Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

114 5. the western kingdoms
capture Arles and Marseilles in 476. In the same year, a Roman general in
his service carried out an unsuccessful invasion of Italy. In Spain the
remaining areas still under direct imperial rule, notably the province of
Tarraconensis, were brought under Visigothic control by campaigns in the
same decade. 3 Thus, by the end of Euric’s reign the Visigothic kingdom
extended from the Rhône to the Loire and also encompassed all but the
north-western corner of the Iberian peninsula. Euric is recorded by Isidore
of Seville as having issued laws, but it is not certain that the extant fragmentary
code that is called the Codex Euricanus is his work or that of his
son. 4 He is also reported by Gregory of Tours to have been a persecutor
of his Catholic subjects, being, like most of the Visigoths, an Arian. 5
However, there is no contemporary evidence for such a view. Sidonius
merely confirms that he was strongly committed to Arian theology. 6
Further territorial expansion came to an end under Euric’s son Alaric II
(484–507), but considerable advances were made in the establishment of a
stable Romano-Gothic state. These culminated in the holding of a major
council of the Catholic church in the kingdom at Agde in 506, and the issuing
in the same year of an abbreviated corpus of imperial laws and juristic writings
that came to be known as The Breviary of Alaric. 7 Under this king, as
under his father, a number of Gallo-Roman and Hispano-Roman landowners
are found in royal service, and there are no real indications that the religious
divide between Arians and Catholics served to undermine political
loyalty to the Visigothic monarchy. Where Alaric II did face a problem was
in the rising power of the Franks to the north of his kingdom. One consequence
of this was the making of close ties with the Ostrogothic monarchy
in Italy, symbolized not least by Alaric’s marriage to Theodegotha, daughter
of its ruler Theoderic (493–526). An alliance between the Frankish king
Clovis and the Burgundian ruler Gundobad led to a joint attack on the
Visigothic kingdom in 507. Alaric II was killed in battle against the Franks at
Vouillé near Poitiers, and Toulouse was sacked. In the course of 507/8 all of
the Visigothic kingdom north of the Pyrenees, other than the coastal region
of Septimania, passed into Frankish control. In Spain, where Visigothic settlement
may have been increasing since the 490s, what was effectively a new
kingdom came into being in the aftermath of the battle of Vouillé.
ii. the burgundian kingdom, 412,534
Following the collapse of the Rhine frontier in the winter of 406 and
the migration across Gaul of the Vandal–Sueve–Alan confederacy, the
3 Chron. Gall. A dxi, nos. 651–3, ed. Mommsen pp. 664–5.
4 Historia Gothorum 35, ed. Rodríguez Alonso (1975) 228.
5 Historiae ii.25, ed. Krusch and Levison, MGH SRM i.70.1. 6 Sid. Ap. Ep. 7.6.6.
7 See ch. 10 (Charles-Edwards), p. 285 below.
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