Fouracre P. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1: c. 500-c. 700

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The Catholic Visigothic kingdom 363

the task was complicated and it took two conciliar assemblies before it was

effected, beginning with the Twelfth Council of Toledo, held in 681.

The

conciliar assembly agreed to restore to those who had lost their rights as a

consequence of the law discussed above, their ancient dignity and capacity

to take out private actions. Likewise it lifted the excommunication of those

who had worked against the king or patria and had been pardoned by the

new monarch. Two years later the Thirteenth Council of Toledo completed

these measures and resolved to return, to those who had taken part in the

conspiracy of Paul and even those who since the time of the king Chintila

had been tainted with this infamy, the right to take out private actions; it

was also agreed to return conﬁscated goods, provided that they had not been

granted to someone else, or ceded causa stipendii.Inthe second canon those

present, petitioning on behalf of those who had lost dignity because of unjust

accusations or confessions elicited under royal pressure, established that from

then on ecclesiastics and nobles would enjoy procedural guarantees and could

only be tried publicly before tribunals made up of people of the same estate.

This canon makes evident the antagonism between the church and nobility on

the one side and royal power on the other; it presents kings as the instigators

of fraudulent trials and accuses them of using physical violence against nobles

and clerics to prove their guilt. It transformed those guilty of acting against the

kingdom into innocent victims.

Ervig made further concessions to the church and nobility. The Council’s

third canon sanctioned a royal decree concerning the remitting of tributes,

in which payments from the ﬁrst year of his reign still owing to the public

purse were written off, with the exception of tributes already collected but

still not handed over to the ﬁsc by the gatherers. It included the pain of

excommunication for whoever contravened the concession. The attention the

Council paid to this decree, not only dedicating one of its canons to it but also

incorporating it in its acts, seems to indicate that the church and nobility were

the main beneﬁciaries of this ﬁscal amnesty. The Council in its sixth canon

also tried to impose limits to the development of a patrimonial bureaucracy

on the part of kings. Henceforth, only freedmen and servi ﬁscales could hold

court posts or administer properties of the ﬁsc or the king, and not other

slaves and freedmen, with the end of avoiding their becoming lofty, and being

transformed in this way into ‘the executioners of their masters’.

Ervig not only rectiﬁed the policies of Wamba through the Councils, but

also used civil legislation to promulgate a new law concerning the army.

The

legislator complained that those obliged to go to war with their serfs, took

The conciliar acts and laws of Ervig are the main sources of evidence for this reign.

LV ix.2.9,pp.374–9.

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364 a. barbero and m. i. loring

with them not even the twentieth part of them, and established a series of rules

which obliged the entire people to answer the royal call, joining the king’s

army or that of duces or comites on the day indicated. The law speciﬁed that

everyone must come, Goths and Romans, free and freedmen, and also the servi

ﬁscales, bringing with them a tenth part of their serfs armed at their expense.

In the event of non-compliance, a dux, comes or gardingus was to be deprived

of his goods and exiled. The thiufadi and other lesser functionaries were to be

shaved, to be condemned to two hundred lashes, and to pay a quantity of gold,

a sanction whose non-completion would lead to perpetual enslavement.

This law has points of contact with that of Wamba, but it tones down the

exigencies of the punishments provided for non-completion. Noticeable is the

exclusion of ecclesiastics from those who were obliged to go to war. Another

innovation was the different punishments laid down, according to whether the

person belonged to a higher or lower rank in the administration and army: the

only ones now reduced to slavery were those of inferior status and that only

in the case of their non-payment of the pecuniary compensation demanded.

Finally, whereas in the time of Wamba one had to assist the army with all

available forces, the law of Ervig only demanded a tenth part of the serfs. All

these modiﬁcations did not alter the half-public, half-private character that the

army had had at least since the reign of Wamba. It continued to be made up

for the most part of private delegations, although the king did not renounce

his rights of ofﬁcial notiﬁcation and direction, whether in person or through

his generals.

