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In 407 to 409 the Vandals, with allied Alans and Germanic tribes like the Suevi swept into the Iberian peninsula. Subsequent to the Vandal-led invasion of Hispania, Honorius, the emperor in the West, enlisted the aid of the Visigoths in an effort to wrest control of the peninsula from the Vandals and other barbarian groups. Honorius rewarded his federates in 418, when the imperial government gave the Visigoths land in Aquitaine on which to settle, probably under hospitalitas, the rules for billeting army soldiers (Heather 1996, Sivan 1987). This settlement formed the nucleus of the future Visigothic kingdom that would eventually expand across the Pyrenees and onto the peninsula.
The Visigoths' second great king, Euric, unified the various quarreling factions of the Visigoths, and in 475, forced the Roman government to grant them full independence. At his death, the Visigoths were the most powerful of the successor states to the Western Empire.
At its greatest extent, before their defeat at the Battle of Vouillé 507, the Visigothic kingdom included all of the Iberian peninsula except for small areas in the north (belonging to the Basques) and in the northwest (the Suevi kingdom), plus Aquitania and Gallia Narbonensis in Gaul.
The Visigoths soon became the dominant power in Hispania. They quickly crushed the Alans and by 429 they forced the Vandals from the peninsula into North Africa. By 500 the Visigoths controlled most of Spain with the exception of the Suevi kingdom in the northwest and the Basque region. At first the Hispanic territories were governed from the Visigoth capital at Toulouse, in the south of France.
At Vouillé in 507, the Franks wrested control of Aquitaine from the Visigoths. King Alaric II, the conqueror of Hispania, lost his life, and after a temporary retreat to Narbonne, Visigoth nobles spirited his heir, the child-king Amalaric to safety across the Pyrenees. For a time (511 - 526) Visigoths and Ostrogoths were reunited under Theodoric the Great, ruling from Ravenna. The center of Visigothic rule shifted first to Barcelona, then inland and south to Toledo.
In 554, Granada and southernmost Hispania Baetica were lost to representatives of the Byzantine Empire who had been invited in to help settle a Visigothic dynastic struggle, but who stayed on, as a hoped-for spearhead to a "Reconquest" of the far west envisaged by emperor Justinian I.
There was a gulf in Hispania between Arian Visigoths and their Christian subjects. Among the Catholic population of the peninsula, deep splits had led to the martyrdom of the ascetic Priscillian of Avila by orthodox Catholic forces in 385, and the following generations suffered persecution as "Priscillianist" heretics were rooted out. At the very beginning of Leo I's pontificate, in the years 444-447, Turribius, the bishop of Astorga in Galicia, sent to Rome a memorandum warning that Priscillianism was by no means dead, that it numbered even bishops among its supporters, and asking the aid of the Roman See. The distance was insurmountable in the 5th century. Somewhat later, Pope Simplicius (reigned 468 - 483) appointed as papal vicar Zeno, the Catholic Bishop of Seville, so that the prerogatives of the papal see could be exercised for a more tightly disciplined administration. Nevertheless Leo intervened, by forwarding a set of propositions that each bishop was required to sign: all did. As elsewhere, bishops confronted secular military lords over hegemony in the territory. But if Priscillianist bishops hesitated to be barred from their sees, a passionately concerned segment of Christian communities in Spain were disaffected from the more orthodox hierarchy and welcomed the tolerant Arian Visigoths. The Visigoths scorned to interfere among Catholics but were interested in decorum and public order. The Arian Visigoths were also tolerant of Jews. Visigothic persecution of Jews had to wait for the conversion to Catholicism of the Visigothic king Reccared, and the same synod of Catholic bishops in 633 that usurped the Visigothic nobles' right to confirm the election of a king declared that all Jews must be baptised.
The Visigothic Code of Law (forum judicum) which had been part of aristocratic oral tradition, was set in writing in the early 7th century— and survives in two separate codices preserved at the Escorial. It goes into more detail than a modern constitution commonly does and reveals a great deal about Visigothic social structure.
The last Arian Visigothic king, Leovigild, conquered the Suevi kingdom in 584 and regained part of the southern areas lost to the Byzantines, which his heir conquered completely in 624. With the catholicization of the Visigothic kings, the Catholic bishops increased in power, until, at the synod held at Toledo in 633, they took upon themselves the nobles' right to select a king from among the royal family. The kingdom survived until 711, when King Roderic (Rodrigo) was killed while opposing an invasion from the south by the Umayyad Muslims. Most of Spain came under Islamic rule by 718.
A Visigothic nobleman, Pelayo, is credited with beginning the Christian Reconquista of Spain in 718, when he defeated the Umayyads in battle and established the Kingdom of Asturias in the northern part of the peninsula. Other Visigoths, refusing to adopt the Muslim faith or live under their rule, fled north to the kingdom of the Franks, and Visigoths played key roles in the empire of Charlemagne a few generations later.
The list of Visigoth kings is quoted in Spain as an egregious example of rote memorization in school during the time of Franco's dictatorship.
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