CHAPTER XI.

THE FAILURE OF THE VISIGOTHS.

IF the rapidity and the completeness of the Barbarian conquest of the Roman provinces, at the beginning of the fifth century, was calculated to excite our wonder, we may learn with even greater astonishment that the conquest of the Visigothic kingdom by the Moslems, at the beginning of the eighth century, was at once infinitely more rapid and infinitely more complete.

The misery and corruption of Roman Spain, the exactions of the taxgatherers, the bankruptcy of the citizens, the slavery of the peasants, the banishment of the soldiery, and above all the enormous numbers of the ever advancing multitudes of the Barbarians, all these things have been alluded to in a former chapter, and suffice to a great extent to explain the success of the earlier invaders. The occupation of Spain by the Visigoths, the gentlest and most human of all the Barbarians, was indeed rather a deliverance than a conquest; for the arms of the amiable Wallia were directed not against the Roman Provincials, but against the terrible Vandals and Suevians and Alans, who had ravaged their country for ten long and shameful years. But even these fiercer Barbarians had failed to possess themselves of more than a portion of the province, and a great number of the cities remained in the hands of the Romans, until at the approach of Wallia as an Imperial commander, the gates were opened to the Visigothic ally, the harbinger of peace to Roman Spain. And when some fifty years later the Imperial authority gave place to that of the Visigoths under Euric, it was rather a change of Government than a conquest by a foreign power.

Thus to the Visigoths of Spain were given enormous opportunities and ample means of founding a prosperous and an enduring Commonwealth. Treated from their first arrival in the country as friends rather than as foes, they entered into the peaceful occupation of the richest provinces of the Roman world, and they divided their broad lands with what 1

Two-thirds to the Visigoths and one-third to the Romans. Leges Wisigothorum, lib. x., tit. 1. 3, 6, 9, and lib. v., tit., 4, 19. See Fustel de Coulanges, Problèmes d Histoire (1891), pp. 289, 99.

yet remained of one of the noblest races that was absorbed into the Roman Empire.

For nearly three hundred years nine tenths of the Peninsula remained undisturbed by foreign invasion; and while the rare violations of the frontier were at all times promptly repelled, prudence or weakness forbade1 retaliation, and the blood and treasure of the country were never at any time wasted in foreign wars. The country, too, enjoyed from the days of Wallia to the days of Roderic the inestimable advantage of Political Unity. The State was never divided, like that of the neighbouring Franks, into rival and often hostile kingdoms, with their endless civil wars and family disputes, amalgamations, divisions and revolutions. Spain, with its fertile soil, its varied climate, its noble rivers, its extensive seaboard, its inexhaustible mines, and its hardy and frugal population, was the richest inheritance of the Gothic race. Yet, after three centuries of undisputed enjoyment, their Rule was overthrown at once and for ever by a handful of marauders from Africa. The Goth had neglected all his opportunities, despised all his advantages, heeded no warnings. He had been weighed in the balance and found wanting; and his kingdom was taken from him-for he had shown himself unfit for power.

Of all the various systems of Government that have been attempted on this earth, Theocracy, or more properly hiero. cracy, is undoubtedly one of the very worst. And in all circumstances and conditions where the priest and the confessor usurp the authority that properly belongs to the magistrate and to the man, disaster is the inevitable result. From the death of Reccared to the death of Roderic, the government of Spain was a Theocracy, tempered by Revolution.

The military spirit, the personal courage, and love of arms which had before all things distinguished the Goths of the fifth century, had in the seventh century entirely disappeared. The military system devised by the prudent Wamba, to supply the place of the old national spirit, had been destroyed, almost as soon as it was established, by the churchmen whose power it threatened. The new national spirit had as yet not been created. The Kings, ruled by the Bishops, had nothing in common with the people, who despised, or the nobles, who assassinated them. The nobles, inordinately wealthy, idle, dissolute, unwarlike, unrefined, lived lives of luxury and ease, whose aimless monotony was only broken by occasional

1 Principally in Septimania or the Narbonensis. The invaders rarely crossed the Pyrenees. It is, however, a most remarkable fact that so tempting and so exposed a province as Gothic Gaul should have been so long preserved to the Visigothic Monarchy of Spain

rebellion. Alaric and Viriatus were both alike forgotten. The Cid had not yet been imagined. Spain was not yet a nation.