The legislative work of Ervig was not limited to the promulgation of new

laws, for he also undertook a new revised edition of the Liber Iudiciorum, which

was published on 21 October 681,ayear into his reign. Among the laws issued

and collected by Ervig in the new Code, those promulgated against the Jews

are notable. These laws, which were presented by Ervig at the Twelfth Council

of Toledo and approved by the assembly in their eighth canon, were extremely

harsh, surpassing even the rigour of previous legislation. In fact Judaism as a

religion was prohibited, Jews were given a year to convert, and the prohibition

of the Passover and other rites such as circumcision was reiterated. As a result

of these measures, although future civil and canon legislation would continue

to refer to Jews, it dealt only with those who had converted to Christianity.

egica and the attempt to establish dynastic succession

Before his death in the middle of November 687,Ervig designated his son-in-

law Egica, who was married to his daughter Cixilo, as his successor, thus

passing over his own male children. The succession seems to have arisen

from an agreement with a powerful noble faction, since six months later, in

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The Catholic Visigothic kingdom 365

May 688,Egica convened the Fifteenth Council of Toledo with the object of

freeing him from compromises with the family of his father-in-law, something

echoed in Asturian chronicles from the end of the ninth century which links

Egica and the family of Wamba. Egica, in the tomus which he presented to

the Fifteenth Council, stated that he found himself bound to two oaths whose

clauses were mutually contradictory. On the occasion of his marriage to Cixilo

Ervig had made him swear, by which he was obliged to protect the children of

the king, but as a condition of his election as king Ervig had also made him

swear to act with justice towards the peoples entrusted to him. According to

Egica, Ervig’s family had beneﬁted from the abuses and unjust conﬁscations

Ervig had made as king. The assembly believed that it was certainly impossible

to complete both promises without committing perjury, so it found that the

second oath ought to prevail because its content was fuller, qualifying it by

saying that this did not license Egica to leave the royal family unprotected, and

protecting them did not prevent him from making legal claims against them.

Behind this problem and Egica’s fear of violating his oaths, what was really at

stake was the destination of properties proceeding from the conﬁscations made

by Ervig, which had passed to his descendants. The new monarch was now

trying to take back this property from his in-laws, in order to weaken their

position and prevent them from raising themselves as rivals.

In 693,Egica brought together a new Council at Toledo, the Sixteenth,

whose acts inform us that a signiﬁcant rebellion had occurred a little before.

It had been led by Bishop Sisbert, who had succeeded Julian as bishop of

Toledo, and who, according to the acts, had attempted to deprive Egica of the

throne and kill him. The conciliar assembly, acting as a high court, condemned

Sisbert and removed him from ofﬁce. Then those present again took up the

doctrine of the inviolability of the royal person, in his quality as the anointed

and elect of God, insisting on the obligation to respect the oath of ﬁdelity

to the king. They decreed harsh penalties for those accused of high treason,

strengthening the rigour of those already prescribed by the old canons. That is

to say, removal from ofﬁce and exile for clerics, and for lay persons, reduction

to slavery under the ﬁsc, deprivation from ofﬁce, and conﬁscation of property

(which was to be taken by the king). Excommunication was an additional

punishment.

Tw o more of Egica’s laws can be related to this plot.

In one, oaths made to

persons other than the king, or those made in the courts, were punishable by

the penalties associated with high treason. The other was designed to regulate

the way in which the oath of ﬁdelity was taken: the members of the ofﬁcium

palatinum were required to take it personally before the king, and other free

LV ii.5.19,pp.118–20 and ii.1.7,pp.52ff.

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366 a. barbero and m. i. loring

men before functionaries called discussores iuramenti, who travelled through the

kingdom to this end. Both the members of the ofﬁcium palatinum and other

free men who evaded this obligation without justiﬁcation were to be deprived

of their properties, and their persons left to the disposition of the king. These

laws conﬁrm that the ﬁdeles regum were not just a restricted group, commended

personally to the king (a deep-rooted interpretation in the historiography of

the Visigoths), but included all of his subjects.

In 694, another Council was held in Toledo, the Seventeenth, whose preoc-

cupation was the Jewish question. In the tomus he addressed to the council, the

king denounced a supposed plot of the Jews, alleging that, in collusion with

Hebrews overseas, they were conspiring together against the Christian people.

