The Dark Ages, 476-918

by Charles Oman

|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 At Julian’s behest he repealed the military laws of Wamba, because they bore hardly on the church, and recommenced the cruel persecution of the Jews, which always accompanied the accession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 |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. |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.

|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.