The Dark Ages, 476-918

by Charles Oman

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. |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).

|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.

|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. |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. |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).