It also afﬁrmed that despite his benevolence towards them, which had led him

to restore Christian slaves to those who had been deprived of them (because of

their inﬁdelity), the Jews, under cover of their promise of sincere conversion,

continued practising their rites and ceremonies. Finally he asked the assembly

for a ﬁrm decision as to what he should do with their persons and goods. The

conciliar assemblies ratiﬁed the royal accusations and in the eleventh canon

agreed that Jews were to be deprived of all their goods and, together with their

women and children, be reduced to slavery, and dispersed throughout all the

provinces of Hispania, unable to recover their status as free men whilst they

persisted in their inﬁdelity. The king could give their Christian slaves letters of

freedom and award them part of their former masters’ goods. Finally children

of seven years and up were to be separated from their parents in order to be

educated as Christians. The Jews of Gothic Gaul (Narbonensis)were excluded

from these measures, owing to the depopulation suffered in the province as

aresult of the plague, but they did have to assist the dux there, with their

goods.

The story of the supposed Jewish conspiracy against Christianity in general,

and the Gothic kingdom in particular, cannot be accepted as having any histor-

ical basis, although the reference to the Hebrews overseas may allude to eastern

and northern parts of Africa conquered by the Muslims, where Jews enjoyed

greater tolerance. The content of this canon represents the culmination of

the comprehensive anti-Jewish legislation of the Visigothic kings. It is worth

pointing out that the serious measures decreed at the Seventeenth Council

were directed at converts rather than against Jews as such, for the text afﬁrms

that ‘they had sullied the tunic of the Faith received from the Holy Mother

Church at their baptism’.

In an epoch when it was difﬁcult to demarcate

the boundaries of the religious and the political, where the faith owed to God

was conﬂated with that owed to the king, those who did not participate in the

‘tunicam ﬁdei, qua eos per undam baptismatis induit sancta mater ecclesia maculaverint’, Vives

(1963), p. 535.

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The Catholic Visigothic kingdom 367

dominant religion began to be marginalised by their religious beliefs and ended

up being accused of wanting to seize the throne and kingdom for themselves.

Another matter of interest dealt with by the Seventeenth Council was the

protection of the wife and descendants of the king, already tackled at the

previous Council where protection and aid had been decreed for the royal

family, with the objective of preventing violence against their persons or the

seizure of their goods. Forcing them to take the tonsure and religious habit

was forbidden, and in addition an obligation to say prayers for the royal family

daily, in every church in the kingdom, was imposed. The Seventeenth Council

developed these measures, including the queen, Cixilo, in the persons of the

royal family who had to be protected, and extending more fully the measures

concerning the question of the properties of royal offspring. The children of

the king, provided that they were not found guilty in court cases, ought to

possess without disturbance that which they had received through hereditary

succession, by gift from their fathers or by just acquisition, and should also

possess the right to dispose of these goods freely. Finally, if they were left

unprotected, the bishops were obliged to offer them help. All these guarantees,

made by the Councils in order to protect the descendants of kings, were a new

element directed towards strengthening the position of a family at the head of

the nobility and also to ensure that the highest dignity, the crown, would not

pass outside it. In the reign of Ervig, the Thirteenth Council had been the ﬁrst

to give this kind of guarantee, and although called into question by Egica and

in part unfulﬁlled, this did not stop him from attaining analogous beneﬁts for

his own family.

In order to strengthen the dynastic principle, Egica also resorted to the recog-

nised practice of associating a member of the royal family with the throne, in

this case his son Witiza, who, as the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754 relates, reigned

alongside him from 698.Anentry in the list of kings known as the Chronica

Regum Visigothorum tells us that in an extension to the previous practices of

association, Witiza was also anointed during his father’s lifetime at the end of

the year 700.Unction made Witiza’s association to the throne something more

than a co-regency or simple attempt to ensure the son succeeded the father,

because it transformed the king into a sacred ﬁgure. He was de facto a king,

chosen by God for the kingdom by means of the ritual act of unction, doubtless

carried out by order of his co-regent and predecessor. By this act the gratia Dei

through which royal power emanated was perpetuated in a hereditary form

through the bloodline.

