Visigoths lost Gaul to Franks but kept Iberia for centuries
From the fifth to eighth centuries the Visigothic Kingdom held southwestern France and Iberia as a Roman successor state. Franks tore away most of Gaul early on, leaving Septimania, while Toledo later anchored a Hispano-Gothic realm until 711.
Romanised Goths from the Danube frontier became Roman foederati. Between 407 and 409 Vandals, Alans, and Suebi crossed the frozen Rhine into Gaul and Iberia, and in 410 the Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome itself, seizing the emperor’s sister Galla Placidia. Athaulf (410–415) then worked the rivalries of Roman and Germanic commanders, took Narbonne and Toulouse in 413, and married his captive.
In 418 Emperor Honorius settled Wallia’s Goths in the Garonne valley of Aquitania. From Toulouse, Theodoric I (418–451) struck Arles in 425 and 430 and Narbonne in 436 until Litorius checked him with Hunnic mercenaries. Rome later sent the Goths into Hispania against the Suebi, and Theodoric II crushed the Suebic king Rechiarius on the Órbigo in 456. His brother Euric murdered him in 466 and pushed the kingdom’s borders outward.
By 500 the realm held Aquitania, Narbonensis, and nearly all Hispania apart from Suebic Galicia and Basque and Cantabrian highlands. War with Clovis’s Franks then cost almost all of Gaul except Septimania. The Ostrogoth Theodoric the Great deposed Alaric II’s illegitimate heir Gesalec after battles at Barcelona. Theudis (531–548) expanded in the south but was murdered after a failed African invasion, and civil war under Agila I (549–554) let Justinian carve out a Byzantine province.
In Iberia, Goths and Hispano-Romans gradually merged, and Gothic speech faded after the court renounced Arianism for Nicene Christianity in 589. The councils of Toledo then gave bishops great weight in secular law, and Visigothic legal codes shaped later medieval jurisprudence. The Arab-Berber invasion of 711 ended the kingdom.
Source: Visigothic Kingdom
