The Visigoths in History and Legend, by J.N. Hillgarth

Abstract

It is a heartening thought for early medieval historians that the last of the kings of ‘the Goths, the Sueves and the Vandals’ died less than forty years ago. This is despite the fact that the peoples normally associated with those names vanish from historiographical view at various points between the sixth and early eighth centuries. Until the accession in 1973 of King Carl XVI Gustaf, who finally renounced the titles, their memory was constitutionally better preserved in Sweden, their entirely legendary place of origin, than in the Iberian Peninsula, where their actual kingdoms had once existed. While the Sueves and Vandals had been eliminated long before, any chance of a new common Gothic identity being fully absorbed by the social élites of what we call the Visigothic kingdom in Spain was destroyed by the Arab conquest of 711. At a practical level, the descendants of those who, prior to 711, may have thought of themselves as Goths were, after that date, no longer under the authority of a single monarchy. Some were ruled by Muslim amirs and then caliphs; others lived under Christian monarchs in the north, none of whom was able to call themselves king of (all) the Goths. In any case, they might not have wished so to do, as another legacy of the conquest was the need to understand why God had permitted it to happen, and here the sins, real and imaginary, of the last kings of the old Visigothic realm became the most favoured explanation. On the other hand, the legal, literary, religious and other cultural inheritances of the former kingdom conditioned most aspects of the life and thought of the Christian communities of Spain after 711, even of those under Muslim rule. So, there remained a tension, never fully resolved over succeeding centuries, between the positive and the negative aspects of the memory of the Goths. Even in modern times, influential Spanish historians continued to criticise the Visigothic kingdom for its supposed decadence and moral decline, while General Franco praised it as the source of Spaniards’ well-known ‘love of law and order’.