Exile - The Kingdom of Toulouse

Exile

By 376, the Visigoths had begun to flee their lands, not wishing to subject themselves to the Hun-imposed slavery suffered by their Ostrogothic cousins. Thousands of desperate refugees, in scenes which cannot have been far removed from modern-day television images of war in Bosnia or Africa, gathered on the banks of the Danube, begging protection from the Roman Empire.

The refugees were permitted to enter the Empire but their subsequent treatment was shabby in the extreme. The Romans seemed to regard the proud Germanic peoples as little better than slaves, and left them to starve in a harsh, hostile environment.

"[the Romans] …levied an ungenerous and oppressive tax on the wants of the hungry barbarians. The vilest food was sold at an extravagant price and… the markets were filled with the flesh of dogs and unclean animals who had died of disease." (Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)

They did not know it, but they were about to reap a whirlwind from what they had sown. In 378, the Emperor Valens and the great bulk of the East Roman Army were slain at Adrianople in one of the worst defeats ever suffered by the Roman Empire. It was never fully to recover.

But the Visigoths gained little from their victory and in 382 signed a treaty with the Romans, under the terms of which they settled in Thrace and Moesia in the southern Balkans. In exchange for this cession of land, which remained subject to the Empire but which was exempt from Roman taxation, the Goths provided warriors, under their own command, for the Roman Army.

In the last decade of the Fourth Century, an adventurer named Alaric became recognised as leader of the Visigoths and made it his aim to find for his people a territory in which they could finally settle. His chosen target was no less than Italy itself, and to this end he fought a long series of wars against the Roman Patrician, a Vandal named Stilicho. The rivalry between these two Germanic renegades was to become almost legendary. On 24th August, 410, Alaric's men stormed into the city of Rome and sacked it thoroughly, the first army to do so since the Celt, Brennus, seven hundred years previously. But Alaric died soon afterwards, following a brief illness, and the Visigoths still had no home.

The Kingdom of Toulouse

After the sack of Rome, the Visigoths continued to migrate westwards by way of Genoa and Marseilles. They were bought off by the Western Emperors, and employed as clients against a variety of Rome's barbarian enemies. Notably, they helped defeat the Suebi in Spain. After this, in 418, they were settled in Aquitaine as Roman federates (foederati) and gradually consolidated this region into their own realm; the Kingdom of Toulouse (Tolosa), expanding it into north-eastern Spain (possibly giving their name to the region - Catalonia from 'Gotalonia'). Roman provincial administration was wisely retained, and a number of high-ranking Roman officials continued to serve under their new barbarian masters.

The Visigoths gradually expanded their kingdom and by the time the last Western Emperor was overthrown in 476 it stretched from Nantes to Cadiz, taking in almost the whole of Spain and southern Gaul. In 507, however, they suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Franks at the Battle of Vouillé, and were all but driven out of Gaul. Their kingdom in Spain survived for several centuries, until finally destroyed by the Moors in 711.

Mark Furnival, 1998