The Visigothic kingdom in Spain had to endure annexation by the Ostrogoths and invasion by the Byzantines (see below). The peninsula fragmented so that authority passed to the local landowners before Spain re-emerged as a strong and centralized kingdom at the end of the sixth century. Leovigild (569-86) achieved the reunification of most of the peninsula through military means, finally defeating the Suevic kingdom in 585. The problem that remained was the division between the Arian Visigoths and the orthodox Christians who made up the majority of the population. Leovigild may have been edging towards conversion to orthodoxy before his death but it was his son Reccared (586-601) who took the plunge. Summoning the bishops to Toledo in 589, Reccared not only proclaimed his conversion but formed an alliance with the church through which church and state worked together to consolidate the political unity of the state. This remarkable development showed how well the authority of the Visigothic kings was accepted. As in Italy the distinction between Visigoth and Roman appears to have faded with time although it is interesting that the names of the rulers remain Gothic ones well into the seventh century. This perhaps reflects the fact that Gothic had become synonymous with elite status.
As a result of this integration, the Visigothic kingdom was to compete with the Frankish as the most stable in Europe. Their decayed cities especially those along the coast, the modern Marseilles and Barcelona among them, saw a flickering of new life as limited trade with the Byzantine east revived. The Visigothic kingdom was also intellectually fertile. The most prestigious of its scholars was Isidore, bishop of Seville from about 600 to 636. Isidore’s most influential contribution to political life was the development of a theory of Christian kingship in which the ruler must shine through the exercise of his faith. However, his contribution to scholarship was as great. In his twenty-volume Etymologies, Isidore collected a vast range of earlier material to serve as a foundation for the understanding of the meanings of Latin words. He was a determined advocate of a traditional classical education for the clergy, insisting that it was better for Christians that they read the pagan authors than remain ignorant of them. Like Cassiodorus in Italy, Isidore set in hand the copying of manuscripts, and classical learning was preserved as a feature of education more successfully in Spain than in any other western state. Yet there is already a sense of the classics of the past vanishing. The authors stood, Isidore said, like blue hills on the far distant horizons and he found it hard to place them even chronologically.
In contrast to these two European kingdoms, Vandal rule in Africa was less stable. The Vandals had dealt a deathblow to the empire when they cut off the grain supplies to Italy after their conquest of 439. They then created an effective navy (see earlier p. 633) and so forced the Byzantine emperors of the fifth century to treat them with respect. In Africa, they ruled as overlords, for the most part isolating themselves as garrison forces in the coastal cities. Landowners had their estates confiscated and there was bitter conflict between the local Christians, the heirs of Augustine and the Donatists, and their Arian rulers. As a result there was little hope of accommodation between Germans and Romans. It was the fate of the local Christians, written up in lurid but probably exaggerated detail by one of their bishops, Victor of Vita, that aroused the interest of the east, in particular the emperor Justinian (527-65) in Constantinople. It seems to have been his initiative, based on a desire to help the oppressed Christians as well as to make a final, if anachronistic, attempt to revive the western empire, that lay behind the decision made in 533 to invade Africa, an invasion which was astonishingly successful (see below, p. 666). It was followed by an invasion of Italy in 535.
World History
