Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (7 page)

Meticulous scholarship has tracked the progression of Visigothic kingship in the fifth century. In the first stage, the tendency was to emulate all forms of Roman legal practice and Latin titles. In the middle stage, the
Reges Gothorum
saw themselves as something better than mere
foederati
. In the last stage, as successors to the Empire, they thought themselves as good as any emperor. Over the same decades, the upper stratum of Visigothic society, the
optimates
, gradually lost their influence. Germanic tradition had stressed the equality of all warriors. Post-Roman monarchy stressed hierarchy and regal dignity.
¹⁶

Thanks to the Frankish chronicler Gregory of Tours (534–94), Euric has been stained with the label of a persecutor of Catholics. The insinuation is unjust. A few dissaffected clerics like Bishop Quinctianus of Civitas Rutenorum (Rodez) were driven into exile. But nothing occurred to match the savage persecutions perpetrated by the Arian Vandals in North Africa.
¹⁷

Shortly after the deaths both of Euric and of Romulus Augustulus, the last of the Western emperors, Flavius Teodoricus, alias Theodoric
the Ostrogoth, accepted Byzantine instructions to march on Italy and to restore imperial fortunes. He crossed the Alps with a huge army in 488, scattered the defenders of the post-Roman order, and killed its leader, Odoacer, with his own bare hands, after a three-year siege of Ravenna. Calling on the aid of his Visigoth cousins, he overran the Italian peninsula from end to end and assumed the title of ‘vice-emperor’. Bolstered by the military and cultural power of Byzantium, and by great maritime potential, his Ostrogothic kingdom based at Ravenna soon threatened to overshadow its neighbours and rivals. In addition to the Visigothic Kingdom of Tolosa, it bordered the (second) Kingdom of the Burgundians recently established in the valley of the Rhône (see pp.
94–5
).
¹⁸

Euric’s son, Alaric II, who succeeded as a boy in 484, was the eighth of the royal line. He spent much energy mollifying neighbours and subjects alike. His greatest achievement lay in the preparation of the famous
Breviarum Alarici
, a highly refined compilation of Roman law. This work, which interpreted laws as well as summarizing them, was approved by a committee of nobles and clerics before being promulgated in 506. It would become a standard text throughout post-Roman Gaul until the eleventh century.
¹⁹
Furthermore, Alaric courted the Ostrogoths. He married Theodoric’s daughter, and with her produced an infant son, bringing the prospect of a vast and combined pan-Gothic federation into view.

Alaric’s nemesis, however, arrived in the shape of Clovis, king of the Germanic Franks, who from the 480s had begun to extend his realm into Gaul from the Rhineland and who was already busy undermining the Burgundians. Clovis was a neophyte Catholic with limitless ambitions, and the ruler most likely to feel threatened by a union of the Goths.
²⁰
In 497 he had joined with the Bretons to mount an attack along the western coast of Aquitaine, where the port of Burdigala (Bordeaux) was briefly occupied. Sometime after that, he won a crushing victory over his eastern neighbours, the Alemanni, and felt free to pay more attention to the south. Alaric’s instinct was to avoid confrontation. He had once handed back a Frankish fugitive, Syagrius, who had dared to challenge Clovis. Gregory of Tours reports how the Visigoth insisted on going to Ambaciensis (Amboise), where he engaged Clovis in face-to-face conversation on an island of the River Loire:

Igitur Alaricus rex Gothorum cum viderit, Chlodovechum regem gentes assiduae debellare, legatus ad eum dirigit, dicens:
‘
Si frater meus vellit, insederat animo, ut nos Deo propitio pariter videremus.’
…

When Alaric King of the Goths saw the constant conquests which Clovis was making, he sent delegates to him, saying: ‘If my brother so agrees, I propose that we hold a conversation together, under God’s auspices.’ And when Clovis did not reply, Alaric went to meet him regardless, and they talked and ate and drank, and left each other in peace.
²¹