The absence of anything like the Feudal System made the position of the great landholders entirely false, their wealth without a justification, their estates without a reason, their lives without an object. If the lord had no influence, the labourer had no hope. A slave in fact, if not in name, he found the Gothic serfdom as oppressive and scarcely less demoralising than the Roman servitude. The Christian bondage, indeed, was more odious, in that it was more incongruous. The Bishops were among the largest1 slave-holders in the realm; and baptized Christians were bought and sold without a blush by the successors of St. Paul and Santiago. Kings without power, nobles without influence, a clergy already corrupt, a people not yet free-it was a poor result of three hundred years of dominion. If the Provincials of Honorius were a people of Taxgatherers and Bankrupts, the subjects of Roderic were a nation of Priests and Slaves.

Thus had the Roman and the Visigoth alike fallen into decay. The glory of their Imperial dominion, the pride of their Gothic liberty had alike departed. The successors of the Celtiberians had become a population without patriotism, without part or lot in the welfare of the country in which they lived. Harassed by wars which brought them no glory, and by Revolutions which brought them no freedom: abandoned by Gothic kings to Romish ecclesiastics, the great body of the nation was ready to exchange the double yoke of their inglorious oppressors for the Imperial Liberty which they found under the Arab.

The weakest spot in the Visigothic monarchy was the absence of the hereditary right of the kings; and although in many instances a powerful sovereign was able to ensure the succession of one of his sons, the elective principle was too valuable a weapon both in the hands of the nobles and in the hands of the churchmen, to be suffered to fall into decay. Chosen at first only by the free Visigoths, the kings gradually accepted the position that the approval of the Council was necessary to validate their election, and in the time of such royal puppets as Sisibut, Sisenand, and Chintila, the Council ruled the King: the Bishops not only ruled, but constituted the Council. Thus an elective

See

1 Neither the serf nor the slave could marry without the consent of his lord. If an unauthorised marriage was discovered, husband and wife were separated by force, a provision more savage than that of the older Roman law. post, APPENDIX to this volume-The Laws of the Visigoths. Muñoz, Del estado de las personas en los reinos de Asturias and Leon; and Dozy, Histoire, tom. ii., 20-25.

2 See Dahn, op. cit., vol. v., passim

See also

monarchy and a celibate priesthood deprived the State of that stability of government and that regularity of administration, which are among the most certain advantages of the hereditary system. Had the kingdom of the Visigoths descended as of right from father to son, the kings would have been independent of the great Metropolitans, and the nobles would not have been tempted to flatter the bishops, in the hope of being able to supplant the king. But as things were ordered, the entire power passed into the hands of a great ecclesiastical hierarchy a priesthood, ignorant and irresponsible, under the orders of a supreme episcopate, ambitious, eager, arrogant, lusting after temporal power.

For the Councils2 which play so large a part in the domestic history of the times, had nothing of the popular, or even of the aristocratic in their composition, but were merely assemblies of churchmen, together with a few Palatines or officers of the king's court, instituted in the first instance for the discussion of religious and doctrinal questions, and gradually invested, by the personal weakness and doubtful authority of successive monarchs, with immense political and legislative power,

At the opening of the eighth century, Spain had no industry, no commerce, no arms. Not even letters had survived. For the Catholic church discouraged, if it did not actually prohibit, the study of polite literature. Virgil and Homer, Tacitus and Livy were Pagans and Atheists, and their works were unprofitable and impious. The study of natural science or of medicine, the development of manufactures or of industry, the cultivation of the arts, these were equally

1 Of the thirteen kings who reigned from Alaric to Athanagild, 411-554, no less than eleven died violent deaths; two were killed in battle, nine were murdered by their subjects.

2 A list of the principal Councils of Visigothic Spain may be useful for reference :-Illiberis, 306 ?-Saragossa I., 380;-Toledo I., 400;-Tarragona, 516;—Gerona, 517;-Toledo II., 527;—Lerida, 546;—Valencia, 546 ;—Braga I., 561;-Braga II., 572;-Toledo III., 580;-Narbonne, 589;-Seville I., 590;-Saragossa II., 592;-Seville II., 619;-Toledo IV., 633; -Toledo V., 636;-Toledo VI., 638;-Toledo VII., 646;-Toledo VIII., 653 ;-Toledo IX., 655;-Toledo X., 656;-Merida, 666;—Toledo XI., 675;-Braga III., 675;— Toledo XII., 681 ;—Toledo XIII., 683;-Toledo XIV., 684;-Toledo XV., 688;-Saragossa III., 691;-Toledo XVI., 693 ;-Toledo XVII., 694;— Toledo XVIII., 701 or 702.

