The Romano-Germanic kingdoms

The story

After the last emperor

In AD 476 the last emperor of the West, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by Odoacer. But the empire had not vanished overnight, and life in the towns and the countryside did not change all of a sudden. For a long time, groups of Germanic peoples (the Romans called them “barbarians”, meaning foreigners who did not speak Latin) had been living inside the empire's borders. Some had arrived in war, others as allies paid to defend the frontiers. When Rome's power in the West grew weak, their leaders began to rule alone the lands where they had settled. So, between the 5th and the 6th century, western Europe filled up with new kingdoms. Historians call them the “Romano-barbarian” or “Romano-Germanic” kingdoms, because in each of them two worlds lived side by side.

A map of Europe to redraw

The Visigoths had settled in AD 418 in Aquitaine, in southern Gaul, with their capital at Toulouse. Defeated by the Franks in 507 at Vouillé, near Poitiers, they withdrew to Spain, where the capital became Toledo. Their kingdom lasted until 711, when the Arabs arrived.

The Franks were a league of Germanic tribes. Their king Clovis, who came to power in 481, defeated the Roman general Syagrius at Soissons in 486 and then the Visigoths. He made Paris his capital. He was also the first great Germanic king to be baptised in the Catholic faith, that of the Romans: tradition says in 496, but recent studies put it somewhere between 496 and about 508. It was a clever choice, because it won him the support of the bishops and of the Roman population.

The Vandals, who crossed from Spain to Africa between 429 and 430, had their most famous king in Geiseric, who sacked Rome in 455. The Vandal kingdom lasted until 534, when it was reconquered by the Byzantines. In Italy Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, set out in 488 with the approval of the Eastern emperor Zeno, defeated Odoacer in 493 and set up his court at Ravenna. In the British Isles, after the Romans left at the beginning of the 5th century, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes gradually settled on the island and founded seven kingdoms, known as the Heptarchy.

There were other, smaller ones: the Burgundians between the Saône and the Rhône, in the region now called Burgundy, and the Suevi in Galicia, in the north-west of Spain, who even minted their own coins.

Two peoples in the same country

In almost all the kingdoms the newcomers were few compared with the Roman inhabitants, and the kings knew it. To govern, they needed officials, judges and bishops who knew Latin and the old rules. In the Ostrogothic kingdom, for example, the Goths took care of war and the Romans of civil administration: this was the division of tasks that Theodoric wanted. Of all the kingdoms, Theodoric's was the one most like the old empire: the ancient offices and the structure of the Roman state stayed in force.

The laws also show this living together. The Visigoths had a code of their own, the Code of Euric, written around 475. In 506 King Alaric II had a collection of simplified Roman laws made for his Roman subjects, the Lex Romana Visigothorum. The Burgundians did the same with the Lex Romana Burgundionum, written at the beginning of the 6th century (the exact date is debated). For a time, then, a Goth and a Roman could be judged by different rules. Only much later was there a single law for everyone, such as the code of the Visigothic king Recceswinth, around 654.

The problem of faith

Another obstacle was religion. Many Germanic peoples were Christians, but they followed Arianism, a teaching different from that of the Catholics: the Arians thought that Jesus was lower than God the Father. The Vandals, Ostrogoths, Visigoths and Burgundians were Arians, while their Roman subjects were Catholics. So in the same city there could be two bishops and two churches, and at Ravenna Theodoric had separate places of worship built. Some Arian kings treated Catholics well, others persecuted them: the Vandals were harsh with the Catholic clergy. In time the difference disappeared. The Burgundian king Sigismund, who came to the throne in 516, was already Catholic, and the Visigothic king Reccared became so in 589.

A slow blending

For a few generations the two peoples lived side by side without mixing completely. Then they began to have the same neighbours, the same markets and mixed marriages. Latin words changed under the influence of the newcomers, and little by little French, Spanish and the other Romance languages were born from spoken Latin. Not everything lasted: the Vandals were defeated by the Byzantines in 534 and the Ostrogoths disappeared after the Gothic War, which ended in 553. Other kingdoms, such as that of the Franks, survived instead and became the base of the Middle Ages.