Visigothic Kingdom 405-712
In 405 two Germanic tribes, the Vandals and the Suevi, crossed the Rhine and ravaged Gaul until the Visigoths, drove them into Spain. The Suevi established a kingdom in the remote northwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula. The hardier Vandals, never exceeding 80,000, occupied the region that bears their name -- Andalusia (Spanish, Andalucia).
Because large parts of Spain were outside his control, the western Roman emperor, Honorius (r. 395-423), commissioned his sister, Galla Placidia, and her husband Ataulf, the Visigoth king, to restore order in the Iberian Peninsula, and he gave them the rights to settle in and to govern the area in return for defending it. The highly romanized Visigoths managed to subdue the Suevi and to compel the Vandals to sail for North Africa. In 484 they established Toledo as the capital of their Spanish monarchy. The Visigothic occupation was in no sense a barbarian invasion, however. Successive Visigothic kings ruled Spain as patricians who held imperial commissions to govern in the name of the Roman emperor.
There were no more than 300,000 Germanic people in Spain, which had a population of 4 million, and their overall influence on Spanish history is generally seen as minimal. They were a privileged warrior elite, though many of them lived as herders and farmers in the valley of the Rio Tajo and on the central plateau. Hispano-Romans continued to run the civil administration, and Latin continued to be the language of government and of commerce.
Under the Visigoths, lay culture was not so highly developed as it had been under the Romans, and the task of maintaining formal education and government shifted decisively to the church because its Hispano-Roman clergy alone were qualified to manage higher administration. As elsewhere in early medieval Europe, the church in Spain stood as society's most cohesive institution, and it embodied the continuity of Roman order.
Religion was the most persistent source of friction between the Roman Catholic Hispano-Romans and their Arian Visigoth overlords, whom they considered heretical. At times this tension invited open rebellion, and restive factions within the Visigothic aristocracy exploited it to weaken the monarchy. In 589 Recared, a Visigoth ruler, renounced his Arianism before the Council of Bishops at Toledo and accepted Catholicism, thus assuring an alliance between the Visigothic monarchy and the Hispano-Romans. This alliance would not mark the last time in Spanish history that political unity would be sought through religious unity.
Court ceremonials -- from Constantinople -- that proclaimed the imperial sovereignty and unity of the Visigothic state were introduced at Toledo. Still, civil war, royal assassinations, and usurpation were commonplace, and warlords and great landholders assumed wide discretionary powers. Bloody family feuds went unchecked. The Visigoths had acquired and cultivated the apparatus of the Roman state, but not the ability to make it operate to their advantage. In the absence of a well-defined hereditary system of succession to the throne, rival factions encouraged foreign intervention by the Greeks, the Franks, and, finally, the Muslims in internal disputes and in royal elections.
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