Medieval Europe 07 - Visigothic Spain (400-711)

If you have heard my lectures on Rome or listened to my earlier lecture on the Gothic War, then you should be somewhat familiar with the Goths. The term “Goths” is a collective term to refer to many different people who, by the fifth century, largely coalesced into two distinct groups: the Visigoths who fled the Hunic invasions a century earlier and become heavily Romanized as foederati and the Ostrogoths who entered the Roman Empire a bit later. While the Ostrogoths would form a kingdom in Italy, the Visigoths would form a kingdom in modern-day Spain, or the Iberian Peninsula. In this lecture, we explore the Visigoths more closely during period of a Spanish history known as Visigothic Spain which lasts from roughly 400 up to 711. In this brief lecture, we will see the rise and fall of the Visigoths in the region. As I cannot do their history justice in a single lecture, I will be narrowing my discussion to the main themes of Visigothic history and the significant cultural elements of the Visigoths to explain their downfall in the early eighth century at the hands of the Umayyad invaders, whom we will meet in the next lecture.

 

Heavy Interlude by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100515

Artist: http://incompetech.com/