Of these sixteen assemblies, six only included a single layman among their members. The eighth Council of Toledo included 17, the ninth 4, the twelfth 15, the thirteenth 26, the fifteenth 17, and the sixteenth 16. See Montalembert, op. cit. iii. 210-12. Geddes' Tracts, vol. ii. Masdeu, xi., 232, 58. Lafuente, ii., lib. iii., cap. 8; Eng. Hist. Review (1887), pp. 209, 232, 234; and Esp. Sag. ii., 197-203, and vi. 50.

4

Dahn, ubi supra, p. 225-6.

Hallam, Middle Ages, iii., 269, 270, 275. Lecky, European Morals, ii., 222. Milman, Latin Christianity, ix., 4.

unedifying to the devout Catholic. That sublime manifestation of "poetry in stone" so strangely called Gothic architecture, is not only not Visigothic, but it was unknown in Spain for over four hundred years after the destruction of the Goths. And although the great province is still covered with the glorious remains of Roman constructive art, there is scarcely found trace or fragment of the rude architecture of the Visigoths to tell of their dominion in the Peninsula.1 Vitoria is the one existing city that was founded by these 2 sojourners of three hundred years, and the very name it bears is anything but Gothic. For strangest, perhaps, of all the many signs of decay and loss of national life, the Visigoths, by the end of the seventh century, had well nigh lost their own language. And thus only may be explained the truly wonderful fact that while every town and river and headland in southern Spain, even at the close of the nineteenth century, recalls the dominion of the long banished and still hated Arab, not a word is to be found in the local nomenclature of Castile, nor yet of the Asturias, to tell the tale of the Visigoth.3

When Atawulf first crossed the Pyrenees at the head of the Visigoths, Latin was already the language of the Roman Diocese. When Roderic threw away his crown on the banks of the Guadalete, Latin was still the language of the Visigothic Kingdom. The Goth had been absorbed by the Roman.

1 And what there is, is of the poorest and meanest character. See Ponz, Viaje en España, vol. i.

Ya que no exista hoy edificio alguno de los construidos por los Godos en nuestro suelo serà por eso imposible formar idea de la architectura en ellos empleada? José Caveda, Ensayo sobre la Architectura, ed. 1849—p. 65.

2 Vitoria is said by Ford to be derived from the Basque Beturia—a height. The Latin Victoriacum is more obvious. See Marieta, Tratado de las Fundaciones de Ciudades, &c. (Cuenca, 1596), pp. 43-52. In any case the name is not Gothic, although the city was almost certainly founded by Leovgild as a permanent military station after one of his victories over the Suevi, and is said to have been first named by him after his son Reccared.

The Vandals may have given their name to Andalusia. See post, APPENDIX IV. ; and Septimania was at one time known as Gothia, but the name did not long endure. See Freeman, Hist. Geog., pp. 90 and 154.

3 Garibay remarks shrewdly enough that of the so-called Gothic kings in Spain who reigned in the ever growing north-west after the coming of the Moslem, not one bore a name that had been borne by any of the Visigothic sovereigns from Alaric to Roderic inclusive. Every name was of Latin origin; and the first Pelayo or Pelagius has moreover a distinctly heretical flavour. See Romey, iii., 151.

To

By a strange accident indeed the name "Visigoth" has given rise to our word Bigot a word meaning in the old French detested foreigner or heretic. the Catholic Franks, of course, the Visigoths of Southern Gaul or Spain, were objects of bitter hatred both on religious and worldly grounds. See Henry Bradley, The Goths, p. 329. Cf. Littré, Dict. sub BIGOT. Littré is inclined to favour this

derivation.

It is worthy of note that Bigote in modern Spanish, means, not a Bigot, but a moustache; and that even in the figurative sense a hombre de bigotes is used to signify not a fanatic, but a strong minded man.