witiza, roderic and the end of the visigoth kingdom

Information about the reign of Witiza (698/702–710)isscarce and the ﬁgure

of this monarch is obscured by legendary stories from a later period, which

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368 a. barbero and m. i. loring

attributed to him a reputation for lechery, through which he corrupted the

bishops and the people and provoked the wrath of God. As had become usual

amongst the later Visigothic kings, at the beginning of his reign, and on his

own initiative, Witiza lifted the condemnations hanging over members of the

Gothic nobility persecuted by his predecessor. According to the Mozarabic

Chronicle he returned to them their dignities and lands. Those pardoned by

Witiza and returned to royal favour were those who had participated in the

rebellion of Sisbert. The action of Witiza in favour of nobility persecuted by

his father probably took place during the Eighteenth Council of Toledo, held

at the beginning of his reign, but from which no acts have been conserved.

The Mozarabic Chronicle of 754 contains an obscure passage in which it says

that in the year 701 Egica and Witiza left their palace, moving from place to

place in Spain, as a result of a disaster or calamity previously mentioned by

the chronicler. This information has been linked with the revolt of a certain

Seniofred, who minted coins in Toledo in the last years of the seventh century.

It is more likely that Seniofred jointly led the revolt of 693–694 with the bishop

Sisbert, since its epicentre was Toledo, and the chronicler refers to the plague,

the only general calamity recorded by him during the reign of Egica. According

to the acts of the Seventeenth Council of Toledo the epidemic devastated the

province of Narbonensis around 694 and it is likely that from here it extended

south of the Pyrenees and that its devastating effects lasted into 701.Alaw

about fugitive slaves, promulgated by Egica soon before his death at the end

of 702,proves that the king had abandoned Toledo, as it is dated in the city of

ordoba.

The Mozarabic Chronicle gives some information about the brief

joint reign of the two princes, that is, between 698 and 702.Itnarrates that the

comes Teodemir victoriously repulsed an attack by the Byzantines which had

come from the sea, information related to the struggles between Byzantines

and Muslims in North Africa which led to the loss of Carthage in 698.

The end of Witiza’s reign is not well understood since there is no explicit

evidence about his death or about the circumstances that surrounded the

succession. Sufﬁcient is known, however, to afﬁrm that it was difﬁcult and

not peaceful. The Mozarabic Chronicle claims that, while Witiza ascended

the throne on the death of his father in conditions of complete tranquillity,

Roderic’s succession in 711 was accompanied by widespread disorder. We also

know from Christian and Muslim sources that Witiza’s children attempted

to keep the kingdom along with the enormous landed fortune to which they

were heirs. On the other hand the Continuatio Soriensis of the Chronica Regum

Visigothorum includes two people following Witiza, Achila and Ardo, the ﬁrst

reigning for three years and the second for seven. Coins from Tarragona and

LV ix.1.21.

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The Catholic Visigothic kingdom 369

Narbonne minted in Achila’s name have encouraged speculation that he may

have been a son of Witiza, but this identiﬁcation does not ﬁt in with the

information that Witiza’s family collaborated with the Muslims and readily

accepted Islamic dominion. In the light of these indications there can be no

doubt that the disappearance of Witiza at the head of the kingdom, presumably

owing to natural causes, opened a period of civil war to which the Mozarabic

Chronicle unequivocally alluded, in its comment about Roderic’s tumultuous

seizure of the kingdom and also in the comment that at the moment of the

Muslim invasion the kingdom was submerged in a civil war, intestino furore

conﬂigetur.

It was in the context of intervention in this civil war that the Muslim

invasion occurred. The intervention of foreign forces in order to support a

pretender to the crown had occurred on other occasions, but this time it

would have profound consequences for the Visigothic kingdom. The Arabs,

who after expelling the Byzantines and conquering the Berber tribes during the

last third of the seventh century had established themselves in north-western

Africa, saw in the civil war the opportunity to invade the Peninsula. In July

710 a small incursion took place under the command of one Tarif and in the

following spring Tariq ibn Ziyad, a freedman Berber client of Musa ibn Nusayr,

governor of Ifriqiya, crossed to Spain with a large contingent of troops. The

king of Toledo, Roderic, was ﬁghting in the north against the Basques when

he was informed of the disembarcation of the Muslim army, which was made

up mainly of Berber troops from North Africa, and after reuniting his army

he marched south. The deﬁnitive encounter took place, according to Muslim

sources, in the Wadi Lakka,atoponym that has been identiﬁed with either the

river Guadalete or the Barate, both in the province of C

adiz. There, according

to the Mozarabic Chronicle, Roderic was betrayed by his troops who sided

with his rival for the throne and the king was defeated and killed in the battle.