As it turned out, Clovis could not be assuaged so easily. Recently allied both to the Burgundians, by marriage, and to the Byzantine emperor, who granted him the title of imperial consul, he aimed to steal a march on his rivals. A joint campaign against the Visigothic realm was agreed. The Byzantines were to patrol the southern coast. The Franks were to march from the north. An offer of parley from Theodoric the Ostrogoth was spurned. It was the spring of 507, and a ‘flaming meteor’ was lighting up the night sky:

Igitur Chlodovechus rex ait suis:
‘
Valde molestum fero, quod hi Arriani partem teneant Galliarum…

King Clovis, therefore, addressed his warriors: ‘It pains me that these Arians are holding such a large part of the Gauls. Let us march with God’s aid, and reduce them to our power…’ So the army moved off [from Tours] in the direction of Poitiers… Reaching the River Vigenna [Vienne], which was swollen by rain, the Franks did not know how to cross until a huge hind appeared and showed them how the river could be forded… Pitching his tent on a hill near Poitiers, the king saw smoke rising from the Church of St Hilaire, and took it as a sign that he was to triumph over the heretics.

The scene for the fateful battle was set:

So Clovis came to grips with Alaric, King of the Goths, in the plain of Vouillé [
in campo Vogladense
], three leagues from the city. As was their custom, the Goths feigned flight. But Clovis killed Alaric with his own hand, himself escaping [an ambush] thanks to the strength of his breastplate and the speed of his horse.
²²

The outcome, therefore, was undisputable (and the Vouglaisiens have proof positive of their name’s derivation). The power of the Visigoths in Gaul was broken in a few hours. And the Franks pressed on. Some of them rode over the central mountains to garner lands as far as the Burgundian frontier. Clovis made for Burdigala, where he wintered before sacking Tolosa the following spring. A remnant of Alaric’s forces made a stand at Narbonne, but most of them withdrew to the line of the Pyrenees. The Gallic heartland of their kingdom was abandoned. Henceforth, the Visigoths would rule in Iberia alone, preserving their ascendancy there until the arrival of the Moors two centuries later.

Explanations of the Frankish victory differ widely. The victors’ version conveyed by Gregory of Tours stressed the hand of a Catholic God who had aided his Catholic warriors. Even Edward Gibbon stressed the role of religion, imaginatively casting the Gallo-Roman nobility in the role of a Catholic fifth column. His arguments are now contested.
²³
He is on safer ground when he writes of the fickle fortunes of war. ‘Such is the empire of Fortune (if we may still disguise our ignorance under that popular name)’, wrote Gibbon loftily, ‘that it is almost equally difficult to foresee the events of war, or to explain their various consequences.’
²⁴

For a decade or more, Theodoric the Ostrogoth continued to pursue his pan-Gothic dreams. He was the designated guardian of his grandson, Alaric II’s young heir, Amalric, and the nominal overlord of a supposedly nascent ‘empire’ stretching from the Alps to the Atlantic. Yet the pillars of his own power were crumbling. He could not maintain order in Italy, let alone challenge the Franks in Gaul or assist the Visigoths in Spain. The moment was ripe for the Roman emperors in Constantinople to launch yet another strategic offensive. Shortly after Theodoric died in 526, the Emperor Justinian prepared to lead his legions to the West in person.
²⁵
For the rest of the sixth century, as Alaric’s descendants consolidated their hold on Iberia, imperial troops remained in Italy, while the successors of Clovis the Frank put their shoulder to the long task of transforming Gallia into Francia, and Francia into France.

III

Though the Visigothic Kingdom of Tolosa lasted for eighty-nine years over a wide area, the physical evidence for its existence is minimal. Archaeological excavations have yielded almost nothing.
²⁶
Although one gold
solidus
of Alaric II has survived, most coins from Visigothic Tolosa carry imperial inscriptions. Several hundred marble sarcophagi from the period bear no marks of identification. Almost everything that is known comes from fragmentary written sources. Even the site of the battle with Clovis is not entirely certain. One group of antiquarians equates Gregory’s
campus Vogladensis
with Vouillé, another group insists on locating it at the nearby village of Voulon.
²⁷
There is almost no mention of the Visigoths in the widespread ‘Heritage’ activities of Toulouse and Aquitaine.
²⁸
Only recently has a comprehensive bibliography been compiled to help scholars piece the jigsaw together.
²⁹

