Spain. The Saracen conquerors of Africa had spent the last twenty years
in taming the Moors and Berbers. All the tribes had now bowed to their
yoke and accepted Islam: swelled to vast numbers by the new converts,
and yearning for fresh fields to conquer, the Arab chiefs were preparing
to leap over the narrow strait of Gibraltar, and throw themselves upon
the Spanish peninsula.
The romantic legends of a later generation tell a lurid tale of the
wickedness of king Roderic, how he violated the daughter of count
Julian, the governor of Ceuta, and how the outraged father betrayed his
fortress, the key of the straits, to the Moors, and guided them over to
the shores of Andalusia. All this is purely unhistoric. There is no
reason for believing that Roderic was better or worse than his
predecessors; of his character we know nothing: his very existence is
only vouched for by a name and date in the list of Gothic kings, and by
a few very rare coins.
This much we know, that ere he had been eighteen months on the throne
the Moors landed in force at Calpe, thenceforth to be known as
Jebel-Tarik (Gibraltar), from the name of their leader. They began to
lay waste Andalusia, and Roderic came out against them at the head of
the whole host of Visigothic Spain, which must now have been composed—as
the laws of Wamba show us—of a few wealthy counts and bishops heading a
great multitude of their serfs and dependants. The levy of the Visigoths
proved far less able to resist the Moslems than had been the troops of
Byzantium. [Sidenote: Battle of the Guadelete, 711.] On the banks of the
Guadelete, near Medina Sidonia, Tarik gained a decisive victory. Roderic
was slain or drowned in the pursuit, the Gothic army dispersed, and
without having to fight any second battle the invaders mastered Spain.
In less than two years (711-13) Tarik and his superior officer Musa, the
governor of Africa, subdued the whole country; a few places, such as
Cordova, Merida, and Saragossa, held out for a short space, but the
Goths did not choose a new king or rally for any general effort of
resistance. By 713 the only corner of Spain which had not submitted was
the mountainous coast of the Bay of Biscay, where the untameable Basques
and the inhabitants of the Asturias maintained a precarious liberty,
preserved rather by their obscurity and the ruggedness of their homes
than by the inability of the Moslems to complete their conquest.
[Sidenote: Causes of the fall of the Visigoths.] So fell Visigothic
Spain. The reasons are not far to seek: the kings—chosen from no single
royal stock, but creatures of a chance election—had become powerless,
the mere slaves of their clergy; the great nobles were disloyal and
turbulent; the smaller freeholders had disappeared; the great mass of
serfs had no heart to fight for their tyrannical masters. The State
combined the weakness of a land under ecclesiastical governance with the
turbulence of extreme feudalism. It would have fallen before the first
strong invader in any case; if the Moor had not crossed the straits,
Spain would probably have become an appanage of the Frankish realm under
the mighty Mayors of the Palace, or the still mightier Charles the
Great.
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