CHAPTER XIII

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.