Besides dukes and counts, the king kept other officials in the provinces. These were the domestici who were charged with the control of the royal domain-land throughout the kingdom. They were the king’s private bailiffs for his own possessions, acting much as the ‘Procurators of the Fiscus’ had once acted for the Roman emperors in the ancient provinces. There were other domestici in the palace, whose offices were also financial, and who must apparently have served as underlings to the high-treasurer.
The revenue of the Merovings seems chiefly to have fallen under four heads. |Revenue.| The first was the profits of the royal domain, worked by the domestici. The second was the produce of custom dues, levied both on the land and the sea-frontier of the empire. The third was the produce of fines and compositions in the law courts, of which one-third always went to the king. But the fourth, and most important, was the regular annual tribute of the countships. Each district was assessed in the king’s books for a defined sum, and this the count had to raise and send in, on his own responsibility. It seems that at first only the Gallo-Roman districts were charged with tribute. Theudebert, the grandson of Chlodovech, we are told, first subjected the native Frankish districts to the impost, a grievance so deeply felt that, when he died, the Austrasians rose, and slew Parthenius, the minister who had suggested to the king this method of increasing his revenue.
From this short sketch of the constitution of the Frankish realm it will be seen that its organisation lay half-way between the almost purely Teutonic forms of the government of early England and the almost purely Roman methods employed by Theodoric the Great in Italy. This is what might have been expected. The Frankish kingdom was by no means a primitive Teutonic state, but it was far more so than the Ostrogothic realm in Italy.
CHAPTER VIII
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. |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]]
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.