As we have seen, the Visigothic army was largely composed of private retinues,

from which its structural weakness derived, and which was used by the Islamic

forces to their own advantage. The latter, according to the Mozarabic Chronicle,

also killed Roderic’s rivals.

Tariq then marched on Toledo, and occupied the royal city with, according

to the Mozarabic Chronicle, the positive collaboration of the bishop of Seville

Oppa, who was Witiza’s brother. The role that the Chronicle attributes to

Oppa is decisive, in keeping with the narrative’s stress on the way in which the

civil war had facilitated the Muslim victories. It is also a major argument in

favour of showing that Witiza and his family were responsible for the arrival

of the invaders, since he appears to have collaborated with them from the ﬁrst.

The rapid intervention against Toledo reveals that from early on, even from

their disembarcation, the Muslims were attempting to seize the kingdom. The

370 a. barbero and m. i. loring

Mozarabic Chronicle tells us that some of the nobility of the royal city were

executed and that its bishop Sindered abandoned Toledo and the Peninsula,

in order to ﬂee to Rome. The execution of nobiles viros after the taking of the

city, something that did not recur in the conquest of other cities, and the ﬂight

or exile of its metropolitan, have been understood as part of a strategy aimed

at preventing the election of a new king capable of coordinating organised

resistance. In this way the Islamic armies then had only to confront pockets of

local resistance.

As a result of the success of Tariq, the governor of Ifriqiya, Musa, arrived

personally in the Peninsula with his son ‘Abd al-‘Aziz at the head of a new Arab

and Berber army in the summer of 712.Itremained until 714, when Musa

and Tariq left the Peninsula and marched to Damascus, where Musa had been

recalled by the caliph, leaving ‘Abd al-‘Aziz in charge of the troops and gov-

ernment of the Peninsula. By then only north-western regions of Tarraconensis

and Narbonensis had escaped Islamic rule, and here Ardo had succeeded Achila,

and reigned for seven years. A seven-year reign for Achila corresponds with the

information in the Mozarabic Chronicle which says that Val

ı al-Hurr governed

all Spain, both citerior and ulterior, between 716 and 719. This rapid conquest

culminated in the occupation of Narbonensis between 721 and 725.

In conclusion, the end of the Visigothic monarchy was a consequence of

diverse but related factors. One should cite in the ﬁrst place the political

factors, the most important of which was without doubt the strength of Islamic

expansion. But to this must be added the civil war which followed the death

of Witiza. The ﬁdeles regum had a great autonomy of action which belies the

apparently centralized structure of the state. This meant that the invaders could

reach concrete agreements with the duces and comites of the different provinces

who, doubtless, were more interested in keeping their positions than in ﬁghting

for the defence of the kingdom of Toledo. Another factor in the disintegration

may be revealed by Egica’s law against fugitive slaves, a widespread problem

which reﬂected hostility to the dominant social order and indifference to its

political vicissitudes. This was true of slaves and doubtless also of the freedmen

and free, especially the large numbers under patronage, whose close links of

dependence imply their servility. Finally, the Jewish minority could not but

view in a positive light whatever change of dominant politico-religious regime

took place.

Garc

ıa Moreno (1989), p. 189.