The church of Nostra Domina Daurata – Notre-Dame de la Daurade – whose origins were connected with the Visigoths, was totally demolished in 1761 to make way for the construction of Toulouse’s riverside quays. It had housed the shrine of a Black Madonna. The original icon was stolen in the fifteenth century, and its first replacement was burned by revolutionaries in 1799. Prints survive of an early medieval octagonal chapel lined with marble columns and golden mosaics. The present-day basilica, like the cathedral of St Saturnin, is entirely modern.
³⁰

Fortunately, the maps and the museums are not totally bare. A cluster of place names featuring the suffix
-ens
, as in Douzens, Pezens and Sauzens, all in the Département de l’Aude, is judged to betray Visigothic origins. The village of Dieupentale (Tarn-et-Garonne) possesses the only name of exclusively Visigothic provenance:
diup
meaning ‘deep’, and
dal
, ‘valley’. Certain modest types of bronzes, eagle brooches and glassware are classed in the same way, thanks to similarities with finds in Rome’s former Danubian provinces. And on the road between Narbonne and Carcassonne one passes the imposing whale-back Montagne d’Alaric. Local sources explain its name by reference to fortifications dating to the reign of Ataulf, and to a persistent myth concerning the last king of Tolosa’s last resting place. The mountain shelters the ruins of a medieval priory, St Pierre d’Alaric and, on its northern slopes, a registered wine region which produces vintage wines within the scope of AOC Corbières.
³¹

Nowadays, some of the strongest hints of a Visigothic past in southern France emanate unexpectedly from wild legends, from historical fiction, and in particular from one small village deep in the Pyrenean foothills. Rennes-le-Château is a walled, hilltop hamlet in the Pays de Razès, containing perhaps twenty houses, a church and a medieval castle. It commands enchanting views over the Val des Couleurs, and stands beneath the ‘Holy Mountain’ of Bugarach, starting point of Jules Verne’s
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
. Identified as the ancient city of Rhedae, it gained a reputation in the nineteenth century for having been the impregnable stronghold of the Visigoths after their expulsion from none-too-distant Tolosa. The stone pillars of the parish church were said to be of Visigothic origin, and fabulous rumours of buried treasure proliferated.
³²

In 1885, the parish was taken over by an extraordinary, not to say notorious vicar, Father Bérenger Saunière (1852–1917). Together with his neighbour and colleague, the Abbé Boudet of nearby Rennes-les-Bains, author of a bizarre volume on ancient Celtic languages,
³³
Father Saunière dabbled both in history and in the occult. When renovating his church, he claimed to have discovered three parchments hidden inside a Visigothic pillar and covered in coded messages. Soon afterwards, he showed signs of ostentatious and unexplained wealth; the splendid villa and fake medieval folly which he built are still in place. When he was dying, his deathbed confession so shocked his confessor that the vicar was denied the last rites. His favourite motto, reportedly, was a quotation from Balzac: ‘
Il y a deux histoires: l
’
histoire officielle, menteuse, et l
’
histoire secrète, où sont les véritables causes des événements
’ (‘There are two sorts of history: lying official history and secret history, where the true causes of events can be found’).
³⁴

To be fair, the Visigoths form only one of many elements in the fantastical pot-pourri of stories that have circulated since Father Saunière’s death. They have been resurrected in the company of Cathars, Templars, Rosicrucians, the shadowy Priory of Sion, and the Holy Grail itself. Dan Brown’s
The Da Vinci Code
is but one of a dozen books that feed off the mysterious tales.
³⁵
According to taste, the secret Treasure of Rhedae is variously described as the ‘Jewels of the Visigoths’ carried off from Rome or from Tolosa, or the ‘Hoard of Jerusalem’, brought by the Visigoths from Byzantium. The link with the so-called ‘bloodline of Christ’ hangs on yet more far-fetched suppositions, namely that St Mary Magdalene travelled to southern Gaul and that her descendants married into local Visigothic families.