SeeToch, chapter 20 below, for the view that there is no evidence for a large-scale Jewish presence

in Spain at any time during the Visigothic period.

chapter 14

FRANCIA IN THE SEVENTH

CENTURY

Paul Fouracre

The main focus of the narrative history of Francia in the seventh century is

its ruling dynasty, the Merovingians. This is because the precious few Franks

who commented upon what was happening around them were primarily inter-

ested in a tiny social elite which participated in the exercise of power through

the medium of the royal palace. Hardly less for modern commentators, the

doings of kings, and of queens, and the arrangement of power in and out

of the palace, have become the necessary principles around which we must

organise our understanding of events. The very chronology of the period is

determined according to which king ruled where, and for how long. The

Merovingians themselves have a poor reputation – they are notorious as ‘the

do-nothing kings’ – and given the nature of our sources, this has had the effect

of dragging the seventh century down with them. In the most pessimistic view,

its main redeeming feature was that it also saw the rise of the family which

would form a new ruling dynasty, namely the Carolingians. The ‘decline of

the Merovingians and the rise of the Carolingians’ has thus often been the

keynote for studies of seventh-century Francia. But the beginning of the tran-

sition from the one dynasty to the other is by no means the most signiﬁcant

feature of seventh-century history. Far more important is that this period saw

the maturing of a political culture that would outlast both Merovingians and

Carolingians and spread well beyond Francia itself. With a gradual disappear-

ance of direct taxation and with the enlargement of territory under a single

ruler, the seventh century saw the development of a regime which was formed

out of consensus between the different groups of the powerful in society. It

is the power-sharing needed to address a broad coalition of interests which

appears from a Carolingian perspective as simply the loss of power by incom-

petent Merovingians. Two early ninth-century sources in particular, the Prior

Metz Annals and Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, have conditioned our view of

371

372 paul fouracre

the history of this period.

Indeed, the durability of that view is lasting tribute

to the skill with which the authors of these works justiﬁed the Carolingians’

seizure of the throne in the year 751. What they described was a Merovingian

failure so complete that intervention by the Carolingians was an urgent moral

necessity.

Einhard’s account of the last Merovingians is compelling, but ultimately

misleading. Their energy had gone, he tells us, and they no longer enjoyed the

use of their once extensive lands: all that was left to them was a single villa and

their long hair, the symbol of their former potency. Their eventual successors,

the altogether more vigorous ancestors of Charlemagne, treated their nominal

overlords the Merovingians with respect and enabled them to carry on with

their ceremonial duties which, rather ludicrously, they discharged from an

oxcart.

No modern historian would seriously dispute that Einhard was highly

partisan in his writing, that he displayed ignorance of Merovingian ceremonial

and that his account was plainly second- or third-hand. It is nevertheless with

his end in sight that many of the truly Merovingian sources have often been

read. Superﬁcially, they may seem to conﬁrm Einhard’s observations, or, rather,

he theirs. At the other end of our period, Gregory of Tours’ rather pessimistic

view of the progress of the Franks across the sixth century primes us to expect

further decline in the seventh.

At ﬁrst sight a comparison between Gregory’s

ﬂuent history and the guttural and piecemeal narratives of the seventh- and

eighth-century chronicles seem to bear out a notion of decline. But we must

be careful not to read too much into what is ultimately a literary comparison.

For the basic account of seventh- and early eighth-century history we must

rely on the chronicles just alluded to, namely the Fourth Book of the Chronicle of

Fredegar (referred to simply as Fredegar), which takes us up to the year 642 but

which was composed or compiled about two decades later, and the Liber His-

toriae Francorum which goes up to 727, when its author signed off.

The Liber

Historiae Francorum was also the basis of Carolingian-inspired Continuations

of Fredegar which in their ﬁrst section follow the Liber from the mid-seventh

into the early eighth century. To supplement the chronicles’ rather meagre

coverage of events we can also draw upon the numerous saints’ Lives written

either in the Merovingian period itself or not long after. In fact these Lives are

Annales Mettenses Priores,pp.1–19, ﬁrst section trans. with commentary, in Fouracre and Gerberding

(1996), pp. 330–70;Einhard, Vita Karoli i,c.1, trans. Dutton (1999), pp. 16–17.

Einhard, Vita Karoli i,c.1,Dutton (1999), pp. 16–17.

Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis, Decem Libri Historiarum.OnGregory’s view of history, Goffart (1988),

pp. 112–234, and Heinzelmann (1994), pp. 136–67.

The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar, cc.20–90,pp.13–79.Onthe Chronicle, and its Con-

tinuations, Collins (1996); Liber Historiae Francorum, cc.37–53,pp.306–28; cc.43–53, trans. with

commentary, Fouracre and Gerberding (1996), pp. 79–96.See also Gerberding (1987).